This week I held the first week of work orientation and briefing for our new trainee who is originally from Wisconsin, US. Our spoken work language is Finnish and it seems she handles it brilliantly as she has been living in Finland for some time now. But I've noticed for me it's intriguing to have another spoken language in my world once again. All our docs and coding is naturally in English so it's not much of a stretch to actually speak English out loud, to me at least.
Despite this we have decided that it is good to use Finnish at work, because she wants to learn more and it's difficult otherwise, if we all keep speaking English. We Finnish people are funny that way, we don't really speak Finnish if the other person is not fluent with it, we switch to English too easily, because of our natural hospitability and because most of the Finns like to make the other person comfortable instead and we generally know English well.
I actually have some family from Australia from my mothers side, some of my cousins don't even know Finnish even though they have Finnish names, as they have lived most of their lives in Australia. I've never been there, but kinda through my special interest in languages I've learned to speak English pretty fluently and it comes naturally to me.
Anyway, solely the fact she is American living in Finland is kinda awesome in my world. After everyone has left the office we often get stuck in these long discussion about cultural differences, metal music and life in general. We have a lot in common and this week seems like a good start. I'm hopeful this will give birth to something great in our work community.
@rolle I’m an American living and working in Finland, but I work from home and my exposure to Finnish is limited and transactional vs. conversational as a result.
I do aspire to learn Finnish though.
In the meantime, my daughter goes to a Finnish public school and is quickly learning the language.
Great interview with Jay Graber (CEO, #Bluesky) on Decoder with Nilay Patel (@reckless1280), where they dig into some of the major difference between Bluesky (#ATProtocol) and #Mastodon (#ActivityPub).
Launching Mastodon and not being able to see anything about the Baltimore incident might finally mark the time when I need to build a Fediverse service around the news.
Continuing my exploration of store brand/generic Lagers in #Finland, Coop Lager (4.2%, "Blond" #Lager) brewed by Sinebrychoff Oy Ab for S-kaupat. Ingredients: Water, hops, and barley malt of which at least 75% originates from Finland. Costs 1,02€ for a 330ml can. Best by Feb 23, 2025. Would buy again. #beer#olut#öl
And suddenly everyone on #Threads is a #fediverse expert and feels the need to explain (copy and paste) what it all means to their followers because @zuck entered the room.
Does anyone know of a setting to /NOT/ allow iOS to add new contacts to your address book without prompting?
Something changed in a recent iOS update where every address I respond to is now automatically getting added, and this new behavior is beyond irritating.
Thanks in significant part to nudging of blogging friends -- and milestones like @davew's noteworthy re-imagining of what a blogroll means (and what it can do) -- I've taken my blog out of its hibernation.
@dangillmor@davew You broke the internet. I get: “Resource Limit Is Reached. The website is temporarily unable to service your request as it exceeded resource limit. Please try again later.”
I have seen the downsides of the Quote Post feature on Threads lately. There it is in even wider, in constant use, because there is no shares shown on your profile.
Quoting a post often puts others in a spotlight and not always in very flattering way. I have made that mistake myself as well. It doesn’t feel good if you criticize someone this way and people start slandering and it’s out of your control. I sometimes feel like a bully using it.
So if/when we ever get a Quote Post functionality here on Mastodon, I hope it will be different. Perhaps in this case the problem is Threads and the algorithm and not the feature itself though.
“Security researchers created an AI worm in a test environment that can automatically spread between generative AI agents—potentially stealing data and sending spam emails along the way.”
