eukgoekoko

Seriously, the fuck has happened to nerds? I expected to see some name-dropping in the post, probably some mentions of GNU / Richard Stallman. What have I found? Jobs and Woz, you're sure nerdy as hell, Mr. Apple-Fanboy.

> It is not that different from German in this matter.

I've met several Germans who spoke Russian fluently, none of them has really mastered the instrumental case, not even a friend of mine who worked at the German embassy in Moscow. Although you might say it's a minor grammar difference, this particular grammar case seems hard to grasp for people who are not accustomed to it through their native language.

Also, from my personal experience, quite a few Germans who learnt Russian had a real struggle understanding the concept of perfective/imperfective aspect.

+1 Baumwolle is my fav.

> Would you have been open to her asking you to stop if she felt that was ruining her productivity

Most definitely yes. But she never really shared with us what she felt. So when I heard from my boss she wasn't OK with us talking Russian I was like: WTF, how doesn't she understand she has a privilege to speak her native language at the office while most of the employees have to resort to the silly form of English they learnt at school?

I was sharing my personal experience with my boss because of > think from someone else's point of view.

As for "incidental knowledge transfer" as you call it, there's another side of it: it's called distraction.

No it's not. If my current boss is talking German fast enough, I can barely understand. Whenever he's talking with the legal team he's using German. This is a clear indication to me that my participation is unneeded (altough I do communicate with our lawyers on variety of subjects). Moreover, I think overhearing other people's conversations is impolite.

You are making too many assumptions about the nature of our conversations just in a single comment. Imagine a situation: a newly joined junior dev is given a task to implement a web scraper. Meanwhile, senior devs sitting beside her start discussing AWS bills for the previous month, pretty much in a casual way. Do you think she should a) be given a chance to participate in this discussion b) carry on with her task, asking senior devs of what's unclear when needed?

It's good that you've mentioned efficiency. How do you think, if junior devs would have to take part in every tech conversation, scheduled or not, when would they do their job?

> And I think they should be given the option to attend all other meetings too,

Surely we had numerous meetings altogether, she wasn't excluded. But if every engineer would be given the right to attend every meeting, this would pretty much degrade to everyone just holding meetings all day long.

> I wouldn't want to work for your company. Thanks for sharing! There are quite a few companies that follow your vision, I wish you good luck in your career.

Xenophobia is literally a "fear of unkown". What I meant to say is that one could rationalize irrational fear of unknown speech with this feeling of exclusion, but could it be it's just uncommon sounds and intonations that make you feel uncomfortable? I've mentioned Italian sales for this very reason: facing a different culture would naturally raise questions within you: - are they talking shit behind my back? - do they have something against me? this all depends on your levels of paranoia and xenophobia. As a person coming from a vastly monocultural society I used to feel this, too. I believe the solution to this is being open for everyone and overcoming xenophobic sentiments and by no means complaining to the boss.

> Even in the case where a junior wouldn't be able to contribute to the discussion meaningfully ... they can learn from it.

Do you mean to say junior devs should be a part every single meeting held by senior engineers? This is utter nonsense, sorry.

That's hilarious. I used to work as a senior backend developer in one of Berlin's startups. Another senior BE dev was a native Russian speaker, so despite our fluency in English we started chatting in Russian now and then. Our conversations were meaningful and respectful (unlike those held by our predominantly Italian sales team who would shout out words like "cazzo"). We didn't mean to exclude anyone either, we only used Russian talking about stuff we wouldn't immediately share with everone in the first place - just because junior devs do not have to participate in the discussions about architecture design. Still, a junior dev from the US felt intimidated hearing our mother tongue so she asked our manager to introduce "English only" policy in this German company. She could not pass the probation period (was too busy doing gymnastics directly in the middle of the office space) and left the company, but the policy remained. Sure I don't have an answer to your question, but may I ask you: what's wrong with you? How do you think, does your attitude have something to do with xenophobia?

> Nuclear in Germany was always pretty minor.

This is simply not true. According to https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/29295/umfrage... nuclear's share in Hermany's total power generation was 30,6% in 2000, staying around 30% until 2009.

You're still missing my point: your claim about Gorbachov having no memories of NATO borders negotioations is false, the sole purpose of my comment was to debunk it. There's one thing I can agree with you though: this argument had really taken imbecilic position.

You have claimed that "Gorbachev has publicly admitted he has no memory of it". This record of preliminary talks with Baker published by Gorbachev Foundation proves the opposite. There's no question this document has no legal bearing, but it's definitely more than just an allegation to say the US have fooled poor Gorbi.

> And the last point. NATO is the mechanism for securing the U.S. presence in Europe. If NATO is liquidated, there will be no such mechanism in Europe. We understand that not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as well it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO’s present military jurisdiction will spread in an eastern direction.

taken from https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16117-document-06-record-...

I remember how Konyok-Gorbunok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpWkJuXGQic was just driving me nuts, I was just 6 y. o. and couldn't handle the frustration from losing on the 3rd screen. This game was just inhumane, I've only seen 20-year olds being good at it.

There was popular demand for these flights. My father once flew with Tu-144 from Moscow to Alma-Ata because of some urgency. The distance between these two cities is about 4000 km which is comparable to the distance between London and New-York. By the time he used to be a student and since the flight was subsidized it costed him just 83 roubles, which is just 20 roubles more than a flight on an ordinary plane, according to wiki (https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2%D1%83-144#%D0%9A%D0%BE%...)

The goal of this project is to replace tundra with grasslands. And tundra isn't a forest really, it's quite the opposite: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tundra

I still think you're missing my point, although I am impressed by your German skills ("der Schimmel" is BTW just a homonym, it's hardly related to the topic of syntactic ambiguity).

> is a) another joke sentence nobody uses in practice, and b) is exactly a case where you can only distinguish the part of speech (and the grammatical case) of a word from the syntactic structure and not from its morphology, something you claimed doesn't happen in German, but here it clearly does.

I didn't make such a strong claim. All I wanted to say in German syntactic ambiguities are much less of a problem than in English. I've brought two anecdotal evidences to let you compare possible ambiguities in both of them, these two are indeed nothing but jokes.

But let's take a closer look at them once again.

a) "Time flies like an arrow": the word "time" can be 1) a noun 2) an adjective 3) a verb in declarative form 4) a verb in imperative form. This gives us a factor of 4 on the very first word of the sentence.

b) "Wenn Fliegen hinter Fliegen fliegen" - ambiguitity exists just between "fliegen" as a verb and "Fliegen" as a plural noun, thus the "ambiguity factor" of the word "f/Fliegen" is just 2.

> but I would need to see some good data before I believed that claim, because it's just not something that is immediately obvious.

Fair enough.

Sorry if it was confusing, I really wanted to mention both a) lexical ambiguities b) syntactic ambiguities as possible obstacles for NLP.

> Unlike German, English typically has very rigid word order, so in the context of a sentence, you'll know if a specific word is a noun or a verb.

So you say you are able to guess from the word order what part of speech a particular word is. But with German you hardly need all this guessing.

If you compare two marginal examples: - English "time flies like an arrow" - German "Wenn Fliegen fliegen hinter Fliegen..."

you'll find out the English one has way more possible interpretations.

I cannot agree. Not only English seems to have many homonyms (the word "spring" alone has more than 2 meanings), its grammar is also somewhat primitive. Let me bring one more example, this time another way around: Google Translate from German to Russian. The verb "tragen" ("to wear") is translated as "износ" ("a wear") which is a noun. Using English we lose important knowledge: we have no clue what part of speech the word "tragen" is.

This isn't an issue for any considerably long fragment of text, it will be properly translated due to context analysis. Still if the text would be analyzed using German in the first place, this would become less of a problem.

It's not just NLP, English is pretty bad as an intermediate language for translations from language A to language B. If I try translating a Russian word "пружина" ("a mechanical spring") to German using Google translate, I end up with "Frühling", which in fact means "springtime". This is an obvious artefact of transitive translatiion: Russian -> English -> German.

Providing context may help, but still translation to English strips important pieces of information.

HDYT, is it time for you to cut down on soya as well?

I think you're missing my point. But anyway thank you, it's always nice to get a feedback from a mammal.

What if it doesn't? Would I be able to get my money back? Just as I've said, mentioning Sergei Pugachev and not mentioning Boris Berezovsky in one article looks strange. I totally get it why Pugachev is being mentioned: he's been advertising himself ever since leaving Russia. OTOH Berezovsky's dead so books about his influence might not sell well. Fun fact: it's Pugachev's own claim he was the architect of the coup https://www.bbc.com/russian/uk/2015/07/150724_brit_press

Given all these inaccuracies in this advertising artice I don't feel too much convinced. I'd recommend everyone reading the book by Paul Khlebnikov https://books.google.de/books?id=vb2ZAAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y which gives a detailed insider view on Russian politics of that era. BTW, writing this book has costed the guy his life. As for "Putin's People" it looks like an another unwitting attempt to cash in on anti-Putin hysteria.

As a Russian national sharing most of anti-Putin sentiments I can tell that Guardian tends to provide an oversimplified picture of Russia. Most importantly this very article misses the fact that there were many actors in Russian political theatre at the time when Putin became prime minister. For instance, the article tells nothing about the involvement of oligarch Boris Berezovsky in the coup. But yes, I get your point, reading fairy tales is far more entertaining than reading chronicles.

> by a coterie of former KGB officers, or "siloviki"

"Siloviki" are not exactly KGB officers, "silovik" is a name for every security, military or intelligence serviceman which is accurately described in the linked article https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/20/west-p...

It's fun to see how Guardian keeps playing Chinese whispers.

> You just got lucky with Cyrillic that a Helvetica version supporting it exists.

This is hardly a coincedence that Cyrillic alphabet has broader support and adoption among fonts.

Sure, I can go with font-family: sans-serif But what if I have to add Mongolian support for a website using Helvetica typeface for the currently used Cyrillic script?