In the same way learning a new programming language with a very different/unique paradigm will make you view/perceive problems in a different way, so does learning a new natural language, given that it is different.
For instance, English, French, Spanish, German all share a very similar concept of "subject verb object" but Japanese has a very different concept of conveying information. I can't explain how, because that's exactly what you only get by learning the language.
>will make you view/perceive problems in a different way, so does learning a new natural language, given that it is different.
This as well as the initial statement you've made is controversial and generally frowned up by linguists.
We do not have any evidence that people perceive the world differently nor that it bears any relevance to how they view it. There were attempts at it, but the results are either not very convincing or are based upon farfetched conclusions.
>I can't explain how
Well yes, because it's a broad and unquantifiable claim as well as one that's not really supported by evidence.
As such I don't think it's fair and justifiable to say that learning Japanese changes the way you think. You're just adding additional unnecessary mystique to it.
I mean, this is my personal opinion and experience. Also, if you claim this is "frowned up by linguists" then a source would be appreciated.
> Well yes, because it's a broad and unquantifiable claim as well as one that's not really supported by evidence.
No. Imagine you never tasted ananas (pineapple) before in your life and now you taste it for the first time. Can you describe the flavour to someone who never tasted it, so that he can imagine the taste? Mind that I'm not taking about sweetness and acidity, just the distinct aroma.
I don't think you can. Does that mean it's just an "unquantifiable claim" that ananas has a distinct aroma? If so, even an "unquantifiable claim" can be helpful for others to understand.
Oh, and don't come with something like chemical analysis or so, since we can't really do that with the brain quite yet.
It’s especially ironic when Japan is the embodiment of what the average tech person in the West purports to be ideologically offended by: nationalism ( celebration of war criminals, denialism of crimes in Pacific Theater as a hoax ) , racism ( and a racial superiority complex ), sexism ( top medical school recently found to set lower bar for male candidates ), sexual assault not being pursued by criminal justice system , animal rights, pollution ( Japan is one of the top recyclers, but everything is individually wrapped and wasteful ), cultural appropriation, classicism with remnants of feudalism, worshipping and upholding white male privilege, xenophobia ( Japan’s borders was once closed for hundreds of years. The border being restricted over the past 2 years is not surprising ), stubbornness to adapt to new technology, mega corporations controlling the narrative on “factory towns” ( visit Nagasaki and you will see the mainstream museums praise Mitsubishi Heavy Industries for its part in the industrialization of Japan, but mention of forced laborers was absent. Their lobbyist even admitted the local Japanese residents found it uncomfortable that industrialists were applying for UNESCO heritage ), hierarchy/authoritarianism, and general intolerance ( people with tattoos are not allowed into public baths. Customers will leave reviews about “dirty tattoos” if chefs accidentally didn’t cover up fully. I’ve even seen a particularly intolerant Buddhist temples that prohibited people who have tattoos or wear skirts )
>It has tourist amenities without really being touristy
All the results it gave are flooded with tourists, and some of them are among the most expensive you can get in Croatia. :shrug:
Unsure of what to think of the results, as it seems to have very little relevance to the input description other than being in Croatia and being tourist spots.
They decided to up their price per user by a significant amount not too long ago... our self-hosted instance suddenly became more expensive than Slack but with an obviously not nearly as polished product as Slack. So we moved over to Zulip because at least they do their own thing, we haven't had any regrets over the switch to Zulip.
It's a chat app that doesn't eat your life, but just provides the service of helping you to communicate. It doesn't want to interrupt your workflow. It doesn't try to connect to everything. It makes it easy to organize work conversations and doesn't wish to be the remote work coffee machine.
It seems unreal that nowadays, I find solace in a software for finally trying to help me instead of extracting value or stealing attention from me. It should be the default.
My former company adopted Zulip because we were in the cybersecurity space and needed an on-prem solution. When I first saw it I thought "oh god this is going to be awful" - very ugly UI compared to Slack and others. But after getting used to it, I found that the UX is excellent.
For anyone searching around, don't be put off by the lack of "polish" - Zulip has a really good fundamental design.
We tried Zulip about a year ago. There were loads of things we loved about it - the threading model in particular - but the learning curve was steep for non-technical members and the mobile app lacked a couple of key features (share sheet integration was the big one, from memory). We also looked at Quill, which had a similar threading model but … was bought and then sank without a trace. We ended up on Slack, which is a total car crash. Can’t find anything.
It was frustrating because Zulip felt like it was so close to being a great - and unique - product. Might be time to take another look and see if it’s there yet. It’s a really great community, friendly and very responsive on GH issues.
Head of Product for Zulip here. I'd love to dig in deeper to understand what's confusing to non-technical folks as they are starting out, so that we can keep working to improve the product and documentation to address it. If anyone is up for a chat, please reach out by email at support@zulip.com, or in the #feedback stream in the Zulip development community (https://zulip.com/development-community/)!
Hello there, thanks for the offer, very much appreciated and characteristic of the Zulip community as a whole.
I actually did open and/or add to issues on GH, and actively participated in the development Zulip instance on the issues that came up for us as a team. I found the community to be very receptive.
I just want to reiterate, for anyone coming across this thread now or later, that Zulip really is a fantastic product and open source project. The main uphill battle for us was getting non-technical people to buy in to a paradigm of effectively “filing” their messages up front. That’s not some kind of problem with, or criticism of, Zulip as a product. For messages to be in correct context, the sender needs to _put_ them there. To want to do that, it helps if they buy in to the paradigm in the first place.
“Why do I have to do this?”
“Because it makes it possible for anyone to come along later and get the whole picture.”
“Okay, that’s worth a bit of friction up-front.”
It’s really a people thing - not a Zulip thing.
Just 2c from our little team.
Best of luck and thanks for all your great work. We’ll definitely be checking it out again soon.
My view is that there is a UI issue here, but I can't come up with a suggestion of how to improve it.
People get their head around MS Teams very easily and fundamentally the only difference between Zulip and Teams is that you are required to put a title/subject on your thread in Zulip as supposed to Teams where it's optional.
In Teams the value of this is clear whereas in Zulip you need to understand the goal. I've always thought that with a bit of a step back UI adjustment to Zulip things could be clearer.
What made the learning curve higher for non-technical members on Zulip than it was on Slack? It’s been a few years since I used Zulip, but I don’t feel like it had a particularly different level of complexity.
I think the fact that you must give a thread topic to send a message.
It's not particularly difficult concept, but different from every other chat app. And for a large user base being confronted with this demand "when they just want to send a message" is frustrating.
Yeah that’s consistent with what we found. The threading model is so powerful, because even large teams that are mainly async can actually find stuff they need, _in context_. That’s really difficult or impossible in something like Slack, Discord, etc, and the value of that can’t really be overstated.
On the other hand, you’re asking people to buy into what is essentially a completely different paradigm than what they’re used to. Maybe it’s more like a loosely-structured wiki than a chat app.
I really like it, though. I feel like it deserves a lot more attention than it seems to get.
Zoho Cliq solves this by using ML to parse the message and give a suitable name.
It's suitable 7/10 times, and the remaining 3 - it either doesn't matter that much or is trivial to rename.
Disclaimer: I work for Zoho, but in a different team.
I find that I really like it for work.
But for informal interactions (gaming etc) I like Discord better because of the voice channels. In Cliq they're "calls" and feel much more formal.
> And for a large user base being confronted with this demand "when they just want to send a message" is frustrating.
Isn't it a conceptual framework thing, though?
People have no problem putting a topic when sending emails, and they are perfectly capable of following grouped conversations, as for example in Outlook.
Maybe it would be enough to present it as "a mail application where you can also do chat on a reply thread", to create the right expectations?
I don't think we are missing the point, we were looking for a Slack alternative and found one. They charged a bit to give you push notifications, now they charge more of it. If not having push notifications were an option for us, we'd have simply downgraded.
Then you also need to build and distribute Android and iOS apps for your employees. Congrats, you now have a significantly larger project than "put Mattermost on a server and update it occasionally".
I am using it on both cloud-hosted (work) and self-hosted (friends chat) servers.
Push notifications work fine, the mattermost app that's already on the android and iOS stores work fine, they have done for the 3-4 years I've been using it.
We tried Zulip a couple times and ended up setting up a Matrix server when Slack became unbearable. The advantages of being able to federate with other channels is high, like almost everyone I have severe channel overload and I want an application which will be open all the time to reach as many people as possible.
It's almost coincidence, though, both Zulip and Matrix became 'good enough' around the same time, and we actually tried to move to Zulip at one point, which I think hardened opinions. I do like the semi-threaded approach Zulip takes, just not as much as I like even the possibility of a future where I can use Matrix for as much as possible.
> I do like the semi-threaded approach Zulip takes
Interestingly I think of Zulip as the fully threaded approach, and Slack/Discord etc. as the semi-threaded approach (because it's optional). The only other "fully" threaded approach I know of is MS Teams (in the Team) - each conversation is a thread (and the fact that people don't realise this is an indication of how good the UX is).
and Zulip has a "public access" view, which I wish more open source projects would adopt (:eyes: kubernetes.slack.com) since it allows search engines to index into the threads: https://zulip.com/help/public-access-option
> Web-public streams do not yet support search engine indexing. You can use zulip-archive to create an archive of a Zulip organization that can be indexed by search engines.
Ah, thank you for pointing that out and sorry that I didn't notice that caveat. I somehow thought Google's indexer was "hash url" aware but I can totally appreciate that the devil is in the details about that stuff
We're on a freemium plan for slack. Works fine and doesn't cost us a thing. We don't care about having an archive of chats. That's not what it is for.
Self hosted would cost us more in devops money than we'd end up paying even for a premium SAAS contract for whatever you would use for this. People think devops is free, it rarely is and usually is the most expensive thing in terms of cost. Especially doing it properly can eat into development time quickly. Which unless you are bored and have nothing better to do is even more costly. Somebody costing 1000/day spending even half a day on this adds up quickly. And it's never just half a day. The point of hosted SAAS software is getting people like that out of the equation.
You can pretty much run a small startup on freemium accounts for a lot of things. Our biggest IT cost is google docs and google cloud for our actual infrastructure. These days we are also paying for a few additional things (Asana, Figma) but we started out with freemium accounts for that as well.
> Self hosted would cost us more in devops money than we'd end up paying even for a premium SAAS contract for whatever you would use for this. People think devops is free, it rarely is and usually is the most expensive thing in terms of cost. Especially doing it properly can eat into development time quickly.
Perhaps you have no idea how to manage servers but launching an instance and a docker container isn't magic which requires a single weekend of learning and it costs that one time operation and $10/mo for the server. (What the hell is a premium SaaS contract? Are you being oversold by some salesperson?)
Certainly not knowing how things work is rather expensive thinking it is expensive.
I'm an engineer and CTO and well aware of how a "why don't you just ..." can escalate into a significant side project. The thing is I know how these things work and I've seen them escalate repeatedly. We used to run things like jenkins and gitlab self hosted. And we had to deal with outages, backups, things running out of disk, etc. It was doable but definitely a bit of a time-sink.
If you don't care about devops, monitoring, uptime, and all the rest, then yes, you can run the entire company off a few beautiful snowflakes on some VM. If it goes down, you just do it again. Been there done that. But doing it properly requires a bit more effort. I shut down my last self hosted Jenkins about five years ago. Not doing that again. Just not needed anymore.
Anyway, for things like slack (which, again, we run for free), I don't see the value of self hosted.
We just launched a free forever SaaS offering that is competitive to Slack and includes kanban boards for project and task management and a few other bells and whistles for software developers. You should give us another look!
For further elaboration, self-hosted just means that you get a license to install the code on a server you control - whether that license is FL/OSS, something proprietary, or some middle ground (open core etc).
It’s actually because I’m not in an english speaking country that Google is failing me and screwing my searches for anything than can be somewhat pushed to local results…
I’m glad it works for you, it just reminds me how different are everyone’s expectations of good search results.
We use it at work. We first switched over to Mattermost, then to Zulip. Mattermost seemed like a clone of Slack and we were initially "satisfied", but didn't see it get improved that much nor noticed any attempts of it trying to tackle other problems. Then they raised their prices to even higher than Slack's, which we took as a bit of dick move seeing as we were self-hosting it + it has nowhere near the experience of Slack. Push notifications in general didn't seem to be that good.
Zulip has a nice spin on the way discussions work with their concept of "topics". It lends itself well to how we conceptualize the discussions across our development teams, without unnecessarily creating many ad-hoc temp channels (something we'd have done on Slack). We're liking it thus far. That being said I do need to check why it's using about 35 gigs of RAM on our server.
Please report this in https://zulip.com/development-community/; this certainly sounds like a memory leak. We aren't aware of any other reports of memory leaks in Zulip in the last couple years, so we'd be very happy to help track down what's happening on your server.
Russian security support is also not recent! The primary condition of Ukraine's denuclearization was that Russia, along with the United States, France, and UK, would defend Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial claims perpetually. It seems one of these parties signed with disappearing ink.
Exactly - there is no such reputation for Russia and it has proven once again, that words of Russians are not even worth what paper is worth, but for everybody else - it is a trap. It was really naive to give such guarantees - they could be more realistic and demand, that Russia at least remove military bases from territory of Ukraine. Even the current events were because of fears to lose Sevastopol - pride of USSR military(which did nothing in WW2).
US and other signing power reputations is worth more(than Russians) and rest of the world is watching. US has already lost a lot of soft power and this entrapment is another dent in reputation for vaning superpower.
> Or when U.S. Secretary of State James Baker famously promised that NATO would “not expand one inch eastward” of Germany?
You've fallen for Russian disinformation. This lie keeps getting spread around and corrected. Baker mentioned this to Gorbachev in preliminary talks for the treaty after the fall of the Berlin Wall, as a "what if? what concessions would the USSR then make?" It was then immediately struck down as an option by other US bureaucrats, never made it into the treaty, and Gorbachev never even mentioned it again until 2008 when he said US never promised this but expanding NATO into Baltics and such was against the "spirit" of the talks. One person, even a Secretary of State, spitballing ideas about what a treaty would look like is not even close to any sort of agreement between entire superpowers.
It happened multiple times. It is not a lie, no matter how much the US state department tries to double down on the amnesia.
>The former idea about “closer to the Soviet borders” is written down not in treaties but in multiple memoranda of conversation between the Soviets and the highest-level Western interlocutors (Genscher, Kohl, Baker, Gates, Bush, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Major, Woerner, and others) offering assurances throughout 1990 and into 1991 about protecting Soviet security interests and including the USSR in new European security structures. The two issues were related but not the same. Subsequent analysis sometimes conflated the two and argued that the discussion did not involve all of Europe. The documents published below show clearly that it did.
Russia has publicly expressed regret that it did not get the wording in a treaty though it holds to the idea that assurances made outside of a legal framework are not worthless, whereas to an American legalistic mind it appears, they are.
Probably it would have made no difference anyway. There's no independent court of international law to adjudicate. Treaties and memoranda arent all that different in the end.
It could be partly cultural. I've noticed when dealing with Americans the idea that you cant expect people to keep their word if it's not explicitly written into a contract is quite common. It's also idiosyncratically American - I havent noticed this word-is-worthless/contracts-sacrosanct "if we take you for a ride it's your fault" attitude elsewhere.
> Russia has publicly expressed regret that it did not get the wording in a treaty though it holds to the idea that assurances made outside of a legal framework are not worthless, whereas to an American legalistic mind it appears, they are.
Russia isn't even holding to an actual legal treaty about respecting the sovereign territorial integrity of Ukraine and you're exclusively pissed at Americans for assurances outside of a legal framework?
The expansion of NATO came first in 97- at a point when Russia was militarily at its weakest, and a drunk American puppet was in charge.
Crimea would likely still belong to Ukraine if NATO hadnt done that - eastern europe being a buffer being the presumption built into the negotiations. There was some trust before. There is none now.
As it was, the pushback on NATO against the vulnerable, much invaded western border once Russia recovered economic and military strength was inevitable.
As inevitable as the NATO invasion and occupation of Afghanistan when in 2001 the Taliban dared to request evidence and a trial while Americans bayed for blood.
> Russia has publicly expressed regret that it did not get the wording in a treaty
At the time in question, Russia wasn't a sovereign subject of international law, but a subordinate entity within the USSR. Mikhail Gorbachev, who was a somewhat important figure in the USSR government at the time, and likely to know, has explicitly stated that such assurances we're not given, nor was the matter negotiated [0] (it is true that the possibility or it being an item on the table seems to have been raised as an inducement to the USSR to participate in resolution of German reunification, but an offer that an issue can be in the table to get someone to the table is not a commitment, even informal, on the anything besides allowing discussion should it be raised.)
>Gorbachev: “I do think that they could have done more. Much of what has since happened has been directly related to the collapse of the Soviet Union. We cannot blame anyone for the dissolution of the Soviet Union. However, many people in the West were secretly rubbing their hands and felt something like a flush of victory – including those who had promised us: ‘We will not move one centimetre further East.’”
Brookings is about as useful for proving a point on Russia as RT. Might as well quote Trump on who won the last election.
The main issue here is to remember, that promises has to be given to US, to other countries - especially neighbours and to various clans of Libya and citizens of Libya - especially to young and poor hot-heads who are quick to blame their government and Leader. Then and only then you can have guarantee that you, being as a ruler of Libya are not getting rusty trombone... erm, that might be more pleasant, but apparently it was rusty pipe, that was performed on Kadaffi.
Looking how Putin is performing in Russia, it seems more than clear that he will get his rusty pipe in his anus, because the path of getting it is way too similar... Kadaffi got his rusty pipe, after his Navalny-level opponents were forced out and killed and the ones that came next were not into sophiscated and educated arguments, but went straight in with the pipe... and surprise surprise - they were new generation of Libyans, born in Lkadaffi Libya and bred by Khadaffi.
U.S. Secretary of State James Baker did not had authority to promise that NATO would “not expand one inch eastward” of Germany. Also in a real nonimaginary world, such "promises" and talks has to be realized as written agreements on paper. Completely different from what Russia signed in a very real Budapest Memorandum.
Khadaffi was killed by American backed rebels supported by NATO. NATO might as well have pulled the trigger.
The main issue is that the US state department (led by Hillary at the time) made it abundantly clear to every tinpot dictator in the world with that stunt that the two worst things they can do are A) denuclearize and B) trust America's word.
North Korea took note of what happened in Libya and as a result Kim Jong Un got a nice little tour of Trump's presidential car.
The word of the US is trash. The security guarantees it gives are trash. They've made it clear that they respect power but everything else gets lip service.
It seems like none of the other parties are defending Ukraine's sovereignty, and one is violating it (Russia). None of them seem willing to keep their defense commitments.
To be fair, given the 2014 events, all the parties signed with disappearing ink. Russia invaded, but the US, France and UK failed their obligation too.
How? Budapest Memorandum only required parties to respect borders, not to defend them. They only need to "seek immediate United Nations Security Council action to provide assistance" when there is threat of using nuclear weapons.
Putin's claim is that he signed it with the legitimate government of Ukraine and that Ukraine is no longer legitimately governed since the Maidan "coup".
It's similar in nature to the UK's insistence that Venezuelan gold cant be sent back to Venezuela - since it is not legitimately governed. Or when revolutions take place and new governments decide that the debts of the "old" government dont apply to the new.
US also threatened sanctions against Ukraine in 2004 in violation of article 3, presumably under the same theory (& because they just didnt like yanukovych).
International law is mostly a matter might makes right and/or opinion it seems. There is no court, after all. One side's coup is another's spontaneous democratic uprising and one side's free and fair elections is another party's rigged ballot.
UK has not seized Venezuelan gold - as soon as Venezuela will get recognized government, UK will restore Venezuelan rights to their gold.
How this even compares to Crimea? Russia has no intention to give Crimea back - no matter what government is in Ukraine. Russia was already very nervous about Sevastopol naval base under Yanukovich, when the rent agreement was running out and that is the only reason for seizing Crimea, as this allows it to maintain than naval base. It is also a theft, as so far Russia was paying rent for that base and now it doesn't have to.
Ask Venezuelans what should happen to the gold and majority would say give it back. Access was cut off precisely when they needed funds the most.
Crimea won't be given back, no. They ran a vote and asked the majority ~85% ethnic Russian Crimeans which country they'd like to belong to and, after maidan, the outcome was a forgone conclusion with or without the boycotts.
Ukraine and western powers tellingly opted to argue that the vote was wrong because it was in violation of Ukraine's constitution rather than it didnt reflect the will of those voting.
Even if Western powers didnt routinely flout international law when it suited them (e.g. supporting Israeli settlements on stolen land), it's a little bit awkward to declare a democratic vote illegal if you're trying to position yourself as the world's #1 fan of democracy.
Ironically if America could have held itself to higher ethical standards in the last two decades it would probably be in a better position to push Russia's new expansion back.
When the $21 Trillion EU puts their big boy pants on and form their own army, they can have agency (Serbia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya, Syria, etc, etc).
Until then, the 900# red white & blue gorilla of NATO is driving. Folks don’t like it? Well, time to stop whistling “The Yanks Are Coming” every time they want to tussle with their neighborhood.
Gross. Most programmers will work as independent contractors and pay 5% in taxes. But keep in mind, 0 goes to your saving programs / pension and you have 0 employment protection, as you are not an employee, but private entrepreneur. You need to do plan for your retirement / unemployment entirely by yourself.
The rent in Kyiv is $500 for a shoebox and $1000 for something adequate. Starting salary is $600-800 per month. So, you can afford a shoebox and to eat shit as junior dev :). Which is still better than a lot of industries here.
As high skilled engineer with 10 years of experience I make an $96 000 yearly, but I work directly for UK fintech company.
All things included SE still make a lot of money here, but nothing crazy. And trust me, living in California beats living anywhere in Ukraine at any day.
Can you clarify what you mean by this?