For the few times where I had to speak to someone about topics I don't care much about, I found that simply asking questions to learn about them ( as well as the person I'm speaking to) is enough.
"What team do you support? Has it always been the case? How do you think they compare to <well-known other good team>?"
"What car do you drive? Any particular reason for that car model? What's the brand's best and worst things? Oh, that piece tends to break easily; pardon my ignorance, but what's the purpose of it?"
"Any key difference in the way you hunt/fish this or that animal, or the time of the year during which you hunt/fish? I don't know that word, what does it mean? Do you have any anecdotes about some hunting/fishing you did?"
Those have to be adapted to the person and situation, but they are pretty good to keep a conversation going. People love to speak about their interests, and a lot love to even teach about them. Putting yourself as the listener makes them perceive you as nice, and you might even gather interesting information to yourself, or at least gather enough knowledge to have an easier time speaking about it next time..
I found that simply asking questions to learn about
them ( as well as the person I'm speaking to) is enough.
This is such a great insight and skill.
This is something that 99% of "nerds" don't understand about sports. You don't have to fake your way through "knowing about sports" to have a conversation around it.
Suppose you're in Buffalo, NY and you don't know a thing about sports. However, unless visiting with your eyes and ears closed, it would be difficult not to see that the city is really into its football team.
If you are "stuck" in a conversation with a Bills fan and don't know a thing about football, you could just ask - are the Bills good this year? what's it like being a Bills fan? are Bills fans as crazy as they say? how did you come to be a Bills fan - were your parents Bills fans?
There's like 100 possible conversation angles there that don't require any knowledge of sports
Discussions like these show that some people really block out anything beyond their specific interests.
I don't care about superhero movies, so I haven't seen any of the Marvel or DC movies, yet I still know they exist and sometimes I know which one is being promoted right now. If I got stuck at a table somewhere with someone who is a big fan of them, we could have a conversation. It'd mostly consist of me asking questions, but that'd work fine, because as a fan he'd have opinions to share. Same thing with sports or anything, really.
I concur. This would have been awesome anywhere. The fact that this is in Japan is not surprising, although it's clear that if one were to go check out a lifesize Totoro statue, having in Japan makes it nicer because it's its "natural" environment.
Why do you say they "push away the inevitable"? Why would it be inevitable to have quality apps without AI integration? I would even argue that in a lot of cases, no AI integrationadds quality to the app.
> I'm guessing that, if I start by importing a Japanese deck from some other source (because, for example, there's a source with high-quality notes), and then I split it into a writing subdeck, and then the original source adds new notes for new words or makes changes or whatever, that merging the results is basically unsupported.
Splitting a deck in subdecks can be done through tags, and every card has a unique ID field (usually the front, but you or the creator of a deck can define another one). Assuming tags is the only field you change, when you re-import an updated deck into your collection, Anki will match the IDs and you can define it's behavior when it comes to new or already existent cards.
> 4.5 (better in creative writing, and probably warmer sound thanks to being vinyl based and using analog tube amplifiers, but slower and request limited, and I don't even know which of the other features it supports)
I was just thinking about this yesterday. A few weeks or months ago I started learning something new from an online course.
Because I like using Anki to help me remember, I started copy-pasting stuff from that course to a spreadsheet to then export it as a CSV to import into Anki.
One thing leading to another, my spreadsheet quickly ended with weird formatting everywhere that would be converted through macros to HTML tags to style the resulting Anki notes.
This was still implying much manual work, so I finally figured I could just scrape the lessons for which I want notes via some script, and get the resulting CSV with a simple command.
I'm been working on that scraper for two weeks now, and I just realised yesterday that that's the most time I've spent on a side project since too long to remember, and it brings me joy and motivation in the evenings and weekends. Also, apart from the occasional script, I haven't wrote a line of code for years, and I don't know why I ever stopped coding since I love this so much. And last but not least, I decided to go for Python, and I've never learnt Python so it's quite a challenge but also a satisfactory experience.
All in all, this side project is spaghetti code with a dirty hacks sauce, I would never open-source it, and it's never going to be useful for someone other than me.
But it feels like I'm dusting off my brain, and rediscovering skills and passions I had long forgotten. Like finally waking from a long slumber. I'm currently a bit depressed, struggle to focus, and feel burnt out, but at least I am motivated by something and I create something for me, and this makes all the rest bearable.
Great choice and keep going! At my last job, we actually created and sold Anki decks and I can tell you that Python was the main language we used for this. In fact, it's also one of the main languages used to build Anki (it's built with PyQt + Rust & Svelte).
In Japanese learning, people sell premade decks for things like learning kanji with mnemonics and graphics, or curriculum-like decks that provide a sensible order such as N+1 sentences (sentences with at most one unknown word or kanji)
I'm also in the business of generating Anki decks, except on the tools side: https://reader.manabi.io is growing in popularity for Japanese sentence mining for Anki on iOS & macOS
My project began as a "blissful" side project and is now my full-time occupation.
Interesting app, I haven't heard of Manabi before! How does it compare to other apps like Jidousho? And other, more general desktop tools like Yomitan? On mobile, I'm currently using Yomitan on Firefox for mining, but I'm curious about other mobile-specific approaches and apps that people have made.
Compared with Yomitan, a couple quick differences that come to mind:
- Manabi tracks the words and kanji you've read to show you which are new to you, and which you have as flashcards. You can see this visually on the page, and in a vocab listing
- Review flashcards that appear in whatever you're trying to read. Soon I will also have it auto-review flashcards passively as you read and encounter them naturally
- Add flashcards to Manabi Flashcards or to Anki including AnkiMobile on iOS
- One-tap words to look up instead of mouseover from starting boundary
- Manabi packages reading tools such as RSS, EPUB and soon manga (via Mokuro) with user-editable curated libraries of content. Yomitan is less of a standalone-capable tool
I am working on adding Yomitan dictionaries now (to also make the app multilingual) as well as more integrations such as 2-way sync with Anki, WaniKani, JPDB
I think Jidoujisho has a lot of similarities but it's not an iOS/macOS app
I should put up some product comparison material as there are a lot of tools out there
It almost certainly would be useful for someone other than you.
Everything you described automating is something at least thousands of people also do. And most of them don't care about the code quality if it works.
I'm really not sure: it's highly specialized to scrape the pages of that particular course and output it in my own HTML and CSS classes. Luckily for me, their format is quite standard across chapters, but may not be across courses, and I didn't write the code to be modular or adaptive given my need (and the fact that I'm learning Python, not application design).
Still, the code lives in a git repo, so it's not excluded that I'll make it evolve to something more generic and maintainable in the future. But today, it's my own little dirty code that I will jealously keep and hide like that lewd drawing I did when I was a teenager.
When using `dd` I always verbally say "`if` is input file, because I want to take data from <whatever I wrote there> and `of` is output file, because I want that data to overwrite <whatever I wrote here>". Never have I ever had a `dd` incident, but that's such a fear I have that I developed this habit.
>The name comes from the ~~seeds~~ fact that ripe seed pods explode when touched to disperse seeds widely.