I don't think those bottles have been altered in anyway, a lot of standard glass bottles will have imperfections in them that look like that, amplified by the thickness of the bottle itself. You don't see this with jars because they tend to be thinner than bottles.
The rubik's cube inside a bottle is a fairly easy one, if you've ever seen a disassembled rubik's cube then you will clearly see that it's possible to just feed each piece in one at a time and put it back together with some tweezers and a lot of patience.
The article doesn't actually have a paywall, it's more of a blocking message asking you to donate, but you can click it away and read the whole article for free.
Well I know you could definitely render the same thing in blender and it would probably be faster as blender is actually designed to render images and animations, as opposed to Unity being primarily a game engine.
As far as generating them procedurally I'm not sure. I'm assuming you're using 3d models of the chess pieces, and while it is possible to do procedural animations with the animation nodes add-on I haven't used it much myself so I'm not sure if it will me your use case.
Blender also has a great python API. AFAIK it has an API for every single function so the sky is the limit really. I don't think it would be too much effort to create a blender file that on startup would execute a script that generates a random chess board arrangement, inserts the corresponding models, and sets up the camera.
Blender can even render from the command line, so you could probably just setup a loop that keeps rendering the same file over and over to generate a whole bunch of positions.
I see this somewhat frequently among some parts of the online language community. For some reason people seem to think that you're not immersing in a language unless you're in a country where that language is frequently used. They somehow equate being immersed in a language with physically being in a country where that language is frequently used.
Don't get me wrong, being in a country is a great way to immerse yourself in a language, but it is by no means a requirement.
In terms of exposure to content in the language you're learning, what's the difference between someone who is living in a country where they see that language on TV, in the newspapers, hear it on the radio, and speak it with native speakers, versus someone who watches content in that language on youtube, reads articles/newspapers online in that language, talks online with people who speak that language, but lives somewhere where they don't speak it? Not much.
Setting up a "local immersion environment" requires putting effort into finding native resources and trying to reduce your exposure towards your native language. It's certainly more effort than being in a country where you can't help but be surrounded by your target language, but it's definitely not impossible.
The idea that listening to music, listening to podcasts, watching youtube videos and reading articles in your target language is not immersion is silly, since this is what native speakers living in their country experience on a daily basis. Environment is everything, not location.
The difference between this and an unmaintained salt water aquarium is that the aquarium isn't a closed system. Whatever gases are created by the life in the aquarium being mixed with fresh air and eventually diffusing into the surrounding environment. I'm no expert on the subject but I would imaging this makes a huge difference compared to a completely closed system.
Except that's not what the algorithm does at all. It shows you things SIMILAR to what you've already watched, but not exactly the same. Of course no one wants to listen to the same songs over and over, but Spotify recommends you SIMILAR music so that you have a chance of finding something else that you like.
Sure, if your goal is to broaden your horizons and find media that's different to what you normally consume, then those algorithms probably won't allow you to do that. But for Youtube and Spotify, it means their users are constantly finding more things on their platform that they enjoy, which means more time on the platform and ultimately more ad revenue (or revenue from other premium services they offer).
The pitch accent ShinTakuya mentioned is actually a huge part of why attaining a native-like Japanese accent is so hard. It's more than just individual words having an accent that can affect the meaning of the word.
There are rules for the pitch accent of conjugations of verbs and adjectives, rules for compound words, suffixes, prefixes and even a combined sentence level accent that changes depending on the accent of the word contained within that sentence.
And to wrap it up, there's exceptions to most of these rules. Not to mention that names of places and people have their own accent that, while one can gain an intuition for over time, are still something to be aware of.
Edit: There's also the fact that English doesn't have a pitch accent system, so it's harder for English speakers to acquire an unconscious understanding and production of the correct pitch accent than it would be for someone whose first language is Chinese. While Chinese's tones aren't as complicated as Japanese's pitch accent, the fact that Chinese speakers have to pay attention to the relative pitch of a phoneme gives them an advantage when listening to words in Japanese as they will be unconsciously aware that the pitch of a word is important and most likely reproduce it correctly without conscious effort.
I think Duolingo is great for forming habits. Ultimately, if you want to learn something new you need to work on that skill over a decent period of time, and this becomes hard to do without a regular habit.
Duolingo is also great at exposing yourself to the language gradually, but unless your goal is to simply be able to hold a conversation or say a few phrases, I don't think it will get you anywhere in the long run.
As I'm getting more into language learning (specifically Japanese), Krashen's input hypothesis seems to be an important part of the process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiTsduRreug
Essentially he makes the distinction between "learning" that word A in language X has some meaning Y, and acquiring an unconscious understanding that word A means Y.
His main point being that this unconscious acquisition (that is, being able to hear a words/phrase and not having to put conscious effort into to translating it in your head) only comes from comprehensible input, that is, listening to the language and understanding messages (I'm not so convinced that it has to be entirely 100% comprehensible, rather from experience think language can be acquired even from something like 20% comprehensible material).
Communities have been rising up around Krashen's theory, one being AJATT (All japanese all the time).
alljapaneseallthetime.com
The creator of the site advocated listening to native Japanese material 24/7 (or at least as much as you possibly can during the day) as well as making i+1 sentence (linking back to Krashen) flash cards using Anki (or equivalent SRS system).
More recent innovations on AJATT have been arising thanks to MattVsJapan (https://www.youtube.com/MATTvsJapan).
He is currently developing a method he's calling MIA (Mass Immersion Approach) that refines AJATT into a more general approach that is applicable to any language (for now it's more focused on Japanese since that's what Matt is most experience in).
One common criticism of these methods is that they advocate NOT speaking until you are have achieved some form of basic fluency. The reasoning being that training your unconscious model on listening will prevent you from making mistakes early on, until you are ready to train your model from your own speech.
Honestly I'm not doing these methods enough justice, there is a lot of background and theory behind them, and MIA itself is still evolving (Matt is actively trying to change the way people learn languages, or if not that, at least the way people think about how language learning works). If anyone is serious about learning a language to a highly proficient level, ditch duo lingo, textbooks and tutors and read up on these methods instead, you won't regret it.
If you can make a really nice MIPS emulator, that would be awesome. I had to learn MIPS for a programming unit I did in my first year of university. We had to use the MARS emulator which is a not particularly good MIPS emulator in java.
A well made and nice looking MIPS emulator would be awesome.
Source: check the language breakdown on zig's repo: 0% rust (what swc is written in).