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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 17th, 2023

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  • Bilingualism is a bit overloaded nowadays, which I find kinda annoying given that word “polyglot” exists.

    Anyways, if you can freely use another language in an informal exchange with a few people of different sobriety levels while failing to remember key words and recovering from that - you’re a fluent polyglot. Ability to exchange information is a key part of what language is, and that’s how you measures your proficiency.

    Bilingual can also mean “natively proficient in two languages”. And if you’re older than three years old and are not native speakers of multiple languages already, the chances of you becoming one are slim.

    Native proficiency is a result of a language acquisition ability that is not well understood and disappears early into child development. It results in a level of effortless mastery that seems to be impossible to achieve as an adult, i.e. a dedicated or merely attentive native speaker will be able to recognize that you are not one.


  • It’s not “people vs persons” but “those people vs they”.

    Conversationally, “those/these” distances you from the group you are talking about, which is humorously weird when it’s your family you’re talking about.

    It’s not the meaning of the words, but habitual (and often fleeting) attribution around them that tripped you up.

    PS: “People” are uncountable, “persons” are countable. That’s basically the whole difference between the two plurals. Although it’s rapidly disappearing, as “ten people” won’t raise a single eyebrow in a conversation.





  • Teeth cannot produce enamel. Enamel is not a living tissue and it was produced by cells outside of the tooth in a coral-like manner. In order to grow a new tooth, you need it to be fully surrounded by specialized living tissue for the whole growth cycle.

    PS: I honestly expected something like this to come out of bioelectric computation research, but progress seems slower there. Or rather knowledge and techniques in other fields is reaching critical mass, giving us these advances.



  • Sorry, but you don’t get to claim groupthink while ignoring state of Apache when Nginx got released.

    Apache was a mess of modules with confusing documentation, an arsenal of foot guns, and generally a PITA to deal with. Nginx was simpler, more performant, and didn’t have the extra complexity that Apache was failing to manage.

    My personal first encounter was about hosting PHP applications in a multiuser environment, and god damn was nginx a better tool.

    Apache caught up in a few years, but by then people were already solving different problems. Would nginx arrive merely a year later, it would get lost to history, but it arrived exactly when everyone was fed up with Apache just the right amount.

    Nowadays, when people choose a web server, they choose one they are comfortable with. With both httpds being mature, that’s the strongest objective factor to influence the choice. It’s not groupthink, it’s a consequence of concrete events.






  • Slotos@feddit.nltoMemes@lemmy.mlGet Bread Get Dead
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    10 months ago

    Wealth itself is a stronger predictor for future wealth than individual performance.

    That quote of mine doesn’t talk about success, nor wealth itself for that matter. You’re ignoring everything in the message to argue against a statement that was never made in the first place.



  • Slotos@feddit.nltoMemes@lemmy.mlGet Bread Get Dead
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    10 months ago

    Millionaires often worked for their money. Billionaires often worked for their first millions too. Problem is, difference between a billion and a million is about a billion.

    On the other side of the argument, the amount of people that work harder and smarter than any given billionaire and have nothing is simply staggering. If it wasn’t down to luck, they’d all be billionaires.

    So yeah, it is dumb luck. Randomness is not uniform, and someone ends up being close to the time and place of a local spike.




  • Seems to me, you’re dealing with a micromanager.

    Personal recommendation - put things into writing. When you get your assignment verbally, write it down with assumptions you have to make to fill the gaps, and send it to the person who gave you the assignment, with the person responsible for your teams’ results in CC. Basically an “I heard you, and I’m starting the work as described below”.

    Communication is one of the most important skills in software engineering, and this way you get to practise it while probing the social waters of dealing with management.

    Try it, see how it goes, adjust accordingly.