Bilingualism is a bit overloaded nowadays, which I find kinda annoying given that word “polyglot” exists.

Anyways, if you can freely use another language in an informal exchange with a few people of different sobriety levels while failing to remember key words and recovering from that - you’re a fluent polyglot. Ability to exchange information is a key part of what language is, and that’s how you measures your proficiency.

Bilingual can also mean “natively proficient in two languages”. And if you’re older than three years old and are not native speakers of multiple languages already, the chances of you becoming one are slim.

Native proficiency is a result of a language acquisition ability that is not well understood and disappears early into child development. It results in a level of effortless mastery that seems to be impossible to achieve as an adult, i.e. a dedicated or merely attentive native speaker will be able to recognize that you are not one.

It’s not “people vs persons” but “those people vs they”.

Conversationally, “those/these” distances you from the group you are talking about, which is humorously weird when it’s your family you’re talking about.

It’s not the meaning of the words, but habitual (and often fleeting) attribution around them that tripped you up.

PS: “People” are uncountable, “persons” are countable. That’s basically the whole difference between the two plurals. Although it’s rapidly disappearing, as “ten people” won’t raise a single eyebrow in a conversation.

Oh yeah, please do imagine there is no such thing as a time zone.

On an ellipsoid!

Teeth cannot produce enamel. Enamel is not a living tissue and it was produced by cells outside of the tooth in a coral-like manner. In order to grow a new tooth, you need it to be fully surrounded by specialized living tissue for the whole growth cycle.

PS: I honestly expected something like this to come out of bioelectric computation research, but progress seems slower there. Or rather knowledge and techniques in other fields is reaching critical mass, giving us these advances.

“Huh, I wonder” has been driving general scientific progress and heart failures in engineering since forever.

Federation has nothing to do with that capability. git clone exists since the beginning of git.

I’m giggling like a kid that finally got the candy from the top drawer. It’s beautiful.

If you push tickets - software developer at best.

If you iteratively solve problems by learning, building models, and trying hard to break said models until a sufficiently robust one remains - welcome to engineering.

If you’re a software engineer, you’re applying an engineering process to the field of software development. Adding a shopping cart to a blog can be a perfectly sound solution to the problem at hand.

Engineering becomes more important at scale, but scale itself doesn’t define engineering.

Don’t learn Elixir to replace Ruby. Learn it to enjoy OTP and BEAM.

I would love to join a cool company that’s willing to accept a dev that can transition fast. However, most of Elixir job listings I find are gambling or crypto. And I ain’t gonna touch those.

How to I relax? My shoulders get so tense at times that it leads to crippling headaches.

When people say “pointers are hard”, they mean “I have no idea where the star goes and now an ampersand is also implicated”.

FTL is a weird one.

Speed of light is a singularity in a special relativity theory. Singularities usually indicate model limitations, not reality fundamentals.

The theory happily describes behaviours below and above this “speed limit”, but insists on it being unapproachable from either side, which is weird already. At the same time our other models tell us that matter loses a finite amount of energy when it gains mass and stops moving at the speed of light.

Problem is, we don’t seem to have a vocabulary to discuss ways around this singularity and universe is not so forthcoming with any clues.

It’s a general crysis of physics lately. We know our models have limitations, we often know where they break exactly, and universe just giggles along.

But yeah, it’s highly unlikely that any SF will correctly guess a viable FTL, even if it is possible. Especially considering how seemingly every author thinks quantum entanglement is it.

Not that it’s untranslatable, but I enjoy it quite a lot.

Поцілуй бузька в калатало - go kiss a stork on the knocker.

If you ever heard storks, you’ll recognize the dismissiveness of this statement.