The kobo colour goes for less than $160 regularly. It is water proof, has front ligths, usb-c, and it can display color. I’m considering it for an upgrade from my, bought used 8 years ago, kindle. With Kobo, and ereaders track record in general, it will probably last twice that and still work. I consider that extremely cheap, specially in a market that usually expects people to dump a thousand dollars every two or three years for a phone. E readers have some of the best cost to utility ratios of electronics.

I really like QuollWriter.

No

You hate Java, you love Rust, noted.

Also:

SAP,

Graphics,

Data science,

Web.

Good day.

Java is still massive in corporate software. As in, internal software for corporation’s day to day operations. Machinery management, inventory software, point-of-sale applications, floor management, automated finance tracking. Stuff that isn’t really cool or talked much about.

And of course there’s Java’s most important job. Coming up with features and syntax that Microsoft can copy and steal for C#.

It’s a cycle all popular languages go through. First only experimental applications and super opinionated programmers use it. Then everyone wants to use it for everything. Then it finds a niche where it excels and settles.

I remember Java, C++, Python, and JavaScript going through those phases as well. Currently, everything is Rust.

Tl;Dr: skip the apps unless they’re part of a bigger in-person course. Prefer reputable sources like pimsleur and mango languages. If you have no rush, get graded readers and watch a lot of YouTube, podcasts, etc.

Ok, so here are my two cents on learning languages and the whole category of learning apps. They are all flawed on some major way or another. But mostly it is about pacing learning progress.

Teaching absolute beginners is easy. They know nothing, thus anything you show them will be progress. The actual difficulty when learning a language is finding appropriate material for your level of understanding, such that you understand most of it, but still find new things to learn. This is known as comprehensible input. The difficulty of most apps is that they are not capable of detecting then adapting study content accordingly to the student’s progress. So they typically go way too slow, or sometimes too fast. Leaving the student frustrated and halting learning.

Jumping with some nonzero knowledge into any app is also torture. It’s known as the valley of despair. The beginner content is too boring and dull, now that you know a bit, but the intermediate level is way too much of a gap for you yet.

My advice is to skip language learning apps. The “motivation via gamification hypothesis” is flawed and lacks nuance and understanding of behavioral science. People don’t stop studying out of a lack of tokens, gems, streaks or achievement badges. It’s because the content itself is uninteresting and bores them. Sure, the celebration and streaks work at first, but they usually lose effect by something known as reinforcement depreciation. The same stimulus shown too much or too frequently stops being gratifying. The biggest reward for learning a language is actually using it.

A method that is known to work is to find graded readers. Watch a lot of YouTube, podcasts, social media, in the target language (avoid the language learning influencers) listen to native influencers speaking about topics you care about. Books work, in-person courses work, learning apps are good to start you up form absolute zero. But most learning happens on what you do in your everyday life. Using the language is the most effective way of becoming good at the language. Everything else is just excuses for using it.

Until it gives you a list of books and two thirds don’t exist and the rest aren’t even in the library.

Good writers use em-dashes with care and intent. They’re a tool like everything else, and they abound in literature. That said, LLMs do tend to use it every time and everywhere.

I’m the last person to ever ask for perfection. The problem is that educators are being told that video is so great. Then their schedules are crammed full by administration with hundreds of hours of video to show the kids. Leaving them with no time for reading, discussion, or project work. Time that is already taken by tests. So in the end, good educators who are probably way better than some of the awful standardized slop shown to children, have to waste hours showing mandated videos. Bad educators sit on their hands knowing they don’t have to become better because the video is babysitting the kids. This dulls the kids to learning and sends them into a false impression that learning is 100% passive. Sorry, but this way of using video is a net negative to education.

The better option is to recognize that just like everything in education, you need diversity and play to each strategy’s strengths according to the group being taught. Video is good to show things that cannot be demonstrated in class or to showcase highly specialized topics. But it has to be mixed with other strategies to be truly effective. What you must not do is pretend that video is always the better option for everything. Because that is absolutely not true. Specially since OP’s assumptions are wrong.

watch the most engaging individuals instead of the average ones

This has no impact on education. If the teacher present in the class is average, a better instructor on the video has a marginal effect, if any at all.

presenting the content in a way designed by entire teams of top teachers

This has not happened and it’s mostly unnecessary. Specially as the mythical “team of top teachers” has never existed, it is not a thing that exists anywhere. Education all over the world is usually designed by committee, with all the associated flaws and setbacks.

falling back on the average ones only for the interactive parts of education

The worst person for the most important part of the process doesn’t sound good to me.

We have the science, we know that in order to have a positive effect videos must be short, display things that cannot be ordinarily experience in everyday life, and present concrete single topic lectures that can feed interaction and discussion in the classroom, or provide guidance to project work and problem solving. They are a tool that makes good educators better, but for average educators who don’t know how to take advantage of it, it won’t have much impact.

The only point I will disagree on it’s about video. Today’s teaching actually over relies on video media precisely under the hypothesis you suggested. Unfortunately modern science knows that showing and telling is the lowest and most primitive form of learning. Effective learning happens when the student starts using the knowledge in interaction with others. For example practicing using said knowledge to solve problems and later teaching others about the topic. The old medical adage has been proven to be true: see (hear), do, teach. Video is less effective at knowledge transfer than reading and for the worse, reading proficiency is at an all time low. Precisely because of pedagogic inertia in adapting evidence based strategies and depending on tradition based strategies.

It is, infrared radiators weight a shit ton and are inefficient, big and unwieldy. Still the only viable option for cooling in space. AI would take an hugemongous square footage of it just so the GPUs won’t melt.

Sexual abuse and grooming children are life altering events that put psychological development and life in danger. How are they not on the same level of severity as a gun inflicted wound? You brought up the subject, not me.

Don’t change the gender, change the event. Teen shoots self on the foot while playing with parent’s unsecured revolver. Is Smith and Wesson responsible?

Morally? Maybe. Legally? Hardly.

If dems went on that basis to push gun laws Republicans would have a fit. That’s how you know the political attention and support around this event is an hypocritical act. This has nothing to do with protecting children, but all with exerting government control over citizen’s internet activity.

Grooming happens everywhere on the internet, and Kansas laws aren’t aimed at that at all. Xitter, Facebook, tiktok, Snapchat, Instagram are way bigger vectors of child grooming. We’ve known for a decade that social media is the biggest source of CSAM, usually with way less moderation than porn sites. But this isn’t about children, it is about pushing a purinatical agenda to get support for a party to acquire control of free speech online and ultimately squash dissent and independent thinking.

It’s like being intimidated by Mr. Rogers. You have to be the most insecure monster to feel like unconditional kindness is threatening to you.

It’s an extension so it can be deactivated. That’s good. But it is a lot of effort and time invested on a feature no one requested, to shoehorn people into workflows that have been proven to be unproductive and introduce another telemetry spying vector. While several performance issues and years old bugs remain ignored. So of course people hate it.

I mean, he’s called a pope, so it is implied right there in the name.

But you’ve heard of me!

/s

YouTube was almost bankrupted because the cost of storage, servers and bandwidth greatly overran the ad revenue. Every idiot with 2 subscribers uploading dozens of hours of content cost them a ton of money. It is easy to underestimate how expensive video streaming infrastructure is.

Doesn’t matter because they get a cut every time they let their friends lie to the board. Executives get a cut every time they seem like they’re approving something. No one is personally liable for the lie. And those selling the lie get bonuses on every contract until they can sell the company to the next bag holder. It’s all imaginary power plays to funnel money.