davidjohnstone
Joined 15 years ago
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987
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Member since
Oct 27
davidjohnstone.net
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Comment · 3 years ago
I'm more of a desktop user, but I wasn't happy with what was out there so I made my own (but only for Melbourne): https://davidjohnstone.net/weather/melbourne . I'm tempted to turn it into a proper Australia-wide product. The BoM's data licensing fees (in the order of $5k/year) are a bit of a barrier.
Comment · 4 years ago
Yeah, the network effect is strong, but there's never been a better time to challenge it. I think the potential of success is partly based on quality of the alternative, but also on the direction Twitter goes from here. It doesn't seem like the worst bet to make.
Comment · 4 years ago
It seems its decentralised nature is a hindrance to some or many potential users[1]. My impression is that it's often treated as an alternative, but not really a truly viable alternative, and the field is wide open for something better.
1. For example https://twitter.com/hwkanderson/status/1588523823426859008
Comment · 4 years ago
I'm skeptical that it's a viable alternative for most people, who don't care about the fact that it's decentralised.
Comment · 4 years ago
Thanks, that's interesting. Yurou Zhong, in her book Chinese Grammatology, traces the end of the latinisation movement to a precise date in 1958 when Zhou Enlai gave a speech "当前文字改革的任务" ("The Current Tasks of the Script Reform"), where he announced the current tasks are to simplify characters, promote putonghua and issue and implement a pinyin plan, conspicuously not including further alphabetisation.
Comment · 4 years ago
The comparison between Latin in Europe in the early modern period and literary Chinese in the Sinosphere for much of history is pretty good (and often made). Latin and literary Chinese are very different languages, but had similar roles in society by being the standard written language in a world where everybody spoke different languages (that were heavily influenced by, or even derived from, but different to the written form).
Comment · 4 years ago
> This is only because the plan for simplified characters died midway through. There was a second round of simplifications that would have gone even further with talks of full phoneticization if that succeeded.
I was under the impression that most of the debates about moving from Chinese characters to alphabetic writing happened in the pre-PRC period. For example, Lu Xun supported Latinxua Sin Wenz[1] in the 30s. These proposals failed for a variety of reasons. Simplified characters were introduced in the 50s. Pinyin was also introduced in the 50s, but unlike previous latinisations meant to replace the Chinese characters, it was only ever intended as a teaching tool. I think there was still a thought to replace Chinese characters with alphabetic writing at a later stage, but, in practice, it pretty much died in the 40s.
Comment · 4 years ago
The New York Times' article on her life has a couple of corrections for things that look like they were written earlier and not updated with the latest when published. For example:
> The earlier version misstated at one point the length of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. It was seven decades, not “almost seven decades.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/world/europe/queen-elizab...
Comment · 4 years ago
I wondered the same. The main downside is that you need to do some processing to extract the entries from the dump and get the plain text of the fields you want.
I'm also a little surprised they didn't think Wiktionary was sufficient for languages apart from English. I could be wrong, but my impression is that it's pretty good for major languages[1].
Comment · 4 years ago
I also made a fast-loading news website. It should be roughly as fast as yours. https://www.thenewseachday.com/
Comment · 4 years ago
You put square brackets around parameters. e.g., routes/greet/[name].tsx
Comment · 4 years ago
I read this a month ago. Excellent book. Incredible story.
Comment · 4 years ago
You're right about the numbers often being expressed in W/kg, because power to weight is more important than power when going uphill. For big climbs (more than half an hour or so), that number is closer to 6W/kg for the best, or maybe a little more (especially if you go back in time a bit for some reason…).