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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: April 27th, 2024

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  • Some might say interconnecting everything could be a legitimate goal. Nonetheless, some people started to report about huge amounts of data and metadata being sent to Matrix central servers.

    Curious that this claim is without source in the original.

    I also have porblems with their claims about bridges. Bridges are Band-Aids to allow you to communicate with people not on Matrix, not a dark masterplan to build a central spionage hub.

    By default, a homeserver trusts matrix.org in questions of federation and identity of other servers. You have to get that trust from somewhere. You are free to choose another source for that.

    (For example, my homeserver isn’t federated at all, and has that trusted server removed; it doesn’t communicate with anyone. Also it’s not synapse, but that’s besides the point.)




  • smiletolerantly@awful.systemstoaww@lemmy.worldIt really did
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    4 days ago

    Yep.

    Those older movies are beautiful achievements for sure. But it’s disingenuous to say that there isn’t a plethora of movies and shows today that rival and surpass those older examples visually. Not to speak of just how much more fluent animation has become.

    Many of the people who worked on those older masterpieces are still in animation today, and have only become better at their art.














  • Thanks! :) Yes, definitely not dropping it :)

    Pimsleur is actually a rather “old” program, originally devised just as a kind of audiobook, but now they also do have an app. It’s 30min/day and basically only teaches you to speak. They do not make any claims about getting you to a point where you are fluent, can read, write, reason about grammar, or anything the like; but they do, very very quickly, get you to actually talk and to understand other people talking.

    I initially started learning with them, 20 days before a vacation to a notoriously non-English-speaking country, and it was actually great to, at that early point, already be able to get across what you needed to say and to understand what was being communicated to you in 95% of situations, AND not be hampered by the usual shyness to speak in a foreign language, because I was already so used to actually speaking out loud in it.

    I’ve since added a more traditional grammar/vocab curriculum, but continued Pimsleur precisely because I’d be lacking speaking exercise otherwise. So, yeah, no, I’ll probably continue on with it.

    What I actually dislike about it is

    1. they do not teach you any systematic grammar (which is OK!), but then also think that therefore, you cannot pick up on patterns. The consequence of this is that ~90 lessons in, if a new verb is introduced as vocabulary, then I can be certain that the vocab section for that lesson will contain that verb, that verb as a question, that verb in the past tense, and that verb negated, even if those forms are 100% regular. Which would not be a problem, EXCEPT they put a stupid 10-vocab-cards-per-lesson limit upon themselves, so now whenever a new, actually difficult form or concept is introduced, it is never in the vocab and I have no way of revisiting things I did not understand. (The same, btw, is true for numbers. Literally every number from 1 to 100, and basically every multiple of 100 up to 10.000 is in the vocab at some point, despite it being crystal clear how to form numbers once you have seen 1-20, 100, and 200. Yesterday - again, 90 lessons in!! - my vocab included the word for “twelve”.)
    2. their “spaced repetition” is a joke, because a) its “spaces” are way, way too big and b) obviously do not adapt to your skill/gaps.

    So, yeah: really nice to get talking quickly and to help with pronunciation and getting used to speaking; really bad for everything else.