I'm more of a desktop user, but I wasn't happy with what was out there so I made my own (but only for Melbourne): https://davidjohnstone.net/weather/melbourne . I'm tempted to turn it into a proper Australia-wide product. The BoM's data licensing fees (in the order of $5k/year) are a bit of a barrier.
That's really nice! Another commenter mentioned the Willy Weather API, which uses BOM data and has a generous free tier. Not sure if that would enable you to make it Australia Wide at a reasonable cost?
Yeah, the network effect is strong, but there's never been a better time to challenge it. I think the potential of success is partly based on quality of the alternative, but also on the direction Twitter goes from here. It doesn't seem like the worst bet to make.
I would certainly like to see a replacement and Mastodon is deserving in many ways - pretty mature, built with sincere motives of delivering a better communication platform/protocol, decent UX and maintainers that listen. To the extent I express pessimism about it, it's because of patterns of social behavior rather than any shortcoming of Mastodon itself. Overcoming network effects needs some kind of can't-live-without-it innovation and sadly 5 years of trying demonstrate that federation alone ain't it.
I actually only care because it makes it unviable for a takeover. Apart from that for all intents and purposes it's Twitter, the fact that it's centralized do not matter to usability
It seems its decentralised nature is a hindrance to some or many potential users[1]. My impression is that it's often treated as an alternative, but not really a truly viable alternative, and the field is wide open for something better.
The comparison between Latin in Europe in the early modern period and literary Chinese in the Sinosphere for much of history is pretty good (and often made). Latin and literary Chinese are very different languages, but had similar roles in society by being the standard written language in a world where everybody spoke different languages (that were heavily influenced by, or even derived from, but different to the written form).
Fair enough, there are similarities. However, alphabetically written languages are the same as their spoken - learn how to pronounce a hundred letter combinations and exceptions, and as long as you know the spoken language you're good. However with latin, pronouncing it wouldn't help with comprehension. With logographically represented languages, the characters have more to do with meaning than with pronunciation. It's part of why Chinese characters were used for completely different spoken languages (Korean, Japanese)
> This is only because the plan for simplified characters died midway through. There was a second round of simplifications that would have gone even further with talks of full phoneticization if that succeeded.
I was under the impression that most of the debates about moving from Chinese characters to alphabetic writing happened in the pre-PRC period. For example, Lu Xun supported Latinxua Sin Wenz[1] in the 30s. These proposals failed for a variety of reasons. Simplified characters were introduced in the 50s. Pinyin was also introduced in the 50s, but unlike previous latinisations meant to replace the Chinese characters, it was only ever intended as a teaching tool. I think there was still a thought to replace Chinese characters with alphabetic writing at a later stage, but, in practice, it pretty much died in the 40s.
> We believe: Chinese characters inevitably must change. We can use the changes in Chinese characters of the past to prove that in the future, this must follow the global trend of phonetic spelling [this is almost a carbon copy of Mao's words]
This sentiment continued through the second round of simplification. The People's Daily (the usual mouthpiece of the PRC) wrote an article in 1977 (https://www.laoziliao.net/rmrb/1977-12-20-1) in concert with the beginning of the second round of simplification explicitly describing character simplification as setting the stage for phonetic spelling.
> 毛主席指出，汉字的拼音化需要做许多准备工作；在实现拼音化以前，必须简化汉字
> Chairman Mao has stated: the pinyin-ification of Chinese characters requires a great deal of preparation. Before we can achieve pinyin-ficiation, we must first simply characters.
But by that time literacy rates were sufficiently high that there was considerable backlash against the second round of simplification and it was withdrawn, first informally and later formally. Had it succeeded, no doubt a fully phonetic script would've been at least on the table for discussion.
Thanks, that's interesting. Yurou Zhong, in her book Chinese Grammatology, traces the end of the latinisation movement to a precise date in 1958 when Zhou Enlai gave a speech "当前文字改革的任务" ("The Current Tasks of the Script Reform"), where he announced the current tasks are to simplify characters, promote putonghua and issue and implement a pinyin plan, conspicuously not including further alphabetisation.
In general it is true that the central government agreed that in the interim pinyin was not to replace characters. However, they explicitly made clear that this was a plan only for the initial task at hand, and not any final conclusion about the future of a phonetic script. The sentences preceding my quote from the committee head make this clear:
> As for the question of the future of Chinese characters: will they never change or will they change? Will the change be restricted to the scope of their current form, or will they be replaced by a phonetic script? Will they be replaced by a phonetic script based on Latin characters, or will they be replaced by another form of phonetic script? For now, we will not rush to any conclusions on this topic. We believe: Chinese characters inevitably must change. We can use the changes in Chinese characters of the past to prove that in the future, this must follow the global trend of phonetic spelling. Moreover it can be said, the languages and scripts of all the people in the world will one day come together and unify as one. But these are not within the scope of our current reform tasks and as such today we have no need to discuss them further.
The committee head's pronouncement was in fact essentially paraphrasing and nearly copying large parts of Zhou Enlai's speech. So I would not characterize his speech as closing the door on a phonetic script, only setting it aside for now and leaving the door open for a future date. From Zhou Enlai's speech:
> As for the future of Chinese characters, will they not change across the eons time? Or will they change? Will they trend towards changes based on the shapes of characters themselves? Or will they be replaced by phonetic script? Will they be replaced by a Latin character-based phonetic script, or will they be replaced by some other form of phonetic script? As of now, we are not yet in a rush to make conclusions. But writing must change. The past changes of Chinese character can prove this. In the future, there must be change. Moreover it can be said, the scripts of all the peoples of the world will one day unify as one, indeed language itself will gradually unify. Humanity's language and script development's ultimate trend is to gradually become closer. In the end there may not be much of any difference [among different languages].
And as we can see that rhetoric about a fully fledged phonetic script would indeed come back once the initial reform plans were finished.
Only with the failure of the second wave of simplification does it seem that future plans for a phonetic script finally disappeared from the conversation.
The New York Times' article on her life has a couple of corrections for things that look like they were written earlier and not updated with the latest when published. For example:
> The earlier version misstated at one point the length of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. It was seven decades, not “almost seven decades.”
I wondered the same. The main downside is that you need to do some processing to extract the entries from the dump and get the plain text of the fields you want.
I'm also a little surprised they didn't think Wiktionary was sufficient for languages apart from English. I could be wrong, but my impression is that it's pretty good for major languages[1].
