...which makes me think that Uber ratings may have less to do with the driver and more to do with the person giving the rating. I, for one, struggle giving people a bad review knowing that their livelihood depends on it — it's either 5 stars or crickets.
For anybody interested in this era of photography, the book "A Triumph of Genius" by Ronald K. Fierstein is such a brilliant documentation of the history around the Kodak vs Polaroid patent war.
A huge Duolingo fan and I play every day, but I wonder whether it's actually helping me to learn anything. I've been using it to study mandarin characters for the 3rd year now, but when I actually see Chinese text there's barely anything I recognize.
Admittedly, I spend maybe 5-15 minutes per day on average and most of that I do in a rush, but the expectation still sounds fair -- reading would be relatively passive knowledge too.
It can be very hard to perceive the progress you’ve made if you aren’t actually putting it into practice.
Speaking from personal experience, if you’ve actually put in substantial time in the last year, you’ll find that a lot of that practice will demonstrate itself over the course of a few conversation classes with a teacher.
Doing Duolingo every day makes you good at Duolingo.
There aren't any tricks IMO. You have to practise the thing you actually want to be able to do. You wouldn't expect to get good at playing guitar by tapping an app every day, why would it help you learn a language?
I’ve successfully used duolingo to learn multiple languages.
I’ve used it as the way to get started and build a base of vocabulary and grammar, allowing me to comfortably jump into immersion with audio/video/speaking etc.
Duolingo is quite effective at what it advertises, it never claims it will bring you to full fluency.
I’m studying too mostly on my own for about 2.5 years. I can read a most characters I see in the wild, though that still leaves enough that understanding the text is hard or impossible. OverallI find reading much easier to study than listening. I haven’t used DuoLingo and would recommend HelloChinese instead. But that’s only a few months to half a year of material; you have to move on. After that I used an Anki deck of HSK vocab.
Are you reading anything? Find graded readers like from Mandarin Companion and read those (start with ones that seem too easy).
Have you learned to write any of the characters? I don’t think you need to learn to write all of them, but learning at least 50 or so got me to understand and recognize the characters better in my reading as well.
The Pleco app is a nice reader letting you look up words just by tapping on them. Also turn off pinyin in any study apps you’re using, just use characters (except for in answers to verify you’re right).
You’ve certainly learned something, but at the level of commitment it’s going to be less than if you put more time into it (yes I’m captain obvious here).
One thing that you will notice is that even if you can’t utilize it fluidly now, if you were to jump into more immersive methods now, you’ll realize that it’s all there under the surface - you’ll very likely make very rapid progress.
Pay attention to the camera & directing the next time you watch an episode, it's an absolute masterpiece.
One example to look out for is the back-and-forth between Columbo and the baddie. They would usually stand in opposite ends of the room and shot from two (sets of) cameras. One camera is closer to Columbo and the other is closer to the baddie, so when the detective is "winning" an argument, he'll look bigger on the screen and vice versa.
This usually starts with a shot where Columbo looks super small somewhere in the back of the room, then he'd ask his famous "just one last question", and then they switch the setup. Now Columbo is bigger in the front, and the baddie looks small while they are in trouble.
The output will be a simple website, we already have all pages in HTML, and from the tech perspective we could use any of the above.
What I've seen was: SquareSpace is still rather limited, Prismic and Contentful are around $500 per month in their non-free-tier, and Strapi is just too expensive to find devs for. Plus their editor looks the same as Wordpress's if I'm honest.
On the other hand, Wordpress has a massive community of reasonably priced freelancers, has updates many times a year, and most things you want out of the box (such as SEO, or easy hosting on Heroku or elsewhere). The only thing it doesn't have is the excitement to work with it :)
Is there a good business case for any of the competitors?
I've worked a bit with Contentful, and it seemed like a pretty good CMS, but pricey. The client was moving off of it because they wanted the more familiar WordPress UI.
Webflow is basically a super good editor that spits out static sites on build.
As easy to update as squarespace for non-tech folks, but as customizable and secure as a static site generator (since you can build everything from scratch).
Interesting that she located the elements by tapping on the screen at certain positions, instead of using the left/right swipe _anywhere_ on the screen, which selects and reads the previous/next element.
Having seen a lot of these videos before (we've been working on making apps truly accessible), I never actually came across someone who didn't use the left/right swipe as a first plan of action, but hey ho, you always learn.
(I wonder if it depends on mental models, and whether you prefer building a 2D map of the screen to moving up and down in a 1-dimensional vector.)
I usually use left/right flicks for screens I haven't interacted with before, but I use taps to find elements I use often, particularly when they're easy to find. I sometimes use a mixture of both, i.e. tapping somewhere near the bottom of the screen to focus on the tab bar, then flicking left or right to find the right tab.
If the goal is immunity to Covid-19, isn't it simpler to just: catch it?
To be on the safe side, they could have lowered the risks of a bad outcome by things like (1) catching a smaller viral load (2) actually prepare for it and catch it at a convenient time etc. (Someone who's actually interested would research this longer.)
Surely it's safer than the home cooked vaccine, and surely the favorable option on a risk vs potential benefit analysis. Would make for a boring blog post though.
This is my perspective. (No luck yet!) From what I am hearing it doesn't matter though, I will need to get vaccinated anyway to be allowed to travel etc.
This is a useful answer, especially because I don't think most people consider or make this decision mindfully. Sabbaticals can be an important option not only to advance your professional development but also to avoid burnout.
And I always hear people who consider it, but nine times out of ten (or probably more), they drop the idea for a copout reason (I met someone / need to save money for X / this job is too great to leave)
No-code is useful for building enough of the app to figure out whether there's a market for it in the first place. It's not fair to compare it to building the actual product with an actual team -- a more realistic alternative would be outsourcing the prototype/beta to some random team.
