After getting a lot of requests on Reddit for guidance on how to learn a language, I decided to make a proper guide for people. The first few chapters are available on my website. The full PDF/epub guide can be downloaded for free using a link in the guide. Enjoy!
Curious to know how you think it's possible that Chinese people are able to speak with each other if you think writing their language phonetically would render it incomprehensible.
I'm a bit confused about your reasons for signing up, but it looks real to me. It could be with all the buzz around AI it really did see a large surge in interest. I'd be interested to hear from the founders and how they managed to grow so quickly.
This idea was the foundation for the Quantum Country book [0], which was essentially an experiment in combining reading with spaced repetition learning to let you do just that: understand a topic deeply.
Anyone interested in the theoretical underpinnings of the idea can read about it in the blog post [1] the co-authors wrote. For anyone who objects to the idea that rote-memorisation can aide learning rather than simply let you mechanically repeat facts, you should read the paragraph "How important is memory, anyway?" [2].
Also reminds me of the Reddit thread [0] where someone accidentally used write access credentials that were on an onboarding document and wiped the production database. GitLab guy actually joined the conversation.
Hard agree. People post links to websites with technical descriptions and little basic info all the time, and this is the first time I'm seeing a thread of people complaining about it. If I'm interested in something I see, I start Googling terms; I don't expect a specification for software in a specific field to cater to my beginner-level knowledge.
1. While Russia warned against NATO expansion, it wasn't (and still isn't) in their power to do anything to stop it. Its actions have resulted in the expansion of NATO, a reasonably forseeable result.
2. NATO is a defensive only alliance, and can't be invoked for an invasion of Russia. If their concern is the ability of the US to store missiles and other military gear on its border, too late - the Baltics are already members. It would be an odd choice to invade purely based on the likely future expansion of an alliance that is designed to prevent you from invading its members.
3. NATO expansion or no, an independent, westward-leaning Ukraine is not an acceptable outcome. This would make NATO expansion irrelevant or at best an ancillary cause.
It's also worth noting it's not like this is the first time Russia has invaded and occupied one of its neighbours. AFAIK Georgia wasn't about to join NATO. We can't see counterfactual universes, but in my view an equally valid possibility is that NATO has stopped what is happening in Ukraine from happening in the Baltic states.
Overall the facts don't line up well with the theory that this is a response to NATO expansion, and therefore the US is to blame - it might be a factor, but more serves as a rhetorical justification Russia can use that it knows people in the US and UK can use domestically.
If you're a realist about international relations it's pretty easy to see why the UK and US might see it as in their geostrategic interest to prolong the war, and that might have been a factor. It's also worth noting there was a huge amount of public pressure for both to react. Either way, in their view, a longer war is worth it for a pro-western Ukraine, and Ukraine seems to agree. As for acting to prevent an agreement, that's largely speculation, but either way, the final choice was still Ukraine's.
Russia is completely in the wrong here, but this is false:
> NATO is a defensive only alliance, and can't be invoked for an invasion of Russia.
NATO is a regional security alliance with a mutual defense commitment. Most of the operations for which it has been activated were not invocations of that defensive commitment, which has only happened exactly once.
> 2. NATO is a defensive only alliance, and can't be invoked for an invasion of Russia. If their concern is the ability of the US to store missiles and other military gear on its border, too late - the Baltics are already members. It would be an odd choice to invade purely based on the likely future expansion of an alliance that is designed to prevent you from invading its members.
It's worth noting that the Soviet equivalent to NATO was the Warsaw Pact, whose largest military operation was invading a member because they wanted to leave. While ostensibly a collective defensive alliance, like NATO, the Soviets treated it as a tool of binding its sphere of influence together, and it would not surprise me if the current Russian leadership sees NATO the same way, a tool by which the US government coerces its sphere of influence to do its bidding. (Needless to say, this is not an accurate view of NATO, but I suspect it is the view that Russia has of it.)
> It's worth noting that the Soviet equivalent to NATO was the Warsaw Pact, whose largest military operation was invading a member because they wanted to leave.
I don’t think that’s quite accurate (it seems, unless I’m mistaken, to conflate elements of the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968); the Hungarian revolutionaries in 1956 declared an exit from the Pact but that invasion was pure USSR, not Warsaw Pact. Czechoslovakia in 1968 had reaffirmed its intent to remain in the Pact and faithful to Marxism-Leninism just prior to the Warsaw Pact invasion.
Nevertheless, that the Soviet Union invaded two Warsaw Pact members over insufficient perceived loyalty to the USSR’s direction seems to underline your general point of the difference between the Warsaw Pact and NATO, notwithstanding any quibbles of the precise details of either invasion.
I distinctly remember terming my searches as questions. I was young and this was back pre Google so I was using Ask Jeeves. Naturally if you're asking someone something you would phrase it as a question, so in my mind it made sense to ask it that way.
Though I agree with you it's annoying, you gotta hate the game not the player. It's Google's fault for valuing things like this in its search results. All the author is doing is trying to get seen. I'd say that if they have to irk a few people like us to get themselves higher on search results, they'd probably judge it as a good trade-off.
