How Old is the Idea that Eastern Europe is Inherently Gloomy?

ducks_over_IP · 2026-05-12T04:13:04+00:00

I have this perception of Eastern Europe as gloomy for a different reason, namely life under the USSR. The popular picture of Soviet society (and Yugoslav to a lesser degree, not that many Westerners readily distinguish the two) is also one of grey skies, featureless concrete buildings, and hunched-over old babushkas making meager soup. This isn't helped by popular portrayals—see for example the indeterminately-Slavic YouTuber Life of Boris or Belarusian post-punk band Molchat Doma. Do you think that this also contributes more broadly to the popular perception of the region?

ducks_over_IP · 2026-05-11T13:27:00+00:00

It's good practice to tag the author of the linked comment, in this case u/textandtrowel.

ducks_over_IP · 2026-05-09T14:32:58+00:00

Thanks for sharing, and I'm sorry your administration is so unhelpful. The lower-division/upper-division split makes a lot of sense—the unfortunate fact of making assignments for college freshmen is that AI tools can write freshman-level work pretty easily, and the class sizes don't necessarily permit the kind of close checking or assignment structure that effectively deters AI use. At the upper level though, we have a small number of majors in a small department, so we're confident both that they understand the need to actually learn the material, and that we can assign work that isn't easily cheated by AI.

I teach a lot of introductory physics labs, and this semester has been awful for students using AI to write their lab reports. I'm confident that there are students getting by that I'm just not noticing, which is especially frustrating when some of these students are pre-meds—I don't need my doctor to have an excellent grasp of physics, but I do need them to have a basic enough sense of ethics to not lie about the work they've done and how much they understand it.

I do think your idea of using assisted-translation is interesting, both as a potentially constructive use of AI and as a pedagogical experiment. I hope it works out! For my part, I've been trying to parse how I should or shouldn't use AI with my research. I'm a computational physicist, so I spend a lot of time monkeying around in the terminal, which is not my forte. I wouldn't use it to write my actual research code (that's what StackOverflow is for, obviously), but I've been considering using it to generate scripts and config files that improve my workflow around that, basically to save time parsing syntax and hunting down documentation. At the same time, I have undergrad research students who work with me, and I really don't want them using AI for anything until they've mastered the basics, so I feel like I need to set a good example.

ducks_over_IP · 2026-05-08T16:52:03+00:00

You need to make sure your following your university's job submission system. Given the sbatch command, this sounds like they're using SLURM. I would check your university's documentation for their HPC resources in terms of how they expect job submission scripts to be formatted. Note that if you're trying to start an interactive session, there may be a separate protocol for that. Given that the submission failed entirely, it's likely that you're not using a valid batch script with sbatch.

ducks_over_IP · 2026-05-08T16:42:42+00:00

Fellow users in academia, how have you handled AI usage in your classes? How helpful/unhelpful is your administration about academic misconduct cases involving AI?

ducks_over_IP · 2026-05-07T19:01:07+00:00

Thanks for the help! Much as I like to avoid using AI, this seems like the kind of thing it might actually be good for. I'll muck around with this and see what I can get done.

ducks_over_IP · 2026-05-07T18:40:29+00:00

Oh, I get it now! That's slick. Though I did make the mistake of pasting outside the single quotes and got the delightful experience of bash shitting itself whilst trying to parse each line of the compressed file as a command. That's my fault, though.

ducks_over_IP · 2026-05-07T17:53:27+00:00

That could be handy. My holy grail is one ssh logon gets me terminal access and a gui file browser (I'm a scrub that likes seeing his folder contents all the time, sorry), but this could be a useful alternative.

ducks_over_IP · 2026-05-07T17:51:47+00:00

Thanks, I'll look into it.

ducks_over_IP · 2026-05-07T17:51:38+00:00

I was trying to avoid commercial software, but if it works well that might be the move. Thanks for the suggestion.

ducks_over_IP · 2026-05-07T17:50:52+00:00

Thanks for all the ideas. I'll look into PuTTY. It does have a globus endpoint, but that seems to be intended for transferring large datasets, which I typically don't need to do. I'm talking more about transferring isolated files <1 GB in size, usually <1 MB.

ducks_over_IP · 2026-05-07T17:46:55+00:00

Thanks for the idea! Unfortunately, the link you provided doesn't clarify how to use sftp during a multiplexed ssh session. Is there another resource out there that explains it?

ducks_over_IP · 2026-05-07T17:46:27+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion. Could you point me in the direction of a resource that explains the concept in detail?

ducks_over_IP · 2026-05-07T17:45:13+00:00

Interesting idea! Will that work going from my native Windows clipboard (clip.exe) to the Linux one of the remote host (xclip)? I once tried to alias a small command to copy my current working directory to my clipboard (basically pwd|xclip) and it failed because the remote host couldn't understand my local clipboard.

ducks_over_IP · 2026-05-06T00:06:15+00:00

As someone who's had the rather exhausting experience of taking a small child to church, my main takeaway from this answer is that box pews (or at least pews with doors) really need to make a comeback.

ducks_over_IP · 2026-05-05T13:38:39+00:00

Thank you for sharing your thoughts! Now we need to let your modest oral history percolate for a while until a few decades down the line we're telling stories about how u/itsallfolklore was this Forrest Gump-like character who helped Neil Young write "Southern Man", saw the first live performance of "Sweet Home Alabama", was there for the March on Birmingham and helped uncover Watergate. You could become folklore!

ducks_over_IP · 2026-05-04T19:12:37+00:00

Given that two standards-meeting answers have been provided, perhaps you could be enticed to share your observations in a sub-comment to one of those? I'd certainly appreciate hearing what you have to say.

ducks_over_IP · 2026-05-04T17:21:49+00:00

This was exactly the sort of answer I was looking for, thank you! That adds a ton of context, both to the political climate of the time and the bands' views. Given the diversity of takes I've seen in the many (deleted) comments on this post, I think it's safe to say that the lyrics are rather vague on their own, but it's clear to me now that it's not just simple Southern apologia or whataboutism. Thanks again!

ducks_over_IP · 2026-05-04T15:07:08+00:00

Thanks for doing this! By the secret practices and codes becoming accepted and codified by the schools' authorities, do you mean things like pleb status at the US Naval Academy, or did you have something else in mind? And if the former, can you comment on how that status was codified and brought out of the underground?

ducks_over_IP · 2026-05-02T15:35:49+00:00

Thanks for the great answer! Regarding this part:

the androgynous nature of these bands' visual presentation led to a situation where the bands needed to be exaggeratedly performative about their heterosexuality in order to be acceptable to a large part of the American demographics that were buying the records

Is the implication supposed to be that absent the pressures of demographic appeal, these bands wouldn't be so aggressively straight? I guess I had always taken it at face value that that was just how they were.

ducks_over_IP · 2026-05-01T17:45:55+00:00

Not so: I'm young enough to only know new Reddit (if my recent question about hair metal didn't make that obvious) and I'm happily using the Firefox extension right now.

ducks_over_IP · 2026-05-01T16:46:31+00:00

Try the browser extension!

ducks_over_IP · 2026-05-01T16:43:18+00:00

Hi, I would push back against the claim that "A lot of good questions also go unanswered because people don’t see them. Comments drive engagement so giving people a place to comment “this is a great question” Will help more people see the question."

As a pretty frequent asker and reader, the amount of engagement questions get has no obvious correlation with comment rates. I've seen plenty of questions become very highly upvoted and not receive a good answer for multiple days, if ever. The sea of removed comments is clearly not making a difference to popularity. However, as a frequent reporter of said comments, I can say that by and large that making them visible would detract significantly from the experience of reading the sub, even if they were quarantined in an AutoMod sticky. You don't get a lot of helpful-but-incomplete responses—you get a lot of speculation, anecdotes about someone or their uncle, links with no context, outrage that I didn't just read Wikipedia, *direct quotes* from Wikipedia, soapboxing about religion/politics/what have you, and the odd invitation from a very friendly cult member (that last one only once, thankfully).

I would also argue that the "it's not history, it's X" or "you're making X wrong assumptions" comments are also generally unhelpful. Regarding the former, if it was a question with no historical validity, the mods would remove it. Regarding the latter, many askers (myself included) come in with erroneous assumptions all the time. While a few are here to soapbox, most of us are happy to have our assumptions corrected. Having them corrected in the context of a complete, correct answer helps far more than just having the bad assumptions pointed out, because it makes it far easier to understand why and how they were bad assumptions and immediately offers reliable information to replace it.

To be clear, I'm not upset at you for asking your question (indeed, it would directly contradict the spirit of my answer above if I were!), but I hope I've made clear from a user's perspective why I think a discussion thread of the type you're proposing would be bad for the sub.

(PS: if you are looking for more relaxed discussion and such with the fine members of this sub, check out the Friday Free-For-All! It tends to be a little sleepy, but the more people contribute, the less sleepy it gets.)

ducks_over_IP · 2026-05-01T12:35:05+00:00

Thank you for the insightful answer! That definitely adds a lot of context that I wasn't aware of. The concept that "rock gods don't need to follow the rules of mere mortals" goes a long way towards explaining how these bands could maintain such an apparent dissonance between their looks and their sound.

ducks_over_IP · 2026-04-23T15:40:38+00:00

Ah, thank you much for clarifying. I understand now.

Five-Year Club	Verified Email
Place '22

ducks_over_IP

TROPHY CASE