fcatalan

I've been trying a few things, some are very interesting.

For example it understands Europanto* perfectly, but when I asked it to produce some it was germanic-only Europanto: English, German, Danish, Swedish... I told it to use more romance words and he came up with pure French. After some more prodding he achieved a decent mix.

I also tried to get it to behave like an ersatz Duolingo for Basque and it sorta worked, but it would need some clever working on the prompts to really be usable.

(*) Europanto is a joke language that uses random European language vocabulary on top of a generally English grammar.

Of course it's just another variety, but it's the one equivalent to the Received Pronunciation or "BBC English". People also tend to consider it the "original" one because, well... the language started in Castile. Up until a couple decades ago, if you wanted to have a career on national TV, radio or as an actor, toning down any other accent and switching to Castilian was a requirement, or at least would help a lot. Nowadays not so much, but still happens enough that in Spain a Castilian accent is perceived as "not having one".

There's a bit of "accentism" in Spain. Speaking with a southern accent will (wrongly) mark you as "lazy", "uncultured" or "unsophisticated" to some people.

I was born in Castile, so I usually speak "accentless" standard Spanish, but my mother comes from Extremadura, just a couple hours drive to the south, and when I speak to her I involuntarily switch to the extremaduran accent. I don't notice it but other people hearing me for the first time are shocked by the sudden switch.

Extremaduran accent has the same aspirated x and s mentioned in the article, so for "This is Extremadura" I'll tend to say "Ehto é Ehtremaura" to my mother and "Esto es Extremadura" to other people. Another curiosity is that many of the original "conquistadores" (Cortés, Pizarro) hailed from Extremadura.

It's not just concrete things like command line or linux or old crusty editors, it's about how they lack general computer savvy and flexible problem solving skills.

One example:

I had this guy, it was his second job, the previous one was about some Enterprise Java thing. Intelligent and hard working, and able to learn: we were exploring Erlang for some parts of the system and he was contributing within the month, with just a bit of hand-holding. But one day we get an urgent request for new functionality in the Java parts of the org, so I hand it to him. First task is getting some static data out of a few dusty html tables deep in the intranet and dumping it on a new table in the dev DB so we can start prototyping around it.

A couple of hours go past and I go check up on him. He's deep into some docs for an XML parser and ORM so he can parse the tables and get the data into the DB. He has already like 5 or 6 classes with all their getters and setters but he's not nearly halfway done.

I bring up the browser console, type $ to see if jQuery is loaded in the page, then come up with a one liner that spits the insert statements on the console (I had to google a couple of times, I'm not really a jQuery dude).

But then even that was a bit too flashy... he could just have coaxed the data into the database fiddling around with a spreadsheet and the DB GUI for a couple minutes.

But somehow his default and almost only mental model of interaction with data was overengineered Java, no matter how overkill it was for the task.

The kind that went into the subject just because it pays well and are taught some kind of bimodal syllabus: Lots of heavy Math/CS stuff they forget after the test and then practical programming as defined by "industry", industry being the big consulting firms churning out Java.

I find a version of this even with fresh out of college programmers.

They just know how to type Java on an IDE, maybe some SQL (using some graphical front end), some HTML/CSS. They can't operate in a Linux dev environment at all, can't use the command line or exit vi or perform any kind of simple shell based automation or use git without a plugin for their IDE.

And they also are reluctant to learn because they are self defined into some narrow field that doesn't include all this ops trickery in our workflow that they don't consider real programming.

Uh I don´t know what this has to do with the rest of the discussion but... The University sells some official swag through their "Mercatus" store, including clothing, and in fact in recent years had a lot of it related to the 800th aniversary.

But it also tolerates every souvenir shop in the town selling shirts and hoodies showing the university seal, which I guess makes them kind of "semi-official". Many students wear them.

Anyone curious can enter "Rua Mayor, Salamanca" in Street View and look at the front of every other shop in that street...

Japanese grammar is way more regular, "logic" and almost "computer-like". There are fewer and clearer rules and they are made very explicit by the usage of particles marking every part of speech. The phonetics are quite simple too, not too many weird sounds. The lexicon might be a bit hard once you try to express nuances, but spoken Japanese must be one of the easiest languages to get started with.

My kids' school and high school use Teams for some stuff. I have to use it occasionally for work too. The thing is that's nigh impossible to simply log out as one user and back in as another, so we have to take a lot of care of who used this or that device last. And don't get me started on the nightmare that is dealing with Minecraft accounts older than the Mojang acquisition. It's not only Microsoft. Trying to subscribe to third party stuff like Just Dance on the Switch is a kafkian experience that I couldn't solve. My daughter is angry with me for giving up.

Nice! I dreamt about making exactly this for years, also after reading Patrick O'Brien. Learned some 3D modeling, tried a few game engines, thought a lot about water rendering and bought a very nice book: "Seamanship in the Age of Sail". But I always got distracted by other interests. Will try it for sure.

The prompts that made it simulate command line systems don't work as well anymore. It still does it but the output is more terse, for example 'ls' just produces a plain list of a couple filenames instead of a full one with sizes and permissions.

Still very useful for churning out bureaucratic bullshit. Yesterday my wife had to write text justifying why a bunch of professors were qualified to teach the subjects they have been teaching for years. Prompting chatgpt with a couple lines from their resumes and the subject names produced 90% usable results.

I clicked, not really sure what it was about and started reading the first paragraph, armed only with my STEM-derived knowledge of the alphabet and I got it instantly. So it seems to work. Very interesting concept.

I'm that one man show, within a very dysfunctional org. I write a lot of internal tools, unprompted, just to save time for me or colleagues I like. I get bored sometimes, so deep inside some of them there's a naive Forth interpreter, and I then write some non performance critical logic in Forth. It's just a silly personal joke, at least until the proverbial bus hits me.

In my experience, Duolingo is as good, in fact better than the average class you can get. It won't get you to fluency by itself, but years of bare lessons won't either.

A few years ago I got randomly interested in Danish, so I started Duolingo Danish. In a few weeks I was able to understand tweets from Danish newspapers. In 4 months I could read novels, slowly but well enough to enjoy them. Do I "know" Danish? Not really, I can't speak past a few sentences and have a hard time understanding it spoken (Danish is a particularly hard one at that). But my RoI for 20 minutes a day for a few months was great.

Then my daughter had a hard time with her school English. She knew nothing and could not even follow the glacial pace of her lessons. I bribed her into keeping a 200 day streak in Duolingo and she was suddenly acing her tests. Now she has some interests with English only sources, and that alone is enough to help her keep learning, but duo was a huge kickstarter.

My wife also had non existent English from years of classes and needed to at least understand emails at work instead of always passing them by me, and a 300 day Duolingo streak fixed that.

I don't doubt that there are very good teachers out there, and you need to complement Duolingo if you really want to learn thoroughly, but it really puts you on track for very little actual effort.

A secular place won't execute them on the spot, but their sworn enemies for 1500 years would most probably do.

My uncle bought an imported ZX Spectrum in 1984 when I was 10. I was instantly hooked. I read BASIC books from the library and programmed on paper every day, then tested the programs every Saturday morning.

He still had the Spectrum in pristine condition in its original box last year when he died of cancer. I'd love to have it, but don't really want to ask my aunt and cousin for it.

While you are the party in the right here and others have given sound advice, some part of me is rooting for the guy. It sounds like someone jaded, maybe well into burnout. He might not have been like that always, might be worth exploring why. I've been in similar situations throughout my life and always overcame them, but over time it gets harder to care enough to lift yourself up without any help.

I work at an 800 year old institution. I have been here for 20 years. My wife works here too.

Salary isn't great in global terms, but puts us within the top 20% national household incomes. Enough no not really care about money.

We work 35 hours per week, pretty flexible schedule, about half from home and have more vacation days than we know what to do with.

The work is a bit monotonous and the office politics terrible, to the point of giving us depressing "golden cage" feelings sometimes, but when we take a peek outside, it doesn't look better than what we have. So we'll probably stay for the next 20 years.

I was in college in 96. Email accounts were only for some limited staff and foreign students, but we all wanted one. I managed to get hold of one, with console access, because the mail interface was elm.

I downloaded the passwd file and took it home to crack a few passwords, intending to take over accounts that were unused.

Jack the Ripper beeped loudly every time a match was found. I had it running for hours, with the occasional beep, but suddenly the PC started beeping like crazy for a good minute. Turns out that the default password was no password at all, you'd set it up on the first login.

It had found a big bunch of accounts created and never used, so me and my friends had struck gold.

Even when we were inevitably caught it wasn't a big deal: Some "don't be naughty boys" over a few beers.

Simpler times.

I had to hastily evaluate a bunch of online proctoring systems during lockdown. They went from dismal(1) to borderline scammy(2). I advised against using any, and got a lot of pushback from the department heads. Someone in the regional government must have seen the same as me, and after a couple weeks the regional education authorities had banned the damn things.

(1) one of them systematically failed to do face recognition on females with particular haircut styles

(2) Another claimed to be "AI powered" when it was pretty obvious after a couple meetings that they were just handing out the proctoring to real people quickly poring after the fact over a slideshow of the whole thing.

Dead weight would be people doing nothing. After those come the negative contributors: they do stuff but is all politicking and scheming, or just waste others time. Doing strictly what you are really paid for is bad now?

It would be about 99% unfair. In my experience Wikipedia style moderation setups are a magnet for small minded petty martinets. Of course rules and some criteria are needed, but soon those people run over any shred of common sense while wielding them.

Back in the summer of 1999 I had finished college and an internship and was weighing my options. Many afternoons I was hanging around the office with a friend that had just been hired by a startup. One day there was some issue, I don't remember exactly what, I casually typed a Perl one liner solving it, and was hired the next day.

And some time later the people from the internship place called me just as I was becoming sick of the post acquisition vibes at the startup, so I left.

And so on... I have never sent a CV or interviewed, sometimes I think I should have.

My entire job was doing that for a university for a few years. You won't catch me doing it again even for 2x my current salary.

I'm experiencing a version of this. I'm burned out at my job, but my life circumstances and personality keep me from looking for another one.

What I have done is strictly confining my job to have a minimal impact on the rest of my day and concentrate all my real effort in a particular hobby. I have gotten decently good at it in about a year, and made myself known in a few communities where the top practitioners hang around by sharing my results or giving feedback for others.

The result is that now I'm continuously rejecting commissions and offers that would turn it into a second job. I don't want that, but just getting asked feels so validating that the effort is completely worth it.

That's another reason for them. Can't make verbal promises to you and then forget about them via email.

It's the same here as in your partner's place. Even the proportions. This is government work: hiring practices are bad by design and "firing practices" unexistant. No one is ever fired. This means that the place is perennially understaffed in practice and depends fully on the goodwill, personal/professional ethics and patience of those that will do the work. But since they can't fire and we all have to live together somehow, management likes to keep the illusion that everyone is the same. So sometimes they will design promotion schemes or bonuses that favor slackers over the guys doing the job, or punish everyone equally for the sins of a few.

It's a pretty kafkian environment, but it's sort of a golden cage too: Pay is good, benefits great, stability rock solid. I'm used to a freedom of agency and independence that I'm afraid would go over badly in a normal place. So I stay.

Oh I also have stories about this... maybe for another thread. I should really just leave, but I know I won't

Welcome to government jobs, where it's way easier to squeeze those who do the work than fire those that won't.

"Nailed" it. Perfect description of my situation. I wish I weren't like this