I am a veteran software engineer who works as a freelancer from their home.
I love modernizing ancient software by carefully, slowly rewriting while it is still operating - without disruptions.
Currently I have two wonderful, awesome, really amazing clients between whom I split my time roughly about 50:50.
For the first one, I am the "Primus inter pares" in a team rewriting a 20-yo C++ & JS-based system in modern nodeJS + Typescript. My main job there is not to write code (it seems), but review PRs, review code, give coding guidelines, merge PRs, and make sure everything my team needs is there: test servers, development server, on-premise Gitlab, on-premise Mattermost, a good/respectful/lovely atmosphere, a lot of fun, and what else we need to deliver an awesome product. The team is amazing, the atmosphere is full of respect and love; I will stay with this team as long as I can.
For the second client, I am rewriting a 15+ year old system (Java, Java/Swift/Vue1.x-FE; rpc-like crap-API) using go(BE), gRPC (API) and dart/flutter (FE).
Here I am the core developer for the new client and the new back-end. The back-end is, for now, a proxy/a wrapper around the existing one. Behind that wrapper, two wonderful co-workers are modernizing & optimizing the Java-BE. This team here is equally as lovely as one can ever hope for; and yes, I will stay with this team as long as I can as well.
Oh, and BTW: people in both teams are nearly 100% remote.
I am married to a wonderful, an absolutely amazing person who is so full of love that she sometimes struggles with the universe (or with humanity). And I am a proud father (yes, "father"*) of a woman with a brilliant Beautiful Mind and a heart as big as the universe (who also happens to have Mastery of Words™️).
I love learning new things from complete strangers. The stranger the new knowledge the more fascinating it is for me.
I have a #FragMyBrain (autistic, ocd, nd) so be ready for detailed explanations, where each word is carefully chosen & positioned in the sentence, but still some missing - when you ask me something.
I quickly fall in love with brilliant people with language mastery skills - Mastery of Words™️.
You can always shitpost with me & talk garbage - as long as it is done intelligently, with wit & humor, and respect.
The fastest way to land on my block list is not to make a mistake, but to repeatedly make the same stupid mistake again and again and insist on it being right. There is always enough space in the "Dungeon of Blocked Accounts" (and being racists, queer-/transphobic, ableist, disrespectful, white supremecist, etc., etc. - you know what I mean).
I will add CW and mark as sensitive whenever I think so. If I forget once, please inform me and I'll correct it as fast as I can. I don't discuss whether something needs CW/sensitive marker or not, I just accept it.
I wear my feelings on my skin, i.e. what you see is how I really am, there is no IRL Imdat Celeste and a different, Fediverse Imdat Celeste: you will see a lot of 🫂,💜,😍,🥰,🥹,😳... and more. If you feel it is intruding, please let me know.
I come over differently, but I am also insecure: so, I will add a lot of emojis - just to be sure.
Also, please don't expect a "normal person" here: I am completely, utterly, hopelessly an un-normal person.
Also, my posts my start with one specific topic but during the text itself it may just become something completely different - "Train of Thought".
Again, nice to meet you - I am always looking for more new friends...
*: I am a trans non-binary person. When I came out to her, my daughter asked me how she should call me from then on and since it is an honor to be her father, that, yeah, I am and will always be that.
Something I love telling people is that the Mandarin euphemism for ‘being horny’ is ‘I ate your tofu / I want to eat your tofu / they ate my tofu’. I feel like we should popularize that in pop culture. Like, you hear that in TV shows (mainly Taiwanese but also sometimes mainland Chinese)
People have been able to add multiple audio tracks for #languages and audio descriptions in videos since the founding of the Matroska format in 2002. Audio tracks have existed on DVDs since the 1990s. It has taken this long for #YouTube to start adding this standard feature, and not everyone is allowed to use it. It's been a year since this feature was made semi-publicly available, and still, only larger, more well-known creators can use it. Just something to think about. #Accessibility
Language can be a time machine—we can learn from ancient texts how our ancestors interacted with the world around them. But can language also teach us something about people whose language has been lost? Ph.D. candidate Anthony Jakob investigated whether the languages of prehistoric populations left traces in Lithuanian and...
The gallop towards #enshittification as propounded by @pluralistic continues unabated. This time with Duolingo. I've been using the app for years. In fact almost straight for the past 180 days. Then their recent update removed the clear, well articulated speech & replaced it with what seems to be AI generated, barely comprehensible, low quality speech that effectively makes the app (now shapp/shit app) pretty much unusable.
If you're a Duolingo user or just a lover of language in general & if you've noticed this please file regular reports about the sound quality & add a comment. Become ungovernable.
Lumi = snow
Hanki = full cover of snow, at least half a meter
Nietos = large & wide ,naturally piled snow
Kinos = smaller, localized piles of snow. If articifial, always this
Nuoska = malleable snow, you can make snowballs out of this
Tykky/tökkö = wind-packed snow
Hankikanto = melted and refrozen cover of snow which you can walk on
Räntä = sleet
Pyry = heavy snowfall in wind
Tuisku = ice crystals snowfall strong wind
Myräkkä = snowstorm
The current frequency of language usage on the Web (e.g. 52% of websites in English) doesn't reflect the diverse cultural and linguistic needs essential for global access, highlighting the importance of internationalization (i18n).
Fuqiao Xue, @w3c i18n activity lead, gave a comprehensive report of past and future @webi18n work, collaborating with spec and #browser#developers to address gaps, particularly for endangered scripts and #languages.
Many British adults regret not concentrating in their French or German lessons at school. Most believe that languages should again become compulsory in school.
Many feel ashamed that they cannot speak another language and would welcome the opportunity to learn.
Only 21% of UK adults said they can have a conversation in a modern language that's not their mother tongue, according to a YouGov poll commissioned by the British Academy.
Hello, I'm Wikimedian in residence at Toulouse University, France: I train academics on #Wikipédia, #Wikidata, #Wikicommons, #Lingualibre, #OpenScience for better information flow and free education. I created the Graphic workshops, periodically write on conflicts, humans rights, and Chinese culture, topped the Covid Task Force. Since 2012 I fight for #languages conservation via Lingualibre, currently focus on signed languages and Occitan whistle speech. Follow me for more :3 :tireless_barnstar:
A question for bilingual/polyglot people: Do you post both in English and in your other, native languages? How do you decide which one? I see my English posts get more reach, probaly because some people have filtered out other languages.
I find it easiest to post in the language whatever I feel like writing in. I don't give it much thought. How about you?
Being from where I am in the world, my words for ingredients are in Malay, Teochew, Hokkien, Tamil (there’s no order to which food items are in which language. They simply.. are. Some fish we use the Malay names, some fish we use the other names. Same with veggies)
And now that I am in N America I am re-learning some words in Cantonese
I thought I couldn’t get ‘kang kung’ here but learned it’s actually called ‘ong choy’
I'll post about the work we're doing to think about the future of our software, the challenges and successes behind some of our technical initiatives, and support for #languages and #accessibility across 400+ languages and locales.
I'm super hyped to geek out about free and open software online!
"Bilingual Mandarin and English speakers living in Singapore also showed a preference for left to right mental time mapping over right to left mental mapping. But [..] also quicker to react to future oriented pictures if the future button was located below the past button – in line with Mandarin. Indeed, this also suggests that bilinguals may have two different views of time's direction – particularly if they learn both languages from an early age. "
People that have experienced language attrition of their native language, how difficult was it to relearn your language? And do you have any tips on how to overcome mental blocks and other challenges with it?
If you are learning a new language in general, which techniques work best for you that I can try?
Currently I speak my native language very poorly (about A2 level), but English pretty much fluently. I'm taking lessons and I know native fluent speakers IRL, but it really is a struggle.
Researcher investigates undocumented prehistoric languages through irregularities in current languages (phys.org)
Language can be a time machine—we can learn from ancient texts how our ancestors interacted with the world around them. But can language also teach us something about people whose language has been lost? Ph.D. candidate Anthony Jakob investigated whether the languages of prehistoric populations left traces in Lithuanian and...