Antoni

You’re welcome

Very interesting situation has happened to me today. I had a big problem with passing one of the lessons in Duolingo Chinese course. Lesson was about magic words 谢谢 (thank you) and 对不起 (I’m sorry).

What took me by surprise was the struggle that I had with the responses to those magic words.

• When someone says “I’m sorry” you respond with 没关系 (no problem).
• When someone says “Thank you” you respond with 不客气 (you’re welcome)

I literally tried to pass the lesson like 5 or 6 times and every time I failed on the phrase “No problem”. Because for me it was the response for either “I’m sorry” or “Thank you”. Duolingo really triggered me. For good.

I searched on the internet, net enjoyer I am indeed, and found the answer. In Chinese they use “No problem” only to reply to other’s requests. You cannot answer “No problem” to “Thank you”. Explanation 3:10.

“No problem” != “You’re welcome”. They cannot be used interchangeably in Chinese.

I dug deeper, net enjoyer is my second name, and found even more interesting stuff. Chinese society has very different perspective on saying thank you, it is mostly used during interaction with a stranger, where a clear boundary can be felt. But actually inside of families they rarely say thank you or I love you, because it sort of establishes boundaries between two parties, making interaction more of an value exchange (which is very Western way of looking at relations).

Interesting resources I stumbled upon:

• Why don’t Chinese people say thank you amongst friends?

Great question! And there is actually an answer. China is a very Confucian society, and as such, Chinese people are taught to be very polite to strangers. Politeness includes saying things like, “Thank you,” ”Please,” etc. You will find that, if you are on a Chinese street and you, say, help an old lady down from the bus, she and her daughter will profusely thank you.

However, Chinese close friends and family actually do say polite things, they just do not say it outright. For example, if a good friend went out of his or her way to cook for you, instead of saying, “Thank you for cooking for me!” (which would make them unconfortable as being too polite and distant), they will often say, 你辛苦了！ which means, “You worked hard!” It is their way of saying thank you, without actually saying it directly.

• How ‘Thank You’ Sounds to Chinese Ears

My Chinese friends say they notice that Westerners use lots of pleases (qǐng) and thank yous (xiexie) when speaking Chinese. And actually, they say, we use way too many of them for Chinese taste. A Chinese linguist, Kaidi Zhan, says that using a please, as in “Please pass the salt,” actually has the opposite effect of politeness here in China. The Chinese way of being polite to each other with words is to shorten the social distance between you. And saying please serves to insert a kind of buffer or space that says, in effect, that we need some formality between us here. “Good friends are so close, they are like part of you,” Danny said. “Why would you say please or thank you to yourself? It doesn’t make sense.”

• The Difference Between Saying ‘Thank You’ in Chinese and English

This essay strikes me as someone fetishizing a culture, deeming it “mysterious”, and trying to find great meaning in the self-imposed mysteries, when simpler explanations are at hand.

Reading through forum answers we can clearly see with how complex phenomenon we are dealing. Culture is a living organism, everyone has its own context, experience and opinion. It is very hard to come up with definitive judgement and summary.

But definitely the Chinese culture has a different perspective on the word “thank you” because it can be seen in the very result of this culture, language.

Mateusz

0x0.st

I don’t want your premium subscription that allows me to store up to 2 TB of data that I don’t have and that I don’t trust you with. Storing something on your platform is uncomfortable. Downloading something while using the terminal is nearly impossible to do without copying a network request as a CURL command from the F12 menu. Your aim is to keep the files secure - and also run some statistics on it’s metadata and maybe even content - so you need these cookies. But this platform is not what I really need 90% of the time when I just want to send a stupid pdf to someone that is over 10Mb. The safety of it’s content are next to none so you can skip the keys, permissions and ownership. Give me a platform that is the pastebin.com of files! For extra points remove the file after sometime so that I at least have some hope of the ephemeral nature of this thing. I thank miauz genyau for bringing 0x0.st into existence and keeping it up and working!

Often the simplest interface allows for the biggest amount of flexibility. Even if the privacy of a given file is important just use encryption and along with the link send someone the password that is used to encrypt that file. Programmers are supposed to create so why settle for something that already is created. Saying that I understand the value in a solution that “just works” but what if that solution goes offline? We’ll you’re SOL because everything that you knew how to do was based around this. Accept technical minimalism - rely on less and less, and the things that are your dependencies ought to be simple. A site like this can be programmed by anyone with any technical knowledge - even if this one fails, you can just recreate it without much hassle. But what would you do if DropBox or Google Drive failed? Are you going to rewrite it on your own, self-host or just look for an alternative that is going to be similar but not quite there? Each decision that we make has benefits and drawbacks, all you need to do for your world view to change is reassign weights to the things you care and do not care about.

Computer latency: 1977-2017

It’s easy for me to go into a endless rant over this but I’ll try my hardest no to do that. Starting from the basics, as Microsoft showed latency is noticeable to humans even at levels of 1-10ms. Everything that we have dealt with before had latency equal to zilch. Mechanical devices where information travels at the speed of sound act so quickly that we perceive them as instant. A nice example for me is each morning when I grind my coffee beans using my hand grinder. The latency between feeling of resistance on the handle and hearing the sound of crushed coffee is zero. Some other examples include opening the doors in an old car, riding a bike or many machines at the gym. Enumerating examples is trivial but explaining what makes them special is very handwavey. For me it’s the resulting motion that is non-trivial and for that I mean not in the same axis and plane. You feel alive when you use tools like that. Grinding coffee is so grounded in reality that focusing solely on the act is a kind of mediation.

Did you meditate when using your computer lately? As Jonathan Blow noticed if you search for stock images of a “frustrated person” you’ll notice that many of these photographs are a person sitting in front of a computer. It might be a coincidence that this trend of angry people in front a computer took off but it certainly does not help the matter of “are computers today fun to use”. Each and every device that is allowing you to read these words is a supercomputer that would blow the minds of people just 50 years ago. The amount of processing that a CPU can do these days is so staggering and yet we do not posses the ability to quickly judge how many cycles is required to perform a given operation. Dying on a hill is fine, but claiming that hill as yours and setting up post is dedication. It’ll crossing of dates on my imaginary calender for as long as I can see and always let people around remember what the hill stands for. In the morning and at noon I’ll yell at the top of my lungs “Computers are calculators, everything else is just imaginary!”. There is no Object-Oriented Programming in the CPU, nor any Functional Programming, Execution as a Service, Deployments, Technology Stacks or a Borrow Checker. Everything is just a thing we invented and said that “Yep, that pretty much covers everything, just do that for the rest of your life…”.

Forgetting what a computer is and how it works creates an environment where you’re a in perpetual sensory depravation tank. Whenever you click something, type a on keyboard, try to change a tab in your web browser, search for files on your disk you start floating. The space around you becomes void and there is nothing for you to do. Milliseconds start to feel like hours, you concentration is broken and your mediation training while using the coffee grinder is the only thing to save your focus. It’s sad because the more you know about computers and how freaky they really are, the more you understand that there is a better world out there. Using a computer does not have to be like talking with a speech-jammer all the time. It does not have to be a pact of “I’ll be patient, and you’ll do my multiplications quickly someday when you feel like it”. Strive for the ability to meditate when using a computer, strive for your computer to become a coffee grinder. Simple, responsive, a tool to give you happiness.