I too hated original metro on desktop back in the day and especially missed the start menu, but I also look back on it fondly.
I think that Microsoft was ahead of its time and that they had a better design language than any competitor and original metro still holds up favorably to contemporary designs.
Last time I sat down with a windows 11 pc I even thought “wouldn’t it be better if the start menu was just full screen?”
Untrue. Google maps infers direction from multiple time-separated locations - that is, your velocity vector. If you don't move, it guesses - and is quite often wrong.
No. You can see blue emit from your position in the direction your phone is pointing. If you turn around, it will turn around too. It uses the built in compass for this.
The `selectors` crate is pretty mature to be fair. It's what's used in Firefox for all CSS selector matching. The main advantage of using it is that it's modular so you can just pull that part out without the entire CSS engine.
Also the filters for adblocking have extended the CSS selector syntax to add extra features, and you might not want those to leak into your parser for stylesheets.
That's amazing. I just assumed the ad lists were volunteer maintained like a wiki. I'll be sure to use Easylist now that I know they're also advocating for users while punishing bad advertisers.
I'm still not entirely sure it's for the best or not.
On one hand, it is a concentration of power into hands a few people.
On the other, it is for a good cause, to maintain a list of ad network and site banners that drain resources, cause privacy issues, etc.
The Easylist people aren't saints. They get paid off by Google to allow "Acceptable Ads". So you just show a different campaigns if your user is running adblocker nowadays.
That's a lot of work to bypass the blocks on a browser that's far from the market leader. Now, even if the browser does become popular enough in the future to be targeted, the developers would probably gain enough resources and support to replace one of the engines with the other.
What made a lot of Econ and related stuff click for me is the idea that there is no such thing as a sale, only a purchase. When you buy a tv for $200, the electronics store buys $200 dollars of cash for $200 of TV.
So the electronic store hasn’t made any money on the transaction. They lost $200 dollars of tv and received $200 of cash. So the tv account got deducted 200 and the cash account got increased 200.
That is a bit of a over-simplification. Its true that there would be corresponding $200 entries that balance. But the store did make money on the transaction, and the journal entries would show it in a manner as shown below (assumption 50% margin on sales). (COGS is Cost of goods sold).
Yes, the journal entries don't immediatly show the profit as an explicit line item. But once closing entries are done, an income statement can be created that essentially shows the change in value of all your accounts for a certain period. In the income statement, profits would be calculated.
I actually agree, and kinda wished there was some sort of "binary" alternative to json that every text editor would open and let me edit as easily as json, because at the end of the day, it is no more binary than utf8 encodings with their number of bits, endians and confused line endings.
mine too, but none was such a dick. also, anything related to school (particularly at a young age), is not viewed as something to boast of (at least in my experience in italy, serbia and portugal).
My shorts are mostly of the creators I follow or adjecent creators. I do get the occasional AI slop, but it looks more like the algorithm is testing someone new, to learn what they are, than the algorithm feeding me slop.
Now Facebook/insta shorts, they are somehow just trash. But maybe that is because I don’t follow any creators on those platforms.
There’s another school of teaching, where kana and kanji are banned for the first 2-3 semesters because they are a distraction to learn and internalize words and grammar.
I’ve met a few students of this textbook system when I was on exchange and my impression was that they were very skilled at Japanese for the amount of time they’ve been a student and what they told about their seniors was they pick up kanji fast, since they already know the words.
The big problem of course is that it is completely incompatible with other schools. Where do you place them when they go on exchange? With the n3 or n5 students?
Anyway, I always thought it was interesting that the exact antithesis of RTK* exists and works.
*RTK or “remembering the kanji” is a system that teaches all kanji before student learn their first word. It’s quite popular online as it lends itself very well to solo studying.
> *RTK or “remembering the kanji” is a system that teaches all kanji before student learn their first word. It’s quite popular online as it lends itself very well to solo studying.
One thing I have found over the years, I have never met a foreigner living in Japan who has used it extensively. (Many were aware of it, but few used it heavily.) However, there is a lively community of online learners who use it. (Don't read that as a judgement against using it; this is simply an observation.)
I was surprised to read this part:
> a system that teaches all kanji before student learn their first word
I have never heard this description before. I always thought it was a learning aid to use mnemonics to remember the meaning of individual kanji. If someone can complete all volumes of RTK before "learn[ing] their first word", I would be stunned. It would be a feat of super-human level of memorization and recall. That said, the Internet is a huge place with billions of people. There will be somebody, somewhere who took this path and is happy to tell you about their success using it.
"all" might be a bit of an exaggeration, but the philosophy is to learn to recognize roughly 2000 kanji before starting the actual language learning. Volume 2 and 3 are supposed to complement more normal language learning.
The theory is based on the authors experience seeing Chinese and Korean students learn much, much faster than their western peers in Japanese language classes, coupled with an argument for "If you can read 50% of characters, you still can't read"
I'm surprised you've never come across this, as it is in the foreword.
> There will be somebody, somewhere who took this path and is happy to tell you about their success using it.
I met this somebody in Japan. If I remember correctly, he spend a summer "doing" RTK, then took 1 semester Japanese at his home university, went on exchange to Japan for two semesters, and after finishing his first semester abroad he passed JLPT 2 (not N2 - this was before they added the N)
Good for him. He was a strong student, but I wouldn't recommend it.
> I met this somebody in Japan. If I remember correctly, he spend a summer "doing" RTK, then took 1 semester Japanese at his home university, went on exchange to Japan for two semesters, and after finishing his first semester abroad he passed JLPT 2 (not N2 - this was before they added the N)
While I certainly believe your story, I hope that you know he is an extreme outlier with super-human level of memorization and recall. Tiny question: Do you know if his uni with in the countryside or a big city? The people whom I have met that gained fluency the fastest (normies here, no superhumans, please!) all had significant time lived in the countryside, so they had an immersive language learning experience.
Thank you to confirm. He probably had the "perfect storm" of countryside language immersion with excellent recall. (I am jealous!) It is always bloody impressive to me to see someone achieve near native-level understanding of Japanese coming from a completely different linguistic culture.
I have always felt furigana bridges that gap well enough in written learning. The downside is that it might become a crutch, but it can't for long if you are serious about learning reading. Native materials pretty quickly drop furigana.
Like with a lot of things like this, if you learn for long enough the differences in the major approaches work themselves out.
About 25 years ago, I studied Hebrew. It is a fascinating language to me (as is Arabic). One of the features, weirdly similar to furigana, is the "dots" placed above vowels to indicates how to pronouce words. (Sorry, I don't know the technical linguistic term to describe these dots.) In regular texts, these dots are excluded, and readers are expected to (essentially) have the dots memorized. I always struggled to read Hebrew text without the dots.
In the last 10 years in Japan, more and more goverment documents are now available with furigana. Sometimes the edition is called "Friendly Japanese" (yasashii nihongo / やさしい日本語). The best explaination I can think of: There has been a dramatic rise in the number of non-university-educated foreign workers who have come to Japan on labor contracts -- factory workers, farm workers, hotel staff, shop staff, etc. They need to live their daily lives in Japan, but will struggle with native-level Japanese documents, so the gov't (both national and local) make an effort to reduce this friction. I expect the level of support from local gov'ts will be very much correlated to the number of foreign workers in their districts.
There’s another school of teaching, which bans all reading, writing, and speaking altogether in favor of exclusively native speaker verbal input for the first 6-12+ months of learning. Some YouTubers seem to like the idea of this, though sounds pretty extreme.
I agree that most of their money comes from Google (at least for now).
But when you load their home page (https://www.mozillafoundation.org), the first thing you are greeted with is a banner that says they have raised over $6M in their last campaign alone.
So, it seems that millions are being donated by users.
The claim that most of those users want it to go to their browser is not supported or refuted by that page, but I have read a detailed breakdown of all their donations and attempts to guess what people really think they are donating for, and it matched my original statement - though I haven't got the time to search now, what do _you_ think people are donating for?
I think that Microsoft was ahead of its time and that they had a better design language than any competitor and original metro still holds up favorably to contemporary designs.
Last time I sat down with a windows 11 pc I even thought “wouldn’t it be better if the start menu was just full screen?”
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