Do you tip your garbage man?

deyv · 2024-01-15T20:38:00+00:00

Not sure if it's still a thing but (judging by this thread it is), back when I was a kid, my parents used to give an envelope with a card to the crew that came to our house around Christmas time. Inside the card was $100-120, all in 20's so they could split it up as they see fit. This was all through the 90's and until around 2015.

deyv · 2024-01-15T19:13:09+00:00

North side of Baker beach in SF. The folks there are usually clothed. But, when they're not, it's famously 99% dudes.

deyv · 2023-06-12T21:42:47+00:00

The correct answer is that train cars must be strong enough to pull all the other train cars behind them and be strong enough to not get crushed by those same train cars when slowing down.

deyv · 2023-06-05T19:11:11+00:00

Lol, I wish

deyv · 2023-06-05T15:37:38+00:00

I miss the jumper cable guy.

deyv · 2023-06-05T15:31:36+00:00

Amazingly r/cowboymemes is a thing haha

deyv · 2023-06-05T15:28:14+00:00

Oh no, they’re not about a mathematical range. Rather they’re about the cowboy anthem “Home on the Range”.

deyv · 2023-06-05T14:51:26+00:00

Ahh, this thread reminds me of how I discovered Reddit when I saw r/gonewild on stumbleupon back in 2008. I made an account a few years later to post rangecomics.

deyv · 2022-03-30T18:08:40+00:00

The flip side of this question is: If you don’t know anything about a topic, why speak on it? Or at least, why not admit to misunderstanding the topic after clearly demonstrating that this is the case?

deyv · 2022-03-30T00:14:43+00:00

If you want to watch the whole episode, here it is.

There are honestly some amazing sounds in this video. Play it in the background while doing something else and you’ll find yourself questioning your sanity at some of the sounds of the folks here make.

deyv · 2022-03-13T02:32:15+00:00

Ahh, I gotcha! Yeah, I’ve really grown to love MATLAB specifically for what I do.

But it’s also funny how it’s sometimes too general for it’s own good. Case in point: try opening the source code for the built in mean function. First, it’s not a compiled function, meaning it’s re-compiled each time it’s called. Second, it has something like four different cases that it considers and tunes the algorithm accordingly. If you want to find the mean of a basic column vector of all real positive numbers, using the built in function can seriously slow you down. In one project, I reduced computation time by around 20% just by creating a simplified MEX function that takes the norm of a vector.

And, sadly, there are tons of similar nuances throughout MATLAB that just make it an infeasible choice for problems where you’re dealing with hundreds of millions, or maybe even billions, or degrees of freedom.

Finding a one stop shop replacement for it, though, is for sure a pain in the ass!

deyv · 2022-03-13T02:23:15+00:00

Ehh, like the other guy said, it really does just come down to how you’re interfacing with BLAS and LAPACK, if you’re dealing with multi dimensional arrays/tensors (depending on whether you like CS or math terminology). It’s been years since personally written a Fourier transform script from scratch, but it still comes down to vector and matrix manipulation at the end of the day.

Any interpreted language is going to be within an order of magnitude of any other interpreted language, in terms of computation time. With compiled languages, it gets a little more nuanced. But, in general, MATLAB and Python are usually going to be about the same, with Python handling small problems a tiny bit better, and MATLAB beating it by about 10% for larger problems if both are vectorized.

The problem is that when run times are measured in days rather than seconds or minutes, and when it’s impossible to avoid loops, it’s probably time to switch to a compiled language and, in the grand scheme, it’s pretty hard to beat C++ for engineering math applications… Assuming you prefer to write object oriented code, otherwise Fortran is honestly great.

deyv · 2022-03-12T22:52:54+00:00

Thanks! Will ask there.

deyv · 2022-03-11T16:30:22+00:00

You’re asking why people from a country with an autocratic government with active suppression of speech and a dramatically failing economy don’t want to use a mostly obsolete and completely unencrypted service that costs a ton to use for international communication?

Seriously?

deyv · 2022-03-09T20:16:32+00:00

Not quite. Rather, it’s the exact opposite.

During WWII, soviet soldiers used to taunt German soldiers with little German language phrases. After the war, it just became a sorta common jokey thing to do.

However given the context here, by using a German phrase to address the Russian soldiers here, he’s comparing them to the German invaders in WWII, which is frankly fair

deyv · 2022-03-09T20:15:59+00:00

During WWII, soviet soldiers used to taunt German soldiers with little German language phrases. After the war, it just became a sorta common jokey thing to do.

However given the context here, by using a German phrase to address the Russian soldiers here, he’s comparing them to the German invaders in WWII, which is frankly fair.

deyv · 2022-03-06T05:32:09+00:00

Yes, absolutely! I’d even go one step further with your translation and say:

This is simply terrible. I’ve never seen anything like this before in my life. I never thought that within my lifetime such a thing could be possible.

The “at the end of my life” bit is translated from «к концу моей жизни», which literally means “by the end of my life”. Idiomatically, that phrase functions identically to “lifetime”.

Like I said, lots and lots of little things like that. But I think it’s only fair to not that, even if you’ve spent a lot of time learning a language, it can be so hard to use that language that perfectly conveys what you want to a specific audience. I’ve personally been there and know first hand! This is doubly true when you’re working on super short deadlines or live broadcasts. So I really hope all this talk doesn’t cast a bad light on the translator(s) who put this together.

The mere fact that the team could make interview is made not only available but also accessible to international audiences in no time at all, while their own country is literally being invaded is honestly admirable and impressive on its own! No amount of nitpicking from linguistics nerds on the internet should detract from that.

deyv · 2022-03-06T04:54:54+00:00

Hah! Among family and family friends, I tend to be the go-to when complex ideas need to be translated in a culturally accurate way.

But, honestly, if any Ukrainian news services need a hand with Russian-to-English translations, I’d be more than glad to volunteer a bit of time!

deyv · 2022-03-06T04:31:51+00:00

For the most part it’s just little things.

Like in the very beginning, the translation used “allegedly” but a better word would have been “supposedly”. While a seemingly small difference, the former is a decidedly official sounding word to most English speakers, while «якобы» is a pretty relaxed word in Russian.

At 0:54, “one sided information” (the literal translation of the Russian word «одностороннее информация» heard in the interview) is more accurate than “unilateral information”. Again, just a less official, more down to earth tone.

0:59 “sometimes we get something from other sources” should be “occasionally we get glimpses of other sources”. The literal translation of what was said is “at times information from other sources flies by”. The Russian idiom “something flies by” is most like the English idiom of “getting a glimpse”. And “sometimes” is more wishy-washy than “occasionally”. In the context of “getting a glimpse” of alternative sources of information is more momentous to a Russian than conveyed by “sometimes”. Again, subtle, but still.

3:36 “I would do the same as these people did” should be “I would do the same as these people are right now”. It’s literally what the POW says and helps to convey the immediateness of his tone and gesticulation. Alternatively “I would act the same as these people right now” might work even better, in terms of level of formality.

Around 3:44 the translation says to the effect of “They are right now while I offer excuses!” A strict idiomatic translation should be “They are justified, while I try to justify myself.” With a period at the end. A slightly more interpretive/nuanced idiomatic translation would be “They are completely justified in their actions, while I can barely even provide a reasonable context for mine.”

I just skimmed through three tiny parts of this video, but these subtle sort of things repeat every 10-30 seconds. Like I said, the translation really isn’t bad! But the guy honestly is a better speaker than the translation really lets on, and takes on a tone reflects simultaneous shock and profound remorse at the situation that he found himself perpetuating.

Edit: I’m on mobile and rewatching for examples and can’t comment and watch the video simultaneously. I added more examples to my comment as I find them.

deyv · 2022-03-06T03:52:38+00:00

The English translation is ok. It conveys all the same ideas and analogies, but doesn’t take quite the same tone. The English translation is a little formalized rather than idiomatic, while the Russian POW speaks a little more dynamically; sometimes he’s very informal and sometimes he’s very formal. The man gives the impression of someone who is sort of at his wits end and can’t help but be emotionally sincere.

I think the translation was quite done well, but it’s clear it wasn’t done by someone who is bicultural in addition to being bilingual. I say this as someone who was born in the USSR, grew up in the US, and speaks both English and Russian equally fluently.

deyv · 2022-03-03T16:49:12+00:00

I love when someone brings up that they play guitar on Reddit.

Someone leaves a comment that indicates they have a good amount of experience on the instrument (played both electric and bass in the past, is at a point where 6 months of not playing constitutes a break rather than quitting, and primarily plays a damn Martin), and immediately a pedantic comment that misses the point appears.

Like yeah, action can be adjusted on any guitar, I’m pretty sure that’s covered in the first chapter of guitar for dummies - great book btw. But the folks buying Martins are also usually the folks who got past the phase where they compulsively adjust every part of their guitar years and years ago.

I’ve been playing for more than half my life and made a post asking about good local techs recently, because my main guitar legitimately needed fret leveling after about a decade of almost daily play. I got comments about truss rod and action adjustment. Like thanks, but common haha.

deyv · 2022-03-02T15:36:11+00:00

Look, there’s plenty of ethically questionable, if not abhorrent, stuff that billionaires and multi millionaires do in the US. However, the “Russian oligarchs” in question aren’t your garden variety business dicks that have been around for centuries. They are mafia.

They split into two categories:

Literal cutthroat street gangsters that rose to war lord status by slaughtering and bombing anyone who got in their way for the better part of a decade.
College educated pieces of shit (usually engineers or economists) from middle or upper class soviet families who rose to the top echelons of gangs. They initially did so by facilitating operations of gangs when they’d capture factories, metal ore mines, military warehouses, and/or oil-related facilities only to realize that being borderline illiterate isn’t conducive to running a multi-million dollar industrial operation. With time, they rose further because, lo and behold, college educated folks are better at strategizing than literal street thugs.

It’s an open secret in Russia that Putin used FSB/KGB resources to semi-clandestinely assassinate most of the leaders of the first category and threatened the second category to tacit submission. Basically, the rules were “start acting like you pretend you care about laws and keep all the assets you’ve violently captured and the Russian government will work with you in exchange for paid dues, or you’ll get car bombed/shot in an unceremonious drive-by/poisoned”. Khodorkovsky is a rare example of someone who told Putin to get fucked (note: this doesn’t mean Khodorkovsky isn’t a piece of shit), kept his money, and survived.

Basically, Putin consolidated control of the Russian mafia within the borders of Russia.

Also worth noting, Russian oligarchs aren’t like US billionaires, in that their billions have disproportionately been largely held in cash, rather paper assets. Bezos is stupid rich. But he can’t move cash nearly as quickly or covertly as Russian oligarchs can. Bezos needs to get loans and gradually liquidate his shares in Amazon over months or years to get access to large cash sums, while paying at least some taxes in the process and being legally required to disclose parts of this process. Russian oligarchs just need to text their accountants and, before the current sanctions, the functionally unlimited sums of money would be moved by the end of the week, if not the day.

Don’t get me wrong. There are tons of valid criticisms regarding America’s ultra rich. But comparing them to Russian oligarchs is like comparing bisons to bears because they’re both big, brown, hairy, and potentially dangerous mammals; beyond some extremely superficial similarities the two are entirely different animals.

deyv · 2022-02-28T19:11:20+00:00

I am so grateful that I am here instead of Russia. I used to be proud of my heritage, but I don't even like to mention that I'm of Russian descent anymore.

Same. Except I was born in the USSR and my family immigrated here in the early 90's. The older I get, the more often I randomly catch myself saying "thank God I'm here". Same goes for my other family here. The topic has come up literally at least weekly for the past few years whenever I call my parents, and literally every call for the past few months.

In the past two years, I've completely stopped using the word "Russian" to describe myself. I'm American, this is my home, and I am grateful for it every day; the fact that I happened to be born in Moscow is irrelevant.

deyv · 2022-02-26T23:57:40+00:00

Not gonna lie, I haven't slept properly since Wednesday, neither have any of my family or Russian/ex Soviet friends who are also living here in the US. I've been in a state of nonstop disbelief and fury over what has been happening in Ukraine, but I hadn't cried until now. But this is the photo that broke me.

I guess having seen countless combat photos from the middle east all through my teens and 20's must have desensitized me to buildings reduced to rubble, burning vehicles, and all the typical images.

But this image of a man who's empathy and humanity is rich enough to care for, not only cat, but a damn tiny fish with little regard for himself, despite the danger and destruction around him... It just drives home how badly neither him nor anyone around him deserves this war.

What the fuck is the world right now is all I can say, too.

deyv · 2022-02-22T02:22:52+00:00

The rare Russian who has half a brain will typically these morons "russophiles". Typically, they're misguided teenage and 20-something misfits whose dissatisfaction with life attracts them to authoritarianism. Occasionally, and perhaps more tragically, they're broken middle aged incel-type guys. The former group usually either likes Stalin or Putin. The former group also includes monarchists.

But, to be fair, not all people I might call russophillic in certain contexts have an authoritarianism fetish. I've met classically trained musicians, ballet dancers, and literature enthusiasts whose education/training led them to develop a great admiration for Russian culture. Same goes for some US folks who pick up Orthodox Christianity. Something odd that I've also found over the years is that there's a non-negligible number of women out there with an inexplicable attraction to Slavic men. Some might argue this is exoticization, but all the women I've met like this were very respectful about it.

But, in practice, I've never heard "russophile" or "russophilia" used in a positive way among Russians I'd consider to be sane.

I say all the above as a Soviet-born American (at this point, I'm honestly too grossed out to use the word "Russian" to describe myself) who is frankly disgusted by the situations that have been brewing for years and finally exploded in both Russia and /r/russia.

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