observantTrapezium

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Interesting, I’ll keep it in mind next time I have to deal with this problem (hopefully never but who knows).

    A few years ago I was in contact with researchers that were developing an AI tool to parse PDFs (I think they didn’t care about converting to editable formats, but extracting data), from their material I got the impression that it’s extremely difficult to do right using traditional algorithms.

















  • I just had to coordinate an online meeting with some guy at a company, I had no idea where he’s based but he suggested time slots in EST (I’m in Toronto). I asked him twice if he’s sure, thinking he may be based outside of North America and doesn’t know that Toronto currently follows EDT which is GMT-4h, and he just responded “Eastern Standard Time”.

    And of course he actually meant EDT. Turns out he is based in North America, just dumb.

    Fuck timezones, but more than that fuck daylight saving time. You want an extra hour of sunshine after work in summer? Shift the work schedule, not the fucking clock!



  • Interestingly, that is not the case. Month names can differ in different languages. I discovered the hard way that Ukrainian has completely different names for months when I had to connect to a Linux machine in Kyiv with Ukrainian locale (I can read Cyrillic, but the abbreviated month names meant nothing to me). The name for August is “serpen” by the way, and it is similar in some other Slavic languages. Also Arabic has its own month names based on Akkadian, August is “ab” but an Arabized version of the word August is also commonly used and understood. Finally, in Mandarin and presumably other Chinese languages, Gregorian months are only referred to by their number, so we are in “bayue” (lit. eight(th) month).