bstpierre
Maybe because I was taught to read music for piano as a kid?
The only exception was learning banjo (as an adult) because I basically learned it all from youtube and forced myself to memorize songs. But when I could play piano I only ever remembered a few bars from a couple of songs, everything else had to be written down. Even just playing chords on a uke!
To others questioning the need for rewriting: language changes over the course of a century! It's no problem for me, as a native English speaker, to read English from around the turn of the 20th Century. However, it increases the degree of difficulty for me to try to read French or Spanish from the same time period. Also, to get through an old book I have to learn a bunch of useless words that have fallen into disuse; it's much more effective for me to learn the version of the language that is relevant in today's world.
It looks like the French TTS isn't working properly yet? At least on the couple of titles I tried. The selection of titles you have listed looks great.
1. Keeping track of where I am in a series. Goodreads has a handy feature where you can see the list of books in a given series. I maintain a reading list with (way too many) different series and it has my next book in each one.
2. Remembering which books I've read. (Kind of related to #1.) More than once I've gotten more than a few pages into a book and realized, "hey I'm pretty sure I read this before".
Either of these would work in a notebook or spreadsheet but that would require changing my workflow (and "importing" a long list of books).
It started as a few sed commands to merge TeX+code -> TeX for a book project. I ran these sed commands from a makefile. Life was easy.
But then there were complications, and I needed to make slightly more sophisticated substitutions. So the sed commands moved into an awk script, run by the makefile. This was better than maintaining a handful of little commands that were growing on a weekly basis. Life was good.
The transformations I needed kept growing a bunch of little variations, and the awk script became hard to maintain, so I rewrote it in go, with proper parsing and output. (And even unit tests, after the 2nd time I broke some output.) Designing it as almost-a-proper-compiler was 10x better than maintaining an ad hoc script. Life was great, even with the overhead of maintaining a separate processing tool.
It may be the case that a small amount of trees is beneficial overall for pollinators but if you’re managing an area as described then it takes a bit more work to plan for trees and mow around them.
A dozen or so years ago I worked at a startup using svn and all reviews were like this: generate a diff, post a link to the diff on jabber, someone will comment/question. There’s room for immediate back and forth as needed. Revise, approve, done. Very lightweight, yet effective. However we were all colocated and all of the team members were high functioning so I’m not sure if it generalizes. (Also, being colocated meant that occasionally the jabber conversation could move to f2f with whiteboards if things got complicated.)
Unfortunately the fg part of the equation was lost on about 2/3 of our class... after editing they would start another scheme instance! I recall being in the terminal lab the night one of our first assignments was due, and the machine slowed to an absolute crawl. Can't remember exactly how it was resolved but I do recall being taught how to look for classmates running two or more instances of scheme to remind them about fg. (Also not helpful to machine load: "solutions" to the 8 queens problem with infinite recursion. The real lesson here was, in later years, to not be logged in on nights when CS 401 had assignments due.)
IMO the real problem with something as subjective as books or movies is that even completely honest, well-reasoned reviews are going to be all over the map. My review of a Pride and Prejudice movie is going to be maybe 3/10, but my wife would give it 7/10, while we have the opposite reactions to something like The Hunt for Red October.
I don't care about reviews from experts or the unwashed masses. I don't even really care about reviews that much -- I'm more interesting in ratings from people who like the same kind of stuff I do.
I’m not a door pro, but my experience with diying doors puts it definitely NOT in the category of mindless!
My name My town (slightly misspelled), My State
no zip code, no mail box number. The beauty of being in a small town where the postmaster knows who you are.
It might not be necessary, but I think it’s sorely needed
Being serious all the time is unhealthy
Some of the stories, maybe only at higher levels, prompt you to respond to or summarize the story in 20-40 words. Then it applies some basic grammar and spelling corrections. Nice to get some feedback, but I don’t have any real way to know how correct or comprehensive it is.
I finished the French course through level 1, and was about 60% done through level 5. That’s advanced enough to know a lot of what you don’t know, which makes filling in the gaps a lot easier. I think my word list in the app was 2k.
For Spanish I only got about 30% to level 1. The gaps there are obviously much wider but since it’s got a lot of similarities to French, and the fact that there are tons of learning material, it’s not too hard to make steady progress.
I tried Russian on Duolingo for a while, and it was actually great for learning the Cyrillic alphabet, but the explanations of cases, declensions, word order, etc were really lacking and just grinding through memorizing individual sentences was obviously not going to be effective.
But I never felt that the ai was really doing anything helpful… I got tons of the same easy questions, and even “hard” lessons didn’t seem much different except for being slightly longer sentences.
What’s better than duo? Other people have talked about other apps being better, I haven’t tried anything but Anki.
I don’t have any structured conversation time set up yet; italki or something similar seems like a good idea. Actually producing the language on demand is definitely a weak spot. But I do a fair bit of reading, listening to podcasts/Netflix/youtube, and have built up good Anki decks.
Your observation about irregular verbs and conjugation in various tenses is spot on. That’s one of the harder things about keeping track of the flow of a podcast for me too. Video is easier with more visual cues, and especially if I have cc on ;)
Studying the decks daily is not only far more time efficient than duo, I’m finding that the learning sticks much better. (Part of this I think is because I have had to look up the rules and exceptions to be able to make up cards for some focused study topics. I think it also helps when new vocab or sentences come from a book I read.)
Then on a day where I couldn’t possibly have gone near any ivy I ended up with a couple of spots on my fingers. And then again a week later before I realized it was probably on the boots. Fortunately just a minor inconvenience, but it’s crazy how the oil sticks around.
The mice have a solution for the murderous cat: simply put a bell on the cat’s collar and then they will know when it’s coming.
But… who’s going to “bell the cat”? i.e. who is going to perform this unpleasant and possibly fatal job?
An interesting experiment would be to find the switch-time threshold for a wide range of developers.
Typically I don’t rely on a full build for getting things accomplished, and not CI if I can help it. Local, incremental, and minimal path to feedback is what I aim for.