bluquark (u/bluquark)

bluquark commented on The beautiful dissociation of the Japanese language aethermug.com/posts/the-b... · Posted by u/mrcgnc

RyEgswuCsn · 2 years ago

> Japanese has a lot of compound words of Chinese origin, where two or more kanji appear as a set.

In the original Chinese language, a "word" mostly consists of a single character. Interestingly, many of the compound words commonly seen in modern Chinese were in fact coined by the Japanese scholars during their attempts to translate western writings around the 19th century and were later "imported" back into Chinese language. Interestingly, the two examples in the article, "art" (美术) and "science" (科学) are both of Japanese origin, though one can still tell whoever coined the terms chose the individual characters due to their meaning being relevant to the concepts the words are describing.

bluquark · 2 years ago

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 commented on The beautiful dissociation of the Japanese language aethermug.com/posts/the-b... · Posted by u/mrcgnc

bluquark · 2 years ago

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 commented on How web bloat impacts users with slow devices danluu.com/slow-device/... · Posted by u/jasondavies

bluquark · 2 years ago

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 commented on FSRS: A modern, efficient spaced repetition algorithm github.com/open-spaced-re... · Posted by u/rickcarlino

ekidd · 2 years ago

One massively overlooked way to improve spaced repetition is to make easier cards. It's surprising just how easy an effective card can be.

I started out using Anki to learn French vocabulary. I'd make pairs of cards, with English on one side and French on the other. This started out easy, but became utterly brutal and depressing with several hundred cards in my deck. Too many near synonyms.

I eventually took a hint from Katzumoto's Japanese advice, and started making cloze cards. I'd copy and paste an entire paragraph from an ebook or a web page, and hide just one word. These cards were easy, but also effective.

Then I got lazier.

I'd only hide half a word. Or I'd just boldface a word, and mark the card as a "pass" if I could sort of remember that word in context.

And somehow, these cards actually worked better.

Then I got lazier still. If seeing a card made me grown "Oh, not that card", I'd just delete it. If I missed a card 3 times, I configured Anki to permanently suspend it. If I actually needed to know a word, no worries, I'd see it again soon in a more helpful context. And my French vocabulary continued to grow by leaps and bounds.

I don't think that biggest improvements will come from better spaced repetition algorithms. I suspect the biggest wins will come from improved card formats. And it's surprisingly hard to make a card too easy to be useful.

(Source: 35,000+ Anki reps across three languages.)

bluquark · 2 years ago

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 commented on FSRS: A modern, efficient spaced repetition algorithm github.com/open-spaced-re... · Posted by u/rickcarlino

pitherpather · 2 years ago

Given the importance of spaced repetition, I've wondered if a modular approach is called for, contra Anki.

Aren't there three separate items?

1) Your cards (or a subset of cards).

2) The history of your interactions with them.

3) An algorithm (potentially just-in-time) taking that history into account to present cards to you, thereby adding to the history.

bluquark · 2 years ago

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 commented on Brother have gotten to where they are now by not innovating retro.social/@ifixcoinops... · Posted by u/anotherevan

JohnMakin · 2 years ago

I see now after having made this comment there's a sub-thread under this parent that discusses how useful this refrigerator feature can be. I guess I was just born 40 years too late. Seems impossibly silly to me.

bluquark · 2 years ago

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.