Note: since this was originally published, Mozilla released an updated Terms of Use that appears to grant them a license to slurp your data into an AI, and removed key provisions formerly committing them to not selling your data.
See here for the dicussion. For now, I’m striking it out of recommendations in favor of one of its forks until the implications of this change are either fully clarified or reversed.
Read more...You can’t do much these days without connecting to the Internet. Unfortunately this means exposure to:
Your network channels are probably the first thing you should thing about securing. There are lots of other things you should do as well, but most of them are worthless without at least some network security. There is no 100% foolproof approach, so I’m ordering this by bang-for-your-buck (in terms of time and/or money).
Read more...Today’s Internet is in many ways worse than the one we had 30 years ago. It used to be easier and more fun to use computers and to be online in, say, the 1980s or 90s. This is not just nostalgia. While the hardware and software was certainly less capable, but it mostly got out of your way and didn’t take more from you than you were getting from it because for a brief time, personal computers were connected peer to peer or only intermittently on a young internet that commerce had not found or figured out how to coopt and monetize. This is no longer the case. And it couldn’t have happened at a worse time because computing has since pervaded all aspects of society. Ads and other behavioral nudges are in your pocket, buzzing your hip every few minutes.
Read more...In the US our shared sense of reality is strained even more than usual.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the fact that we use the same part of the brain for both moral disgust and physical disgust. Neurobiologists’ explanation goes something like this: since the concept of moral wrong is new on evolutionary timescales (<50,000 years) selection has coopted a part of the brain that was chiefly evolved for somthing else, namely, detecting and rejecting food/water that might make us sick, to also help modulate our understanding moral and social limits. So we end up have trouble telling the difference between something that’s morally wrong and something that just disgusts us due to, say, unfamiliarity. In our confusion we intellectually conflate “different” or “unfamiliar” with “wrong” – after all, they feel really similar – and hang on to the possibly erroneous conclusion even upon minor reflection. Some of us even settle on the idea that “icky = bad” is a decent rule of thumb to live by. 1
Read more...I often see developers use regular expressions in the process of parsing languages such as DSL, data serialization formats, and config file formats. Regular expressions are powerful, concise, supported in lots of languages as a sort of sub-language, and they are already known to many programmers, so they can be a good solution here. Obviously some people are finding success using them this way.
Read more...Use polytonic keyboard to get the stress diacritic. Not needed with Duolingo but it’s helpful for reinforcing pronunciation.
In both Windows 10 and Gnome, the input toggle is [Super-Space].
The final-form sigma “ς” used at the end of letter-case words is normally where the US-EN “W” key is.
| gr | en |
|---|---|
| είναι | to be |
| πίνω | to drink |
| τρώω | to eat |
| conjugation | ending | meaning |
|---|---|---|
| πίνω | ω | I drink |
| πίνεις | εις | you drink |
| πίνει | ει | he drinks |
| πίνουμε | ουμε | we drink |
| πίνετε | ετε | you drink |
| πίνουν(ε) | oυν(ε) | they drink |
| gr | en |
|---|---|
| εγω | I |
| εσύ | you |
| αυτός/αυτή/αυτό | he/she/it |
| εμείς | we |
| εσείς | you (pl) |
| αυτοί/αυτές | they (masc+neut)/they (fem) |
These are the singular, nominative case versions:
Read more...A condenser mic is pretty key here, but you might as well try with whatever you have. FWIW my condenser runs through an M-Audio M-Track 2x2 (USB-C), which provides 48VDC phantom power to the mic, as well as driving the input used by ProTools.
It’s also essential to have headphones so the accompaniment does not leak back into the vocal track during recording. I use a cheap pair of earbuds, but over-the-ear headphones might be better for attenuating any potential leaks.
Read more...Like all bad tech blogs, I’ve detoured into a customization yakshave. My problem: I want to support markdown-side input of TeX math with some level of accessibility on the reader side, i.e., I don’t want to render the math as images, I want to retain the semantics. So I went a googlin’. [^1]
MathML: Great, there’s a representational standard (1). Now the bad news: it’s not very concise – it is only ideal as an intermediate format – it is unsupported in Chrome, and it’s poorly supported in some other browsers. The upshot is you need to use js to do last-mile part of the render.
Read more...Since this is my first foray into self-customized nonlinear periodization, I want to state some assumptions/reductions from my previous survey before diving deep on the specifics.
Block periodization. Since my goals involve multiple seasons (bigwall, late-season alpine) with different energy systems and skills, it makes sense to leverage the flexibility of block periodization while minimally maintaining gains made in non-focus energy systems. I have several seasons of linear periodization and base built, as well as some recent experience doing custom blocks designed by coaches, so this seems like an OK time to make the leap to self-customization. Also, given that the pandemic has effectively lengthened my training period by delaying objective windows, this is a good time to switch things up.
Read more...This is just my note-taking from reading/listening to Steve Bechtel on the topic.
Classical periodization: macro cycles of endurance, strength, power, etc. This doesn’t apply to climbing b/c it’s largely a skill sport. There are too many skills and energy systems at play to spend a whole year converging on one system and/or one point of performance. Most climbers have several opportunities per season or multiple seasons per year (rock, ice/mixed). This applies even moreso to climbers whose objectives span sub-disciplines that require a different mix (e.g. a bigwaller who has sport RP goals).
Read more...