Oh man, what's old is new again! I remember using spritesmith [0] to handle a big UI icons spritesheet. Even animated a few of these in the same way! (Though using background-position, a fixed size, and some javascript to change a class name once per frame.)
I think the point the author is trying to make is more so about these mini networks on their own LAN, which their family uses. (And maybe dreaming of a neighbourhood utility LAN as a middle ground between LAN in your house and WAN as just a trunk to a big ISP node) The full quote is
- A Raspberry Pi 3B+ with a 3 gigabyte hard drive setup as a "server" (makes this site available on my home network[9])
- I publish this site via GitHub Pages service for public Internet access (I have the least expensive subscription for this)
...
[9] I can view my personal web on my home network from my phone, tablet and computers. So can the rest of my family.
The equivalent self contained home server exists today in the homelab community, either with Mac Minis or NAS systems running Unraid or TrueNAS with community apps. Add in Tailscale on top for remote access.
What’s needed is a lot of work on the software front to make it much easier, with interoperable standards. Self-hosted WYSYWIG options as easy to use as the social media tools for photos and writing and social posts. Ability to run distributed chatroom style instances with tracker like discoverability to replace Discord. Built in backup options with easy offsite backup replication.
Boring in this case means something like "unmemorable" or "indiscernible". The great big dice roll that happens for everyone at the start of the big game has way too many variables to land on the same values twice, so being boring is a choice to hide the diff between you and the person you're talking to. ("Audit what you've hidden" is a neat way to phrase that.)
If you rolled all 1s for charisma, that would be unboring, it'd be memorable!
I keep coming cross these videos on youtube from Cornelius Quiring, and it's been making me think about trying it out. If anyone is looking for videos about drafting patterns for clothing, I think he's stuff seems pretty approachable!
Using language "correctly" is one of humanity's oldest class dividers. [citation needed, source: me speculating] If you personally benefit from dividing people into in- and out-groups (most of the time you do), saying you must speak a certain way is a great way to get people to self-identify on one side of that line. (Excluding cases where grammar helps with communication, that's "I don't understand you" versus "you sound poor".)
You make it hard enough that someone needs years of expensive education or has to be born in the right family that speaks the right way, and now all we can do it try to meet that arbitrary standard. Everyone will struggle, so the act of calling it out is a choice, rather than a fact. If someone lets that mask slip, IMO it's because they're not worried about being accused of occupying the wrong side of the line, rather than any lack of "trying". Trying sort of implies there is a goal to hit.
In the past this was a major issue that meant useful features were only ever usable after IE/Safari finally supported them half a decade later, but it has seriously gotten better. Sadly as a result of Chromium's overbearing presence, but it's a helpful outcome at least.
Problem with safari though is that it’s tied to OS updates that many people just defer for insanely long periods of time. So unlike the other browsers, it’s not evergreen, so if you need to support any iOS users or Mac users who don’t use chrome etc, you’re out of luck
Yeah that definitely sucks. I have seen MacOS Safari updates come though separately in Preferences.app > General > Software Update, but I think that release channel is for security issues.
Saying that, MacOS and iOS generally (up until recently, from what I've heard) have very good uptake rates for major updates. It's become less awful standards-wise as time has gone on in my experience at least.
Honest question, how? If this is a side project so you're presumably the person making the courses, and you didn't speak Turkish before, how did you make a course that taught yourself Turkish?
> We work together with some institutes of endangered languages to be able to teach them on our platform.
I assume this is how? Are you a platform for these institutions to provide Duolingo-style language courses? Can you possibly provide more details on who these orgs are?
Not OP, but I also coincidentally built a language learning app to learn Turkish. I don't think you can create courses without experience in the language, but it is possible to build analytical tools to make language learning possible. Tech + linguistics can take you pretty far.
This isn't to hijack the thread, but wanted to comment because honestly one of the coolest feelings in my life has been learning a language I don't know from an app I built.
That's really interesting! Are you talking more of language as a field of study? (phonetics, grammar, history, etc) Having lived in a place where I only had a pretty limited understanding of the language initially, I constantly made VERY embarrassing mistakes that were 100% cultural. It's so hard to teach that without knowing the quotes people think of when you say something, or the way people soften swear words, or what forms "feel" polite in what scenarios...
Of course it's hard to get that without a baseline knowledge of phrases/words/grammer... but you're talking about teaching other people, which is interpretable as an authority on the language you're teaching, right?
My app works in a bring your own content kind of way. Most users AI generate their expressions, which gets you pretty far, especially in the beginning. But for languages I speak, I curate my expressions with things I read or hear or get corrected on.
I've also tried to use a more sentence-mining approach for Japanese, given the cultural differences, but tbh I haven't found much benefit at my level (A1/JLPT5).
I'm pretty sure it's impossible to avoid awkward situations in other languages, 10x so with culturally foreign languages. Best I can do is help you learn from them :)
This is why penpal language exchange sites were so valuable like Lang-8 back in the day. You'd get corrections from actual native speakers and could dump all those corrected sentences into a database to link standalone words to actual usage.
I’ve got some plans around that :) currently there’s a really naive implementation of what I call “Language islands”. They’re collections of expressions/sentences. The idea here is to be able to share them, discuss them, correct them, and end up with more curated lists of learning materials.
So not post based like lang8, but more granular. I do expect people to write little entries/anecdotes piece by piece though and share them. There’s a pretty thriving telegram community so I’m hoping that solves the community aspect and gives people a place to exchange. (There’s also a subreddit but it’s not yet very active)
Finishing them is not my next task, but the one after. So soon!
If the point of learning a language was to say new words to yourself, you can just make up words.
If you want to be understood and understand others, who ever "they" are sort of need to exist while you're learning.
I can promise you, speaking out of a phrase book burned into your brain with limited cultural knowledge from other people makes for a very boring cringeworthy conversation partner, and an awful language teacher.
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