Paul Ganssle @pganssle@qoto.org

@brainwane I have been learning Spanish with Dreaming Spanish last 6 months or so and I do sorta see where they are coming from on waiting to acquire a lot of the language before speaking. With ~400 hours of Spanish, I am comfortable enough understanding the language that I have noticed a bunch of things about the pronunciation and differences in accent that I am sure I would have to consciously change if I had been speaking from the start.

@brainwane The comprehensible input people apparently agree with you, since they think you basically don’t talk at all until you basically know the language 😛

https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page

@kevin I think the idea is that they are not going to make a second season, so the expectation is that the entire story will be told in 8 episodes or whatever, rather than just having a season end in a cliffhanger or dragged out for several seasons or whatever.

@hynek I don’t know how much I hate reading paper books because I don’t think I’ve read one in 12 years or so, but I was surprised at where this went. For me reading on a phone or tablet is not nearly as good as reading on a front-lit epaper device. Once the Kindle Paperwhite came out I was like, “Well, never need to read a physical book again I guess!”

@fantazo Totally forgot about that one. Yeah, that is nice for language learners, it’s always so hard to keep track of the huge number of overlapping metaphorical meanings of different prepositions, where prepositions used in each situation are very case-by-case.

I find it interesting in this post they seem to claim that the use of “en” for “in a given time period” has a clear meaning, but “je” is used for “at a specific time”. I kinda feel like you either say that a specific spatial metaphors make sense about each phrase, or you should use “je” for both, since the preposition doesn’t provide additional information.

For a specific day, you have “before”, “after” and “around” where the meanings would be clear and would be made ambiguous if you swapped them around, but if you swapped out “at” or “in” for “on” with “this day”, it would sound wrong, but the metaphor would be roughly the same.

Another good bit of grammar from Esperanto, the preposition je.

These are just two of the affixes, by the way. I really liked the whole system of them, it makes it pretty easy to quickly build a big vocabulary, and it’s very expressive: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Esperanto/Appendix/Table_of_affixes

-ul = person characterized by (juna = young, junulo = a youth)
-ej = place characterized by (lerni = to learn, lernejo = school)
-ilo = instrument (skribi = write, skribilo = writing implement)

They can also be used by themselves, like:

iĝi = to become
ulo = dude, chap
ilo = tool

One thing I really like about #Esperanto is the infix -iĝ- which refers to becoming, it basically makes words intransitive, like:

So ruĝa = red, ruĝiĝi = to blush
naski = to give birth, naskiĝi = to be born
edzi = to marry, edziĝi = to get married

There is a similar (maybe annoyingly so) infix for “to make/cause”, -ig-, which makes them transitive:

morti = to die, mortigi = to kill
riĉa = rich, riĉigi = to become rich, riĉigi = to enrich

Those and the question marker “ĉu” are features I often wish I had in other languages.

We are far too informal these days, which is why I’m taking a bold stand against the rampant use of Nicholasnames.

Thank you for coming to my THEODORE Talk.

@leaverou That said, I have heard that with the current generation of batteries, it’s better to run them lower before charging them rather than having them hover around 100% all the time.

That said, battery life in a phone has almost never gotten so bad that I was bothered by it before something else dramatic happened to make me get a new phone, and the few times I’ve had to replace a battery it was pretty simple and/or cheap to do — even in the modern era where no phones have user-replaceable batteries (😭).

As an aside — up until around 4-5 years ago, I always had replaceable batteries, so I also often didn’t use the USB port, I would charge the batteries by themselves and then swap them out when the one in the phone got too low.

@leaverou I was originally skeptical, but I really prefer wireless charging now, for the following reasons:

1. It’s very easy to just have a pad at my desk(s) and on my nightstand and when I take my phone out of my pocket, I put it on there instead of on the table. The tiny decrease in friction makes it way more likely that I’m going to charge as I go.
2. I like being able to pick up the phone without any tether and put it right back.
3. I’ve had a few phones start to have problems with the USB port. Wireless charging avoids that problem and also reduces strain on the USB port throughout the life of the device.

I haven’t noticed my phone charging particularly slower when charging wirelessly when compared to being plugged in, but even if that were the case I don’t think it would matter much. The low-friction nature of the charging makes it so that my phone doesn’t ever get terribly low in the first place, but even on days when I don’t charge during the day, I always get a full charge overnight anyway (and even a dramatic difference like 2 hours vs 1 hours wouldn’t matter in that case).

@brettcannon And PyPy’s test suite seems to be pretty good at finding PEP 399 violations.

@cnx @webology Oh, weird. I don’t think I configured that feed content thing at all, so that must be the default of whatever SSG I’m using for the blog…