mtalantikite

The other night I was at an event and pulled out my iPhone 13 mini to show some people a video I had taken -- the two people on either side of me exclaimed and pulled out their iPhone minis and we all laughed about holding on to them until they turn to dust.

As someone who has never owned a TV and doesn’t know about this space, are there any TV manufacturers that are just a basic screen anymore?

I have the Assimil Sanskrit course sitting on my shelf that I’ve been meaning to spend time with. Would love to be able to read old sutras one of these days.

Agreed, I'm constantly coming back to a Claude tmux pane just to see it's decided to do something completely ridiculous. Just the other day I was having it add some test coverage stats to CI runs and when I came back it was basically trying to reinvent Istanbul in a bash script because the nyc tool wasn't installed in CI. I had to interrupt it and say "uh, just install nyc?". I was "Absolutely right!".

I don't speak Hindi unfortunately, but it's definitely on my list of languages to study (after Bangla)!

It looks like the Hindi tanha comes from Classical Persian [1], whereas the Pali tanha comes from Sanskrit [2]

[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%A4%E0%A4%A8%E0%A4%B9%E...

[2] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ta%E1%B9%87h%C4%81

Do wholesome desires, like practicing the dharma, not change you? Do unwholesome desires, like staying stuck in your addictions, not trap you?

My point is that desire is something that is deeply explored in all three major schools of Buddhism. In the Vajrayana to the point that we take the most difficult of our base desires as paths of practice, like seen in karmamudra.

This is a core concept of Buddhism, called tanha, and has been contemplated for a couple thousand years at least: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ta%E1%B9%87h%C4%81

Oh that's awesome, I never knew about this app! Walking around NYC it always feels like an easter egg when I randomly notice an Invader somewhere.

Yes, but also it's just annoying to have a car in NYC. For many routes the subway is going to be faster than driving and sitting in traffic, unless you're traveling between outer borough neighborhoods that only have a connection in Manhattan. If you're making that commute often (say, Bushwick to East Flatbush, or Flushing to Canarsie), a car might make sense, but then this whole congestion pricing thing doesn't apply to you.

Transit is $3/ride (in a few weeks), 24 hours, and all over the city. It's not perfect, but for the vast majority of cases owning a car in NYC is just not really worth it. If you need one because you have a weekend home out in Long Island or up in the Hudson Valley, you can afford the $9 toll.

And GitHub got free hosting and support from Engine Yard when they were starting out. I remember it being a big deal when we had to move them from shared hosting to something like 3 dedicated supermicro servers.

And also because she was from what is now Bangladesh. Same with Bose from this list.

> Teams is not primarily a text chat software. It’s not built for this purpose as that’s not how most office workers collaborate. That’s quite obvious.

The problem is that it’s a perfectly fine video meeting application (although what sociopath decided entering a meeting unmuted was a proper default), but many orgs try to push it as their chat application too. The UX for that is awful. And for some of us that is the primary way we communicate. I started working from home in 2008, collaborating on code over Freenode long before that. Most eng teams I’ve been on these past 20 years coordinate on chat. It’s hard when the business people think Teams is fine and then the rest of us have to use busted software.

Honestly, I feel like Paris does a great job. I know it's relatively small population wise for a major international city (~2 million), but it's population density is about 50% more than NYC without ever feeling overwhelming. Just having those 6-story Haussmann style buildings everywhere with wide boulevards makes it feel very human scale.

I've been living in Brooklyn for just shy of 20 years and I'm very comfortable in dense cities. After spending about a month in India, primarily in Delhi and a bit in Jaipur, I remember getting back to Manhattan and thinking "wow, look at all this space, there's no people here! What a peaceful, relaxed city".

Skipping rope is also a great option. Cardio is up there with running and it's not as hard on the knees. We usually start every session at my muay thai gym with it, and whenever I travel I'll just throw a cheap rope in my bag.

I do love just getting out and running though!

I didn't say there should be no strings. I believe institutions should follow laws, and if they or society find those laws to be unjust, we have recourse through our democratic institutions.

The Civil Rights Act was legislation put into place by Congress, signed by LBJ, and upheld by the Supreme Court. This compact was a letter sent by the White House telling universities to fall in line with their demands or be refused funding. I find those to be two completely different things.

Regardless of what is in the compact, it's important that our educational institutions have independence to run themselves as they see fit. To make funding conditional to a set of demands by the government takes away that independence.

> In some schools of Buddhism, the tradition was to live with only one bowl and one spoon. The practice was to beg daily

It still exists today. A friend of mine was a monk for many years and would make daily alms rounds.

It also happens in other lineages of Hinduism too. A Baul teacher of mine was supposed to do a short teaching tour here in the US a few months ago and actually got turned away at SFO by immigration because the immigration officer just couldn't understand that she doesn't make money and eats all her meals from alms. He told her no one exists like that anymore, detained her, and sent her back to Bengal.

I agree with you, it could have a place in a toolkit of things to acquire a language with. But I don't think that's what they're marketing themselves as. Their tag line is "The world's best way to learn a language", which, personally, I wouldn't blame a person for reading and thinking "cool, I guess I'll just do this and finally learn a second language!". They didn't say "build your foundation in a foreign language" or "first steps in your language learning journey". They said "best way to learn a language", which, I'd say, is false and misleading.

I've never used TikTok, but I actually wonder if this hypothetical teenager would learn more following a ton of users in their target language or playing games on Duolingo. I'd be interested in that study.

I tried it for a few months, but never was really able to get it to work for me, although I did find the dictionary hover overlay in YouTube videos to be helpful at the beginning. Yabla is different in that they will break up a video into pieces, have you listen to it without subtitles, and then ask you to type out what you heard. This was really helpful, particularly on the advanced levels, as picking up various accents can be difficult until your ears adjust.

The hack is there isn't really one thing, it's using multiple tools like I mentioned in my original comment.

If I were to start again with a new language I'd do 1) A full Assimil course 2) comprehensible input and 3) an iTalki tutor 3x per week. Anki is helpful too, so if you had time to add that in every day I'd do that as well.

By learn another language I mean getting to C1 or equivalent. Being able to comfortably spend time in a country that speaks your target language. Having regular, improvised conversations of various depths. Reading literature in that language. Things like that. I really don't think Duolingo can get you there on it's own, but hey, I'm open to being wrong.

I've just have seen many friends keep their Spanish streak for a year or two and I would say they'd still test around the A2 level. I've said it in this thread that that is of course not nothing, but there are much more efficient ways to get to A2 or B1.

Yeah, for sure, thanks for pointing that out. For them it seems like fluency is defined as the ability to work comfortably in a professional setting in that target language. I self studied some of their French courses and found them helpful. I've never taken a course of theirs before, but a family member did do a year immersion in Arabic as part of their training for the foreign service, and of course it was a lot more intense than self-study.

That's great! Maybe Duolingo has changed things up since the last time I tried them years ago. Being able to listen to even simplified native content and understand it would of course be beyond a basic grasp of the language. What were your study habits with it?

My opinion is of course just an opinion, and it's made up from all the many people I personally know that have done Duolingo for a year (or years) and would maybe be at an A2 level. It's certainly not nothing, and honestly might be better than your regular grammar first course, but I think there's more effective ways. For me it was Assimil as the primary base, which got me to reading "L'Étranger" in about 6 months. Listening to native content took longer.

Yeah, same for me using Assimil for French (along with a few other tools). Six months in I could read L'Étranger in French.

My next project once I can pass the C1 test is to use their French -> Spanish course. I kind of recommend them to anyone that will listen, as their method worked really well for me.

I think the thing I dislike about Duolingo is it sort of catches the casual person into a trap by misleading them into thinking that by using this app they'll learn another language. It's not that it's a bad app, it's just that that's not going to happen. There's no one resource that will get you to even an intermediate level in a language. And the State Department's FSI estimates are unfortunately pretty accurate for hours to fluency [1].

For me to put a foundation for French down it was: Assimil for about 6 months (30 min/day), 30 minutes of daily comprehensible input, and Anki & Clozemaster for vocabulary (~15-20 min/day). Mixed in there was a couple months on Yabla doing listening comprehension, some grammar study from Bescherelle books, and some tutoring on iTalki. After about maybe 9-12 months I could listen to RFI's broadcast targeted to learners [2], but even then I still needed to go to the transcription a lot at the beginning.

To mislead people into thinking that doing some vocab study for 30 min a day in Duolingo is going to get them anything beyond the most basic grasp of a language is kinda not cool.

[1] https://www.state.gov/foreign-service-institute/foreign-lang...

[2] https://francaisfacile.rfi.fr/fr/

Oh great, I'm glad! I vividly remember the first time a friend that was studying 18 Musicians for a class at Berklee came over to my apartment with the original ECM vinyl and we just sat there silently listening for the hour. I don't think I'll ever grow tired of listening to it.

I should try coding to Vexations sometime, it could last me the whole work day!

My year in review music roundups from Spotify or Apple Music have always been totally useless because I code to Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians almost daily. Something about that composition just gets me in the zone and I've been using it to study or work to since I first heard it in college 20+ years ago.

Thanks for the thoughtful response and links! I actually think you've convinced me to go back and try to complete the whole French KOFI deck, as there are certainly gaps in my verb conjugations.

For hearing French, I went through the old FSI French phonology course at the beginning, as well as all the grouped (A1/A2/etc) comprehensible input from this channel: https://www.youtube.com/@FrenchComprehensibleInput/playlists. Oh, and I did a bunch of the French listening comprehension on Yabla for a few months: https://french.yabla.com/.