I’ve read it all recently and I felt like the later described utopia was also a kind of dystopia, very Brave New World like (or at least the seed for a BNW-like dystopia). I kept waiting for a twist in the story, where the main character would realize that both worlds were terrible, but it never came.
Dune. So many thought-provoking quotes throughout the books, especially the first one. This one pops up in my head often, many years after having first read the book:
"Think you of the fact that a deaf person cannot hear. Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us?"
Also Starship Troopers. Reading it made me somewhat regret not joining the military.
Herbert was a bit long-winded but man the world building was fantastic! We see it all the time nowadays, but when he wrote it, it was extraordinary (in the best sense).
> My plan is to keep chugging through and get to HSK 6 studying after my newborn infant arrives in 2 months, though I don't know if I can keep up the 10 hours a week I'm currently managing.
I have a 5-month old baby and I can tell you it’s possible to keep your language learning going, but you’ll have to be more intentional or even forceful about it.
Before my son was born I studied/immersed almost all day except when I was working or hanging out with my wife (and often the latter still counted as immersion since she’s Chinese :) and we’d watch Chinese TV shows together).
After he was born time became si significantly more limited, but I was (am) determined to keep learning the language.
Here’s some of what I do:
- I could drive 15 minutes to work, but instead I take public transit. That helps me accomplish two things: daily exercise walking to and from the station, and time to listen to podcasts or audiobooks (in Chinese, of course). Once I’m on the bus/train, I’ll either do Anki or a Hello Chinese lesson.
- I try to go to the office as early as possible on any given day, and use the extra time before work to study. I could do this at home, but it’s quieter in the office.
- Most days I’ll spend my whole lunch break on language learning.
- I stick to all of this even on days when the baby kept us up all night long.
Some important things to bring up:
- This all comes at the expense of not having time for any other interests. I have a whole backlog of sci-fi books and other material I’d love to read, but I choose to prioritize learning Mandarin.
- I’m paying a price when it comes to making connections at work. Spending my whole lunch hour on learning means I stopped joining coworkers for lunch. Although right now I also don’t join them to minimize potential exposure to sickness that I could bring home and pass to the baby.
- This can also be detrimental to job performance. I could be putting in more time on learning job-related stuff or simply getting more done, but again, I consider learning Mandarin a priority.
- Other than Anki, I don’t do any learning on weekends. There’s just no time or opportunity to do so.
Not sure if any of this will apply or be doable to you. A lot of it will also come down to your family situation and your relationship with your partner. In my case, I’m lucky that she’s very supportive of my interest in her language.
Good luck! The baby will be a ton of work but also a ton of fun and love :D
> there are lots of people who take it way too far
I wrote in another comment that that’s exactly my issue. I can easily spend hours, days, weeks even just tweaking my card templates due to Anki’s extreme customizability. That stems from a (false!) belief that I can somehow find just the right card format that will impress the language in my head in no time. Took me a long time to reign in the impulse to endlessly tweak templates. I remember having days when I felt extremely frustrated after realizing I had spent pretty much my entire study time working on Anki and not exposing myself to the language.
yeah that's a trap I think a lot of people with an engineering mindset fall in to. Reminds me of the people who spend endless hours tweaking their note taking applications.
I too find it wild when people do it at a beginner stage.
Back when I was learning English during my school years, I only started seriously watching native content after I already had either a B1 or B2 certificate. At that point I already knew most of what was being said, I just wasn’t used to hearing/parsing it in real-time and without the “padding” that comes with learner-oriented content. So the gap I had to bridge there was small.
The burden of learning basically everything at the same time - word meanings, grammar patterns, native-level speech patterns and speed - sounds daunting to me. But I think if you are at a life stage where you can put tons of time into it, it works.
The trouble with ChatGPT is that it can produce wonky sentences sometimes, and as a learner it can be hard to validate that. Most of the time it’s great though, just need to be cautious and ideally find a way to validate the content it generates (in my case I can run it by my wife).
I use ChatGPT to check my answers to the exercises in my textbooks :)
I use Anki but oh did I have to learn to discipline myself. Anki’s extreme flexibility coupled with an engineer’s mind had me spending whole stretches of days or even weeks just tweaking my card templates, hoping to achieve some sort of optimal card format that will maximize my acquisition of the language (Mandarin like in the post). At some point I had enough scripts in there that I had turned it into my own Duolingo-like app.
These days I reign that impulse in and force myself to stick to simple card formats. Creating cards should take as little time as possible. The Chinese Support add-on is super useful for that by the way.
Another thing about Anki is that it can feel oppressive sometimes, because if you don’t do your reps they just pile up and it becomes a drag to clear the “debt.” Staying on top of my reps before I had a baby and life was chill was easy; now with the baby I sometimes feel like Anki takes away from the already limited time I have to expose myself to the language by reading books, watching videos, etc.
I stick to it though, since for a language that distant from the two other languages I speak, memorization work is a must.
> Another thing about Anki is that it can feel oppressive sometimes, because if you don’t do your reps they just pile up and it becomes a drag to clear the “debt.” Staying on top of my reps before I had a baby and life was chill was easy; now with the baby I sometimes feel like Anki takes away from the already limited time I have to expose myself to the language by reading books, watching videos, etc.
For me the new habit has been to not guilt myself too badly for skipping my cards if I know I spent an hour or two on native materials. Key to this has been to make sure that while all of my subdecks under my combined deck offer me a set number of new cards every day, the combined deck is set to zero new cards per day. If I'm missing days, I need to stop adding cards for a while until my daily load is tolerable enough that I'm not tempted to skip out.
Also, I like to get new cards of the same type at the same time. After I've cleared them once, let them be mixed in with the other cards, but when they're introduced, I should be focused.
I hope that FSRS* eventually solves this: they've pretty much done away with manually-chosen "ease" as a concept (although not everyone has accepted that yet.) I hope they'll ditch the idea of people regulating the number of new cards they get per day and move to allowing users to select an amount of time they want to spend, or a date by which they want to have a particular proficiency (defined by card recall), and instead have the algo choose how many new cards you should have. e.g. I'm looking for 45 minutes a day of review, optimize for that; or, I want to be able on the 15th of October to be able to get 95% of this set of cards correct, drill me on them repetitiously for as long as it takes.
There's been a lot of thoughtful discussion about pushing the app forward in ways like this.** Simpler is better, and the scheduler should be scheduling, not the user; the scheduler's job is to adapt to the user.
The next frontier for SRS after polishing the schedulers is to gain an understanding of what makes a good card or a good deck, rather than leaving it as an exercise to the reader along with a bit of handwaving about how it's better to learn from one's own cards than ones that others have made. I'm about 3 years into daily SRS and this is not my experience. I'm eternally grateful to people who come up with innovative decks or just well written and focused cards.
FSRS-based simulator could help user regulate the number of new cards they need to learn per day. The simulator will be integrated into Anki natively in the next release. But it's still an experimental feature. If the simulator is accurate enough, I plan to make it more automatically to support the idea that let the algorithm choose many new cards the user should have.
Incorrect. Gaúcho here, born and raised - but with many many friends and relatives in the other mate-drinking countries and across our (unfortunately currently under a lot of distress) state.
Everywhere in the Pampas region - Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina and Rio Grande do Sul -, the "roda de chimarrão" is pretty much the same. (Apparently in some part of Uruguay it's a bit less shared, more personal).
One person holds the thermos and generally owns the mate. They usually have the first drink as both a way of validating the drink and as a niceness to the rest of the group, since it's the coldest. Gourd is refilled and passed on to the next person, who drinks all of it and passes it back to the "cevador", who again refills it and passes on to the next person. So on and so forth.
I grew up in a border town bordering Uruguay and over there I’d definitely see folks carrying their personal thermos and cuia. But I would see groups on the Brazilian side of the border.
Yeah, this is how I have drank mate my entire life and everyone I know (apart from my wife and her Uruguayan family) drinks mate in this way. I'm originally from Bs As, but I've confirmed this with folks from Salta (NW), Santa Cruz (S), Corrientes (NE, althought not as much as Formosa!) and the odd Cordobes and Mendocino as well.
Uruguayans tend to be more likely to have one thermo and mate per person, similar to the tradition in Corrientes (which makes sense if you look at who their immediate neighbors on their western border are).
> I'm trying to understand why the characters in Dune fought with swords, pikes and knives.
At least part of the reason is that the interaction between a lasgun and a shield would cause a powerful explosion that would kill the shooter too. No one wants that and no one will give up their shield, so they had to go back to melee weapons.
No, there is a in-world reason at least for no drones. Wikipedia:
> However, a great reaction against computers has resulted in a ban on any "thinking machine", with the creation or possession of such punishable by immediate death.
tl;dr - Machine intelligences existed in Dune history, were discovered to be secretly controlling humanity (through abortion under false pretenses, forced sterilization, emotional/social control, and other ways), then were purged and replaced with a religious commandment: "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind"
No, and there is a (piloted) drone attack in the first book -- Paul is attacked by a hunter-seeker.
The reason nobody tries to use the lasgun-shield interaction as a weapon is because the resulting explosion is indistinguishable from a nuclear weapon, and the Great Convention prohibits the use of nukes on human targets.
Just the perception of having used a nuclear device would result in the House which did so becoming public enemy #1 and being eradicated by the Landsraad and Sardaukar combined.
@Potro: If you liked the movie, read the books. I don't read a lot anymore, but during sick leave I started with the first book. Didn't stop until I finished the main story, including the sequels by Frank Herbert's son about a month later. That's like... uh... nine books?
In the book Paul is attacked by an insect drone while in his room. The drone was controlled by a Harkonnen agent placed weeks in anticipation inside a structure of the palace so it was also a suicide attack as the agent had no chance to escape and would die of hunger/thirsty if not found.
This kinda matches what I’ve read recently in a parenting book.
I’m currently reading Bringing Up Bébé, a book written by an American journalist who lived (maybe still lives?) in Paris and had her kids there. She wrote it after she started observing that French parents don’t seem to have the myriad of exhausting issues American parents have, or at least not with the same intensity and for the same duration.
When it comes to sleep, she writes that most French babies sleep through the night by the time they’re 6 months old.
According to her, what a lot of American parents (and from my experience as an expat, parents from several other countries too) do wrong is to immediately tend to the baby the moment they make any noise at night, in the first months few of their lives (this apparently doesn’t apply to the very first month though). That trains the baby to do exactly what you wrote, to get what they want as soon as they wake up in the middle of the night.
According to the author, French parents typically wait a few minutes whenever the baby wakes up at night. Most of the time the baby goes back to sleep.
The explanation she offers is that babies’ brains don’t know how to link one sleep cycle to the next, so they wake up between cycles and typically cry or fuss for a bit. By leaving them alone for a few minutes instead of instantly reacting, parents can help their brains learn to connect sleep cycles more efficiently. If they’re immediately picked up though, they’re actually being trained to do the exact opposite and to stay awake instead.
I really like your post btw, going to look up what you wrote about as it sounds invaluable in case the French method doesn’t work :)
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