This infuriates me. I launch the app to play music and am forced to interact with a pop-up promoting some random new release that is nowhere near the same universe as my music taste.
They recently did the annual “Wrapped” release. It took over the iOS Home Screen widget I use for playing/pausing recent playlists. The widget was unusable until you (1) watched the wrapped video in full on that device (didn’t matter that I had watched it on other devices before) and (2) you had to listen to the playlist they generated of your most played songs.
It keeps losing my downloaded podcasts. Takes forever to switch from online to offline mode. How hard could possibly be, just send a few packets if you get no answer you're offline.
It's really not that complicated yet they somehow managed to mess it up.
I would argue that the price is too low. Any price under $200 is practically free to the employee with so many companies providing learning and development budgets.
You hit the nail on the head regarding L&D psychology. For corporate budgets, $19 signals 'toy,' not 'training.'
My current logic: I'm optimizing for the individual dev/lead paying out of pocket who wants to start now without asking a manager for approval. The goal is to be below the 'mental friction' threshold for a personal impulse buy.
But for a Team/Enterprise version (where the manager buys it for 5 people), you are absolutely right—the pricing structure needs to look very different.
Many companies have discretionary budgets fully in control of the employee. For example, I had $2,500 per year to spend on valid expenses without needing prior approval.
That sounds like a manager budget.
My rationale of 19$ is considering the global audience and budget.
I do have a vision of introducing team licenses later but currently focused on gathering volume and feedback!
I would hope that they have access to a tool to look up the passport by number and confirm that the details match the copy and the photo appears to look like the person.
They do, but it can and will be ignored, based on events to date. The goal is to create ambiguity to enable a power imbalance enabling working outside of the legal framework to accomplish target outcomes. It turns an objective boolean evaluation (“is_citizen”) into a subjective one (“is_preferred_and_compliant”).
You might even hope that such a system would be able to work off of their name and some other memorable, identifiable information like address, origin country, date of birth, and would display their papers with photo-identification available, but alas...
Re. (1): It can really depend on what they did before and during school. While in school, one could have real internships, real personal projects, open-source contributions, working for the university, contract gigs, etc.
Personal anecdata: I was solo building software projects in highschool that earned income (real product, creating real value, some of which were acquired) and worked on the school district websites. During college I contracted with startups part time while also building projects of my own.
Usually you connect your laptop/phone to the portable router network, which then just pulls up the captive portal. Once you auth from one device, any device behind the router is authed with the portal. This is because the hotel network just sees your router's IP/MAC.
This is great. I also played the heck out of GTA2. I had a lot of fun attempting to mod the textures to get my favorite cars in the game. Respect is everything.
I’m trying to learn to speak Chinese and not read it yet. The issue is most of the language learning apps have a focus on characters. I feel like I just want to see the pinyin. Maybe I don’t know what I need, but I haven’t found the right tool.
There's a language learning method where you just listen to audio, until you develop a basic familiarity with the language. (Then learn reading and writing later.)
You listen to audio you don't understand yet, and over time your brain begins to pick up the patterns. It takes a lot of time but you can do it in the background, because that processing happens subconsciously. So you can get that time "for free".
But he got it from linguist Stephen Krashen and his Input Hypothesis of language acquisition. (i.e. that the way babies and kids learn languages, thru osmosis, works for adults too.)
I think the ideal solution is somewhere in the middle, starting with something like Pimsleur which is the same idea (audio and repetition) but more structured and focused, to give you that "seed" of vocabulary and grammar, before you flesh it out with the "long tail" of the language.
To add a bit more to this: AJATT (all Japanese all the time) later evolved into MIA (mass input approach), which then became Refold.
The gist of those methods is mass input + create SRS cards for sentences where only one word or grammar pattern is unfamiliar to you.
A similar but more relaxed approach is ALG (automatic language growth), where you start from very basic input with lots of visual aids and let the language “wash over you”: no taking notes, no creating flashcards, no dictionary lookups. Sounds crazy, but it works for a lot of people. It’s the method behind Dreaming Spanish, which was inspired by the teaching method at the AUA language school in Bangkok, where Dr. J Marvin Brown used Stephen Krashen’s ideas to create a Natural Approach course to teach foreigners Thai from zero to fluency.
As someone who did most of Pimsleur Spanish and Mandarin (and did a single unit in various other languages), and has since continued learning these languages (I'm currently taking 4-5 hours of Spanish class a day in Spain), my two cents is that Pimsleur is fine for gaining confidence in the basic phrases of a language, but is a pretty poor tool if you want to actually learn a language. imo it focuses too much on set phrases without practicing further application.
For adults learning a language, I think you need 3 things to be most efficient. You need to learn the grammar rules/structure, you need vocabulary, and you need lots and lots of content. The specificity of Pimsleur I think is a major blocker. It lacks both vocabulary and content, and there is often a better resource for explaining grammar. I guess maybe the first unit of each Pimsleur course is pretty ok for getting used to the mouthfeel of a language, though.
For Spanish, I got far more out of languagetransfer.org, which helped me understand the concepts of the language much more, and dreaming.com, which gave me lots of content. For Chinese, I haven't found a course I like, but I still think I got more from drilling characters (I made my own app, but something like hanzihero or just an HSK/TOCFL Anki deck is probably good) and using graded readers. I think spoken-first in Chinese is a little bit of a trap, because it's easier to remember things with the written characters, when the relationships between words is a bit more clear.
edit: oh also sidenote, it's been a long time since I used it, but iirc, the Mandarin one is particularly outdated (eg talks about using a phone book) and uses a Beijing dialect, so everyone in Taipei made fun of me the first time I went there.
I recently changed all my language flashcards to be like this. Anki is probably the best option. I have the field with the Hanzi, but just configure my cards not to show it at the moment, so I break the habit of translating everything to characters in my head when I'm trying to listen. It's worked well, and the characters will be there when I decire to do something with them again.
Thanks! I think getting comfortable with characters fairly early is important, as it helps shift your mindset into the right place. That said, I don’t think this project really works until you’re comfortable with at least ~60 characters.
Excuse you, it's nothing like that. These fake internet points mean something real and tangible. Those fake internet points are just made up nonsense. (Heavy sarcasm)
They recently did the annual “Wrapped” release. It took over the iOS Home Screen widget I use for playing/pausing recent playlists. The widget was unusable until you (1) watched the wrapped video in full on that device (didn’t matter that I had watched it on other devices before) and (2) you had to listen to the playlist they generated of your most played songs.
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