SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
No bio...
User ID: 84
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
12hr ago
Are we talking about Russians who live in Russia or ones who've spent some time living in the west?
I know a fair few Russians and can't say I've ever had any problems at all understanding their accent. Occasionally challenges with their English knowledge but nothing related to pronunciation.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
12hr ago
pronounce my simple, white bread American name correctly, despite them presumably hearing it constantly in American media their whole lives
I think you might be overestimating the importance of hearing specific but rarely used words when it comes to pronouncing them. When your native language lacks specific syllables, it can be quite difficult to incorporate them without practise. This isn't particularly helped by English basically having zero logic when it comes to knowing how to pronounce a word you aren't familiar with.
I have an Irish friend whose surname I'm completely unable to pronounce correctly even after hearing it plenty of times. The syllables that a native speaker hears don't map 1:1 to the syllables that I hear (or even know) and no amount of listening is going to help with that. And then there's things like V vs W and names like Vicky vs Vicki which I hear as exactly the same but apparently consistently mispronounced (even after the person tried to teach me how!).
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
14hr ago
People have listed alternatives even in this very thread! So they aren't hard to find. Seems like there's open office, WSOffice, onlyoffice, libre office, and of course Google docs that will fulfills most things you'd need.
And which of those Just Work, aren't horribly slow and don't have garbage UI (the reason I absolutely refuse to use Google Docs)?
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
1d ago
Probably outsourced tech support.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
1d ago
There is already a Wikipedia article.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
1d ago
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4d ago
It's the "same" but from what I've gathered of US high schools, also quite different. First, there are entry requirements (based on 9th year grades). Second, they changed it to course form just before I started in the mid 90s, so you got to pick and choose which courses to take and when. There's a bunch of mandatory courses and then the rest are optional within limits (eg. I took max amount of math and physics and only the minimum required history, biology and such). The entry requirements did wonders because while my high school wasn't anything particularly "elite" back then (it would acquire such reputation some years later), only people who actually wanted to study went there. The curriculum was and is still normal high school (which in practise means somewhat higher level than US but similar to the rest of EU).
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4d ago
The high school I graduated from was in the state top ten for per capita overdoses, vehicle deaths, suicides, and teen pregnancies.
Gotta say, even the existence of such statistics (ie. there being more than one per decade) already sounds bizarre to me. Cultural differences and all that.
I graduated from college. It's not much, but it's a win for me.
I say that definitely counts as a win.
had six weeks of unexcused absences my senior year
Ours was a very progressive high school as far as student freedom and responsibility went. You could be absent from up to 20% of classes from one course without requiring a reason and 30% if you had a doctor's note or similar. I had some "slight" motivation problems in my last year so I ended up skipping 50% of the math classes in the last period and the teacher didn't even notice (I missed something like 15 classes, he thought I missed 5). I outright arranged my schedule for that last period such that I only went to school three days a week. Good times.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4d ago
Are we talking about Christian priests or just any priests at all?
William of Baskerville from Name of the Rose comes to mind. Also Padre Benicio Del Toro from Machete. Father Paul Dure and Father Captain Federico de Soya from Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4d ago
What were the hard programs?
Industrial engineering (think fast track to management for people who know math) and industrial physics (which for obvious reasons attracts people who are really good at math and physics).
and let me tell you it's really fucking weird to keep receiving fan mail about a publication for a full decade from random people who've gone to the effort of figuring out your twice changed email address just for a single message
Were these, uh, Indians?
No. Random people in the field and the occasional amateur interested in the topic. Eg. a few years ago I got a Facebook message from a German guy working for a prominent company in the same field saying he was a huge fan of my (then over 15 years old) work.
I meet people both smarter and dumber than me all the time.
I clearly move in the wrong circles because it's fairly rare for me to meet people who are obviously smarter than me while unfortunately the other end is not nearly as rare. I've arranged my life so I can mostly deal with my peers on that level but unfortunately such selection isn't always possible at the workplace. Internet forums are of course a near complete disaster when it comes to that.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4d ago
We know the common cliche of a guy (or girl) who's "the brain" at their school but has a major crisis when they find out they're merely average compared to everyone else when they start university. I'm curious how many folks here were nothing special in elementary and high school but went on to achieve something substantial academically?
I did mostly decently in school but was never anywhere close to a top tier student. Barely got into the high school I wanted, ie. the one with the shortest distance from my home (Finnish high school entrance is determined by your grades in 9th year). Had to settle for my second choice in university (EE) because I couldn't get in to study CS (and the actually hard to get in programs would have been right out). I went on to publish a couple of semi-influential papers in a subfield and AFAIK my professor still considers me one of his star students even though I never ended up doing a PhD (and let me tell you it's really fucking weird to keep receiving fan mail about a publication for a full decade from random people who've gone to the effort of figuring out your twice changed email address just for a single message).
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4d ago
But this does not explain why countries that already have nukes, don't use them more often. Russia could throw nukes against Ukraine, and it seems detrimental for other powers to retaliate with nukes in this case.
Not when you consider it as iterated prisoner's dilemma. If other powers didn't retaliate in such situation, that'd essentially signal that Russia (and any power with nuclear weapons) is free to do whatever it wants to anyone without nukes. For obvious reasons the powers don't want that and Russia realizes that (or to put it bluntly, Putin would score much less on the german vs autist test than most The Motte commenters).
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
7d ago
There are also many examples in history of savage, unintellectual people later becoming great intellectuals without, perhaps, the genetic stock changing much.
You should look up some medieval descriptions of Vikings for fun reading on this. Or German writings about Swedes from around 1630 for that matter. That same genetic stock rather famously produced Alfred Nobel.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
7d ago
they see any writing with dash-separated clauses and they presume it's AI.
Good. Maybe we'll finally get rid of that stupid looking em-dash. Let the hate flow through you.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
7d ago
That's what six centuries of post-Mongol ruling culture does to you.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
8d ago
It's infuriating, because there are so many sentences that are punchier with a dash thrown in.
My man, just put in the minus sign :trollface:
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
9d ago
Begone, foul beast of Chaos!
This calls for Ordo Malleus. We may need a full exterminatus here.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
9d ago
I'm in the fun spot of some old friends claiming I'm the most engineery person they have ever met (and they know quite a few engineers) while also scoring quite low on tests (12% in the one that was posted), and having been tested (for my ADHD diagnosis) without showing any signs of autism beyond typical "yeah, the guy's an engineer"-level things.
Like yes, some Stuff Matters, but only in the right context. Yes, if you fuck up basic engineering principles in a job or when building something important you're a fucking idiot but also I couldn't give a damn about which order the cutlery is in or changes in daily routine.
I generally get on well with other engineers but much less so with people who are clearly on the autism spectrum.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
9d ago
I'd like to point to UK companies being able to access the European manufacturing base except, oh wait, brexit...
It may have been common knowledge in US but as a EU resident I hadn't actually heard of such issues until I ran into them many times on electronics forums.
I'm working on a side project and if things go well and we get it finished, we'll probably have a small batch manufactured in the Baltics given that we know of a couple of reputable companies there. Several friends' companies and my own previous workplaces have had good experiences when it comes to quality, responsiveness and pricing and if there are issues, it's only a one or two day trip to go there in person to sort things out. Plus the lack of language barrier (ie. everyone in the loop speaks English) is a huge plus compared to China (or even Southern Europe).
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
10d ago
I’ve become much more judicious in my use of the em-dash
The Chad solution to this is to accept that there is only one dash and that it is also hyphen and the minus sign. Aka the ascii character 0x2D.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
10d ago
Just out of idle curiosity: are we talking bare PCBs or complete assemblies? There is a big difference between "I can not find a company to produce a bare six layer board" and "I can't find a company to produce electronics assemblies full of phone-density chips on a 20 layer board with buried and plated vias".
FWIW, here in Europe we certainly have companies which have both the capabilities to manufacture PCBs (like MultiCB, which will produce a bare ten-layer board in six work days in the UK, with initial costs of about 600 Euros). I had a colleague organize the component placement of some six-layer board with a large-pitch BGA with some company in Germany, and that basically worked fine.
I've gotten the impression that the situation is somewhat better in Europe than in US when it comes to low volume orders. If you need eg. 100 - 10000 assembled PCBs made, there are many reputable (mostly Eastern European) companies that will happily deliver that with much higher reliability than Chinese suppliers and without a ridiculous markup. China is difficult if you don't have someone on the site making sure the suppliers actually provide what they promised and just won't suddenly replace components with more "convenient" ones (that have worse specs). Based on several electronics forums in the US it's something of a crapshoot whether you can find a supplier that wants to deliver such orders as many seem to want only high value clients. Maybe you get lucky, maybe you don't.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
10d ago
If there is an obligation to "maximise shareholder value"
As far as I'm aware, there are few countries where this is actually true. Yes, it's the default but if the charter of the company says otherwise, the obligation can be something else (as long as it's legal).
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
10d ago
Right. Which is exactly what I've been saying the whole time and why the earlier Jane Street comment was so confusing.
That... really hasn't been my experience. At a previous job much of the IT was outsourced to India and we always dreaded having to speak with them because it was complete crapshoot whether we could understand anything they said. We had no such problems with the ones who'd moved to Europe nor with any of the native Europeans.
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