Making it a movie would ruin it. Unless it was more of a
“Literary” film like 2001 and even then a fancy director
would have to stray from the original to make it work visually and add conflict. Just read it. I believe in Rama’s premise. Aliens just wouldn’t be interested in us in the same way we’re not interested in local squirrel population. Rama answers the “great filter” question. Where is all the intelligent life going in universe? Right under our noses doing its thing while we do ours. Maybe on our AI will be interesting to aliens.
The summary text is descriptive and accurate (so far, need to test more). Thumbnails for each segment could be better--less repetitive, eyes open, etc. But overall as good or better than what I've seen from commercial video mam vendors over the last 20 years.
I can't think of a more effective way to kill Firefox. You'd give the fence-sitters a reason to switch, you'd get rid of all the volunteer contributors, and you'd get rid of everyone who uses and advocates for Firefox because it's free* software, which would probably be a significant portion of the remaining userbase. (I know it's technically possible to charge money for free* software, but it's impractical.)
Fence-sitters already switch in droves, Firefox lost 250M users in the last ten years. So keeping the status quo already clearly leads to demise.
And how can you claim you are free* when 90% of your revenue comes from your main competitor?
Maybe making a paid browser is what they need to become truly free* and reset to a user-centric product development culture, which could then actually make it an exciting product again (even if they initially lost 90% of users as a consequence, those would be lost with time anyhow).
I think you're underestimating the size of the demographic who care about FOSS, or who believe FOSS to be more trustworthy. It's not big globally, but I think it has a lot of overlap with people who use Firefox and people who care about online privacy.
There's no way that the intersection of people who care about online privacy, don't mind that Firefox is less web-compatible than a Chromium-fork, but also don't care at all about FOSS is big enough to sell a product that everyone else is providing for free, especially since you're not just saying goodbye to the Googlebux, you're also saying goodbye to part of your workforce (the volunteers,) free advertising (FOSS advocates and default installs on desktop Linux,) web devs (no one would pay to test pages on a niche proprietary engine,) extensions (most high-profile extension devs are FOSS advocates,) and most of the community. It wouldn't work.
What I am advocating for is making Firefox users also become its customers, vs current situation where user!=customer, and customer being Google. This obvious and giant conflict of interest has to be a major contributing factor to the decline of Firefox.
I am aware that Firefox may lose 90% of its user base if it switched to a paid model, but my point is it will do so eventually anyway - if things do not change radically.
So much this! Considering how much of my work and play time is spent in a browser, I would pay a hefty sum for a browser that met my needs and kept me safe from the data thieves. I'd even pay a subscription for this, where many current products do not deserve a sub model.
Learn a another human language. You don’t have to be good at it or even able to converse. Languages are systems of thinking as much as they are systems of communication. Some thoughts only make sense in a given language! The process of learning a language builds cognitive skills and perhaps fights cognitive decline. If you have absolutely no “ear” for human language start with Esperanto and work your way to additional languages from there.
I was going to leave this comment. I am about ~2 months into study Japanese and I love it. I get up early before work, and make some coffee and study for about an hour and it is one of my favorite parts of the day.
I am still very much in the beginning stages but the satisfaction of being able to read or understand something that was previously so foreign, is incredible.
As a fellow language lover I second the suggestion, but not the reasoning. What's your evidence for "some thoughts only make sense in a given language"? From what I've read, this isn't agreed upon in the linguistic community. As for Esperanto, it's heavily biased towards Western speakers, so it wouldn't necessarily be easy to start with for someone whose native language is non-Western.
On the most superficial level:
It's easier to talk about snow or numbers in languages that have more words for these concepts than in languages that have less.
Languages with lots of words for snow tend to be used places where there is lots of snow to talk about. Languages with few words for snow tend to be used in places that don't get much snow and thus don't need to talk about it.
In short, if you need to talk about any subject learn the local language (whatever that is) so you can talk to the locals about the topic.
Having recently listened to John McWhorter's lectures on the history of human language, I was surprised to find out that there is no reliable evidence for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (that language affects thought). The Wikipedia article on linguistic relativism states:
> The strongest form of the theory is linguistic determinism, which holds that language entirely determines the range of cognitive processes. The hypothesis of linguistic determinism is now generally agreed to be false.
English includes a lot more words than most people use regularly. I imagine that's the same in any language. Just expanding one's working vocabulary in one's native language would probably be quite helpful for thinking and expressing oneself more fluently—not that learning another language isn't valuable.
I'm told that English will create words for where other language create grammar. (which can be anything, from a new tense to prefixes to other things I cannot imagine because I don't know the language)
> Languages are systems of thinking as much as they are systems of communication. Some thoughts only make sense in a given language!
This sounds like the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis [1], and it's been refuted, by and large. There's a good pop-sci book examining it [2], and it concludes that there is really only instance where language clearly influences world view, and that is that in the Guugu Yimithirr languages: people don't use left, right, front, back, but the cardinal directions north, south, east, west (as in, "there's an ant on your western leg"), and that does appear to give them a superior sense of direction.
youtube. Find out how to translate a term you are interested in to the target language and search that term. You will find a ton of videos of someone in your target language doing something of interest to you. For example "Weld" in Spanish is "Soldar" - throw that into the search box and I get plenty of interesting videos of people teaching how to weld, which is a topic I'm interested in so I enjoy watching them and I have some idea of what they must be talking about. (Of course some of them are giving bad advice, but I'm there to learn the language...) Don't forget to look at the related videos from the videos you watch to branch out topics.
You need to find your own topic of interest, but it is a great way to learn from native speakers as they would speak.
Assimil is the best program I've found so far for learning a foreign language. The way you learn the language feels very natural to me. I used their book but they've recently released an app which may be good.
I also recommend Pimsleur as a supplement to work on your accent and listening skills. Don't let the limited vocabulary misguide you...Pimsleur teaches and emphasizes a lot of very useful language patterns/structures. Great tool in the language learning toolbox
In my view, apps are ok to train vocabulary, but not really to learn the grammar and usage patterns. As such, some languages might lend themselves somewhat better to learn via apps (Malay), while others are less suitable (Russian, Japanese).
Find native speakers and talk to them. Write down words you don't rememberand put them in Anki (or Pleco flash cards if you're learning Mandarin) and drill yourself on them daily.
I only ever try reading latin. It does massage my brain.. the order of words, the way ideas combine slightly differently at many layers.. it does tickle the brain deeply.
Even knowing alphabet (cyrillic is "fun" one) does stimulate.
I'd second the idea of learning a non-Latin alphabet. Cyrillic is fun and many English speakers would only be a few hours' study away from recognising and sounding out every character. Korean is surprisingly easy to grasp and has the bonus of appearing to be quite complex. Even just plain old Greek is familiar-yet-not enough to be a challenge.
In terms of ones I personally don't know but would enjoy - Georgian script is beautiful, and Armenian looks cool too. I know enough to suggest steering clear of Arabic and Hebrew unless you're willing to commit to learning the languages themselves though. I'd be happy to be proven wrong on this though!
Knowing the alphabets themselves aren't really practical unless you're going to the country (and even then only if you can then match the sounds to some words) so it's only really a little party trick or for personal satisfaction.
I don't know the numbers but I would assume there is more literature in French and Spanish by now, and more diverse.
To learn a language effectively it's important to be able to immerse yourself in it. Youtube with auto transcripts, Netflix w/ subtitles, news in written form, chatting with native speakers in a language exchange by texting or skype, tutoring, etc. Once your reach A1-A2 level by any traditional mean, you will have a lot of options to get to fluency.
After trying a few different options I have ended up on the (seemingly very uncool) Pimsleur program (available for cash lump sum or monthly. I am paying monthly). For me, one of the biggest challenges in French is how a lot of words get blended together and are spoken very fast. It's easy to hear what seem like new words, but they're actually things I know, but spoken as native speakers do. This listening concept is extremely important for me with French in particular. To contrast, I speak Swahili too and learned it differently, where I wouldn't say there's as much of a demand for emphasis on listening to native speakers.
Some other alternatives I tried first include:
Chatterbug: Nice combination of tools/methods, but expensive and I'd need to pay a much higher price to get the kind of listening I need. A side note on these guys that's relevant for this site: they do a lot of ruby/rails stuff and have a nice graphql gem called cacheql.
French Uncovered: Interesting idea and fun method of learning, but the "book" material wasn't as long as I'd have liked and I would have liked to do a lot more listening. The self-study written materials are decent, but felt slow and like a forced way of trying to cram information into my head, where I personally do better getting that stuff naturally.
Language Transfer: Great free option, but doesn't have native French speakers and the French course doesn't good too far.
I've also done the apps like Duolingo, but the listening and speaking isn't what they do best. I basically get great at Duolingo, but not at being able to use the language.
Spanish language learner here (five years invested). Some generally applicable tools/programs I'd recommend are: Anki (or any other SRS flashcard app), Glossika (expensive but worth it), and Clozemaster (free). Glossika and Clozemaster work better after you have a basic foundation with the language. To establish a basic foundation, I recommend this strategy (https://bit.ly/397DPzM).
The boxed set has 3 booklets (Essential/Intermediate/Advanced) that cover all the grammar. Libraries usually have it.
I recommend them for the main romance languages and possibly German but for Slavic or Asian languages I would recommend other sources (I am barely intermediate in Russian and Czech and was trying Mandarin for a while).
I tried a single lesson of the trial version of Frantastique, and enjoyed it, however their monthly subscription is too expensive ($20-50 range). Can't say much else since I didn't finish the trial.
Agreed. My language learning skyrocketed once I forced myself to only converse in the language. Regrettably for that you need to have native language speakers available which was something I was able to avail myself of.
Online tutoring platforms like iTalki have tutors from all over the place. Including in countries with vastly different cost of life. For spanish for example you can get an hour of one-to-one tutoring with a pro teacher for less than $10. Lots of teachers from Venezuela for example where this is more than the average monthly salary.
I can give you a couple suggestions from my own experience, of course take them with a lot of salt... Unless you're very studious, start with an environment where French is spoken at you and you occasionally have to speak back, with comprehension routinely above 80%. Typically this means a classroom unless you have or are confident with other social engagements...
I did 5 years of French throughout junior and high school. I didn't quite reach fluency, but over a decade later without any further instruction I can still read a good amount, absorb new vocabulary quickly (and retain it pretty well -- I just wish I knew about Anki back then), and understand well-enunciated/slower speaking people. (Favorite recent example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WLsxYlTA9Ds He's basically talking about why people find it easy to understand him vs. some random Parisian.) I've forgotten some of the grammar but if I ever get motivated to refresh that I'd go through the book we used in the final year again and make an Anki deck. (https://www.amazon.com/Fois-Pour-Toutes-Hale-Sturges/dp/0801... -- Une Fois Pour Totes. If you can reach the level by whatever means where you can start a feedback loop of teaching yourself more within the target language, I think it helps a lot. Even using a French-to-French dictionary, rather than English-to-French.)
In contrast to French I've been lazily teaching myself Japanese over the past few years, but I haven't been diligent about it and thus my conversational ability is still basically 0, my vocab is limited (though recently expanding quicker as I'm able to pick out more and more words/phrases from media), and my kanji count is only ~500 out of 2000. With more diligence I think I have enough books and methods to synthesize them that I could achieve similar proficiency as my current level of French even without a classroom environment to test it in, but I'm also fighting prioritization. If it were higher priority I think I'd try and enroll in a community college class or something just to get a boost on speaking with immediate teacher feedback.
TLDR: As far as free tools go, Anki is great for any language, especially when you build the decks yourself. (I like the existing "french core 3k" deck as it includes audio for its sentences, but unless you already have a basic understanding of French grammar, I think it might be too much to start with.)
Back in 2005 I interviewed for a director of engineering role at Amazon. But after I learned about the culture and methods Amazon uses to "manage" it's people I lost interest. It's just not how I want to be remembered. I don't see the value of a harsh dehumanizing environment ironically used to create a feeling in customers that people come first. And I just don't think these tactics work over the long term. Google will be around long after Amazon fails because it retains and inspires it's best engineers.
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