bluquark

11 ms·

1.
by bluquark 2y ago
According to this paper https://www.lingref.com/cpp/decemb/5/paper1617.pdf the natural linguistic evolution towards compounds in Chinese was well under way by the time of Middle Chinese (~800CE). And most of
2.
by bluquark 2y ago
One interesting thing about gikun is the widely different forms it can take according to the stylistic purposes of the text. - Most of the time it's simply a pragmatic way to introduce a clarification without breaking the flow of the t
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by bluquark 3y ago
Dan's point about being aware of the different levels of inequality in the world is something I strongly agree with, but that should also include the middle-income countries, especially in Latin America and Southeast Asia. For example
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by bluquark 3y ago
For what it's worth I've gone the opposite direction (one language, 70k Anki reps). For me, carefully adding context has largely felt like time wasted at card creation time (which can a surprisingly large proportion of study time
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by bluquark 3y ago
Anki FSRS moves closer to being a "just-in-time" algorithm based only on user-provided inputs. And although its data structures aren't strictly modular, they come as close as practical to that ideal while still remaining com
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by bluquark 3y ago
I unfortunately can't find it right now, but I remember seeing a semi-famous quote from the 1950s/60s? calling out variable-speed windshield wipers as an absurd consumerist luxury emblematic of what's wrong with America. The
7.
by bluquark 3y ago
10x over 75 years is a ~3% risk-free annual return. It looks like ordinary government long-term bonds (like 30-year treasuries) were yielding around 4% in 2008, making this look at first glance like a good deal for Chicago. However, munic
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by bluquark 3y ago
Brooks' definition of a silver bullet was "an order of magnitude improvement" and certainly none of those innovations individually come anywhere close. But I agree it's plausible that combined they might amount to one s
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by bluquark 3y ago
Well, "need" is subjective. But subpixel rendering has diminishing returns as DPI goes up and (as the article describes) it causes several performance and interoperability problems, so the appropriate DPI threshold to turn it off
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by bluquark 3y ago
PPP is for comparing consumer lifestyles. World-tradeable goods like military hardware are precisely the kind of situation where PPP adjustments should not be made. Of course the sums are not directly comparable for other reasons, such as
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by bluquark 3y ago
One problem of scale here is that unless a tooling investment has made literally 100% of the work easy, most of a developer's workweek almost by definition winds up spent on the remaining slow and hard problems. So investing in tooling
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by bluquark 3y ago
Much of the Great Depression generation interpreted that as "only invest in bonds and CDs" and missed out on even larger gains. The stock market did very well the whole 20th century for every retirement generation, if they held l
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by bluquark 4y ago
Imagine a defense lawyer at a death penalty trial making an argument like this. "I implore you to consider the possibility that my client is sentient whereas the person he murdered is a p-zombie." The jury would deliberate for le
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by bluquark 4y ago
When you hit diminishing returns on a walled-garden language-learning app, it's time to create a continuous intake of real-world media at your level that you enjoy, plus a suite of inline understanding+memory tools to extract the maxim
15.
by bluquark 4y ago
Thanks! > unless my textbook omits the kanji because of it being rarely used in the real world, as for some words I have found this usually proves to be a mistake, textbooks and dictionaries pretend that you need far less kanji than you
16.
by bluquark 4y ago
> Or rather, one of them, considering that [Duolingo] has all sorts of issues. Yep. I agree with measured criticisms of Anki even while feeling the app is really useful if you use it well. Whereas Duolingo isn't worth bothering wi
17.
by bluquark 4y ago
I've noticed this too, I study with Anki J->E cards and it supercharges my reading skill, helps somewhat my listening skill, and basically does nothing at all for my speaking skill. I was wondering how much adding audio cards or &qu
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by bluquark 4y ago
Using Anki for a 72-hour cram session is kind of missing the point though. For me, the main benefit of Anki is to escape the cram->forget cycle and learn things low-stress and for good.
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by bluquark 4y ago
Personally, as an intermediate Japanese learner, I have been careful to choose the right input just as Krashen advocates, but I also find Anki indispensable. I found to my surprise that I have been improving about equally quickly using A
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by bluquark 4y ago
In the reading direction, it has similar strengths and weaknesses as irregular English spellings. Faster to scan given there's more variety in glyph shapes to take cues from. Preserves etymology and relationships between words, so ne
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by bluquark 4y ago
These 3 criteria seem rather narrow to define a concept as existentially loaded as ikigai. There's a related narrower Japanese word for purely work/task-related satisfaction, "yarigai", which seems closer to what you&#x
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by bluquark 4y ago
I'd recommend checking out books on career transitions before pulling the trigger, for example The Squiggly Career and Refuse to Choose . Also try reaching out to working artists and ask them to a coffee to discuss what the life is
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by bluquark 4y ago
The illegally dumped plastic fishing gear also comes from countries with poorly-monitored fishing industries, so the same basic dynamic applies.
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by bluquark 4y ago
I agree with most of this, but note that stock prices don't track real-world events as closely as you're suggesting. They're based on competing predictions of the future. The market will (or has already) hit bottom when the
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by bluquark 4y ago
> at least it's used for scams and money laundering in a way I can ignore. I thought this, and then my mom got scammed. She realized one day later, and the bank was able to recover the portion sent via bank transfer. But they also
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by bluquark 4y ago
This reminds me of the nerve-biting period up to the James Webb launch. The devs put off this transition for so many years trying to plan for every contingency, but we still can't be certain they didn't miss a crucial flaw. In a
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by bluquark 4y ago
> The developers who are stuck with this specific compression algorithm have no choice but to do the best with what they've got. Right. The point I wanted to make is that with the exception of game developers, who have a unique fre
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by bluquark 4y ago
So as a specific example, would you say there's no excuse for not being able decode a 1GB PNG image in less than 100ms? The state of the art algorithms, in Rust and Wuff programming languages, have reached around 500MB/second dec
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by bluquark 4y ago
Prior to 2020, health work was probably safer, but since then over eighty thousand health workers have died of Covid worldwide: https://www.who.int/news/item/20-10-2021-health-and-care-wor... If the world is unluc
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by bluquark 4y ago
One of the key arguments in favor of enforcing private property rights when this idea was taking shape during the Enlightenment is that they are a powerful incentive to develop. So an additional incentive to either generate revenue from th

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