Thank you. It’s helping that I’m more immersed in the language than ever before. Actually living in Germany makes it much easier to start learning, and re-learning, the language. I’m around Berlin, so English is quite pervasive, but I do try to erste Deutsch in conversations.
I managed to pick up a crime novel off a free pile this week. I’m not able to read it outright, but the percentage of the prose I’m getting is about 60-80%. That’s a huge win for me.
In more formal practice I’m nearing the end of translating book 95 of Die Drei ??? Kids - Geheime Zeichen (secret signs). I’m thinking about getting another one of those since the vocabulary level and prose difficulty are about right for me at this point.
I did manged to order food a few times during the week entirely in German, though I bailed when trying to describe how much of a cheese wheel I wanted to purchase.
This post feels like a bot wrote it as pro Microsoft spam.
Or else?
I did some translation of children’s books. It went well. I learned some new vocab surrounding medical topics (still seeking care in a foreign country, sigh).
I also got some ear training listening to numbers at stores.
Oh! And I realized I can almost understand the train arrival loudspeaker at the main train station for the most common announcements. That’s very helpful.
It relies mostly upon people feeling shame about being denounced. Being impeached is mostly about an official denouncement.
If you don’t care, then it means nothing to the individual. It then falls upon the citizens to actually give a fuck about their country having leadership who is more positive than negative. What we’ve learned in the last handful of years is that about 30% of voters would vote for a king if that king hates the same people they do. Another 30% don’t care who runs anything, so a king is fine with them.
So… A ruling monarch the US will have. It’s nearing the end of the Republic and Orange Fürher has crossed the Rubicon. Apparently no one cares enough to really deal with it, but we’ll surely see lots of walking around on a weekend as to not cause any inconvenience.
Yes, I feel No Kings is the right message, but the actual wherewithal to enforce the Republic isn’t visible yet.
It’s kind of a vote of no confidence that then requires the US Senate to hold a “trial” on whether to remove. Essentially, the House (a more general populace representative body) says "he is bad and should be reviewed’. Then the Senate (which more represents the states, not the public) decides whether to agree and then a removal happens if they do.
Otherwise? It’s just the Senate saying “he’s fine and we’re okay with it”, which is what the Republicans are. They’re okay with crime and hatred of fellow Americans as long as it’s their people doing the hating and criming.
Windows 95/98 sucked shit. I liked the games, but the kernels were terrible.
I dual booted or ran two machines Linux (RedHat 5.2 to 6.2, wtf was up with 7?), then whatever worked (usually Debian based) for a while. Mostly used Linux alone for years, but used Win7 for a bit. That one was okay, but Microsoft can’t build dev tools on their own OS to save their lives.
It’s been Linux Mint for a long time now on desktops and Debian/Armbian on servers.
Basically, I’ve been mainlining Linux since about '97 and it’s doing me just fine. Works great for my kids and wife. We’re a mostly Linux household. It saves me a ton of headaches. Easy to install, patch, and almost no other maintenance.
Danke für die Gedanken.
Nein, ich habe kein Oktoberfestbier getrinken. Ich trinke fast kein alkohol. Aber, ich bin in Berlin und Oktoberfest ist klein hier.
I feel it’s a reasonable level of use. Some of the big hurdles they have are pronunciation, idioms, and complex grammar. I’m operating at a text only 2 year old level, so it should be okay. :-)
The immediate feedback on why my German isn’t totally correct is invaluable. The big ones are conjugation and the variants on implied motion (a huge part of German ad a language), which it’s helping me a ton with.
Mit freundlichen Grüßen!
I learned some more vocab and did some context learning.
I also started using GPT for some really basic story translation. I’d been using children’s board books (18 month old kid kind of materials) for a while, but with GPT it can give me some tailored short stories, then some feedback on my translation.
My prompt:
“I’d like to do some german to english translation practice. Could you please write a 3 paragraph story in German. The language level is 18 months, like a board book kind of level. I’ll try to translate it.”
The feedback after I type in a translation is usually about like this:
Good work! You caught most of the meaning correctly. A few small notes:
“Der kleine Hund Max läuft in den Garten.”
You wrote: “The small dog Max ran in the garden.” Better: “The little dog Max runs into the garden.”
Two things:
läuft is present tense (“runs”), not past. in den Garten means “into the garden” (motion toward), not “in the garden.”
“Die Sonne scheint.”
You wrote: “The son shines.” Just a slip: Sonne = sun, not son. So: “The sun is shining.”
Is it better than in-person work? Nope. Can I do it on the train while I commute? Yup. Is it better than many of the tools I’ve run into? Naturlich.
No one who survived the attempt to require others to use it.
Show me an ad in my own kitchen and that screen is going to be broken.
I moved to Germany. It’s been an experience because the tech status dialed back about 15 years. One area I don’t miss is the ever pervasive drive to have screens with ads on every surface.
The Linux Mint GUI updater is an interesting bit of code, or at least it was about 5 years ago. I looked at updating it a bit with a status bar for a stage I thought could use it.
I opened up the code…Python that just uses a shell call to apt. No muss, no library calls. Okay, that’ll do.
It was a functional wrapper on the command line calls, exactly as you’d hope for a tool.
Awesome follow through. Thank you.
Got a source on how they hid the body? It’s very not cool if that’s what was done. I know the Nazis are trying to turn him into a martyr, and having the body both to hide from the investigation and to make it mysterious so they can tell any lies they like is classic.
Ich auch!
We moved to Germany a few weeks ago (well… moved to Berlin). Immersion here is sorta immersion.
I read some new children’s books. Spent time translating government documents (the never ending array of government documents). Learned a few new words in conversation and got a bit better at people’s names.
Deutsch jeden tag!
It should just be that the government doesn’t patrol the high seas, of course! Every ship should enter into personal 1-on-1 contracts with each pirate for a market appropriate rate to ensure they don’t get attacked. The Libertrian way won’t cause any issues of scale, rampant loss of merchant ships, and an eventual ending of all oceangoing shipping outside of the handful of ships that can afford their own navies to escort them… /s
Come to the Open Source community for ideology, stay for the better life. It’s a learning curve to get in. After that it’ll open more doors and be much more relaxing to run OSS operating environments than you think.
The real fun is when you’ve been on Linux for a few years and are forced to do some tasks on a Windows machine. It’s amazing how bad the Windows UI and tooling is, but it’s hard to see until you can look with some perspective.
I usually start a desktop on Mint since it’s got at least some new drivers and a few more tools with Cinnamon desktop.
If the hardware is finicky or there’s odd devices a distro doesn’t handle, I often just try a different distro instead of driver hacking. It’s a very big hammer, but I’d rather have things work with the distro configs instead of maintaining it myself.
Servers? Debian.
Desktops? Mint (prettier Debian out of the box)
Otherwise? Use what works with the least effort.
You’re sitting on the Chinese Translator problem, and to some extent the basis of the Turing Test (mostly the translator problem).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room
Knowledge != Intelligence
Regurgitating things you’ve read is only interpolative. You’re only able to reply with things you’ve seen before, never new things. Intelligence is extrapolative. You’re able to generate new ideas or material beyond what has been done before.
So far, the LLM world remains interpolative, even if it reads everything created by others before it.