Category: facebook

Doing homework with Masha. A question on French – what do you call a daughter’s husband? The correct answer is beau-fils – mari de la fille, that is, the daughter’s husband. Everything’s fine.

But if you translate the other options, it starts to get confusing.

If you use the French-Russian dictionary from Yandex, the first option is correct. Translation into Russian: шурин, зять. Зять fits, but шурин – isn’t that the wife’s brother? Why are they grouped together?

Translating into English – frère de l’épouse ou de l’époux – the spouse’s brother or the spouse’s brother, translation into English — brother-in-law. Also: brother-in-law: the husband of one’s sister or the brother of one’s husband or wife. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/french-english/beau-frere

Merriam-Webster provides options for brother-in-law: 1) the brother of one’s spouse 2) the husband of one’s sibling 3) the husband of one’s spouse’s sibling

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/brother-in-law

The French interpret beau-frere strictly as 1) Frère du conjoint – spouse’s brother 2) Mari d’une soeur ou d’une belle-soeur – husband of a sister or sister of a spouse.

https://www.linternaute.fr/dictionnaire/fr/definition/beau-frere/

https://www.cnrtl.fr/definition/beau-frere

What a mess?

Interesting work from MIT. They claim that it’s highly possible to determine COVID/non-COVID by the sound of a cough. They write that the accuracy of detection is 98.5%, and it’s 100% among the sample of asymptomatic (but positive) individuals. They trained an AI with several thousand recordings; you can submit your own cough through their little form. The diagnostic service or app is not yet available for phones. An interesting topic, might significantly change the global statistics and early diagnosis scene.

https://news.mit.edu/2020/covid-19-cough-cellphone-detection-1029

Almost everything in physics is based on the speed of light, as a fundamental constant, on the fact that it is the same in all directions. However, in reality, this is not known, it is an assumption (which seems impossible to either confirm or refute). This assumption might imply that the stars we see in the sky (which, upon beautiful reflection, may actually no longer exist) could be burning right at this moment.

It is useful to reassess that although it’s relatively simple to know the rules, it is much more difficult and “expensive” to understand the exceptions, priorities, and boundaries of the applicability of these rules.

Here is a link to the translation into Russian, the original is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTn6Ewhb27k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNOF0KEoFmU

I was amused by the vigesimal system in French until I started wondering about our system

«

— Ok, what’s 20?

— twenty

— 20 is twenty, 30 is thirty, 40 is fourty

— No, forty

— What’s with forty? Why?

— I myself dunno, just “forty”

— Ok, next, 50 is fifty

— No, starting from five we add “dy” at the end, fifty

— Strange, but ok, 60 is sixty, 70 is seventy, 80 is eighty, 90 is ninety

— No, ninety

— What’s with? Why is there some sort of “hundred” in there?

— And hundred is 100

— Hold on, ninetY comes before a hundred? How is that even? 100 is a hundred, what’s 200?

— two hundred

— two transformed into two and “hundred” was added, well ok, this is Russian, three doesn’t turn into some sort of “three”? 300 is three hundred

— No, three hundred

— Damn you, 300 is three hundred, 400 is four hundred, 500 is five hundred

— No, five hundred

— Go to… forty!

©JuiceRU

Celebrated Halloween on Devil’s nose trail in West Virginia. Because of such weekend hikes, I can’t “mature” into taking a proper vacation for already five years 😉 I’ve accumulated a month of vacation days. Anyway, I picked the “right” time for this topic, sorry

Good idea

Also good

Very cool. The video’s been out for two years, but it’s still kicking 🙂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zot-Tu9IqHE

In all modern messengers, I am missing:

– an inbox tab, where all incoming messages from everyone would be gathered, sorted by time. A click would lead to the dialogue

– an outbox tab, where all outgoing messages would be gathered, sorted by time. A click would lead to the dialogue

– a “remind me later” button next to a message. This is available only in Slack

– organizing contacts into groups, ideally hierarchical, and viewing messages from all subgroups of a group. Clicking on a message opens the dialogue.

– assigning tags/metadata to a contact such as “conference guy” or “work” or “” and then navigating by these tags.

– smart auto-replies – as done in Linkedin. A completely neglected topic, but it could be really cool.

It would be great if they invented a plugin system for messengers, so that third-party developers could add functionality like Chrome extensions.

Now I am Chief Software Engineer Level 2. A small step sideways and upwards from schemes and documents to engineering and Java. From a spacious group of solution architects, where there were several hundred of us, to a relatively new area where there are still just a few people, some new opportunities. Now there is a correspondence between what I do and what I call myself. Solution architecture hasn’t gone anywhere; it is still part of the new position. There are more internal themes, and that’s really great. An internal “Exam” (assessment) was taken by several dozen people for two and a half hours, and it was interesting 🙂

P.S. Come join EPAM, it’s cool here 🙂 It will be five years in January since I started working here.