Acamon

joined 11 months ago
MODERATOR OF
[–] Acamon 4 points 3 days ago

Defintely, it's a waste of an opportunity. But as someone also living in non-English speaking country, it's surprisingly a lot of effort to make sure I actually expose my self to the language. If you're work and social circles are all predominately English speaking, you need to take active steps to have meaningful exposure (and you most certainly should!)

I think it's different now that in the past, because it's so easy to live in a bubble and spend a lot of time communicating online. Even back in the 'old country' I barely spoke with strangers, beside shop interactions. I have my headphones on, listening to music, watching streaming services, and interacting with my friends and family. Now that I'm abroad, I can do pretty much the same thing, I don't need to watch the local TV channels I can just watch YouTube, I don't desperately need to make local friends, because I videochat and game with my buddies back home very easily.

It's taken a couple of years here to realise that without actively pushing myself, I'm not really picking up much of the language. Now I make myself listen to talk radio in the car, and try to overhear conversations on the train, rather than existing in my normal bubble. It's absolutely worth it, but if I'd been motivated I could have made myself consume shows, radios, etc in the target language back I the 'old country'. And while there's certainly more possible language partners to practice with, if they don't emerge naturally in your social circle, then it's not all that much easier than finding someone back home who wanted to improve their English to be my language buddy.

Tldr it's a waste to not learn the local language, but failing to do so isn't so much "doing something wrong" as "not actively pursuing a challenging but reward interest".

[–] Acamon 16 points 3 days ago (5 children)

Two years certainly could be enough, but it really depends what the environment. If OP, like many English speakers who live in France for a couple of years, was teaching English, or studying in an English speaking postgraduate course, and then socialising with a mix of people from different places, who all use English as their shared language... It can be pretty easy to miss out on a lot of immersion.

And the level of language to comfortably phone up a hospital, explain a slightly odd request and be bounced around different departments with the administration... I know plenty of native French speakers who would avoid doing that.

[–] Acamon 5 points 3 days ago

I'm actually surprised it's as high as that!

[–] Acamon 4 points 1 week ago (6 children)

I thought it was places that had circumcision that used the death grip, because of the loss of sensation? (but definitely not an expert!)

[–] Acamon 6 points 1 week ago

I did think that after I commented. Mais non, teaching English Linguistics in France.

[–] Acamon 17 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Teach at a university

[–] Acamon 3 points 3 weeks ago

Lots of guys do...

[–] Acamon 3 points 1 month ago

Yeah, I've found since I started doing them slower and less carefully they seem to be more acceptable. Like, start a captcha, switch to another tab and do something, then go back and finish it. No ai's doing that.

[–] Acamon 7 points 1 month ago

Tbh, almost all oven thermostats are not accurate for the actual temperature of the oven. Like, they probably are measuring 170 accuretly, but the thermostat is in the very back top corner and the temperature in the middle shelf is 15 degrees off.

People who are keen on baking, roasting meat etc where temperatures are important often recommend getting an oven thermometer so you can see the real temperature.

[–] Acamon 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I guess it'd be interesting if you could measure the drop in undeclared income by seeing places that increased their turnover as electronic payments became common. Although because covid was a big driver for that in many places, and disrupted all the expectations for business, demand, costs etc it might be hard to pick apart.

[–] Acamon 1 points 1 month ago

I dream a lot, but how vivid they are and how much I remember them varies. Sometimes they're very visual, weird or interesting, but often they're vague and hard to recall. I find that if I'm not getting enough sleep I don't dream as much, but then if I'm on holiday and catching up on sleep I dream pretty hard.

[–] Acamon 11 points 1 month ago (4 children)

No idea why someone down voted this comment. It's pretty much all there is to it. Where ever you're publishing / monetising can have your real name for financial and legal aspects. But the name you put as the author of the stories / books can be whatever you like (probably not the same as someone else who publishes in your field....)

 

I feel like I'm encountering weird little tics and problems with my android devices, and those of family and friends. Just simple things where settings don't seem to be consistently applied, or the os switches something back repeatedly. For example, my apps are set to auto update, to use data as well as WiFi, etc, but every month or so I go into Play and see that some random app hasn't been updated in weeks.

Or my friend only gets Signal notifications when they open the app, despite giving full background data use, turning off adaptive battery, etc. My mother uses an alarm app that needs to display over the screen for a feature, but despite me setting that permission repeatedly Android keeps turning it off.

Is this just anecdotal bad luck? Or is all the work to preserve battery life, control background usage, etc led to an OS where the user can't control things reliably? It starting to feel a lot like MS Windows!

 

(I've got a pixel watch 2 and moto edge 40 neo, and some jlab earbuds.)

I usually listen to music on my phone, but recently linked my earbuds to my watch, and the same music played on Spotify sounds massively better on the same earbuds when played via the watch.

I assumed it was because I had installed the jlab app, and it was doing a bad job of meddling with the eq. But after uninstalling it there wasn't a noticeable difference. Is there some other setting I can adjust? Any thoughts on whether it's something my moto is doing wrong or something my pixel watch is doing right?

Its a substantial difference (although I'm not enough of an audiophile to describe it) enough that I'm now mostly playing music via my watch. But it's hitting the battery hard, so I'd rather go back to using my phone!

34
submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by Acamon to c/asklemmy
 

This is maybe a weird request, but I'm looking for a way to send myself some information at a specific time in the future. Basically, it's because I've got a few sites that are huge distractions for me at the moment, and I can't stop checking my accounts, responding to messages, etc. My willpower is so low, and I've got a lot of important work right now and it's starting to really mess up my life.

So my plan is to change the passwords to my accounts to a long random string, then save that string somewhere that I can't access for X days. I imagined a simple way would be to use a site that would send me an email on a date, and the content of that email would be my random passwords. But my web searches only seem to find pages telling me how to schedule my own emails, which isn't what I need.

Any advice / suggestions?

(also, in case anyone is thinking it, the sites I'm trying to block access to are all linked to the same email account, and I'm also going to change its password, so I won't easily be able to reset them).

Edit: FutureMe is exactly the site I was thinking of, thanks lemmings!

79
ELI5 How does chatgpt do its shit? (self.nostupidquestions)
submitted 5 months ago by Acamon to c/nostupidquestions
 

I hear people saying things like "chatgpt is basically just a fancy predictive text". I'm certainly not in the "it's sentient!" camp, but it seems pretty obvious that a lot more is going on than just predicting the most likely next word.

Even if it's predicting word by word within a bunch of constraints & structures inferred from the question / prompt, then that's pretty interesting. Tbh, I'm more impressed by chatgpt's ability to appearing to "understand" my prompts than I am by the quality of the output. Even though it's writing is generally a mix of bland, obvious and inaccurate, it mostly does provide a plausible response to whatever I've asked / said.

Anyone feel like providing an ELI5 explanation of how it works? Or any good links to articles / videos?

 

And if so, how do they label headphones, contact lenses etc?

40
submitted 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) by Acamon to c/osr
21
how to find a good USB cable? (self.nostupidquestions)
submitted 9 months ago by Acamon to c/[email protected]
 

I feel like some usb cables are great, allow my devices to charge fast, connect to data reliably, etc. But it seems so difficult to find the ones that are good! I've tried buying expensive ones but it seems pretty hit and miss. Sometimes some cheapass aliexpress cable seems to beat the "good brands".

Are there standards or anything I should look out for? USB drives, sd cards, and the like have read/write speeds or different "classes" but usb cables seem to all claim to be brilliant.

Am I just being dumb?

20
discowolf (lemmy.world)
submitted 11 months ago by Acamon to c/amoledbackgrounds
 
 

One thing I loved about Holmes and Moldvay /Mentzer red boxes was having a set of rules that didn't overwhelm new players with lots of material that they won't need until later.

I know that most osr games are rules light enough that it isn't too much, but I was wondering if there are any systems out there that seperate out the 'basic' and 'expert / advanced' levels like that?

A particular peeve of mine is that spell descriptions seem so often to be presented alphabetical so that the 10 spells that might matter are lost in a bunch of pages. But even just class descriptions or saving throw tables that cover the whole range make level 1 look like a stepping stone, rather than a satisfying place to play many an adventure!

Any suggestions?

 

My nephews & nieces aren't currently allowed much computer access because their parents worry about screen time, inappropriate content and the like. But their mother was sharing concerns with me that they won't have the basic computer skills and understanding that we learned growing up in the 80s and 90s. Having to make computers work before you got your reward of a game was such a big motivation for me as a child. We learned to program in BASIC on spectrums and Amstrads (typing code for a game out of a magazine didn't require much knowledge but taught me a lot) and about memory management by fiddling around with AUTOEXEC.BAT/CONFIG.SYS to get DOS games running, and so on.

Are there any good educational computers / distros / OSes? Searching online mostly shows simplified GUI to access educational "games". But I was wondering if there was a Raspberry PI or linux fork or something, that was geared to create a challenging but supportive environment for learning the fundamentals.

Any suggestions?

2
For those who write... (self.supernote)
submitted 11 months ago by Acamon to c/supernote
 

I've just made this community because Supernote related content was one of the last things I'm still checking reddit for. I'm not a regular content creator, so I'm probably not going to be posting lots of new, useful stuff. But now if any other SN users search on lemmy, there's somewhere to start talking!

 

I've use Twilight for years and love the red filter for using my phone at night. But since getting an AMOLED screen it's started to frustrate me. The way Twilight seems to work means that black also gets a red tint. Previously this was great, but on amoled black is completely dark with no back-light that needs masking with red. So by shifting it red, Twilight is actually making the screen much brighter.

Tldr: Any apps that leave black as black, but give a red tint to all the other colors?

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