The approach that has seemed most effective for me (for Dutch and Spanish), and I can also rationalize it from my logical side, is "comprehensible input" method.
The idea is that you're learning like a kid, but in a more focused and efficient way. E.g., someone tells you a story, and while doing so, they'll motion or point to the things they're talking about, but they do so entirely in the foreign language. However, since they're doing so in a comprehensible way, you can easily figure out what they're saying.
It's meant to trigger the connection in your mind between the objects/actions and the corresponding words in the foreign language, and it's meant to bypass the translation phase which language learners often start with.
I am a huge fan of comprehensible input as well. I am working on a website that can (in theory) teach Japanese by relying entirely on comprehensible input. I start by defining simple words using Emojis and I build the vocabulary from there through enjoyable stories. The grammar is introduced very slowly in context. You can check it out here if you're interested : https://drdru.github.io/stories/intro.html
However, a good option, which is similar in principle, is Lingq (https://www.lingq.com/en/). The designer of it has recently become interested in comprehensible input and I've noticed he's adding more and more similar concepts into the app. He also knows 20+ languages, and much of the app was designed based on the approaches he's applied over the years.
Anyway, the app has stories written and spoken in Dutch (as well as other languages), and you can stop and click individual words if you're not able to figure out their meaning.
Also, a YouTube series that I find useful for Spanish (EasySpanish) has recently added a Dutch channel: https://youtube.com/c/EasyDutch.
Lastly, a free chrome extension that I find quite useful for all languages is Language Reactor, which adds easy playback handling and quick translations when needed. It works for YouTube and Netflix: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/language-reactor/h...
I wish there were more options for Dutch, but once you pick up on the comprehensible input methodology, you'll see how you can adapt apps like Lingq and Language Reactor into a similar method.
Dreaming Spanish is awesome! Totally recommend his YouTube but also his website - few £/$ a month to support him and have access to thousands of videos!
Pattern 12 was something I learned early (fortunately) in my software development journey. I think the article I was reading was something to do with how to properly partition your disk (it was about 15 years ago, so fuzzy details, but I remember it was a topic that directly impacted disk storage). Anyway, it listed a series of steps that he followed, which I had printed out and began following (again, 15 years ago).
The paragraph following his series of steps then said, "I soon realized that this was not what I wanted, and in fact, it made for a cleaned out disk. No good. So next.."
And yes, it wiped my disk clean too. The light-hearted way in which he wrote this infuriated me. I just wiped clean my computer because of his article. Granted, I should not have blindly followed the article, and it was a good lesson that has prevented me from ever making the same mistake again. But the way he listed the steps in a very procedural, "this should be followed" format; it felt very deceptive, and the result was irreversible.
I always liked the concept behind BitShares, but I never hear much about it. Conceptually, it seems like it targets the third-party concern.
Anyway, the idea of BitShares is (was?) to ensure stability of their crypto currency through futures contracts. You buy/sell futures contracts that peg their coin to another asset. This guarantees a certain payout at expiration.
For example, you can buy a contract that guarantees you receive (or must pay) the bitshares-equivalent of X USD when the futures contract expires. (You can also have contracts that guarantee the bitshares-equivalent of X ounces of gold, etc.)
So the future (smart) contract itself acts like the fungible stablecoin, even though it's not backed by the actual asset. And it doesn't rely on a trusted third-party. Rather, its stability relies on the futures speculator market that trades these futures contracts.
Such a concept seems like it doesn't have to be limited to bitshares, but can be generalized into a smart contract traded on blockchains like Ethereum, etc.
Did anyone else notice the recent Evernote update in Mac's App Store have a lot of suspicious positive reviews? Most of them were by accounts that had only submitted that one review.
When you compare it to the reviews of their past updates and the fact the current update just fixes minor bugs, their image improvement campaign seems a little over the top.
Wasn't really suspicious - there was a call-to-action at the top of the app to help Evernote by leaving a review (the reviews help their app store optimization).
There are a lot of die hard Evernote advocates out there that'd be happy to.
My philosophy with art is that it is more technical than "artsy," and that the artistic aspect comes from the layers of logic. The more layers of logic applied, the more artsy it appears.
Art is largely a matter of identifying and mimicking color gradients, angles, proportions, etc., and then learning/practicing the various ways to apply the abstract objects to a certain medium (e.g., oil paint on canvas, charcoal on paper, clay for sculpture).
Then you apply additional logic on top of that by learning (and ultimately extending) various "rules" that make something appealing. For example: rule of thirds, color contrast, and studying what stimulates the brain.
There was some study I read about in Scientific American magazine about how people enjoy impressionistic painting because the effort used by their brain to combine the various individual shapes (i.e., thick paint strokes) into an understandable picture is kind of like solving a puzzle on a subconscious level. That can be stimulating and exciting to the brain even though people may not realize it's happening.
I think Brian dated my sister back at Rice.. haha. So strange to stumble upon him here. Anyway, impressive startup resume. I'm familiar with a lot of his projects, but never connected the dots.
Too bad my comment contributes nothing to the post and it's gonna go to the bottom. Oh well..
If you always repeat the same steps, why can't you abstract them into a single method that takes name and text as arguments. You shouldn't ever have to repeat the same set of steps in multiple locations.
Well, of course, and I ended up doing that. But that's not the point, is it? The guy in the blog post could also abstract all those lines in some method and it wouldn't make that OO design with factories and contexts any less bloated.
He uses emacs because he likes the benefit of slime when he's programming with Clojure. But he's not opposed to using vim once a vim Clojure environment becomes more mature.
This is financial, but good move on my part. I invested in Apple the day before the release of the first iPhone ($120 a share). I then recently used some of it to buy a car way out of my league ($270 a share).
AAPL has been very good to me as well, I bought in at $73.25 in 2006. I bought more in 2009 right around the 3gs announcement at $140.66. Then in 2010 when the iPad was announced I bought a couple of times (especially when it went below 200 at an average price of $201)
I have found it tends to dip right around or after announcements, there are usually good chances to buy especially if the announcement doesn't blow everyone out of the water.
The idea is that you're learning like a kid, but in a more focused and efficient way. E.g., someone tells you a story, and while doing so, they'll motion or point to the things they're talking about, but they do so entirely in the foreign language. However, since they're doing so in a comprehensible way, you can easily figure out what they're saying.
It's meant to trigger the connection in your mind between the objects/actions and the corresponding words in the foreign language, and it's meant to bypass the translation phase which language learners often start with.
This is the YouTube channel that really opened my eyes to the model: https://youtu.be/t4CAdmquJsY