For those interested in this type of climate data visualization apps, I have worked on this one in the past, which is actively maintained with a lot of love, and very nice:

https://portraits.ouranos.ca/en

Sorry for the stupid question but is Elliptic Tales your favorite or is it Summing it up?

Elliptic Tales, but maybe it is because I read it first

For "something that is published" (which includes a comment like this) I clearly dislike it too, but for chatting / texting, I realize that I often use it more than my interlocutors, and I'm not sure why. There's a part of lazyness I guess, but also a vague sense of "conveying the impression of a never ending stream of communication", which is closer in my mind to the essence of the chat medium. In French, there is also the additional layer of "using the accents or not".

I always start my texts with a capital, but I don't put periods at the ends of my sentences when texting

that way I can continue the same sentence in the next message if necessary

And if I need to start a new sentence I start that message with a capital.

Very interesting project! I cannot resist mentioning an old project of mine that was made in a very similar spirit, but way before any LLM: wrapping a classic Lone Wolf gamebook around a very crude text parser: https://projectaon.org/staff/christian/gamebook.js

I had written an entire "framework" for it, in JS (so in theory more books could be supported), but it never went anywhere: https://github.com/cjauvin/gamebook.js

This is cool. I wonder what it would like today with LLMs?

I asked a question about exactly this on Stack Overflow, many years ago, which I think received a nice answer: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57966935/asyncio-task-vs...

Author here: my learning objectives, in order of importance, are: (1) vocal understanding, (2) speaking, (3) reading, and (4) typing and writing (far further). As I explain, I'm mostly bypassing the problem of typing by using screenshots (ChatGPT's OCR capabilities are very good, and Anki works very well with it too).

With a few hours of applied learning, distinctions between these will collapse. If you work on typing, your reading will naturally improve (because you're identifying letters to input). With stronger reading, you won't see differences between scripts and reading will be the same as listening. That is, improving your knowledge of the language by reading will improve your listening comprehension too. (Reading the wikipedia article on phonology will also unify reading out loud and speaking, Persian is extremely phonemic.)

At minimum, consider a few hours now compared to the time saved by halving the number of flashcards you need.

I've been using ChatGPT to learn Persian (as a third language) for more than a year now (along with a heavy use of Anki), and it's incredibly useful and surprisingly good, for about everything: romanization, OCR from screenshots, deep explanations of complex and subtle stuff, etc.

Are you writing up how you are doing this. I would be fascinated to learn more about how you use Anki and ChatGPT in concert to learn a language like Persian. Please do share more.

Thanks for suggesting it, here you go: https://cjauvin.github.io/posts/learning-persian/

Love it! Thank you!

Counterpoint: I actually really enjoy his style of writing, which I find clear, patient (you must appreciate visual examples and exploration though) and very often challenging and stimulating (recent examples: the posts about the bigger brains, Conway GoL engineering, and biology / evolution). I find he regularly introduces intriguing and useful ideas, like the distinction between "brain-like" computers (which includes neural networks) and more general, Turing-like mechanisms, and I find his overarching concept of computational irreducibility (even though he didn't invent it) quite profound in its implications. I would add that his posts read like an ambitious research program in progress (like a book written one chapter at a time) and that is why I think certain concepts (like ruliology) may appear obscure at first, if you didn't read a lot of stuff that comes before. One tiny nitpick I have: certain language tics, like the constant use of the "And, yes" pattern (he really uses this a lot I wish someone somehow told him).

I agree. I usually find his posts illuminating. Sure, they’re verbose and self-aggrandizing, but there are way more writers out there online that are also self-aggrandizing but offer no original content or value. Also the rambling style presents a more realistic view of how scientific exploration works than a distilled down paper missing crucial details needed for replication (I’m looking at you ML/AI).

One of my greatest pleasure of random walking the internet is building my list of possible next books to read.. thank you for this one!

Do you have some recommendations? I remember seeing Show HN tools gathering book recommendations from here, but I like specific experiences

yeah I just ordered a copy of "We Survived the Night" based on a post here. Never would have heard of it otherwise.

Mind linking to the post for the curious?

Would love to see that link and any other posts others might have run across here as well. I feel like pre covid it was common to see high Quality ask hn discussions with niche/prestigious book recommendations often. I dont see that as much now.

it was a link to paris review of books- here is the book

https://pioneerworks.org/programs/julian-brave-noisecat-we-s...

If you consider this from the angle of Wittgenstein's "language games", you could say that the problem would be "simply" to distinguish between these two, quite different, language games, and act accordingly.