no mention of Arcan yet, so I'll throw that in the ring..

https://arcan-fe.com/about/

personally I think we need to shift from the 'file location' paradigm to tagging (thinking xattr).. that will solve many problems with UI (also raise some for sure).

Something I learnt from doing research in this space is that spatial memory is quite powerful, and a hierarchical filesystem taps into that.

Whereas tagging doesn't align as naturally with the human brain in the same way.

But episodic memory (the timeline so to speak) is powerful too. Consider "list all pictures I watched in the last two days". Both are important. Combine it by saying "distribute them on the screen from left to right sorted by how long I looked at it in ascending order".

I think local AI would come in quite handy to tag files and keep the tagging consistent..

Isn't it also true that a quick buck can be made on the stock market with these news?

Now Trump offers privileged access to his "tweets" for money.

Late stage capitalism indeed.

"i'm starving."

sounds cynical in my ears. energy demand of these toys will cause many problems, people elsewhere starving being one of them.

update went smooth, i guess? i was hesitant.. can't afford to break my phone.. :)

Sounds intuitive but what about rocket propulsion?

Rockets famously take exponential amounts of fuel to reach higher speeds. I'm a layman, but my guess is that this comes from the exhaust speed being fixed. Orbital speed is higher than exhaust speed, so from a frame at rest the rocket leaves behind a bunch of propellant moving in the same direction as it went. That's wasted energy.

Back-of-napkin calculation says that if you managed to perfectly match exhaust speed with current speed, leaving all the expelled propellant stationary, it would only take quadratic amounts of fuels to reach higher speeds. Like the kinetic energy equation predicts.

This is awesome.

Tested for Japanese. No problems so far, except sometimes repeating the desired number of times didn't work (mobile). Seems to work now.. But looping infinitely produces only three repetitions.

Really good UI with little friction: easily hone in on sentences, easily move on or jump ahead, see vocabulary, create Anki deck. Took a while to discover loop settings, but it's a good choice.

Only now discovered the "custom span loop mode". Great! I was about to ask for it!

AI mode is unobtrusive and helpful.

At last, found something that could need a touch up.. The starter deck from the example story is a bit nonsensical. It features words like URL and site from the Librivox intro. お is "translated" as "honorific" which is kind of true, but it's only a marker. A beginner might not know this. たち shows as answer "plural marker", there it worked. Integrating a flashcard app is no small feat. Impressive. I wonder what algorithm was used. Does it scale?

That's all. Thumbs up!

Thanks so much for testing Japanese! I'll review the starter deck and what goes into it. At the moment it's a bit random, and the nonsensical LibriVox intro spills in. I'll also try to filter out the function words. I have no way to judge that myself, my Japanese is zero.

Glad the mobile interface works. There's an iPhone app too, basically the web app but with native audio support. It can play in the background. Though it's not ready for release yet.

The built-in flashcards use FSRS-5, and I believe it's O(1) so it should scale but I haven't actually done any performance testing yet, to be honest.

The infinite loop is a bug, I'll dig into that too. And I'm not sure if you noticed, but I also put up an FSI Japanese course here: https://lingochunk.com/c/fsi-japanese. Again, I can't judge the quality myself, so I'd really welcome any feedback.

And thank you for the kind review!

Same feeling.

Quake and Quake III Arena was were the magic happened.

Yet, Quake III Arena had no single player. It was a fun MP game, I spent years playing. It's not really the same as Quake and Quake 2.

> Quake III Arena had no single player.

It... sort of did, but it was extremely shallow. It was a preset sequence of matches against increasingly difficult bots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrmJgXT8WSY

Single player = beating the "campaign" in Nightmare difficulty with Gauntlet only :) (but I don't remember how far I got)

Exactly. And I didn't see anyone here talking about QuakeWorld, which changed the gaming experience in an unmatched way.

I'm leasing my kidney. I'm 27 and did the calculation, it's just more profitable than selling. Picked this trend up on TikTok and can recommend. When I retire I plan to get it back.

Was a no-brainer.

As a graduate student, I used to rent my body to Science, by participating in medical school experiments. Nothing injected, but blood drawn.

I spent an afternoon in an iron lung, and a couple nights in the hospital, trying to sleep while med students messed with my air supply.

In the future, some LLM will incorporate this into their side-hustle suggestions. :)

Agree. Experience shows that fluency arises when you don't have to think about rules anymore. My advice is to not spend too much time learning grammar rules (actually, no time, like native learners). Leave the rule discovery to your unconscious brain and get going with rote repetition.

Your brains "language module" is not a slow computer, computing rules, it's a fast lookup-table.

A little explanation goes a long way though, Keyword here being little.

When starting out it is super nice to know stuff like: here is how you say if-then statements, here is how you recommend stuff, here is how make guesses, here is how you quote another person, etc. etc.

That said, I would argue most textbooks get the ratio of the length of the explanation vs. example sentences wrong. For every sentence in the explanation you should have at least three examples.

I 100% agree with that actually. But I find that my lookup table resists adding things to it until there’s a known fallback algorithm. There’s also joy in seeing the system’s elegance. That’s what I wanted to share by writing.

Thanks for getting back to me, OP. I appreciate.

And wow.. you did seem to go out of your way to stay ahead of those comments. Respect for that.

And my respect for dissecting this aspect of Japanese grammar. You seemed to be dissatisfied spending time learning something that, in your eyes, wasn't yet condensed to its most basic rule. And I agree with that feeling. It leads to truely understanding how something became, eventually to discovery. Your article reads like you did that research mostly for yourself, but wanted to share what you found. That's a refreshing attitude, although the chances are high that field has been tilled thoroughly by Japanese linguists. I have to say I can't remember having seen any explanation about secret vowels/consonants in Japanese grammar books - I know some. But that may be because 1. I haven't read every there is, 2a. it's sort of doing archaeology on language and/or 2b. it doesn't add much to simplify learning the rules.

I confess my affair with grammar was always a cursory one and that may be because it proved to be so much more effective to go with examples, and pick that conjugation up as a side dish. But that's just me.

Compressing the rules does make sense, but at some point you just have to learn what's there. Language and grammar is always more or less arbitrary. Elegant yes, but arbitrary. It can't be derived from fundamentals. But the payoff makes it a worthwhile endeavor learning a language so strange from English as Japanese: you get a glimpse what the essence of language is. What a great motivation that was and is.

Some things that might spark your interest and keep exploring:

There are ごだん verbs that look like いちだん: 要る, 帰る, 限る, 切る, 知る, 入る, 走る, 滑る

Verbs with the same dictionary form but belonging to different conjugations: 切る/着る, 帰る/変える, 要る/居る, 減る/経る, 湿る/閉める, 練る/寝る

Keep up the good work. Doing research with the door open is a noble endeavor in its own right.

Thank you! Appreciate the kindhearted comment.

Frankly, this thread was kind of wild, and it really got to me. It's not my first rodeo on HN, but the amount of wilful misunderstanding, weaponized debate devices, and manipulative grandstanding was off the charts compared to anything I've ever received in response to articles about programming. I'm still not sure what to attribute this to, and it will likely torture me for some more time.

I mention this at the end of the article, but the paper that inspired me is "No consonant-final stems in Japanese verb morphology" (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2010.03.026). It uses a different notation but it also considers the suffixes to be -(i)masu, -(a)nai, and so on, and specifies rules for how empty-ish slots concatenate. Maybe you'll be able to understand it better than I did! I found it very interesting but dense.

Haven't checked it out, yet, but looks promising.