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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • I would recommend using Language Transfer.

    It has courses for about 10 languages. All of them are sets of MP3 files, about 10 minutes each. You can download them from soundcloud, listen via YouTube, or install the simple but very effective app.

    I think you would be shocked at how natural and effective this system is. I have been using it to learn Spanish as my fifth language, and it is easily the best language acquisition system I have ever used short of living in the target country. It explicitly avoids and discourages memorization.

    It’s completely free, but the creator asks for donations to cover his expenses. Believe it or not, one man has created courses for French, Spanish, German, Italian, Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Swahili, and recently Japanese.







  • The Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Soul of a New Machine, chronicling the development of Data General’s Eagle computer in the 1970s, one of the characters is a microcode developer, responsible for hardwired logic that runs the CPU.

    Part of his job is managing electrical impulses that last for microseconds or nanoseconds. One day, the team comes in to find his workstation abandoned, with a note on the monitor saying that he is going to join a commune in Vermont, and never dealing with a unit of time smaller than a season again.

    The tech may be ancient for us, but it’s a superb book.




  • That is actually one of my favorite books of all time. Well, at least the first two trilogies. After that, I don’t think he really had much to say.

    What worked for me was a protagonist who was in many ways a terrible human being, but actually thought about the morality of his actions, and respected the values of the secondary characters.

    It was also the first book I ever read that required me to keep a dictionary nearby. I was only about 16 when I read the first book, but I enjoyed having my vocabulary expanded.

    Some people probably dislike the overwhelming amount of similes and heavy use of metaphor, but it made me sit back and think about what I was reading, rather than just burning through it.






  • They just got hoodwinked a couple of times.

    I think that’s being unreasonably generous to the French. Their military was staffed with elderly officers, and they had very poor communications. They didn’t use radio very much and telephones were often cut, so they had to rely on motorcycle riders.

    Also, for some reason they refuse to believe that the Germans would advance through the Ardennes, as they had the previous two times they invaded France.

    Their army then essentially gave up, and they agreed to set up Vichy France, a collaborationist state that was very efficient at rounding up and deporting Jews to the gas chambers.

    The French also refused to hand their Mediterranean fleet over to the British at Mers-el-Kébir, so the British sunk it rather than risk allowing the ships to be used by the Germans.