Thoughts on Using DuoLingo
So I’ve been using DuoLingo for just over two weeks now. It’s been fun.
And I think if you’re interested in learning a language, it’s another tool-in-the-belt to use. As in, it has its limitations.
My impression is, though, that it’s great for introducing words, and some grammar. For better or worse, DuoLingo is quite gamified.
I [...]
Toothless Dangerous Rhetoric in NZPol
I don’t follow the NZ Blogosphere too closely.
Glimpsing at it, it’s not difficult to come across nutcase-y views. (My favourite, as made popular by the NZ Flag Referendum, was the kind which used CAPITALS to highlight IMPORTANT WORDS in a meaningless rant).
– Given that NZ has a largely apathetic attitude towards politics, religion et al., I [...]
Internet Myopia
Twitter is a great website for righteous anger. Recently, I’ve observed that people on Twitter tend to be myopic. – You can be fairly sure that the things people tweet about (or retweet) will all have a single focus. It’s more specific than “my tribe is awesome/good”. I tend to be hesitant about giving object-level opinions.
There’s a well-known [...]
What even is the point of politics
What even is the point of politics?
The arguing-with-acquaintances-about-the-news kind of politics. It seems to be just for expressing anger.. – but moreover, to express tribal affiliation. (Meaningness’s “Ethics is Advertising” post does a good job of arguing this point: that so much of what we do is to signal that we are good people). But it seems to [...]
Best Programming Style Always Depends
In Steve Yegge’s hauntingly interesting “Portrait of a n00b” article, he argues that:
- all meta-data is unnecessary for programs to run. n00b programmers can’t handle the complexity of code, and so prefer as much whitespacing as possible (so that there’s less code on the screen). – Expert programmers on the other hand prefer as much code on the [...]
Catching up on Action Games
So I recently got a new gaming PC. It’s good to not have to say “can’t play that game, my computer is so old”. I was able to re-play through Just Cause 3. – I’d played through on a friend’s PS4; but since then the DLC for the game has been released.
JC3 was already very much an action-playground. [...]
My Impression of Ruby So Far
Background I’ve recently started programming in Ruby. I’ve inherited a codebase for writing automated-UI tests against a website. The tests make use of Capybara, which provides a high-level “DSL” for interacting with a webpage/browser in the sameway a user would; Capybara itself does this by abstracting over Selenium (or some other driver, like Poltergeist/PhantomJS); Selenium itself allows interaction with different [...]
My Hope for Political Discussion
The other day something wonderful happened in a chat group I’m in.
Upon reading David Wong’s excellent discussion of rural voter mindset, a friend made the remark like “we need more ‘empathic explainers’, rather than ‘explainer’ articles”. I agree with the sentiment.. but my mind thinks in ways like “what are the obstacles”.
So I can agree that [...]
Future Cop LAPD
Future Cop LAPD is an old game, released for PlayStation One, as well as PC. It looks like there are dozens of videos about it on YouTube, getting ~1k-10k views each. The comments are usually filled with “man, this was such a cool game”. Sadly, as happens with ‘legacy’ games, it doesn’t look possible to purchase on modern systems. Even [...]
On Programming and Testability
I’ve been reading some interesting blogposts recently: This summary of “Why Functional Programming Matters”, (I’ve not read the piece it summarizes, would probably be interesting) argues roughly that the usual pitch of FP is its purity (“no side effects, no having to reason about side effects”), & that this is a bad pitch. Rather, the benefits FP brings are that [...]