Just a friendly heads up, for the Japanese exercises the video starts just a bit too late and the word you're listening for is cut off. This might only be pertinent for languages where vocab words are appearing at the beginning of sentences, French and Spanish didn't have "gap words" at their sentence start for the few exercises I tried.
This is a cool app, I would have enjoyed this when I was grinding on Japanese back in the day.
"The concept of running shoes as we understand them today, specifically designed to improve running efficiency and comfort, did not emerge until the late 19th and early 20th centuries."
It's a neat idea imagining what running footwear was like throughout history. Was Pheidippides barefoot when he purportedly ran from Marathon to Athens? Did Indigenous Americans debate which style of moccasins was better for your long term foot health? Did warriors develop plantar fasciitis from poorly designed boots?
I love these easy-to-illustrate examples where a request seems simple, but adds a lot of trouble for the person implementing it. "It's just adding a new skin for their footwear, how hard could that be?"
Back in the Windows 7 days I installed Skype on my parents computer before moving abroad, their user experience was basically like receiving a phone call. Even though they weren't tech savvy we never had any issues. I would call them, and if they were home and near the computer, they could answer it and we'd be video chatting.
A year or so ago I found this to be impossible, there was no application for desktop that was as simple as receiving a phone call. My father has no smart phone. I sent him a zoom link via email but he couldn't log on to the family computer without getting blasted with UI updates, terms of service changes, "Do you want to use OneDrive?", "Here's what's new in Chrome", "Try asking Copilot anything!", etc. From his perspective the computer never worked the same way twice. I wish we had regulations that prevented buying out competition.
On a related note, a bit over a decade ago I had installed logmein on my parents' computer to be able to easily help them with any IT issues. But they since pivoted away from personal accounts and I never found anything else as straightforward. I feel that in a lot of ways tech has regressed.
EDIT: I just found that logmein actually offer a personal product again, named GoToMyPC, but what used to be entirely free at the time, is now priced at $35/month.
> It's interesting to see the focus on PDAs now that the product category is entirely dead:
In the context of screen sharing, I guess smartphones are the evolution of what they meant by "Pocket PC". Sure, the mobile remote desktop use-case is a little niche, but the product class isn't dead, it was just reinvented.
I see them as fundamentally different because PDAs mostly didn't have network connectivity at all, while modern phones are connectivity-first and gained functionality from there. It was novel to have a PDA with a modem that did anything, much less provide connectivity back to one's home computer.
That's a fundamental difference in their history, but not in what they turned into. Especially, again, in the context of screen sharing-- a PDA would've needed to have networking in order to run GoToMyPC. It's "device in your pocket that lets you control a bigger computer with remote desktop" either way.
Try RustDesk instead of a bunch of proprietary alternatives suggested by other posters. It uses H.264/H.265/VP9 depending on your hardware and network, and is very fast. It also lets you set up your own server, leaking no information to third parties, but that's optional.
I know this is about Windows, but just in case any Mac users don't know, there's a default app called Screen Sharing (in Applications > Utilities) that lets you dial into any other Mac user's computer if you have their iCloud username, allowing you to both see and control their screen. It doesn't work 100% of the time - sometimes it requires a tweak on a wifi router on the other end - but it's saved me countless hours on unproductive phone calls while helping my mother with tech issues on her iMac.
Windows actually has a built-in remote assistance tool now called Quick Assist. It provides a simple way to remotely control another Windows machine with user consent, without requiring third-party software. It's preinstalled on Windows 10 and 11—just launch 'Quick Assist' from the Start menu, generate a session code, and connect. While it's not as feature-rich as a full remote desktop solution, it's more than enough for parental IT support.
If you have a decent connection I find just using Windows Remote Desktop (RDP) over VPN (Tailscale) works really well.
The value prop for the proprietary services like TeamViewer for me is they work much better over poor connections and cross platform. (Are there any decent RDP servers for Mac/Linux? In any case it’s another thing to have to install.)
I think Chrome Remote Desktop works pretty well. It's easy enough to configure for use and put a link to the host page in the browser toolbar. I might setup RustDesk if I get the time, it was in a state of flux last time I looked at it, but it seems to be more solid now.
My grandparents were terrible at smartphones. To them, it's like a landline phone, but you have to charge it every 1-2 days. Yet my grandpa was decent at PC, and email, and so on, as it was in "a place" and easy to drive.
Exactly! This is a trend nowadays. Go to web - they even make apps for it, just to put you to that webpage - then do some or all of [1].
Unusable!
About Skype: Once upon a time I had a phonecall with my then almost 70 retired mother from abroad, who never been a tech-savvy person, to be gentle, saying we should try Skype for its video chat, better sound and its no/low cost. I will install it next time being home. Next day she called me on Skype! She used the link I sent (she is not speaking English btw.), installed, configured, looked me up and called me out of the blue. Did not happen similar before or ever since. Soon, I will have trouble getting through the typical user experience, well, more like not giving an f getting through it.
WhatsApp these days also has native clients for Windows and macOS (UWP and Catalyst, respectively). They don't yet have all the features of the Electron/web client, but are getting there, and at least on macOS, I much prefer the experience.
Also, I wouldn't exactly call Qt native, unless you happen to be on KDE.
I think this is definitely get them an iPad and use FaceTime territory. They seem to be the least invasive in terms of just letting you get on with the task in hand, instead of having to understand what a OneUI update is and what each of the 5 different TOS checklist items means.
Right now people have to point their phone cameras at at the thing they're photographing or recording, it's a very clear visual signal to others and there are cultural norms for this behavior. If a person is doing this in a common tourist destination that's more acceptable than pointing your camera at somebody else's children without asking them first. Imagine how uncomfortable it would be for somebody to hold their phone at eye level and point it at you the entire time they're having a conversation with you, even if they say they're not recording or anything like that. Having a distaste for smart glasses is pretty consistent with the status quo.
> Right now people have to point their phone cameras at at the thing they're photographing
I mean, that really isn't true. There have been wearable and carryable hidden cameras for ages and we also have 360 cameras that no longer need to be pointed at what they are capturing.
This isn't changing anything about what is available to purchase, and if anything, these are relatively more obvious.
The actual change would be, that if these become widely adopted, those types of cameras would be everywhere.
You're right, it's possible and common to be recorded without somebody pointing a phone camera at you. That doesn't negate my point, right now the norm is that in many situations you _can_ record to your personal device without informed consent but you shouldn't. That will change if these types of cameras are everywhere.
I wasn't even thinking about paywalls, the first thing I did was check to see if cookie banners and "Sign in with Google" popups went away. There's so many user-unfriendly things that you constantly deal with, any amount of browsing is just a bad experience without putting up defenses like this.
> Ask any artist to explain how color works, and they’ll launch into a treatise about how the Three Primary Colors—red, blue, and yellow—form a color wheel
I don't think the author asked _any_ artists how color works before writing this line.
I didn't read that to mean a literal two minutes. Based on his style of writing that was quoted in the article and the nature of his mistake I don't think he's reporting an in-depth postmortem on the situation, although I didn't bother going to twitter to take a closer look. He probably didn't even realize his mistake within two minutes.
When I took my graduate level operating systems class we had to do a bunch of coursework in C. Beej's Guides are the reason I passed that class. Thank's Beej!
I think there's a fair argument to be made that computing is the most complex synthetic thing humans have ever conceived all on our own. If we're talking about making systems in the broadest sense, then any category of problems that we create systems for could conceptually be managed on paper and pencil. Let's say "number of things that could go wrong multiplied by the difficulty a layperson would have in fixing such a thing" is what we mean by complexity, a computer would be more complex than a filing cabinet every single time.
There are trade offs for the complexity though, and well managed complexity could disappear behind the interface of a computer. When this is done well it feels seamless, and when it's done poorly it's painful. So maybe I'm arguing the meaning of complexity isn't 1:1 with the meaning of complicated. At the end of the day "did moving this to a computer make it better?" is the question to answer, and a lot of times the answer is no. QR menus at restaurants is my favorite punching bag for this but any home appliance with bluetooth or wifi is an easy target.
Complexity hidden from a user is there for someone to manage.
This reads like empty circumlocution in defense of programmer jobs.
My boring EE and math degrees are from another era, before all this cool software jargon captivated the world. I am not really sure what all the verbosity of the DSLs, config formats, and many programming languages really solves from an engineering perspective. Much of it feels like baggage from the era before graphical computing first; iPhones don’t boot to a CLI, right?
Humanity burns a lot of real resources preserving computing history when the first computers were human mathematicians. What does a Commodore and Borland have to do with mathematics? Feels like nostalgia more than engineering.
I will keep iterating on personal computing experiments. Ye olde cranks of software lore and genius CEOs are just normal people hallucinating about their essentialness to society. Yawn. (I’m doing it too!)
The real energy vampires are not the sarcastic, but the toxic positivity crowd peddling Ponzi schemes passed on from dad and his 80s bitching Camaro crowd. Yes, yes, you did something within the constraints of physical reality. Ooh wow an expensive agency manipulating boondoggle; can I subscribe to your newsletter?
The next generation grew up on the internet. They’re aware of the hustle, whereas the aging out elders were maybe a bit less discerning given lack of education and experience; how were they know it’s just arithmetic and Boolean of memory addresses and semantic babble? Their special boys seemed convinced and the elders might have been a bit more accepting of hallucinations given their religious upbringing.
I ended up in software expecting to have a career in industrial controls, but entered that field at the tail end of offshoring, never got my foot in the door as networking became harder, internet was not so socially organized back then. Couldn’t figure out where to be at the right time.
I’m fucking sick of “software” as we know it. It’s elementary DSL parsers and git pull github.com/everything.git which given how things work with software is great but that that’s how things work in software is ridiculous.
This is a cool app, I would have enjoyed this when I was grinding on Japanese back in the day.