- panglott parentWe just need a better place to show our parents pictures of their grandkids. Is that such a hard ask?
- A lot of the infrastructure of capitalism is oriented around generating and sustaining small- and medium-sized businesses, and while large corporations will always want to increase market power most sectors have antitrust reasons to avoid outright monopoly. The tech sector feels free to aim for monopoly and generate monopoly rents.
- People aren't mad because Facebook runs a social network or presents users with a newsfeed or provides a messaging service or stores users photos. Lots of companies do those things without complaint. People are mad at Facebook because the company constantly lies about privacy issues, makes one agreement with its users about their privacy and then does something else, and just generally treats the privacy of its users with complete contempt.
- Language learning courses and tools are just ways to kickstart normal language acquisition, so you don't have to go through the years of gurgling like a baby has to. Learning to communicate in a new language isn't exactly like learning some other kind of skill--it's much, much huger.
When you're speaking your native language, you're decoding and processing complex social signals in real time at multiple levels of structure (phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic). Even the best AIs can only get a couple of these levels of structure, with significant error rates, and only in a handful of well-studied languages (there are hundreds or thousands of natural languages). How much time does it take for you to learn 1000 vocabulary words? A natural language will have tens of thousands. A comprehensive grammar of the English language would be dozens of heady volumes and have less information about English grammar than any competent native speaker.
Learning a language is just an astonishingly huge task. No course or system can cover it all. Mostly they're just trying to make things easier for you.
- Oh, absolutely. But I think they're going to be more specialized tools to work on different skills.
For example, I used to use the perapera-kun plugin and I guess yomichan does a similar thing, but that sort of tool—but say, for closed captions—could help listeners get more comprehensible input from movies. Like, here's one I have to try. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/language-learning-...
Or just apps or social networks that help connect speakers in other languages. I know of a Discord server, that lets me practice a target language; the group just meets at an inconvenient time for me.
- The problem is that the tools you need are "listening to and interacting with people in the target language". Human language is a problem of interpreting the creative social signals of other human beings, and there's no way to automate that. With the Web, YouTube and internet radio, the actual amount of target-language material that a person can expose themselves to is hugely, hugely more available than it was 20-30 years ago.
You have to keep in mind what a tool is trying to accomplish relative to the personal development it takes to grow into another human language. Different levels of learners require different kinds of instruction. Bilingual instruction is quickest if a person has zero knowledge of the language whatever. Absolute beginners need direct instruction in phonology. An Anki deck is to build basic vocabulary or literacy for a person who has some. Duolingo is there to get you comfortable with basic grammar or phrases, to get you interacting with native speakers in the first place once you stumble off the plane. A more advanced speaker might need accent reduction work.
Anki is fantastic at flashcards. Duolingo is fantastic at translation exercises, way better than what we had a few decades ago. Definitely the author in the OP should be using Anki rather than postcards on her bed.
"Mastery"-level linguistic tasks include things like writing creative poetry in the language that another person finds moving, describing the movements of a complex machine, or composing an essay in a specific literary style—things that native speakers may find difficult without formal training. There's just no way Duolingo can do that.
I took a survey recently that clarified a lot of this for me. The questions were all things like: What percentage of your time do you spend listening to music in the target language (and your native language)? What percentage of your time do you spend watching moveis in the target language (and your native language)? What percentage of your time do you spend reading books in the target language (and your native language)? What percentage of your time do you spend thinking and interacting with other people and thinking in the target language (and your native language)? If I spend 1% of my time or less in the target language and 99% in my native language, it's no wonder that I have plateaued in it.
- Sometimes people just have fear of an event occurring, and disaster preparedness is a way to help calm that fear and gain a sense of control. I'll confess that the threat of a nuclear exchange with North Korea has caused me a fair amount of concern in the last six months. But reading about nuclear attacks and disaster preparedness has helped me manage that concern.
Moving away is a different kind of preparation; it's certainly not doing nothing. Moving is a lot more extreme than keeping some spare food & water in your basement.
- The problem with this article's defense of firearms for disaster preparedness is that firearms are among the least urgent disaster-preparedness items. If what people were really concerned about was disaster preparedness, the things they would obsess over would be flashlights, water storage and purification, a few weeks of food supplies, backup power sources, medical supplies, portable radios. Some preppers do spend time and energy thinking about this, it's true.
But usually what you typically have is a person who enjoys guns and is trying to think about a situation where it might possibly be useful to own an AR-15. It's a terrible self-defense weapon in an urbanized area (compared to a shotgun or handgun), and they're illegal to hunt with in lots of areas. Owning such a gun requires a major investment of money and time (for practice and training), and encourages this kind of paranoid outlook. So you have interest in guns driving interest in disaster preparedness, rather than interest in disaster preparedness driving interest in guns.
- Why not just give users more power over their newsfeed, instead of assuming that the site engineers can get the balance right.
A user could be able to specify "I want 50% of my newsfeed to be from immediate family, 35% from close friends, 15% from acqaintances." Use a pie chart slider bar to make it clear. Then let the algorithm figure out how to interpret that chart.
- Putting Japanese at such a low complexity shows a lot about the author's criteria and bias.
Japanese numerals are quite easy, but when it comes to actually counting things, it is quite complex. There are two series of numeral words that are used in different contexts, as well as dozens of counter words that pair with a variety of semantic categories. Many combinations or number + noun have quite irregular combinations, like "hatachi" (20 years of age) or "hatsuka" (20th day of the month).
- "The Language Instinct" is almost 25 years old, and it has not fared well IMO, although linguistics is a multidisciplinary/multiparadigmatic field with lots of disagreement. That book was the result of cognitive psychology trying to grapple with Chomsky and generative grammar when they were at the height, and a dominant paradigm within linguistics. But the tide has been shifting away from Chomsky ever since. So the discussion of universal grammar, or the innateness of creole grammars, looks much weaker today.
An "interactional instinct" seems like a much better account of the forces at play in human language acquisition. https://www.scribd.com/document/60713747/Interactional-Insti...
"The Blank Slate" repulsed me by criticizing Boasian anthropology for its rejection of biological explanations for behavior while ignoring the deeply racist context of early 20th century science. The biological explanations that people like Boasian anthropologists were arguing against were pure scientific racism, the premise that the social behavior of "primitive" peoples was a consequence of their biological inferiority, during a time when biology had (for example) not definitely repudiated Lamarckism.
"The Sense of Style", however, looks like quite a good book.
- There's a deeper argument here, too. Growing inequality is an indicator that the iron law of oligarchy is taking hold. The book "Why Nations Fail" divides societies into those with inclusive and extractive political and economic institutions. Inclusive institutions allow the benefits of productivity improvements to be shared broadly, while extractive institutions fear that the creative destruction of technological change will imperil the position and authority of the elites that benefit. There are some great stories in there about Tiberius and Elizabeth I banning technological innovations. https://panglott.wordpress.com/2016/12/10/books-why-nations-...
- I think it's clarifying to look at tablet manufacturers as a whole. The reflexive complaint of Apple is that their system is too locked-down and limited by their approach to software. However, at the same time, there were Android tablets being made in the same era, and it appears that they also suffer from some similar problems (being only limited to Jelly Bean). If so, perhaps the commonest complaints about Apple's approach to software is off the mark in this case.
All hardware products will suffer tradeoffs, and I don't necessarily find it reasonable to think that tablet computers should always be hardware-upgradeable, if it is at the expense of handle-ablity. The author's lament is that the iPad went obsolete before it broke. The PlayBook went obsolete nearly as soon as it was released. How did those Galaxy Tab 2s do? If the problem is that "it went obsolete before it broke", that's infinitely better than "it broke before it went obsolete".
- Why pick on Apple here? Are there any Android tablets from 2010-2012 that still see regular use, get software updates, and new/updated apps? Is anyone still using their Blackberry PlayBooks from late 2010? It looks like the Galaxy Tab 2 from 2012 can only be upgraded to Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean, roughly as current as iOS 5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samsung_Galaxy_Tab_2_10.1
- It's not just hardware upgradability: some of the problem could be solved if app developers created simple, lightweight iOS 5-compatible apps. But of course there's no business case for supporting early iPads, and I don't even think many early iPad owners necessarily think there should be.
The iPad is great because it is compact and a specific, coherent design. I could use a 12-year-old desktop tower for my evening reading, but I don't want to.