2x15: One Mouse in a Row

I use Pelican for a platform but I may be looking for something else soon. I’m a big fan of reStructuredText which swayed me quite a bit. I needed a blogging platform that supported easily adding blocks of code with syntax highlighting. At the time I couldn’t find a single platform that didn’t make it look terrible unless you wanted to spend hours hand editing every single post.

I’d be interested to know if there are any platforms that can now actually do a better for this (preferably not Wordpress).

Once example I remember of @sil’s “not your friend” license was Cedega (previously WINEX), the original implementation of DirectX on WINE before CrossOver came along and did it upstream.

As I remember, you had to pay for the binaries, then they also made the source code available do you (just a zip on a server somewhere), but with the stipulation that if anyone redistributed it they’d stop developing the software.

Oh BTW, saying “Eye-Eff-Tee-Tee-Tee” is longer than saying “If-This-Then-That”.

erm. What makes you think we hadn’t read the memo?

Jono introduced the item by saying “like many of you I haven’t had the heart to go and read it, did a bit of a scan over it,” and you and Jeremy didn’t say either way, but you two also didn’t say much about it other than that it was too big of a topic for a news item which is fair. I listened to it again and Jono wasn’t that negative (just summarizing it by saying “women can’t work in technical jobs because of biological reasons” doesn’t seem like a fair description and his tone was kind of negative but I think he was just talking that way to be entertaining). Calling it a “manifestbro screed” in the show notes is pretty negative though – maybe that was written by someone who had read the memo?

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Yup; show notes are written by me, and I’ve read the memo (and I know Jeremy has too, and I imagine that Jono has red it since) :slight_smile:

I’d like to echo this in that I too was surprised by the negative language used about the memo author, in absence of reading the memo. Whilst everyone is entitled to an opinion it should be a learned one.

Now awaiting the “I’ve now read it and he’s still a d1ck” response…

Again. As @wsha says, we weren’t particularly negative in the show – I specifically was and called the author a dick, and that’s because I’ve read what he wrote (and I had at the time) and I think he’s a dick and completely in the wrong in both what he thinks and how he presented it. The show notes put “manifestbro” in quotes – fine, that’s a derogatory name for this whole affair, but that’s what you get for being a bro and writing a manifesto, and we didn’t make it up. Screed means “a long piece of writing, especially one that is boring or expresses an unreasonably strong opinion”, and I will happily stand behind that definition, but if everyone’s seeing that as pejorative then I would like to make it clear that that’s my choice of word and not necessarily Jono and Jeremy’s. But I’m getting a strong sense here of “you were negative about it!” which actually means “you didn’t push back against it”; Jono is explicitly a bit ambivalent on this subject; Jeremy explicitly said it was too big a subject to be discussed in the news; I said, and continue to think, that the bloke is a dick. (If the other two chaps feel I’ve misrepresented them or the show then my apologies to them and I’ll try to correct it.) Meanwhile, the show notes explicitly directed people to the already-existing thread exactly because we want discussion on this whole topic, so perhaps we should continue there.

Fair enough. Thanks for taking the time to respond.

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Graciously done, thank you! I’d be interested in your thoughts in more detail in the other thread on the content of the memo itself?

@sil duolingo’s business model is actually quite neat: http://www.ted.com/talks/luis_von_ahn_massive_scale_online_collaboration.html. I took a look at it years ago after watching this ted talk, but never pushed through. I can’t even remember the language I attempted to learn.

Ah. Sadly, their idea to do lots of translation stuff didn’t actually work out – https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/25/duolingo-raises-25m-at-a-700m-valuation/ has more details about their business model now that they’ve tried that. (I liked their idea too, when I found out about it, but the market seemingly didn’t…)

Thanks for that update. What a pity!

I don’t see how you came to this conclusion. I didn’t share a view on this, neither did @jeremy. In fact we deliberately agreed before the segment to not get into it as we knew it would suck up an entire show. @sil did say he thinks the guy is a dick, which is really the only clear opinion I think was shared. So, I don’t understand how you could take this as “such negative language” - I think you are reading more into than existed.

Well, basically, I agree :slight_smile: That’s why I said you weren’t that negative in my second post. I still think your summary of the memo was inaccurate (I read it as arguing women prefer other jobs to software engineering for biological reasons, not that they lacked the ability), and the dick comment and show notes were somewhat negative. Any way, I think we’ve spent more than sufficient time on the topic. I’m not particularly sympathetic to the memo’s arguments. I just think that the author tried very hard to cover his behind and couch his words in a way that would be harder to write off as sexist and racist without some explanation and I’m interested in what the most effective way to respond to it is. The response I have seen online has largely been to write it off out of hand like Google did which reinforces the divisions between the right and left on the subject (I looked at the front page of some conservative sites the day the memo story came out and they were plastered with stories about Google’s “war on the right”).

I’ve gone from Joomla to Drupal and finally settled on Wordpress, or rather my department has. As I’ve learned more and more using it I’ve come to detest the plugin and theme culture. It allows designers to slap together sites with plugins they know but it’s so often overkill or just hard to maintain after a few months. Fusion Builder is a nightmare for someone who just wants to read some simple html.

I have learned a lot however and if I can get in there and write something bespoke to replace the stack of dodgy plugins I do. Last year we set up a Science Journal site with a submission form, metadata on the published papers etc but most of it was entered by hand in multiple places. This year the plugins we used stopped working so I decided to write a plugin myself which would have a custom post type for the submitted paper and allow it to be the same post that gets published, drawing all the info it needs for the metadata and template from that post data. Seems to work ok and saves me a lot of time when it comes to publish.

Regarding language learning, I have been living in Croatia for nearly a decade and am still rubbish at the language. I can follow a conversation so long as I grasp the context but anything beyond one word responses or ordering coffee is tough for me. I’ve tried quite a few language tools and aside from flash cards for vocab (Anki is a great tool for that) I’ve not had much luck.
A big problem is that a) the pronunciation is so easy to get wrong that I get a lot of blank looks even when I have, to my ear, said the right thing and b) lots of people speak English anyway and can tell I am when I butcher their words so they’ll speak to me in English. Both of these cut down my confidence in the language.
In fact, my best language learning tool has been my bi-lingual daughter who is nearly 5. She switches effortlessly between the two languages and often speaks her simple sentences to both me and her mother in our respective languages in turn.

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I could edit my last post but that seems unlikely to be noticed… I have read the memo a few more times since my last reply and talked to other people, and now I think I was wrong and what you said was fine. He does effectively say that women can’t code because they can’t handle stress.

It threw me off when you said that you hadn’t read the memo, and then I read it expecting to see something about women lacking the intellectual ability to code (the “can’t code” part of your statement) and glossed over his points about anxiety (maybe because I don’t find coding stressful). I at first took him as saying women preferred lower stress jobs but really he says they lack the ability to handle stress. If he had been making the other point, I would have disagreed with it but it would have been more of a point of debate rather than something negative toward women.

@sil Here’s the Progressive Death Metal band logo you asked for.

[Font]

(See also: metal data.)

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Hey @sil, I’ve been using Duolingo for about 4 years to learn some french.

I have been putting in near the minimum amount of effort so I’m certainly not fluent, and I haven’t had much chance to practice using it yet, but I can understand written french pretty well now. Today I have a streak of 1365 consecutive days (3.5+ years) which I’m quite motivated not to let die (I’m also helped by another automatic system that would charge me if I didn’t practice).

I’ve always had the speaking exercises turned off because I didn’t believe in the accuracy of their automatic rating - this was a big mistake, because now I am really really bad at speaking any of the french that I know. According to a language tutor I know it actually doesn’t matter as much about the accuracy of your speaking as much as it matters to practice speaking out loud at all.

The audio clips you mentioned are prerecorded, but using text to speech engines rather than real people.

To give a bit of background on the money situation, you don’t have to pay at any point, ie to get to any level, so don’t worry about that.

In terms of their business model I think they originally just burned through investor cash with a plan to make money through human-created paid translations like @basje said. As a result they never used to have ads or any kind of paid options. But since abandoning that they have in the last year or so added ads, a paid “pro” option that gets rid of ads and enables offline lessons, and those one-off payments that keep your “streak” alive even if you miss a lesson.

There’s a lot of debate about how effective Duolingo is for learning a language as an adult. As you say, it doesn’t bother teaching you much in the way of language “rules”, you learn in a more natural way (just like you didn’t need to explicitly learn any rules to speak your native language). However I think most people agree that it will take you a much longer time to learn in this way as an adult if you don’t learn some of the rules alongside it, because we lose much of our natural ability to “absorb” language as we get older.

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While reflecting on what I’ve used for my websites in the past and what I use now, I realized something: My god, my 20-year history on the web has been all over the place. I used numerous free hosts: xoom.com, drumline.com, dyndns.org, hypermart.net, wordpress.com, tumblr.com. Sometimes I piggybacked on others’ accounts: my dad’s ISP account, a subdomain on my friend’s web hosting account. I’m probably missing a few.

Like @nshiell, I too wrote my own CMS, I think back in 2000 or so. It was one of my first web programming projects, and turned out to be a great way to learn PHP and MySQL. I found it fun, it raised my confidence in my abilities, gave me experience, and helped kickstart my career.

Eventually I bought http://greaterscope.net, and migrated my site yet again. In 2008 I decided to give blogging another go and started using wordpress.com. After roughly two years of that, I was lured over to Tumblr because of its simplicity. Just this year I moved to a self-hosted static Hugo site, served by Caddy on a Linode server I’ve had for years: https://blog.alanszlosek.com. I absolutely love Caddy, and hopefully Hugo and I will be friends for years. It took me way too long to find a theme that ticked enough boxes, but luckily I was able to fork the theme repo and fix some bugs with generation of tag pages. Version controlled site content published via rsync feels so good!

@parzzix mentioned Ghost and I concur that updates are a pain if you self-host. Markdown with an instant preview panel was awesome, but not being able to apply updates with a single command was a deal-breaker.

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That’s definitely a really good point; I’m using a fairly old version of Pelican to run my site (because it works and upgrading’s a pain, especially since I’ve altered things) but that’s not a problem because its code is not exposed to the world. That’d be a disaster if the live code were on the website, as it is with WordPress and the like, and I hadn’t really considered just how important a factor that is!