The grandparent thought this was implausible, researched it as an outsider (with a slight bias towards thinking the claim is false, which is not a problem per se) and still didn't find any refutation. While I applaud the impetus behind the research, I'm more inclined to believe the apocryphal story after reading the attempt to refute it; not every piece of gossip will be supported by a written statement.
while, rationally speaking, a diligent search for evidence regarding a story that comes up finding no evidence for it, and weak evidence against it, ought to make us less inclined to believe the story, people don't always work that way. this is a well-documented cognitive error, commonly called the 'backfire effect', though it doesn't always manifest
i wasn't attempting to refute the story. i was attempting to find out the truth, and i find your summary of that search as 'attempting to refute the apocryphal story' somewhat offensive
my summary of what i found is that the assignment of ^g to the bell control code happened before gordon bell was well-known, on a continent where he did not live, in the deliberations of a standards body he had no involvement with, revising a proposal from a company that competed with his company, before the construction of any software or hardware that used key-chords such as control+g to produce control codes
under these circumstances it is not impossible that one of bell's colleagues from dec made the proposal, or at least was motivated to advocate it by knowing him¹, but given that i couldn't turn up any involvement of dec or mit people in the standards process at all, much less in the delegation the usa sent to europe for the meeting where the change was made, it seems pretty unlikely
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¹ and predicting the invention of the control key, and that the proposal to start the alphabet at codepoint 64 instead of 65 would fail; but both of these seem to have been fairly predictable
Raymond Chen has been writing his blog for more than 20 years now, almost 7000 posts. It is a treasure trove of information and first-hand account. I can see an argument for peer-reviewing every post, but I think it would have limited (a lot) the amount of "from the trenches" knowledge we get from him.
Your reference to the Parallax Propeller is domain-specific and a bit anachronic; you're talking about embedded computing, while he is talking about general-purpose computing a few decades prior. The point of the post is that general-purpose computing was different in the past (in a sense, that's the theme for the whole blog! that and compatibility hacks), so going this far back is necessary.
The whole page is tongue-in-cheek. In the '90s, <blink> was only supported by Netscape while <marquee> was only supported by Internet Explorer, so combining the two didn't make a lot of sense. Mozilla only added <marquee> support in 2002: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=156979.
This makes it seem like they invented XHR and did nothing with it, but Outlook Web Access already used XHR for dynamic/asynchronous update of an email web interface context four years before Gmail.
If your claim is that Google popularized the ideas behind Ajax, then I'll happily agree: The term Ajax was invented outside Google [0] to describe Gmail front-end inner workings. My first contact with Ajax-like technologies was certainly Gmail in 2004 and not OWA in 2000, so I am not denying the merits of popularization. But I think even saying Google "developed the technology into" Ajax is unfair to OWA, given that Microsoft was pushing the other components of Ajax for a lot longer as DHTML (which led to standardizing DOM [1]; document.all anyone?) and OWA used DHTML+XHR, which was at the time essentially a non-cross-browser version of Ajax (props to Mozilla for implementing a compatible version of XHR and shipping it as part of Mozilla 1.0 in 2002).
I won't argue for Microsoft any further, though, because the "cross-browser" part is key. The fact that they invented and shipped these things in IE with no effort to standardize them (as part of their embrace, extend, extinguish approach) was a big headache for cross-browser compatibility. Google gets most of the credit for Ajax because web developers hated Microsoft's approach to the web at the time (for very good reason). It is interesting to compare Microsoft's behavior back then with Google's current approach of flooding standards bodies with (at times half-baked) proposals.
Duolingo courses are no longer created by volunteers. They stopped the volunteer program in 2021 [1], right around the time they increased monetization efforts. They offered part-time jobs and a $4 million reward fund to previous volunteers when closing the program, which I thought was pretty kind.
Ah thank you, I haven't kept in touch with Duolingo's progression in a few years. While now I see it as more ethical that Duolingo charges for content that they are paying to produce, I still feel like it's slower progression than if everybody could contribute (and those most adept at the language would probably just focus on reviewing PRs)
Disclaimer: I work for Duolingo, all opinions are my own and not those of my employer, etc.
Part of the reason that content is slower to produce now is just that the standards are much higher. Internally we draw a distinction between the old volunteer-contributed content and the new content which is aligned to CEFR guidelines for how languages should actually be taught. Aligning content like this is not only more expensive but also requires more coordination and oversight from domain experts compared to previous methods.
I honestly don't see the point of following CEFR for an app like Duolingo.
Professional and GOOD teachers, that love to teach and did that for several years, know how to teach a language. THey don't need to follow something such as CEFR to know if they do well and what is interesting to teach and in which order.
I find it more important to make interesting lectures which do not follow a standardized curriculum. When someone is learning a language in this way will naturally go toward a CEFR based courses if needed afterward, with a big head start and only when he feels ready.
Also, not allowing to see 'already seen' vocabulary is a very strange move for an app, I guess it's for preventing having the vocab in a app like anki which makes duolingo less useful, but still, even if I don't use such app, having to screenshot all the time to have my vocab is a total pain.
Finally, the app doesn't seem to understand which words/sentences you already know and master and clearly do not need to see for the 400time instead of new vocabulary. Even having maximum points all the time and very fast will usually result in the same vocab shown again and again. It seems like an almost basic statistical problem, so I don't get why it's not fixed.
Also, some vocab is very strange, for example using 'es tut mir leid' in German to just say 'I'm sorry' feels like the content is automatically generated instead of having a linguist or even a German behind.
Anecdotally, I am having a much better time with Duolingo since the last time I tried around 2018 - the changes to be properly made courses in line with CEFR is actually resulting in better learning.
Pretty sure it's to sell proficiency certificates, i.e. https://englishtest.duolingo.com/applicants Established institutions are more likely to accept Duolingo as equivalent to traditional language education if they follow the same standards.
I'm sure a million people have asked. But whats the reason for no firefox support with microphones? Is it a Duo thing or Firefox? I hate having to have Chrome installed on my desktop just to use a single website.
I just started the Japanese course recently and was trying to figure out why a bunch of the criticism I read of Duolingo's course seemed irrelevant or inapplicable. I guess this pivot explains why to some degree.
When the Japanese course first came out it was of low quality, very short with kanji not being taught and even being mispronounced. It seems to have improved over time. I especially like the Stories feature.
More like Duolingo’s decline. They brought their mobile transaction money grubbing “hearts” system to the browser version punishing people for making mistakes (which is the opposite of how you learn a language). But of course you can pay to refill your hearts early!
An important part of reading mathematics is mentally filling in the "correct" interpretation for terms. The optimal amount of detail typically depends on the target audience. Part of that is because making notation fully specified in English is typically cumbersome: If they had written "as their second non-repeating prime", someone could come along saying "shouldn't it say 'second-smallest' or 'in increasing order' as well?". In papers, the use of such terms would typically be accompanied by a formal definition using more precise (but not fully precise, see the talk below) mathematical notation.
I mention this not to be pedantic, but because inferring the "invisible" part of mathematics (when it can be done) instead of asking humans to do it explicitly tends to be a big usability improvement in theorem provers. Andrej Bauer has a nice talk about it at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZSvuCJBaFU
Sure. I'm wondering what people would respond to blanket asking what is the second prime factor of 12, because I would say 2, not 3. So 37 being the median here was a bit jarring specially since "non-repeating" wasn't even mentioned in the article.
An argument on a public forum is not won by whoever shouts the loudest or has the most "courage". If expressed clearly enough, it suffices (and is much wiser) to explain your ideas once and let the readers decide.
So I guess I won. The person I was arguing with called me a religious flat earther and then announced he was done with the conversation, rather than allowing me to reply. Age old forum behavior: Gotta get the last word and run. Sad really. If I was such a savage troll then just don’t reply!!!
