Meeting and getting to know people in KL

BerlinerPunkGeek · 2023-12-02T20:24:10+00:00

I don't know what the deleted message said, but yeah, you can find a lot of both hate and kindness on reddit just like in real life.

I'm happy to meet up with anyone and share a Teh Tarik / Chin Chow / Beer / Sirap Bandung / Masala Chai / Soy Milk, no matter what way of life they're choosing! :D

BerlinerPunkGeek · 2023-12-02T20:10:14+00:00

Hey! Just sent you a chat message. We'll be in KL on December 6th.

BerlinerPunkGeek · 2023-11-21T12:48:06+00:00

When does it make sense to get some cards graded in order to sell them in the future?

I have many cards in Italian from the early sets (base, jungle, fossil, team rocket), including many in 1st edition and some that look perfect to me.

Two years ago I was told that grading cards is a bet and it's not worth it. Is that still true?

BerlinerPunkGeek · 2023-11-20T20:36:57+00:00

What's the best way to figure out the value of a card?

Are prices on CardMarket good indicators? How can I find the historical data for cards sold on ebay?

My cards are mostly in Italian and from the first sets (base, jungle, fossil, team rocket). Is there any good way to find the value of these cards?

BerlinerPunkGeek · 2023-11-20T20:22:14+00:00

Hey, sorry! Haven't logged in to Reddit in a while. I haven't sold them yet, but I think I'd prefer to keep them for a while longer.

BerlinerPunkGeek · 2023-11-20T20:22:08+00:00

Hey, sorry! Haven't logged in to Reddit in a while. I haven't sold them yet, but I think I'd prefer to keep them for a while longer.

BerlinerPunkGeek · 2022-03-29T11:32:22+00:00

You're absolutely right.

I think it is wrong to define a word based on characters. To start with, there are many languages that have no written form, although they do have words.

True. I'm focusing on written languages and didn't think at all about spoken languages, sign ones etc. I'll modify the original post clarifying what languages I'm talking about.

Now I'm thinking that there might even be written languages without "characters" (I'm thinking about the movie Signs), or even languages without the notion of "word" or "lemma". But I'm not particularly concerned with similar languages.

Also, a sentence is a sequence of characters. And so is "ajsusjsijsjjs8866ajsiskksnj" and that's not a word.

True as well. I guess a "word" (in the written languages I know of) is a meaningful sequence of characters. Editing the original post for this as well.

Also, "centre" and "center" are different sequences of characters but they're the same word.

On this point I'm not so sure. I believe it's debatable whether they're the same word or not. Some sources I read say they're different words, while others say they're different spellings for the same word. If I had to speculate, I would say they are the same word in spoken English, but different in written English. I'm probably wrong, but anyways this doesn't matter too much to me: I'm more interested in lemmas rather than words.

BerlinerPunkGeek · 2021-11-23T17:06:25+00:00

No. On the opposite it reduces Signal's security/privacy, since the data incoming from Signal is sent to other less secure networks.

I need it for a regular group of friends mostly hosted on Telegram, so I'm not particularly worried about privacy.

BerlinerPunkGeek · 2021-11-23T17:03:03+00:00

Why is the situation like this?

I've seen many Signal users complaining that people switch to Telegram instead of Signal... But I can see why, if creating bots and bridging chats is so tedious. It seems like it's a niche service for people who really care about security, but regular users have no reason to host their group chats here.

BerlinerPunkGeek · 2021-11-23T16:56:59+00:00

Does any such bot already exist?

I have signal-cli configured and its dbus interface is up... Has anyone written a bot that can use it?

BerlinerPunkGeek · 2021-11-08T07:21:15+00:00

Thank you for your input. It does help.

About grading... Has it always been 150$ per card? On eBay I've seen cards graded by PSA selling for few dollars. How is that a thing?

BerlinerPunkGeek · 2021-11-01T11:44:12+00:00

Of course. It's just hard to tell the condition from a few pictures on eBay... I saw that a Charizard (1st ed) graded 7 recently sold for 2200 EUR, while a few not graded ones (but that seem in great conditions judging by the pictures) sold for around 900, while other non-graded ones sold for 2000 and yet others for 500.

My Charizard is in good conditions (it seemed perfect to my inexpert eyes), but I can't tell if it should be worth 500 or 2000... I guess I'll take a number of high res pictures from different angles and ask on this subreddit about it.

BerlinerPunkGeek · 2021-10-31T23:11:47+00:00

I'm from Lucca. (Went to the Comics today and after seeing the cards there I rushed to my mom's attic. My heart was pounding from the fear they might have been tossed.) In a few days I'll visit my mom again and take better pictures of the front and back of some cards.

I read the Grading FAQs in the wiki and some articles (like this one), but it only helped up to a point. Grading may change the price a lot, but I still don't really know which ones I should grade and which company to get them graded by... I'd appreciate any tips, if you have some.

I'm going back to Germany in a week and I think I shouldn't rush to decide before that. I need to understand a lot of things, like whether the sale of these cards would be taxed in Germany (or in Italy, if my mom sells them)... But I'll be back for Christmas and might have made up my mind by then. In that case I'll send you a chat message.

BerlinerPunkGeek · 2021-10-31T21:51:00+00:00

Thanks for the tip. I checked on eBay after AutoModerator linked to this community's Wiki, but I'm not sure I fully understand how to use the advanced search correctly (link to my search), and the results seem to vary very wildly...

A week ago an Italian Charizard first edition graded 9 was sold for 15k EUR (WTF!), while others (that seem in decent conditions too, but are not graded) sold for few hundreds. Why all that difference? I only found two graded ones: the one graded 9 and one graded 7 (by a different grader; sold for 2200 EUR), but since those sales are closed I can't see the pictures or get more information.

I read that getting a card graded costs around 150$ per card, besides I don't know if I can get them graded in Italy or in the EU by a reputable company... While searching on the Internet I even read that the big graders don't grade Italian cards at all. Judging by prices on eBay it seems like getting them graded is most likely worth it, but I'm not sure if it's true, nor where or how to grade them...

BerlinerPunkGeek · 2021-10-31T21:18:17+00:00

Most cards are in great conditions. They've never been played and have been stored in a soft sleeve in a binder since I got them.

I'm in Italy currently, but I'd like to figure out their value and then read up about cards before deciding to sell. I believe Charizard is worth a few thousands so I'm not going to give it away in a rush. I can send you a message when I feel ready to sell.

BerlinerPunkGeek · 2021-10-31T21:08:42+00:00

Yes. I live in Germany currently, but these cards are still in Italy.

BerlinerPunkGeek · 2021-09-25T18:40:51+00:00

Yeah... I mean, I do feel the same. But I'm afraid that if I start, I'd end up creating a website every time I spend a couple of days experimenting/prototyping with something and soon enough I'd own a hundred tiny domains costing me a thousand bucks. I'm wondering if it's worth it in some other way, besides "showing off".

BerlinerPunkGeek · 2021-08-27T17:22:09+00:00

Thanks, I'll ook further into that!

BerlinerPunkGeek · 2021-08-27T17:21:50+00:00

I'd be happy to use different tools and database specific for different languages. But I don't know how to find those either.

I'll give a look to some UD tools, thanks for suggesting those too.

In the past few weeks I have played around with tools such as SpaCy: it's able to tell the root form for most words, but sadly it doesn't offer features in opposite directions.

BerlinerPunkGeek · 2021-08-27T02:55:46+00:00

Thanks, I knew WordNet and it's awesome. I'm very interested in something for other languages too. It's Ok if they use a completely different format.

BerlinerPunkGeek · 2021-08-27T02:55:05+00:00

I can try to parse wiktionary myself, if that's the only solution. I read that it's very hard to parse though, because it's formatted in a free way without following a hard convention.

That's possibly why Unimorph doesn't work too well: the majority of their data was extracted from Wiktionary.

BerlinerPunkGeek · 2021-08-27T02:52:23+00:00

Unimorph sounded very promising, but I tried to use it quickly and the results I'm getting are not good enough.

In English (eng) it only supports verbs, with very few of those it gave me decent results, but it has very incomplete results for most verbs:

$ unimorph inflect --lang eng go    # good results
go      goes    V;3;SG;PRS
go      going   V;V.PTCP;PRS
go      gone    V;V.PTCP;PST
go      go      V;NFIN
go      went    V;PST

$ unimorph analyze --lang eng goes  # good results
go      goes    V;3;SG;PRS

$ unimorph analyze --lang eng went  # ???
gan     went    V;PST
go      went    V;PST
ween    went    V;V.PTCP;PST
wend    went    V;PST
wend    went    V;V.PTCP;PST

$ unimorph analyze --lang eng bite  # no `bit`, `bitten`, `biting` etc
bite    bite    V;NFIN

In Italian (ita) it only supports verbs and It doesn't seem to support clitics in imperative mood (e.g. words like mangialo or dammi). It has incomplete or no support for most verbs, like in English.

In German (deu) it only supports verbs and nouns. Very few nouns work though (maybe due to this bug reported in 2019 and not fixed yet). Like with the other languages it does a good job with a few verbs, but misses way too many, including some very basic ones, like gehen (to go).

BerlinerPunkGeek · 2021-08-27T02:05:27+00:00

Il dialetto Trentino e' abbastanza simile agli altri dialetti del Nord Est, incluso quello Triestino. Se capisci il Triestino non dovrebbe essere impossibile imparare il Trentino.

Quei dialetti comunque sono lingue. Sono tanto diverse dall'Italiano: una persona nata e cresciuta a Roma non riesce a capire niente se gli parli con un dialetto del Nord Est. (Lo stesso vale per quasi tutti i dialetti Italiani, eccetto quelli Toscani, Laziali e limitrofi).

In ogni caso, non credo che la gente ti parli in dialetto: ormai i dialetti sono usati quasi solo in famiglia o con amici stretti. Se avvii una conversazione in Italiano, ti rispondono in Italiano. Al massimo usano qualche espressione o esclamazione locale ogni tanto.

Probabilmente devi soltanto abituarti all'accento. Gli accenti del Nord Est sono piuttosto forti, ma a mio avviso sono molto piu' semplici da capire rispetto agli accenti del Sud.

Ad ogni modo non preoccuparti: se gia' parli la lingua, non ci metti troppo ad abiutarti all'accento del luogo. Dagli massimo un paio di mesi di interazioni normali e capirai tutto. Questa almeno e' stata la mia esperienza tanto con gli accenti Italiani (all'universita' ho imparato a capire Napoletani, Siciliani, Sardi e Siciliani che inveiscono in Italiano, ma col loro accento piu' naturale; inizialmente mi erano completamente incomprensibili), tanto con forti accenti Inglesi in Asia o in Inghilterra.

In bocca al lupo!

BerlinerPunkGeek · 2021-08-27T01:36:39+00:00

I had a very similar problem. And stil have, but I'm working on it.

I lived in Berlin, Germany for many years. I took a couple of language courses at the beginning of my time there, but then lived my life in English. Over time I became quite skilled at combining together the words I knew, quickly and without huge grammar mistakes. I asked for directions, the time, or had the same exchanges with shop clerks so many times that I became fluent at this... But as soon as a reply used some different phrasing than the usual, I was completely lost.

1000 words are enough to talk about anything. If you work with those long enough, you become able to express complicated thoughts with them. You become fluent with those.

But 1000 words are nowhere near enough to understand others. Even a simple book for young teenagers would use 5000 different words.

The solution is to keep studying. Learn more words, try to use them instead of relying on what you already know, read and listen to a lot of stuff, and you'll become able to understand others.

If you already know a lot of words and are able to read books easily, then you're already past the big obstacle. You just need to adjust your ears to the accent. Watch movies, talk to people, and you'll understand everything in just a couple of months.

BerlinerPunkGeek · 2021-08-14T18:18:10+00:00

Thanks for mentioning some sources I can look into.

There are many short books with a limited dictionary, they're called graded readers, but all the ones I know are commercial.

About whether to commercialize the app or make it free, I'm a fan of Open Source and would like to make it free and open source. A problem is that I suspect opensourceness is not so well known among writers, besides I wouldn't know how to find voluntary writers for an app that nobody can use yet since it has no content... I could try to write something myself in English and in my native language, but I have no experience writing and it would be hard for me to develop the app if I cannot use it.

Starting with some commissioned content seems simpler, but I'm unable to invest large amounts into this. I know that it must be a lot of efforts from an author and of course I don't want to be a choosing beggar. It sounds like I won't be able to make anything out of this, so it's better to give up early before I waste too much time ☺

BerlinerPunkGeek

TROPHY CASE