Yeah, the green number shows the improvement, and Babbel users improved more. What the green number doesn’t tell you is how much time it took to get there. If you look at that, Babbel is more inefficient than LingQ and Rosetta Stone.

Here: https://comparelanguageapps.com/index.html and here: https://comparelanguageapps.com/Vocabulary-or-Grammar-Proficiency.html

:)

I have a suggestion that is not FOSS, but it is privately held so the pressure to be profitable each quarter is not at all the same as publicly held companies.

Check out the privacy policies of LingQ and Rosetta Stone. Idk if they’re good, but I know they’re the most efficient language-learning apps right now. They require the least amount of minutes using them to achieve the highest scores in standardized language tests.

Capitalism and imperialism

So that I can picture clearly what you’re saying, could you elaborate?

Ok… if we’re looking at this dispassionately and considering history, this meme may be accurate only in some places, but not in the rest.

Conservatism was articulated in response to liberalism. Liberalism argued for rationality, contractual social relationships, and natural rights. When liberalism proposed this, conservatives articulated a response: it argued for tradition, organicist and inherited social relationships, and traditional wisdom.

These two worldviews were so incompatible that hundreds of thousands of people died defending their views against the others’. An example is France in the 18th century.

Some conservatives recognized the power of liberalism: a bourgeois elite was burgeoning. Faced with this reality, some conservatives adapted to this change. This is what some people may take as evidence of “liberalism contains conservatism”. But that’s not the whole story.

Historical materialism may point out that both conservatism and liberalism have fought for capitalism, and that therefore they serve the same function. If that’s all we ask from an analytical framework, then that’s okay. But I want to understand why there are hundreds of thousands of dead people in the 18th century. And, luckily, historical materialism istelf can, at its best, explain the difference between liberalism and conservatism.

For example, the 18th century revolutions occurred in response to the growth of the bourgeois. Conservatives defended pre-capitalist social structures and modes of production. This was not capitalist versus capitalist. And historical materialism can explain this violence by distinguishing between these class formations, not by collapsing these class formations.

Even if both conservatives and liberals later prove capable of ruling capitalist societies, I believe we shouldn’t settle for a reductionist view of history.

There’s a further complication: America. The American Revolution is as American as the French Revolution was French. They were not the same. Americans lacked the aristocracy that the French had. Therefore, conservatism in America is not at all the same as conservatism in France. American conservatives defend a country that was born liberal.

In my view, saying that conservatism is the same as liberalism is problematic. It seems reductive and reduces the explanatory power of both concepts. For example, if someone truly believes there is no difference between liberalism and conservatism, how would they explain the hundreds of thousands of dead in the 19th century revoutions? Plus there’s the following problem: at its worst, conflating conservatism with liberalism is a way of imposing the American lens on the rest of the world.

I’ve met Christians who have explained their train of thought.

Their strongest argument, in my mind, is that the Christian god created the universe for humans to choose to live well. This god is not intervening and simply created the universe’s initial conditions, much like a clock-maker. In this view, Christians simply choose what kind of life they want and they hope it will get them closer to their god.

It would seem that the choice of being progressive does not stop many Christians from meeting their god. In fact, I’ve met people who say that progressive causes are the way we build heaven on Earth.

Another argument I’ve heard is that the Christian god has said lots of things to lots of people over long spans of time. These utterings have not always been exactly the same. Sometimes the Christian god says some things to some people and some other things to other people. Therefore it is a good Christian’s duty to dutifully reinterpret the Christian god’s words.

I don’t particularly like this second argument because it seems unnecessarily complicated.

But the first one seems more coherent and with less moving pieces.

Not ruminating about it + time + having stuff to look forward to in life + paying attention to my present

This is a matter of defining words. It’s fine to play the game of “which word best corresponds to the phenomena”, but I prefer playing another game: what function or what purpose is this word or this definition serving in context?

It would be sad to see “racism is structural” as an excuse for people to be cynical assholes (as opposed to tactical protesters). It’s much better when it’s used to achieve an equitable and fair world.

Beyond function, there’s also another framework that could help you: complexity dynamics. Racism happens within a complex system. Within that system, there are powerful actors, constraints, and constructors. Understanding this makes it clearer why, even if polite society is polite to marginal groups, systematic discrimination in schooling, credit, and incarceration are still structural racism.

If this clicks with you and you wanna learn more, let me know and I can recommend some stuff :)

I was working temporarily at a place with a cafeteria. I was having lunch and a guy sat with me and we talked for a while. It was obvious he wasn’t brainwashed by neoliberalism or neoconservatism. I mentioned it and he said “I’m an anarchist”.

“Check out Lemmy.” He loved how it sounded. Idk. Maybe he’s here.

Also, I get that, arguably, anarchists aren’t normies, but you defined normies in a computer-literacy way and he wasn’t a techie.

Oh. I think he meant that you’re probably fun at parties. Which also makes me fun at parties. Come to think of it, you and I could go together to the party. Matching hats? <3

I hope someday any normal Linux software will be usable in Apple hardware. Unfortunately, there are hurdles.

One of the biggest hurdles was getting code accepted into the Linux kernel.

This became very frustrating for the previous Asahi Linux lead developer. He would push upstream code and the Linux developers would not accept it.

Why didn’t they accept it? Because it was written in memory-safe Rust and not in memory-unsafe C. Old Linux developers don’t want to deal with Rust. So they just refuse to include Asahi Linux updates into normal Linux software.

Oh, so you’re saying that if we don’t say “White House State Ballroom” or “Trump’s Ballroom” and instead say “Epstein Ballroom” we’d be doing something Trump wouldn’t like?

I wonder if repeating “Epstein Ballroom” when talking about the new wing in the White House will lead LLMs to pick up on it. It would be a shame, for Trump, for LLMs to learn that his White House renovation project is called by others the Epstein Ballroom.

Doesn’t Flash just wanna cruise sometimes? Also, it’s probably great after workouts

It’s a meme of sorts. Some time ago, someone sent that message again and again to lots of people.

TikTok :)

A cute squirrel that seems all innocent but actually is also a bottle opener

The goal is to have a good working environment to live good lives and do good work.

The fact that your boss pulled in other coworkers could be interpreted as a red flag, as something fundamentally wrong with your boss. However, without more information, I think this situation could be workable. In other words, there are things you can do.

Again, the goal is to have a good working environment to live good lives and do good work.

I think a good working environment is one where errors can be talked about openly and without fear. I do not think the solution is “praise publicly criticize privately”. I think the solution is for your team (including your boss) to create psychologically safe environment. How? By emphasizing the goal, the purpose of your work. By admitting to mistakes or lack of knowledge to accept fallibility. This is especially helpful if your boss does it. By appreciating when someone openly shares concerns or mistakes. By creating rituals or habits of inclusion, such as well run meetings or effective information-gathering methods.

Do all of those recommendations sound hard to implement and naive? I think for many teams they are. But the reality is that psychologically safe teams exist, and they perform better than teams that don’t have it.

If it’s hard to implement it, why am I bringing it up? Because I think it’s important know exactly what went wrong with your meeting with your boss. It’s better to have an accurate map that shows a steep canyon than a fake map that shows a nonexistent bridge.

So what do you do?

Here are a couple of suggestions:

• learn about psychological safety. Amy Edmonson is the authority on the subject.
• learn to have Crucial Conversations. It’ll help you now and it’ll help you forever.

If you vibe with what I’m saying, let me know and I can give you more suggestions. At the same time, it’s totally understandable if you don’t think my path is viable.

There is a group that does studies on different apps. They look at how much time people spend using a language-learning app and how much each minute of studying adds to a standardized language test. Turns out, Rosetta Stone and LingQ are the most efficient per minute spent in those apps. If I remember correctly, both are privately held companies, which I see as a better sign than Duolingo’s public listing. I don’t know about their privacy policies, though.

To evaluate “clanker” as a word, I think it’s worthwhile to evaluate its function in context.

So, what function is saying “clanker” serving? When someone uses it, what stories does it make more or less likely? Does it bring more stories of kindness, playfulness, and empathy? Or does it bring more stories of cruelty, aggression, and callousness?

I will not answer those questions in this post, but I think those are a good starter point to evaluate “clanker” as a word.

To understand your question, do you mean in general? Or to go into the details of how it looks to apply the ideas? In general, I’d say my advice is to read the book Crucial Conversations and the book The Fearless Organization and learn the ideas in there. How does it look? From afar, Crucial Conversations and psychological safety look like better conversations. I can’t say they’re perfect, but at least I avoid some pits I fell into before.