Rendello

> My natural bent is strongly focused on reading and words.

I wonder what mine is. I feel like I don't take to reading in a foreign language too easily (though I have trouble focusing on reading generally), but I definitely struggle mimicking as well. Some times I really wonder how I learned French at all, I got to my current level of ability quite quickly, though I'm sorely lacking a lot of fundamentals both in writing and in speech.

I agree though, you can see a big difference in language learners on Youtube between those who practice speech vs those who mostly read. For example, Alexander Argüelles [1] is a famous polyglot who's written quite a few foreign-language grammar books, but the few videos of him speaking show his heavy accent.

For Korean, I wouldn't bother with Latin letters. Hangul is simple:

> A wise man can acquaint himself with them before the morning is over; even a stupid man can learn them in the space of ten days.

– King Sejong on (what would become known as) Hangul

Reading in Korean would have been quite difficult historically, when it was mixed with Chinese characters à la Japanese [2], eg.

> 悠久한 歷史와 傳統에 빛나는 우리 大韓國民은 3⸱1 運動으로 建立된 大韓民國臨時政府의 法統과 不義에 抗拒한 4⸱19 民主理念을 繼承하고, 祖國의 民主改革과 平和的統一의 使命에 立脚하여 正義⸱人道와 同胞愛로써 民族의 團結을 鞏固히 하고, 모든 社會的弊習과 不義를 打破하며, 自律과 調和를 바탕으로 自由民主的基本秩序를 더욱 確固히 하여 政治⸱經濟⸱社會

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Arg%C3%BCelles

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_mixed_script

I learned French mostly through conversation and immersion. This next language is pretty simple phonologically, and I'm not concerned about having a good accent in it, so the reading-puzzle route is something interesting to try.

I recently wanted to try one of Kató Lomb's [1][2] preferred language-learning methods: getting a book in a foreign language and reading it (and re-reading it), figuring out words and phrases as if it's a big puzzle and writing them in the margins. From her book "How I Learn Languages" (1970):

> I recommend buying your own books for language learning. They can be spiced with underlines, question marks, and exclamation points; they can be thumbed and dog-eared, plucked to their essential core, and annotated so that they become a mirror of yourself.

> What shall you write in the margins? Only the forms and phrases you have understood and figured out from the context.

> Ignore what you can’t immediately understand. If a word is important, it will occur several times and explain itself anyway. Base your progress on the known, not the un- known. The more you read, the more phrases you will write in the margins. The relationship that develops between you and the knowledge you obtain will be much deeper than if you had consulted the dictionary automatically. The sense of achievement provides you with an emotional-affective charge: You have sprung open a lock; you have solved a little puzzle.

I can't really bring myself to write in the books themselves though, so I've been using separate paper. It feels wrong, even in a cheap book, like I'm defiling it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kat%C3%B3_Lomb

https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Kat%C3%B3+Lomb

I didn't say "a grand time". It would also be fascinating to live through the Fall of Rome, the Pazzi conspiracy, the Black Death, or any number of other unpleasant things. I'm pretty on-edge about the interesting times I'm living in right now, but they are certainly interesting.

Tribal warfare is often ritualized [1]. I remember reading that the tribes on what is now Canada's West Coast practiced real, brutal warfare compared to their eastern counterparts, due to the scarce resources.

In Burden of Dreams [2], the documentary about the making-of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo, some of the tribal extras would occasionally go off in their motor boats for raids on neighbouring tribes. It's so interesting to me, tribal life would be fascinating to experience.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritual_warfare

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_Dreams

The suggestion has been brought up and dang has commented on it over the years. He doesn't seem opposed to it per se. It's possible your descendants may live to see dark-mode HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23199062

See also:

dang + "dark mode": https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

dang + "on the list" (lol): https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

One of my favourite ones in the post I linked is the "ff" ligature. It uppercases to "FF", meaning in UTF-8 it goes from one encoded character to two, and from 3 bytes total to 2 bytes total.

Lots to read about here for those interested (and that's without getting into `Casefold`, `NFKC_Casefold`, simple vs complex case mappings, the CLDR, etc.):

https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode17.0.0/core-spec/cha...

I've never seen someone miss sleep paralysis before. I get it, but the hallucinations that people describe never happen to me. I just become aware that I'm about to wake up, but I can't yet control my body or even breathing. I always know not to panic, yet I always panic and try desperately to start moving. I can always see the room, but it's a dream version because my eyes aren't really open and it looks different once I'm truly awake.

I don't have much sleep weirdness, but when I'm about to fall asleep, I frequently imagine 3D object spinning and rapidly changing size. Kinda like the 3D TempleOS sprites [1], but 5x faster and increasing/decreasing size at the same rate.

1. https://youtu.be/LtlyeDAJR7A?t=451

> UNICODE codepoints where the UTF-8 encoding lengths are the same for lowercase and uppercase.

This very same property got me to post this [1], which sent me down the rabbithole of learning about Unicode in earnest and building my Unicode tool. Which may have an initial release some time this millennia... maybe.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42014045

I like burntsushi's string-searching work because it's well documented, split modularly into libraries/applications, and runs the gamut from low- to high-level (his blog posts and comments online are extremely helpful too). I use these three tools which he maintains:

Low level: memchr [1];

Medium level: Regex (Rust crate) [2];

High level: ripgrep [3].

Other names to look out for are the previously aforementioned Wojciech Muła, as well as Daniel Lemire (of simdjson [4][5]). Not SIMD-specific, but Data-Oriented Design can be a big help in terms of thinking about SIMD and cache-friendly data layout (as well as trimming down the work that the computer needs to do, generally). I've talked that to death, so I'll just link those comments here [6].

1. https://docs.rs/memchr/latest/memchr/

2. https://docs.rs/regex/latest/regex/

3. https://github.com/burntsushi/ripgrep

4. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlvKAT7SZIQ

5. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.08318

6. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

I also have a favourite string matching algorithm, the "Generic SIMD" from this post [1] by Wojciech Muła (I haven't really read the other two SIMD algorithms since I wasn't planning on working with intrinsics).

There were some good comments that post's thread [2], including from burntsushi of ripgrep.

1. http://0x80.pl/notesen/2016-11-28-simd-strfind.html

2. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44274001

I think there's a lot of interest in German culture in Japan. You see German characters and phrases fairly often in anime, pronounced just as badly as English in anime.

The popular anime Frieren names all its characters on-the-nose German words. Plot twists get spoiled for German speakers, for example one of the characters is called "Lügner", Liar:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/MeaningfulName/Friere...

Yes, <ruby> works with arbitrary text. There are quite a few styling options too:

https://www.w3.org/International/articles/ruby/styling.en.ht...

This may or may not be relevant, but one thing about lower case generally:

If you're doing string matching via Casefold or NFKC_Casefold [a], characters from both the needle and the haystack are converted to lowercase (with exceptions for algorithm stability reasons) before being compared.

Why lower case and not upper case? Theoretically, the choice is arbitrary, but given the distribution of lower-case vs upper-case characters in most texts, you can use the fact that lower case occurs more often to optimize your algorithms by skipping the case conversion for most characters.

a: https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode17.0.0/core-spec/cha...

That's right, I didn't even think of that. Now I'm reading this fascinating article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_toilet

Laminar flow from the man?

I've seen youtubers achieve laminar flow by filling garden hoses with aligned drinking straws. Perhaps... there's an idea here...?

I'm awaiting the Dyson splashless Suction Urinal.

In my cleaning and maintenance work I'd replaced a lot of these. The orange ones I'm familiar with have a decently nice scent.

But last week I went to use my new shampoo and it had the same scent. On its own it would be nice enough but all I could smell was piss. Then I forgot and tried the same shampoo again a few days later to the same effect!

It's used by Janes as eating root vegetables like onions or garlic is discouraged or forbidden in that religion [1].

(Un)related: onions and garlic are pretty close to each other. Chicago is named after šikaakwa, [2] the native word for the local Allium that's alternately called "wild onion" or "wild garlic" in English [3]. You can hear a similar word for onion in a different Algonquin language, Ojibwe [4].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jainism#Ahimsa_in_practice:_Ja...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago#Etymology_and_nickname...

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allium_tricoccum

4. https://ojibwe.lib.umn.edu/main-entry/zhigaagawanzh-na

I've made this Roman recipe probably a dozen times and everyone who's tried it really likes it [1].

The strange ingredients are garum [2] and asafoetida [3]. The former is just a fish sauce, so that's not hard to substitute, but you have to find asafoetida on the Internet or at an Indian food store.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LynenQ5h2Y

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garum

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asafoetida

If you've been around alcoholics, you know the smell. You can smell their sweat on their body, clothes, sheets, etc.

Plus add in Flash and Java applets.

Books on procrastination? Now you don't have to get around to reading them! (I jest)

> In closing arguments, prosecutor Binu Palal told jurors to take Davis at his word and find him guilty.

> For years, he argued, Davis had been telling people "that he is responsible for Tupac Shakur's murder" through documentaries, his memoir, podcasts and a police interview.

> Throughout the trial, Davis' defence team tried to persuade jurors that his comments were fiction - bravado and exaggeration intended to sell books and make money.

I feel like there's a song about this... [1]

Gangsters telling on themselves can be almost funny from a distance, but that violence and lack of justice is real. It's hard not to feel sick to your stomach when you see a case like the Nathan Leigh shooting, where a Toronto gangster did broad daylight execution (attempted) on camera, beat the case, and has been rapping about the crime for years later [2].

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0KIhEbellKI

2. https://youtu.be/TGmDLJ5wp4I?t=310

I believe the prefixed literals are a direct response to this style of multiline string. The style you showed is pretty common in a programming languages, but language implementers are faces with a tradeoff:

- Keep the initial indentation for each line in the string literal; or

- Track the indentation level and attempt to remove the whitespace for each line.

For a lot of strings, extra whitespace doesn't matter (eg. SQL), but when you don't want it, you end up removing the indentation in the string literal, and having a string like this:

    fn f() {
        text = "This is a decent way to format strings,
    but surely it could be a little nicer indentation-wise,
    right?";
        print(text);
    }

The prefixed lines have the disadvantage of being a pain to use if your editor doesn't have nice multi-line editing like Vim or Sublime. But I think it's a nice option when it's available.

I think it really is a matter of distraction. When I was using public transit a lot, I managed to get through books really quickly by substituting them for my phone. And there was a period where I had no phone for a few months in a new city, and I just read constantly. Even outside while walking. I do the same on my phone, after all.

It's likely the same for me, but I tend to relisten to audiobooks I like, sometimes dozens of times. I have a hard time focusing on physical books, and I've probably only re-read a handful of them, so the net effect is that I take in more with a good audiobook.

I would like to learn to focus... (https://youtu.be/1IRn8BN3Qhw?t=331)

Aside: one Zig (syntax) feature that I really missed in Rust is shown in the second code block, namely prefixed multi-line string literals à la:

    const text =
        \\This is a long comment
        \\But I can split it among lines arbitrarily
        \\And keep my indentation.
    ;

I've started using the Rust macro library `docstr` [1], which does the same thing:

    const TEXT: &'static str = docstr!(
        /// Now I can do it in Rust, too.
        /// I prefer this style a lot of the time
        /// for long texts.
    );

It even works with macros (example from the docs):

    let greeting: String = docstr!(format!
        /// Hello, my name is {name}.
        /// I am {} years old!
        age
    );

1. https://docs.rs/docstr/latest/docstr/

From your article:

> "Mima" is a name derived from a Chinook Jargon term meaning "a little further along or "downstream".

To keep the random learning going, Chinook Jargon [1] is fascinating in itself. A few years ago someone on this site suggested a book called You Can't Win, an autobiography of a reformed hobo/thief/addict written in the 20s. It's fantastic, especially the audiobook version on Spotify. Googling now, I'm seeing it got a (poorly reviewed) movie adaptation this year [2].

Anyway, when locked in a British Colombia jail around the turn of the century, the thief/author used it to communicate with his Chinese cellmate [3]:

> A priest visited the jail one day and gave me a pamphlet on which he had printed the Chinook language. In answer to my question he told me it contained about three hundred words—nouns, verbs, and adjectives. It was created by the Hudson Bay traders, years before, and taught to all the Northwest Indians to simplify trading with the different tribes. […]

> One day he came in with a scared-looking China boy about twenty years old. “Yank, here’s a cellmate for you.” He locked the Chinese in, thinking he was punishing me. The China boy later proved the jailer’s undoing and my deliverance. He knew some Chinook, but not one word of English. I learned from the Indian trusty that he was held for trial, charged with stealing a considerable sum of money from his employer, and that his case was about as hopeless as mine.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinook_Jargon

2. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1402593/

3. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/69404/pg69404-images.ht...

I had a similar thought when someone linked [1] Mike Acton's "Data-Oriented Design Operating Rules" [2] written for agents. The text is Claude-y, but the step-by-step DOD guidance is neat, it specifies a development protocol the likes of which I haven't seen elsewhere, besides in Mike's talks (in less detail).

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49062520

2. https://github.com/macton/nagent/blob/main/context/data-orie...