If the goal is to make money, you will make money. If the goal is to make quality software, you will make quality software. Sometimes those two goals are in alignment, most of the time they are at odds.
in my experience, when it comes to picking two out of: quality, cost, or speed to delivery, businesses always choose speed and cost.
I dont' like it, but I just grew to accept that.
The reason why physical engineering seems focused on delivering quality is because of strict regulatory oversight, which for better or worse, we lack in software.
good quality software (say, based on well designed, documented, tested etc. building blocks) can lower costs and improve speed to delivery in the longer run (less need to refactor, fewer bugs, easy to reuse, extend etc. etc.)
the trouble, empirically speaking, is that this "longer run" is not close enough to weigh on decisions :-)
Yea, it would be rather unfortunate terminology to call websites outside the realms of Google and bing as “dark web” as if somehow these services legitimize the internet itself.
the term 'deep web' refers to the subset of internet-connected information that is not widely published eg on search engines, where as the 'dark web' is specifically sites that hide their hosting information behind tor i2p etc
as unfair as it may be, a huge part of the usefulness of information is its accessibility, and these search engines currently hold a near-monopoly on which sites can generally be considered readily accessible, ie the 'surface web' above the deep web
I would personally call telegram/viber/whatsapp/et al. groups/chats/channels "dark web", since information is not indexed there and is basically decaying over time. In about a decade or decade and a half ago, forums flourished, it was really easy to find and share relevant information with relevant group of interested people. I particularly was interested in car's DIY service & retrofit topics. Unfortunately everything is mostly in messengers these days, which won users by offering real-time responses, but providing no real way of topic sorting or proper history. Duplicates of questions and answers of different topics and threads mixed together into an information garbage bin.
> The traditional aim of fieldwork is to produce for undocumented languages what linguists sometimes call “the holy trinity”: a grammar, which is a road map to sounds, syntax and structure; texts, which are chunks of unedited speech that reveal a language’s texture; and a dictionary.
In some cases, they try to use that knowledge to teach the language to new generations so that it doesn't totally die out. Wašiw (Washoe) is an example that one of my professors worked on: https://www.americanindianmagazine.org/story/where-wasiw-spo...
Yes. What little of it remains however. Much of the worlds languages are disappearing permanently. There is a small movement for foreign individuals to learn dying tongues and for some descendants to learn, but I would not expect this to counteract the prevailing homogenization of language globally. Regional differences in dialect can become new languages over time, but I don't expect this to countermand the number of languages lost in recent times to colonization and the cultural dominance of certain countries and languages.
I’m part of the problem here. My kids will never learn my first language. English has become the language of technology, and will probably become even more dominant as a result.
How old are your kids? The solution (if they're still babies) is to simply speak to your kids in your first language all the time. The brain does the rest. You don't have to "teach" them anything.
It's not that simple. Kids learn language from their peers just as much as (maybe more than) from their parents.
I'm living in the US: I always speak Korean to my teen kids and they mostly answer in Korean, so they have no problem understanding phrases like "When is dinner today?" However, because they've never been to school in Korea, they basically have zero knowledge of Korean words for, say, "descendant", "ambassador", or "independence", while being totally familiar with their English counterparts.
OP is talking about how if kids learn to be bilingual+ at an early enough age then it makes learning languages that much more easier. This is compared to people who speak one language and try to acquire a second but start in, for example, middle school or later. People in the second boat are at a significant disadvantage. It's a well-studied area and one way of picking up second languages earlier is via peers at an early age as well.
It doesn't mean your points are invalid, but in general people like your kids are just going to be way better at learning language.
IMHO, it's almost cruel that many colleges expect all students to fulfill a 2 year foreign language requirement, even if they have no prior exposure or education. You end up with language learning that is watered down and generally a waste of the learner's time, in addition to making their education more expensive.
> You end up with language learning that is watered down and generally a waste of the learner's time
I agree it might often be a failure, in say, achieving fluency. But certainly no a waste. Exposure to foreign languages, and their cultural contexts, can be very enriching, especially the more distant they are from your own culture and language family. And the contrast with your own language and culture can teach you much about your own.
This is a common argument but it completely ignores any idea of efficiency in learning or learning outcomes that benefit the student.
Most people would get way more out of studying a culture and its context by directly studying that and in way less time. This time saved one could spend as 4 semesters of specialized cultural studies, one full cultural study abroad semester, or learning about other things (comparative linguistics?).
There's also the idea that you can only fully appreciate works of literature in their original language, but learning Russian to appreciate Dostoevsky is overkill and many people love his work who don't know the language. Learning about other cultures in translation is arguably going to be superior since any translation you can do is with skills way below fluency.
> The solution (if they're still babies) is to simply speak to your kids in your first language all the time.
No need for them to be babies. That will work as long as they're younger than 12, and probably for a few years after. But if the kids have already learned to speak another language, they will hate this approach.
> But if the kids have already learned to speak another language, they will hate this approach.
The way to fix this is to find them things that only exist in that language and not in English. It could be other family members, friends, TV, music, time abroad, etc.
Kids, like adults, need motivation as the primary factor that determines success learning a language.
Why not speak to them in both? If they're near adulthood already it might be too late, but if they're young kids are basically sponges for languages. And growing up bilingual makes it much, much easier for them to learn a third language down the line if they ever want to.
Speaking to them in your native tongue isn't going to make them worse at English if they're growing up in an English-speaking environment.
My father's parents were immigrants and they spoke their native language to each other, but they didn't want their kids to learn it. I've tested my father and he has about a 5000 word vocabulary, pretty good for someone whose parents didn't want him to learn it!
Kids have an incredible ability to learn languages, given motivation, and they don't need to go to school to learn words like "accountant" reading books will do.
The reasons are non-linguistic - I emigrated partly to get away from the culture of my birth. I want to heavily curate my kids’ experience of that culture and teaching them the language isn’t going to help that.
To me, giving your children a second language is an incredible gift. Setting the pathways in the brain that separate concepts from the written and spoken representation, the abstractions of different grammars, etc, is very valuable. And something that I have really valued as I grew older.
But I (superficially, of course) understand perhaps why you'd like curate their experience of something you took fairly extreme steps to escape. That might well be the greater gift.
Appreciate your perspective -- thanks for sharing.
> Modern games though are clearly designed to get you as addicted as possible and to play as long as possible to an extent that made the old school 90s RPGs grinds look tame and mild.
You do realize the term "quarter muncher" isn't a modern one right? We had plenty of those types meth-level-addiction games back in the early days of gaming too.
You've reinvented Spotlight and tab-grouping by encroaching on the entire content space w/ nested layers of UI elements? If you're targeting the MacOS platform, you may want to reconsider this approach.
Well, I already say that Macs were pretty known for media/writting people such as journalists, artists, painters, designers, writers, and so on. That was pre-OSX.
Mac OS 9 with Quark Xpress and Photoshop were THE tools used in any newspaper/magazine HQ, no matter the country in the world.
Professional printed papers/music and video production = Mac. Period. No one would say otherwise in the 90' s.
But with OSX you had both the media/press people and the science people in your pocket. (Unix sysadmins with KSH, Unix utilities and SSH ready from the beginning, maybe not as a server but you could test all crap locally, and well, Aqua looked shiny, fun and shit would work; and for die hard C/C++/Perl/X11/Motif programmers porting legacy scientific tools to Xquartz and Motif with barely any changes).
And OFC, LaTex, with some GUI's showing the PDF preview.
