bluquark · HackerTrans

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 the cultural exchange with Japan happened after that.

bluquark

2년 전discuss

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 text, essentially a more concise form of parenthetical or footnote.

- In classical poetry it is used for a variety of effects, for example novel synecdoches. One side of the gikun might refer to a season, and the other side might refer to a key detail the poet idiosyncratically associates with that season.

- But the contemporary Japanese learner usually notices them the most in fantasy/sci-fi manga and novels. In this genre it's used to introduce in-universe jargon while showing its meaning in parallel. At the extreme, it can allow writers to go over-the-top with how much special jargon the universe includes, without slowing down the pace of storytelling. (This can pose quite a challenge for translators!)

bluquark

2년 전discuss

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, a user with a data plan with a monthly limit in the single-digit GBs, and a RAM/CPU profile resembling a decade-old US flagship. That's good enough to use Discourse at all, but the experience will probably be on the unpleasantly slow side. I believe it's primarily this category of user that accounts for Dan's observation that incremental improvements in CPU/RAM/disk measurably improve engagement.

As for users with the lowest-end devices like the Itel P32, Dan's chart seems to prove that no amount of incremental optimization would benefit them. The only thing that might is a wholesale different client architecture that sacrifices features and polish to provide the slimmest code possible. That is, an alternate "lite/basic" mode. Unfortunately, this style of approach has rarely proved successful: the empathy problem returns in a different guise, as US-based developers often make the wrong decisions on which features/polish are essential to keep versus discarded for performance reasons.

bluquark

3년 전discuss

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 per card, given how brisk reviewing usually is) and I've been bothering with it less and less. The default simple cards my dictionary plugin creates are usually good enough for me. I go out of my way to add context on the front of the card now mostly when it's a specialized word almost always seen within that context (so there's zero added value in learning it independently).

I do agree with the general idea that laziness and going easy on yourself is good though. I give myself quite a lot of slack when grading my answers, applying a "my understanding of this word is close enough to avoid confusion in practice" threshold rather than some impractical ideal of native-level mastery.

bluquark

3년 전discuss

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 compatible with legacy Anki decks and extensions.

In practice, that's illustrated by the fact that there's now a button to fully recompute all intervals and difficulties based only on your history and the current algorithm tunings. And if you've already been using FSRS and the tunings haven't changed, the recomputation won't have any effect because it's equivalent to the incremental computations after each review.

So in principle it could be thought of as a just-in-time pure function, which involves a cache of generated data only for legacy & performance reasons.

bluquark

3년 전discuss

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 refrigerator camera sounds like the same kind of thing. Modestly useful feature that may well become standard-issue someday because the underlying components can be made very cheaply at scale.

bluquark

3년 전discuss

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, municipalities with a good credit rating can usually issue bonds that pay out about a third less yield than treasuries, thanks to favorable treatment of municipal bonds in the US tax code. I don't know how healthy Chicago's rating was in 2008 but even if somewhat mediocre, it's likely they could've gotten 3% or less on the bond market.

So at a minimum there was no advantage for the city in signing up for a sweetheart deal with strings attached, instead of covering the shortfall by issuing a bond.

bluquark

3년 전discuss

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 single order-of-magnitude improvement (as compared to average early-1980s development), for the subset of organizations that apply all of them together effectively.

In my personal experience at my workplace I've certainly observed many times that the quote "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later." is not universally true. When things go well, onboarding an experienced engineer and assigning them a parallelizable task has often proved a relatively lightweight process on teams I've been on, and I've seen the new member's productivity rapidly exceed their communication burden on the rest of the team.

That might be explainable by how several of the innovations you listed reduce the need for communication between humans. For example, we now need less communication about regressions since CI/CD alerts the responsible party immediately, and we need to ask fewer questions when individuals can examine the entire history of a codebase in version control themselves.

(That doesn't mean Fred Brooks's work is now obsolete, this story is consistent with Brooks's underlying analysis of the problem.)

bluquark

3년 전discuss

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 might reasonably be somewhere lower than parity with print. Everyone agrees it's a good idea on cheap low-dpi displays, but whether it's still worth the costs on so-called "retina" displays is a judgment call.

bluquark

3년 전discuss

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 corruption in Russia and procurement dysfunction in the US. But those factors would need to be estimated explicitly.

(EDIT: Thanks for the replies, I hadn't heard that there also exist specific estimates of "defense-sector PPP", so I acknowledge what I wrote above was wrong.)

bluquark

3년 전discuss

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 certainly improves productivity, but whether it can make things "fun" depends on which categories of hard/slow problems a given developer enjoys.

bluquark

3년 전discuss

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 lifelong.

This historical sequence of stock investors underperforming wildly in the early 1930s, followed by bond investors underperforming wildly in the 1940s-60s boom, is why the 60% stock/40% bond portfolio became the standard advice for cautious savers.

bluquark

3년 전discuss

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 less than 5 minutes before convicting

bluquark

3년 전discuss

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 maximum learning out of that media.

I have been following many of the recommendations on https://learnjapanese.moe/resources/. Most of them are language-specific, but perhaps you can still draw some inspiration from the methods and look for equivalent tools in your target language.

bluquark

3년 전discuss

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 actually do. Lately I started to mine Anki words from conversations on Japanese twitter and I discovered that everyone casually throw around all kinds of kanji that are not on the Jouyou list and in words every textbook insisted were primarily kana.

I think it might be because modern IMEs have made it much easier to casually use rare-ish kanji. Technology has expanded the range of everyone's recall and writing speed, while the textbooks are still reflecting the world of 20 years ago.

bluquark

3년 전discuss

> 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 with at all. It's purely optimized to maximize engagement/revenue.

bluquark

3년 전discuss

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 "reversed" E->J cards to my routine might help. Are those variations worth the trouble?

bluquark

3년 전discuss

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.

bluquark

3년 전discuss

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 Anki+Animebook+Yomichan for 1-2 hours a day while living the US as I did during an earlier period when I was living in Japan (but without access to computerized methods beyond a basic pocket e-dict).

As a beginner, appropriate input was enough to care of "spaced repetition" on its own, since children's media constantly rotates over the same small set of vocabulary. But after I improved past the ~2000 most common words or so, it happened more and more that a word I recently learned didn't appear again in my input until it had already been flushed. The probability that I would actually learn a new word for good progressively decreased as I picked the lower-hanging fruit, which is the cause of the dreaded "intermediate plateau".

I gather Anki pushes out the plateau much further: I have heard that it starts to feel Sisyphean to learn new words with it around the 15000-20000 word mark instead.

bluquark

3년 전discuss

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 new words can actually be faster to learn at an intermediate level of fluency. Personally I often can guess the meaning of new words from kanji + context, but if I only hear the pronunciation I have no idea, so I always turn on closed captions on Japanese TV.

In the writing direction, it's both time-consuming to learn initially and time-consuming to write every time, but it does carry a certain satisfaction and delight. So the current trend to learning exclusively how to read and type them seems economically productive, but the loss of aesthetic enjoyment of calligraphy in daily life is regrettable.

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