cblum

+1 to using it as opportunity to listen to a podcast.

I consider it some of my best podcast listening time. Somehow I’m more tuned in when doing house chores vs. trying to just sit and listen, or while walking outside where I have to pay attention to traffic when crossing the street and such.

To add a bit more to this: AJATT (all Japanese all the time) later evolved into MIA (mass input approach), which then became Refold.

The gist of those methods is mass input + create SRS cards for sentences where only one word or grammar pattern is unfamiliar to you.

A similar but more relaxed approach is ALG (automatic language growth), where you start from very basic input with lots of visual aids and let the language “wash over you”: no taking notes, no creating flashcards, no dictionary lookups. Sounds crazy, but it works for a lot of people. It’s the method behind Dreaming Spanish, which was inspired by the teaching method at the AUA language school in Bangkok, where Dr. J Marvin Brown used Stephen Krashen’s ideas to create a Natural Approach course to teach foreigners Thai from zero to fluency.

Pimsleur is awful for Mandarin. I wish I hadn’t wasted my time on it.

Can you elaborate on that? Sounds really interesting.

I grew up in a place you could call “rural South America” (specifically in a rural border town between Brazil and Uruguay) and at the time didn’t feel free there, but these days there’s a lot I think I could appreciate about the place if I were to go back (I’ve been living in the US for the past 13 years).

> FSAs are insane, conceptually.

Indeed. I don’t understand why they cant just make medical expenses tax-deductible up to a certain amount. The effect would be the same. Why do I need a separate account for it, and why do I have to guess how much I’ll need every year (as you pointed out)?

I guess at least part of the answer is that the companies administering FSAs make money out of this system. Sigh.

Somewhat kinda related: I grew up in a Brazilian town that borders one of our many Spanish-speaking neighbors. We used to make fun of the folks across the border for pronouncing pizza like piça (“pissa”), which on our side of the border was a vulgar word for penis.

FWIW, I’m not in NYC, but I’m in general a “ban the cars” type and have a wife and kid. We’re intentionally raising the kid in the city because we believe it’s a richer cultural environment than suburbs, and also because we both grew up in cities in our respective countries.

This reminds me that when I was a kid, I read an Uncle Scrooge story where a cruise ship of his runs aground and he sends Donald to run it as a new kind of hotel.

I carried that in my head as fact, that there was once a cruise ship that ran aground and they turned it into a hotel.

Only realized it as an adult when one day I brought up the ship-turned-into-hotel thing in a conversation at work.

What’s the work culture there like? Is it more relaxed than in North America or Western Europe?

On a related note, I don’t know how Apple has managed to mess up so badly the idea of storing your own information like address, phone number, etc.

Every time I’ve moved, for months afterwards I keep having to fix my address when using Apple Pay or setting directions to home, etc. because it seems like they keep multiple copies of that information all over the place, instead of referring to a single piece of information.

Places I can think of where I’ve had to update my address one by one: each credit card I have associated with Apple Pay; Maps; my own contact that I can share with others; subscription information; shipping address for Apple Pay.

I get it that some people use separate billing and shipping addresses, but for the vast majority of people the use case is “I have a single home address where I want to direct Maps to, be billed at, and ship stuff to, please update it all at once when I update my address.”

Very sorry for your loss. I lost my dad almost 13 years ago and my mom 4 years ago, much earlier than I though I’d lose either of them.

The initial intensity of the grief you’re feeling will go away with time, and you’ll go back to feeling normal. But I do wanna share with you that some amount of grief will always be there with you from now on. My experience has been that even after all these years, I’ve thought about and missed my parents pretty much every single day since they passed. You should know that that’s coming, and it’ll be particularly tough around major life events like getting married and having kids.

Know that what you’re going through is normal and human. Try to get as much rest as you can, and reach out to people close to you to either talk through things or get distracted for a moment.

> Parking apps are worse than parking meters.

I generally agree, but I’ve had a great experience with one of those. I just wish they all did the same streamlined thing this one particular app I used did.

The QR code I had to scan actually ran an App Clip instead of taking me to a website. Everything was done in one screen: enter plate, parking stall number, hours. My physical interaction with it was just scrolling a little and hitting a button. Done. Wonderful.

Most parking solitions are a shitshow though. Multiple screens (seriously, why?!), having to create an account, not handling payment via Apple Pay so I have to enter my credit card manually. Having to enter the parking location manually (how come it’s not a parameter in the QR code URL?). I’d really like to know what happens at the companies that develop those. It’s borderline criminal how bad they are.

Other than the Bible, that would be Dune and Starship Troopers. I can't really put my finger on how specifically they influenced me, but I often find myself recalling scenes and quotes from those two books when discussing deeper topics with family and friends.