purrcat259

I don't have much of an opinion I suppose english language cultural dominance has meant that newer words are just imported rather than adapted

From what I have heard, Lebanese Arabic is the closest, and still pretty far. Passable conversation is possible.

Maltese is definitely its own language. Arabic roots are there (theres a Semitic joke in there ) but it isn't arabic anymore. Its written left to right with a variant of the english alphabet.

Only if we have a few Maltesers first

Maltese has been loaded with loan words since forever. 5 points if you can guess where bonġu, bravu and mappa come from. At some point there was some literary council for the language that decided that any new loan words should just be spelled phonetically. Computer became kompjuter.

Businesses do work in Maltese and English. Both are official languages. Its quite rare to encounter a business that deals near exclusively in Maltese. Many prefer Maltese but will fall back to english where necessary.

Regarding monolignual speakers, I think theres a lot of stereotypes for maltese only, english only and code switchers. I think its all a bit silly... So as long as communication can happen I don't fuss.

On Maltese music... There's a lot of low ish quality music then there's a few absolute gems. Look up The Travellers, Lapes, Jon Mallia on YouTube/Spotify.

Depends on where you live and how you were brought up, but for the most part code switching is default.

There was a point about 7 years ago when the overton window shifted to "speak english to strangers first" because of a large influx of foreigners who did not know the language. Since then I've met foreigners who have better Maltese than some natives.

Older folks & geriatrics will sometimes be surprised when they assume someone is foreign and they turn out to be Maltese. "int Malti??" is a statement I get often because I don't look Mediterranean despite being born here.

Read with English pronunciation, closest would be mar-sa-shlock.

I don't have much personal experience in attempting to communicate with arabic speakers. From others I have heard Lebanese arabic is the closest and you can have a passable conversation.

I read, write and speak Maltese, AMA if you are curious about the language.

I just listened to your episode on fafo.fm a few days ago and recognised your handle and already knew the link was worth clicking. Your stuff is awesome!

Its a bit of a national meme that every ship that somehow gets into trouble is registered here

I was also in the middle of writing a model downloader and was baffled as to why safetensors headers were suddenly much larger than 8 bytes!

Hotjar used to do this, with a heavy bias for EMEA timezone overlap.

Yeah I actually asked for a few weeks ago when we experienced 10% cuts and I was told they won't share one because of privacy reasons...

But we were seeing the list of deactivated slack accounts crop up slowly anyway.

Yep that pronunciation would be spot on.

Bonswa is very much an older generation term so I'm not surprised they enjoy it

"kif ahna xbin? Kollox sew?"

Its an informal greeting, usually to someone with whom you're already acquianted with. It translates loosely to: "how are you my friend? Is everything ok?"

The x is pronounced the same way you would pronounce "sh" in "shell" in english (so KOLLOSH not KOLLOKS).

Recent governments in Malta have been moving in this direction so maybe there's a playbook :).

The issue we face is that given how tiny and few we are (approx 500k Maltese, excluding what are referred to ad TCNs or third country nationals), is that its hard for the government to do anything without looking like someone favoured their cousin's wife's uncle's nephew.

1. Language: I'd be moving somewhere where the primary language is unknown to me (although I studied german for a while in school).

2. Convenience and support structure: I have young children and their grandparents live 5-15 minutes away.

3. I have a vote here and therefore a sliver of a say. If I go elsewhere, all I'll have is my voice, which will be the voice of a foreigner.

My wife and I have resolved to leave, but not before our parents pass away. Its our one and likely only major blocker. In fact I shifted to working fully remotely during the pandemic to make this eventuality smoother.

Ouch this hits home. Its still the case to today: many Maltese just depend on the government to figure it out for them.

As a result: 1. The government is the biggest employer on the island.

2. There are mandatory cost of living allowance increases every year decided by the government. Its always too slow and slightly too low. For comparison, the last COLA increase had 5% of it shaved off within a few weeks because local milk prices rose as a result.

3. The government has been subsidising electricity since the start of the invasion of Ukraine to avoid rising bills (historically it was a political football). WTO, EC, and other institutions have repeatedly told the government to wind them down but its repeatedly ignored this because any government which does will likely collapse in a few months.

Its a super frustrating cycle to see year after year and its not surprising to see that its been historically accurate too.

Fwiw, I'm Maltese and in my early thirties.

Hi, Maltese here, always lived here since birth, my family is Maltese going back generations.

Off the top of my head: 1. The country is constantly polarised. Politics and football especially. Voting based on your family's political legacy is very common. 2. The idea of being constantly ruled by someone else used to be s convenient excuse to steal from the colonists. The downside is that this attitude never left with the british, so tax evasion is rampant as if you're sticking it to the man by doing so... But in reality you're stealing from yourself. 3. While similar to Ireland in the sense that the economy grew very fast very quickly, it has the opposite problem when it comes to housing: massive supply is not managing to sate the massive demand, so housing prices are persistently astronomically high.

Happy to answer more questions.

This is very similar to the situation in Malta, where an EY survey showed around 90% of 18-25 year olds want to leave the island.

My first was six weeks old when lockdown hit. She spent nearly the first two years of her life with just my wife and I.

We always resolved to speak to her as an adult would and only used YouTube videos which encouraged speech and some signing (look up Miss Rachel to get an idea).

She's now way ahead of most of her peers in terms of speech. I'm sometimes still surprised with how she manages to communicate with us.

Just my n=1 experience.

https://www.simonam.dev/ is mine :)

This actually happened to us last week in fact.

No deployments revealed how a legacy background processor started losing connections to the message queue and gets stuck in a state where it never reconnects.

Deployments always cycled the pods before the issue manifested.

Couch to 5k is an awesome resource to achieve this.

Having gone recently through a push at $WORK to modernize our 3.7 codebase up to 3.9, I'd love to try using this tool.

Does it really only run one file at a time? I'd love for a recursive folder option.

Hotjar does. Pay for the same role is the same band regardless of location.

The four who might have still been alive today had it been illegal to use a phone will driving see OP's point

If the nappy can't handle another round of pee or poop then yeah I might consider waking the baby up to avoid them waking up thanks to the pee.

The secret is in changes before naps though :)

Dealing with people is half the job, so focus on your soft skills as much as you do your hard skills.

http://softskills.audio/ is a goldmine in this regard.

Not yet. It is still a bunch of Python scripts and Ansible playbooks so far.

I've been meaning to invest in a domain anyway as I was piggybacking off a personal one.

Feel free to email me your email if you want a reminder once its live.