A programmer with an interest in transit, making music, and building things of all types.

I have dysgraphia which makes writing difficult for me. I hope you can figure out what I mean despite my issues.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • I have needed a new phone every 2 for the last 6 years because my old one physically broke. Battery might be good, but the screen is cracked: new phone. My last phone quit recognizing the SIM, and so new phone it is. In theory I can buy the parts to repair the phone, but in practice either the parts are obsolete and not stocked, or I can get them special order from China if I’m willing to wait weeks and pay half the price of a new phone. Then hope I actually manage to get the phone together again.

    I live in the US where we use many weird by world standards frequencies. I’ve looked into various repairable phones, (fair phone, pine phone), but I quickly realize I often travel in parts of the US where they won’t work. Thus I’m stuck with what my carrier offers. (Apple might be more repairable, but apparently more locked down)






  • Abuse. I don’t agreewithfree speach in all things. I doupt anyone does. I don’t want to see constant (to the point of only) ads for vbucks. I don’t want threats to my person. There are a few other things like that, that I think we all agree on., I then have a personal list of things like porn or swearing that iidon’t want to see but some of you do. Where to draw theelineethus isn’t clear but there is one.




  • A terminal is something like a DEC model Vt220, or IBM 3270. These are physical machines with a keyboard, and a display. Most often the display was a CRT, but some were just a printer, I supposed some must have had a LCD but I’ve never seen one. A few did have a mouse, but that was rare. They might look like a computer, but they do not have a CPU (or they do but the CPU is very under powered). The point is you can have 100 cheap (cheap as in 4x the cost of a modern PC, without factoring in inflation) terminals connecting to an expensive powerful computer (expensive as in millions of not inflation adjusted dollars, powerful as in a modern smart phone is faster by nearly any measure). Every terminal had some special commands that programs could use to do something more fancy than plain text, but different ones had different abilities.

    These days a powerful PC is cheaper than any terminal could be and vastly more powerful than those old computers, so it doesn’t make sense to have one except as a collectors item. However terminals themselves did leave a useful of program design. Most command line programs know how to control a terminal to do some pretty printing. Thus we often use terminal emulators which let our computer pretend to be one of those old terminals. The DEC vt100 for whatever reason ends up being the most commonly emulated terminal when someone says terminal emulator - there really was a model vt100 terminal at one time.

    Note that a web browser counts as a terminal emulator by the above definition. Nobody thinks of them that way, but they fit.



  • While technically you don’t need to study an hour every day, if you don’t put that much time into it you will eventually look back and see you have spend a year+ and don’t know anything and then give up. An hour a day means it is likely you have made progress between reviews of your life and thus the effort is worth continuing. At 10 minutes per day you will be dead before you know the language, so giving up is the right answer.

    Enough people fail to learn a language in school as to consider the whole idea of school bunk. (but some do learn, and some schools are better than others - but the better ones all feature time as a factor)


  • The duolingo format was never popular with polyglots. The game format makes it easy to feel like you did something which is a great thing, but the is the only pro people who have learned multiple languages find with it.

    There is a lot of debate about what the best way to start is, but all agree that you need to interact with the real language in real world type settings (watching a movie in the language with subtitles is real world, though you need to make an effort to listen not just read!) They also agree that time is important, you need to study at least an hour every day to make progress.