no but there are plenty of of resources much more knowledgeable than I am

Recommend genki if you’re good with a book

If you just want to get started like today duolingo isn’t horrible but I would suggest going into setting as soon as possible and turning off romaji (the English pronunciation guide written over the hiragana). It will make it significantly harder initially but using romaji will stop you from learning the characters. You won’t read the hiragana, you’ll read the alphabet you already know.

That said I did duolingo to brush up a bit and I really dislike that they don’t explain much when you make errors. Given it’s an app they have the ability to bring up so much information for errorless learning. I guess they want to make it “easy” and prevent information overload but it tends to be that they present you with a screen when a concept is introduced then that screen is gone forever. So then if you make the error you just have to kind of figure out the grammatical rules behind what you’re doing wrong

In the beginning it’s not so bad but eventually you’ll get very confused, why does は (wa, kind of like “is”) sometimes go here and sometimes go there? Why is it sometimes は and sometimes が (ga)? Duolingo never really clearly explains particles, wa marks the topic and ga marks the subject. Duolingo just throws dozens of examples at you until you consistently get it correct without necessarily knowing why unless you dig through the app or research independently

It bothers me because I am in mental health by trade and my research interests and background is in human behavior and more specifically learning and skill acquisition. This is an inefficient model for skill acquisition. Allowing the learner to make this many errors as part of your model slows learning, potentially significantly, and allows the learner to learn bad habits and mistakes. So as you’re doing it and mistranslating you may ingrain that (bolding wa/は)

それらはわたしのあかいコートですか (sore wa watashi no akai koto desu ka) are those my red coats?

Should be

それらわたしのあかいコートはですか

(sore watashi no akai koto wa desu ka) which is grammatically incorrect and makes you sound like a goddamn fool

But when you’re learning concepts like doko/どこ and soko/そこ (where, there, basically) you learn that “wa” goes towards the end of your phrase like whatever wa doko desu ka similar to the incorrect example above

Sore/それ and kore/これ are demonstrative (this and that, basically, though the above example again shows how contextually this falls apart and it becomes “those”) and are typically introduced shortly before doko/soko

But again when you get this wrong duolingo will just say “you got it wrong, here’s what it should have been.” To be fair a book has the same limitation, it’s just with an app, especially a mature well funded app like duolingo they have the opportunity to easily be like you got it wrong and here’s why! And that would accelerate learning by quite a bit, at least theoretically

Fun times! Remember these are real basic examples and I am also real dumb

I never know what to tell people like you. DeepL is the best one at translating Japanese and it still is mixed

Japanese is a contextual language. It is difficult for machines to translate because it is not a language where a word simply means this or that.

Take a very short sentence:

がくせいです - gakusei desu

Gakusei is “student”

A literal translation of this would be “am student” or “is student”

But if I say this to you you will infer things based on context and です/desu takes on a different role. If I am clearly referring to myself then gakusei desu in this context becomes “I’m a student” (though to be fair I would probably have said it with a first person pronoun and particle like わたしはわ (watashi wa)

But if I’m referring to another singular person in the room this would be inferred through context, eg “he’s a student.” But this is where it starts getting confusing, the copula (desu) doesn’t differentiate singular or plural, so context is also used to derive plural forms, eg “they are students”.

This copula also applies to other situations outside of he/she like “it” eg コンビニです, konbini desu, konbini being “convenience store”, “its a convenience store”

This is a very very basic idea of why. It gets more complex obviously once you move past these extremely basic examples but honestly someone more knowledgeable at Japanese should explain at that point, I’m self taught and mediocre (thus my use of 0 kanji, I’m pretty sure at a minimum there’s kanji for gakusei and watashi but I suuuuck at kanji. I at least know meat. 肉肉肉 although that’s mostly thanks to anime and the local Asian grocer lmao).

I think AI can probably do it eventually but it will need to be able to do much better job of understanding what the source material is actually talking about and that’s the challenge to overcome. And that’s why it will probably never be able to really accurately translate a paragraph copy pasted into it

As to the sanitation that’s a separate issue about corporate control of AI. If they don’t want their translation services to sound “vulgar” that’s their prerogative I suppose but it also means they sound less human and realistic because people are gross and ugly when they speak. Vernacular is ugly and lexicon adapts quickly in ways that people don’t always love. But to be clear I don’t mean it’s just about slurs and bad words, I mean it’s about slang in general. Words that are generally inoffensive but not considered proper. English equivalents would be what we consider zoomer speak, hella sus yeah bruh type shit (I’m not good at this part)

I don’t even care about flirting with women I just want a free app where I can practice speaking my second language with actual people and not some sanitized AI that doesn’t understand context or slang instead of watching cringe youtubers

Like Duolingo/genki or google translate doesn’t really capture おっす. Duolingo probably doesn’t bother with that kind of informal speech. Google just translates it as “hey”, which isn’t wrong, but it’s not really right either. Even deepl just translates it as yo!, which is much closer but still kind of not really it. It’s more like a sup brah kind of thing. Like a really masculine youthful colloquial greeting I guess is the best way to explain it.

But not discord, fuck discord

This honestly makes so much more sense from an environmental standpoint. Why waste so much in terms of resources shipping hundreds of millions of pounds of sugar water every month so picky babies that refuse to drink water will pump more money into the coca cola empire so they can get type 2 diabetes as fast as possible. Instead just ship this little cup thing at 1/18th the weight and save so much gasoline, road wear and tear, etc.

Who am I kidding, they’ll just put this into plastic bottled water that’s been shipped from 3 states over

This is simply not true

Modern meat is generally pretty safe and chicken tartare is definitely a thing. Is it something you should do if you are immunocompromised, a child, or elderly? Probably not. Is it something you should do if you are unsure of how the meat was handled? Probably not

But if you buy quality chicken from a trusted butcher, freeze the surface, blanch it for a few seconds, you can pretty safely eat it raw assuming you’ve done a good job keeping your surfaces and hands clean. You could probably do it with grocery store chicken tbh but the risks are much greater because you have no clue if the $12/hr kid packing chicken breasts properly washed their hands (handling is overwhelmingly where foodborne illness is going to come from in this scenario)

Is it going to be safe 100% of the time? No, of course not. But neither is eating medium rare steak, or eggs with runny yolks. But could you do this every day for a year with issue? Probably.

Although I wouldn’t necessarily consider this the same over the next 4 years of american deregulation

Raw chicken is kind of like scallops btw

Except using developer mode means you trade away support. Why pay all that money for a bambu if you’re not going to get support? Might as well build your own printer at that point if you’re going to have to problem solve all the issues yourself anyway

Also “This is beta testing, not a forced update”

Beta implies that at some point this will no longer be beta and will a mandatory update.

They’re testing the waters, thankfully the pushback may have them reconsidering. It probably just has them reconsidering the rollout/timing though. they may do something like Philips did with hue: announce the cloud integration into a product that did not require an internet connection or cloud integration for over a decade, get a bunch of backlash, then not implement the cloud part while the heat dies off while still fully intending to do so. The hue cloud was announced as a mandatory change in September of 2023 and still hasn’t been implemented but there is a reminder with each app update reminding you it’s eventually going to be necessary if you have not done it yet.

One guy I knew had a picture of himself giving finger guns as his background and whenever he unlocked his phone he would smirk at it like “oh you”

It wasn’t his lock screen either, just the home screen, so he knew it looked sketch

Mario games were always kind of tech demos for Nintendo innovation and the innovation is kind of boring now

In the 90s it was graphical fidelity and gameplay mechanics, smb1-3 on the nes, smw on snes, m64 were serious contenders for “oh my god this shit is crazy and plays like a dream”.

Sunshine is around where the graphical fidelity started to lag but the physics were still nice.

Then they started to innovate in other ways and galaxy brought in motion controls which were well done (arguably) and the (by then) distantly lagging graphics were almost a feature

But odyssey showed that doesn’t work anymore. Everyone has motion controls now, even phones, and they’re often just annoying. The switches innovation isn’t something that really applies directly to gameplay itself, so ultimately odyssey stays just a standard game, with solid graphics thanks to great design but noticeable slowdown in several areas because it’s running on an outdated tegra tablet, and the same old platformer gameplay because there’s nothing new to do with it.

They did have some cool level design that helped it feel fresh and interesting at times but it ultimately felt like it had similar problems to sunshine: not a bad game, but not an experience the way mario 64, mario world, or mario 3 was. Maybe I’m just too old

Saw this from the moment they did the rfid nonsense, doubled down on my beliefs when they started burning cash on advertising like crazy. Tons of youtubers and such shill this shit

They had a series b round in 2023 of an undisclosed amount with several chinese vc companies and they’ve had investments in 2021 and 2022 as well. I don’t know how chinese vc works but I assume it’s similar to american vc where there is a strong demand from the backer(s) to monetize in this fashion

Why do you think reddit went to shit? Series b in 2014. Those people drop serious cash. Reddits seed round in 2005 at y combinator was for 100k. That’s serious money to you and me, but to vc people that’s not worth getting out of bed. Reddits 2014 series b was fifty million. They suddenly had a gigantic influx of cash to grow infrastructure and compete with the big dogs like meta and twitter. They were fairly successful with this. They then raised 1.2 billion over 4 rounds from 2017-2021. That’s why they had a relatively quick turn to shit; that money was to try to make the site bland and profitable in preparation for ipo. It worked out because the stock made investors a ton of cash at the expense of making the site dogshit

Bambu will have a similar trajectory. Investors will give them an amount of money that is frankly obscene, they will use that money to develop (and probably to party, ridiculous salaries and/or fluff jobs, and have really fancy offices), then they will actively make the product worse. 5 years from now they will have used that money to entrench themselves in the market space. Don’t be surprised if the average person thinks “bambu” when they think “3d printer” because they pissed away 10s of millions on advertising. But their printers will have more consumer hostile bullshit (finally fully locking out 3rd part filament instead of just requiring you to do a pain in the ass respooling seems inevitable) like this and it would not be surprising to see the build quality suffer too.

Connect it to an isolated vlan. Having access to a printer on your intranet can be handy, having access from the internet is generally unnecessary. Do you need to check on it from outside your house? If that’s the case then you need to start looking at stuff like tailscale but i don’t recommend printing while not at home

The dot com bubble was this crazy time where for a brief period a generation didn’t know about this thing that the generation after them was increasingly and rapidly interested in.

So like people use the whole “Wild West” metaphor and it’s really apt. Conglomeration was happening in the 90s with the rise of walmart, home depot, etc and it was becoming clear that opening a retail store was a dying business because the “big guys” were destroying towns. Like it was only a matter of time before a walmart came to your town and shuttered main street

But the internet was different. All these established entrenched companies didn’t care about it, yet. So you could make bank with basic ideas. Like oh, clearchannel owns 70% (now like 95%) of the radio stations in the us. Trying to start anything in that space is foolish, plus there’s all these regulations. But internet radio? Boom, millionaire. Petco and petsmart are rising and putting pet stores out of business. But pets.com? Had prominent national advertising including a float in the macys thanksgiving day parade, a Super Bowl ad, and was listed in nasdaq. Boom, millionaires. Busted after 2 years and now redirects to petsmart tho

Some of them stuck around. Like banking was obviously entrenched with old money but then a couple of rich kids were like what if we use daddies money to do internet banking? Then x.com and PayPal started and now we have elon musk and peter thiels reign of terror

AI seems to have some similarities in that there’s the whole “what if we apply AI to x” thing and VC dummies throw cash at it but it’s not as broad so the bubbles not as big and frankly it’s not as definitively revolutionary. The internet was clearly a game changer. Like anyone with half a brain who used it saw the potential early on; it was a new modality for communication with an unprecedented speed and dearth of information. And after it had matured a few years people started to see how fast it was progressing, especially via stuff like games. We went from doom to quake to final fantasy 8 and everquest in the span of the 90s and anyone paying even a lick of attention saw the potential for things like facetime, netflix, youtube, etc eventually.

But with AI it’s harder to picture. There’s the narrative that it will eventually do stuff and it can do impressive things but for the most part most people’s experience with it is that it’s like having a mediocre employee. Their work is okay but you have to constantly check it because they always make stupid mistakes. They tell you they’ll learn to stop doing that but it’s been several years now and they keep doing it. Just like teslas will self drive in 2018, chatgpt will reach agi any day now, maybe, or maybe it’s an illusion and it’s really just a bunch of if>then statements that are constantly trying to fix themselves but messing up others in the process.

I’m sorry you had such a bad experience. ABA is just a science though, and it’s the way it’s applied that can be good or bad.

ABA should not be used to tell someone to not to like the transformers as a teenager. There are clear ethical guidelines about this. But supervision can fail, unfortunately. You could report your practitioners I suppose. But is that what actually happened? Why did they restrict you from transformer movies?

I have seen unethical practitioners that work with parents who say “this is age inappropriate, my teenager shouldn’t be watching Sesame Street anymore” and try to discourage it. But this is rare these days and the field discourages practitioners from doing this. However, depending on how old you are and where you live and just because shitty people exist this could very well be the case

But I’ll be real with you: I have seen people who are critical of ABA say things like what you said and it turns out they were not given access to their favorite movies because it was made contingent reinforcement. This is how ABA works, it is operant conditioning. But what these people are leaving out is that they were having major functional impairments that required some kind of enticement and there weren’t many things that motivated them to expend effort. They would only shower or brush their teeth once a week or less, they would not do homework ever to the point of failing classes, they would exhibit violent behavior that was dangerous to themselves or others, serious communication deficits, etc.

the way we would encourage the behaviors we needed to see more of and discourage the problematic behaviors was through reinforcement based systems. Of course, reinforcement can always feel like punishment when one fails because a true reinforcement system requires one to withhold reinforcement when necessary so the learner can conflate reinforcement with punishment pretty easily

And I would suggest maybe talking to someone about this, you’ve got a real chip on your shoulder about this. I merely asked you a sentence it and you went into a paragraph long diatribe assuming a great deal about my history. You don’t know me or my experience. You’ve clearly got some trauma, maybe it’s time to deal with that?

What do you think aba is?

This was probably all in the phrasing or maybe people just don’t understand the reality of the situation?

I worked for several years doing mobile therapy that included a significant amount of homeless outreach and crisis management. Everyone deserves to be housed, bottom line, but what it takes for that to happen is a complex situation

There’s the “xxx,xxx amount of homeless but xx,xxx,xxx amount of empty homes in america” statistic that people throw around. I forget the exact numbers but I’m pretty sure thats the scale, if not the take away is that you could literally give each homeless person a free house and still have millions of empty houses. But this would not solve homelessness, at least in the current system. The overwhelming majority would be back on the street fairly quickly. Even if you eliminate the need for mortgage there’s still the need for property taxation; if you eliminate that then communities start to get real shitty. Even if you eliminate that there’s still utility and food costs. Even if you eliminate that there’s still maintenance and not actively destroying the place.

Institutionalization isn’t necessarily the answer although in extreme cases it can be. We had supported rehabilitation programs that were pretty successful, basically apartments with staff that would keep tabs on you, help you budget, do resumes, help you get to drs appointments, make sure you took medications (but didn’t force you to unless there was a court order/probation situation and even then it wasn’t like a “force” situation although there was inherent coercion as not taking meds would be reported to po/court), apply for section 8, etc. you would stay there for a year or two and then move to a more independent placement once supports were in place.

There were also longer term programs for people who genuinely struggled and just couldn’t get that step down to work. These were similar but had less focus on connecting to services and were more akin to nursing homes with more psychiatric care

But then there were also more intensive residential programs we referred to for people with more serious mental illness or addiction issues

The issue, of course, was funding. We had like 32 beds in the short term and 11 in the long term. Funding was like 50% state funding, 20% grants, 30% donations and fundraising and the budgets were tight. Meanwhile the town probably had 30-50 actively homeless at any given point on top of whoever wasn’t in the program and another 50-100 with insecure housing. Even the intense programs, which generally had more secure state funding, still had an overall lack of beds and would have very long wait lists. Sad stuff.

That was about a decade ago now, I feel like it has to be worse now post Covid and trump. I can only imagine what the next 4 years will do to their funding

? I read your comment.

Do you somehow conflate “we should still use musicians” and “while ai is an impressive tech demo the resources that are being gobbled up by it could be better allocated to spaces for people who actually want to devote themselves to their art”.

I bet your music is wonderful with tons of nuance given your need to have things spelled out for you and your apathy for honing your craft

You should go to a drum corps rehearsal or elite piano/violin recital. Shit or even an arcade hosting a bemani tournament. Like not one of the places where their parents are forcing them but somewhere where people are just doing it because they want to, even if it sucks sometimes to play for hours and hours and hours

I used to teach lessons and you do have a point, a lot of people want to be good without doing any work. That’s true of any endeavor that requires effort. A lot of people covet the reward without paying enough mind to the serious amount of effort that one undertakes to get to that point

But some people actually do want to achieve greatness, some people want a sense of accomplishment, some people want a deeper understanding of their instrument, etc

Even if you’re an electronic producer that only ever uses the piano roll you would still benefit from a better understanding of theory and improvisation. This doesn’t come from nothing; it comes from grinding. You don’t necessarily need to read theory books and practice piano of course, you will gain a sense of these from writing songs and getting feedback, but you still need to write and/or play a lot

The rise in electronic artists is arguably more to do with accessibility. literally everyone has a computing device and free music making software is relatively abundant, instruments are expensive and loud, practice space is hard to come by especially in urban environments. Additionally electronic music has a huge factor of cultural relevance in terms of trends from production styles being popular across genres.

AI music is a tool and it’s impressive but the results are mostly derivative, which makes sense given how it works. it would be really cool to see more resources invested into spaces for people who actually wanted to pursue the arts to be able to do so as this is likely the way music (and other art) truly moves forward and actually innovates instead of just hashing out the same tired shit

Oh I see, I just searched the forums and the info there is sparse

Thanks

Based on a very brief glance at this it looks like I would be reliant on self hosting it to circumvent the need for a BAA (although the hosting company may still need to provide one, unless I literally hosted it from my house or something?) not sure

Will investigate further, had not heard of this

Most people won’t close their facebook account. if it ever does happen it will be because the accounts are purged (highly unlikely given facebooks raging hardon for data) or that the site undergoes a massive transformation after losing a ton of value and rebranding ala myspace.

That likely wouldn’t happen for many many years until a solid competitor arose that grew enough to overtake them and that’s real challenging given their size. It was one thing when user counts were in the millions or even tens or hundreds of millions but facebook has several billion users. That’s like a sizable chunk of the entire population of earth.

It would take a very novel approach to overcome those numbers and then you also have to consider momentum: at this point there are a great deal of people who consider facebook “the internet”. Like they open their browser/phone and that’s what they do. It is their habit. Then in second place you have instagram so even if you knocked facebook off meta would still ultimately be ok. And with the incubation period of social media they’d probably have another one up and coming long before your threat became viable that would have the benefit of starting in like 7th place simply because of their massive market share (see: threads). By the time your social network had the 10ish years it takes to get to hundreds of millions of users they’d potentially have that one at a billion, or have pulled the plug and moved on to another trial with a massive head start

Doesn’t mean to give up on the fediverse stuff, just that the gross corporate social media likely wont go away for a very long time, if ever. Barring outside influence like regulatory change of course

It is generally best to keep an entirely separate account for professional dealings so such things are segregated, at least that’s what I do

Signal as a zoom replacement would be great but a big part of the deal would be the necessity for hipaa compliance. I would imagine a huge part of what keeps zoom alive is financial injections from telehealth provides like myself that need a platform that is hipaa compliant that patients understand. EMR software often comes with a telehealth platform built in nowadays but it tends to not work as well and confuses the tech illiterate who got trained on zoom during COVID years.

I’m sure there’s a ton of stuff they have to do on their end to be hipaa compliant that I’m ignorant of but the primary thing is that they have to share a document called a business associate agreement (baa) with me that essentially says they will take meaningful steps to appropriately safeguard any protected health information and makes zoom liable if a breach of their systems exposes PHI.

This is why telehealth can’t (technically, people still do it) occur over teams, skype, discord, facetime, hangouts, etc. google, apple, microsoft, etc have no interest in taking on that liability.

The difficult piece will be challenging zooms pricing. They offer healthcare zoom for $15/mo with BAA. There are better deals though, doxy.me does it for free (they claim this is subsidized by paid account which I believe because they are substantially more than zoom starting at 35/mo).

Would be a great way to get them a revenue stream too. I don’t know anyone who practices heavily telemedicine that relies on free solutions; the only ones I know that utilize the bundled emr components or the free doxy.me service are clinicians that mostly practice in person and only do a small handful of telehealth sessions a month, like under 10% of their total billing. For people like me where it’s 50-100% of their billing it’s almost always a paid subscription. more reliable, tax deduction, and access to support