ManMachine
@max@manmachine.me
Professional computer toucher.
Amateur photographer and musician.
Autistic.
Amateur photographer and musician.
Autistic.
ManMachine
@max@manmachine.me
I have clarified any and all confusions you may have had about ancient Chinese political thought in one convenient chart.
#history #politics #classicalchinese #philosophy
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A hand-drawn flow chart in cute colors: "Ancient Chinese Political Schools"
Confucianism: If everyone would just be POLITE and show their rulers some RESPECT then we wouldn't even NEED any laws
Daoism: Bro, stop trying to fix everything, you're making it worse. The best ruler is one who sits back and doesn't rule a thing
Legalism: There is no problem so small it can't be solved by beheading ten thousand men about it
Confucianism says to Daoism: "You lazy oafs"
Daoism says to Confucianism: "You pompous dicks"
Daoism says to Legalism: "you're REALLY throwing off my groove"
Legalism says to Daoism: "your 'groove' isn't in the budget"
Legalism says to Confucianism: "you NAIVE motherfuckers"
Confucianism says to Legalism: "Sir, I can excuse the slavery, human sacrifice, sexism etc etc, but I draw the line at coarse language"
In the center, with all schools pointing toward the same outcome: "The rivers flood, the crops fail, millions die."
confucianism: if the mat isn't aligned, the master won't sit on it.
daoism: LET'S ALL EAT SOME VINEGAR! *goa trance*
Terribly amused by this alleged "CEO" who set up a bot to make himself sound smart by generating "intellectual discourse" replies on his behalf, which proceeded to write a comically high-brow pseudo-intellectual reply to a joke diagram, get flagged by one of Mastodon's biggest accounts (hi) and vaporized by mods within literal seconds (thank you mods) 
Be on the lookout for these sorts of deep-sounding but vacuous replies. There's probably more of them being run by the same person/group and whatever reason they have to want to build up fake "intellectual discourse" on mastodon can't be good
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A reply to me from "Frank Phoenix" who has an AI-generated portrait:
A chart can clarify the surface, but classical Chinese political thought is an architecture of systems rather than a set of categories. Confucian, Legalist and Daoist traditions interact through context, not through static labels.
When we compress these layers into a single diagram, we gain accessibility but lose the structural depth that makes the tradition coherent. Understanding the architecture matters more than the taxonomy.
My reply to him:
I was GOING to say I think you might have misunderstood the spirit of a chart that has the word "motherfucker" written on it, but given that you've been posting a take like this exactly once a minute to different people, you're clearly a bot trying
to stir up discourse.
@0xabad1dea the amount of content on the internet that's generated from somebody feeding high profile posts into an llm is absurd at the moment, and it's worrying how bad people are at recognizing it.
@0xabad1dea WHAT?! dot-social actually NUKED this charlatan?
@stonebear2 yes. In my experience, they do suspend accounts that I report to them. The issue is more that it's easy to get the accounts set up to begin with
@0xabad1dea @stonebear2 I don't think they did? I can still see the account. I suspect infosec exchange blocked him though. I've reported to make sure dot social is aware of the context.
@gsuberland @stonebear2 I can open mastodon dot social in an incognito window and that account specifically (and not others) is 404. When my husband browses to it in his client, he gets an "account suspended" notice
@0xabad1dea thank you for contextualizing this so I didn’t encounter it in the wild and expend *real* effort before realizing it was slop, but even so I resent the brain cycles spent attempting to parse this gibberish into a coherent thought. this absolutely typifies my “adversarial communication” thesis, it feels like a direct assault on my attention span, the ultimate bad-faith discourse.
the vaporization is much appreciated both from you and the mods
@0xabad1dea I just saw this on emf's replies: https://mastodon.social/@geoffcowne/116838596380739434
wonder if it's the same shape of shit?
@0xabad1dea someone is burning actual tokens for actual money to create this sort of shite? Wow ...
@0xabad1dea do we have any sources on how the ancient chinese would have reacted to being called a motherfucker
@sdubinsky it's absolutely "strike Confucius dead" material but someone was definitely saying something functionally equivalent at the time
they do have a completely equivalent curse in modern Chinese, if you've heard about the "grass mud horse", the joke is that this alleged name for alpacas is homophonous with it
@0xabad1dea oh lovely! That’s a first semester sinology take from someone who just got into their second „Chinese schools of thought“ seminar.
Nicely spotted and I really liked your diagram. I was looking for the „bro, you’re harshing up my vibe“ comment by daoists directed at legalists and yeah, you covered that.
I also find it funny that this guy’s bot’s comment completely ignores that in modern Chinese politics in the ruling class, any and all schools of thought and their predominant teachers are reduced to being vapid tools for propaganda with a tinge of „Hey, can we somehow rekindle religious Confucianism/Daoism to keep people in check?“
@0xabad1dea I'm not sure which is funnier, the chart or this stupid bot, but I DO know which one I'm going to steal^Wshare with friends.
@0xabad1dea PS: I also like the way you schematically draw banners. Stealing^Wborrowing that as well.
@0xabad1dea amazing, A+. i would say “no notes” but I do have *one* note:
where are the Logicians (or the Mohists more generally I guess)
@glyph please imagine a fourth box for Mohists at the bottom and all the others have arrows towards them labeled "sorry, who are you again?" and their reply is " 
"
How does the Buddha come into this?
@truh the abstract "point" in history this represents pre-dates Buddhism being a major religion in China, but Buddhism did heavily syncretize with both Daoist and Confucian ideals.
@0xabad1dea I'm a fan of Classic Taoism and Early Buddhism. Confucianism has some pretty good, legit insights, which made it well-worth remembering this long, but alas is very OK with corrupt officials, cronyism, and brutally crushing conservatism. I think classic Taoism stands out as probably the most "pure" and wise on some sort of macro level, in that it had a clear and accurate sense of what corruption in hierarchies of authority was characterized by. Although the word "narcissism" wasn't available to them yet, they had their finger on the pulse earliest of all IMHO, as to what it was, and why it was so problematic. It correctly advised to get the hell away from narcissists if possible. As to the personal level (not macro-level, societal level), Early Buddhism does the best at teaching things like meditation and liberation of the mind. Buddhism also has a weakly taught, barely findable lesson of "try to get away from narcissists if possible". It's there, but virtually nobody can really find it, as it's lost in a mountain of other teachings.
@0xabad1dea That's a super-insightful chart. Personally, I had no hope in hell of ever understanding the Chinese people I knew to any depth, until I read the Analects of Confucius (a summary of Confucianism). So many times I was like "oh my God, this is where they all get this from". Also explains other China-adjacent cultures to some degree as well, who were influenced by the Chinese.
Having said this, each person *still* needs to be looked at as an individual, with their own morality, ways of thinking and personal beliefs.
@0xabad1dea The untold tragedy of Bill & Ted’s time in China, (re?)inventing Confucianism and Daoism from first principles.
@0xabad1dea there isn't a problem so small it can't be solved by beheading about 1000 men. I think we could solve a lot of our problems with that.
My favourite music editor now has "generate a song for me" button 😔 I guess I gotta make my own...
@nina_kali_nina sigh.. which one is it if you don't mind me asking?
@tove HookPad. I really liked their tracker-like approach. There was a button that would generate something similar to a placeholder melody a long time ago, but now it supposedly generates far more than that
@nina_kali_nina hmph! And a monthly fee for it, of course.. well, hopefully I'll remember to avoid it when I've learned enough about music it starts being time to really look into software options!
@tove I have a lifetime subscription,I wonder when they will turn it off :) I really should export all my stuff from their cloud, now that I think about it...
@nina_kali_nina fun facts about oss sequencers
LMMS is under active development, they just never release. Get the master branch and build if you want to try it
Rosegarden is actually kind of nice (music notation style interface). i don't know why but the timing of notation is easier to sense than horizontal bars even though the bars are simpler
helio looks neat, I haven't tried it yet, though. https://helio.fm/
Thank you all for recommendations, but I liked this editor because it has unique features that other editors don't have. So, yeah, I'll have to make my own editor :)
@nina_kali_nina making things from scratch, because forking is too much work ^^’
@hypha it's not even open source:(
@nina_kali_nina i more meant like forking an existing project or contributing, e.g. lmms
making something from scratch has a huge cost
on a tangent, i doubt Orca[1] is made for your needs?
but it might tease your curiosity, considering you like simple technology
@hypha I think I'm happy to make a simple thing for my purposes, it'd be my third music editor
@nina_kali_nina ooooooooh
you should show me your two first and the third one!
@hypha I don't think the first one has survived, but the second one is around:) it's not good at all
@nina_kali_nina i mean i mostly curious to know some lore about and it's interesting anyway ^^
@hypha I think the most fascinating piece of lore is that lack of internet made the first few years of my coding a really "Galapagos" experience XD with software that at best tried to copy limited things I've seen and at worst was bizarre and a bit unique
@nina_kali_nina @hypha We need a museum about that, from my history of projects at the begining, I'm pretty sure that can be really interesting... Maybe, can be a place that people can go and publish his own "first projects" IAHAHAHAHAHA.
@nina_kali_nina you know what Sagan said: if you wish to make music from scratch, first you have to create the editor.
...
Or something like this 😆
@nina_kali_nina tsk, back in the day at least we had to push some more buttons to make music...
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A Yamaha electronic piano. There are some sheet music on the stand.
@nina_kali_nina our of curiosity, which editor are you using?
@eickot the one in the post? It's called Hookpad. Without it, I use Guitar Pro as a score editor, and in that case only use Major C or Minor A for composing the melody, and then transpose it (yes I struggle to remember the intervals)
Conflicted over how much of the future understanding of the PC and Apple industry ok the 80s is going to be poisoned by AI and how much is going to be poisoned by @NanoRaptor
![[?]](https://media.infosec.exchange/infosec.exchange/accounts/avatars/111/867/038/214/333/074/original/948015da7238758d.jpg)
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*) » 🌐
@david_chisnall@infosec.exchange
All of Nanoraptor's posts are historically accurate, just not necessarily from this timeline.
(Sharing the credit for this one with @quixoticgeek ):
Tom Bombadil is the Jar-Jar Binks of Middle Earth.
can't help getting astrology × audiophile vibes from llm enthusiasts: "oh no honey you can't use opus 4.8, it's so nerfed, try glm-5.2 or the codex 5.5, they have a warm gemini sound, very well rounded on details and tone. but don't use google's gemini models, they are really leos, they have good treble response but you can't trust their mid-range"
@jwz a deep and sincere thank you for making Dali Clock available as an iPhone app. I was away from the house and didn’t have my glasses. And I had to coordinate on an exact time to meet up with someone
I hate how the Apple clock app works to get to the time, all I want is the time in big numbers, but even in world clock it’s still kinda small
In a fit of inspiration I remembered Dali Clock. I downloaded it on a lark ages ago. Years later, my eyes suck, and let me tell you this app is perfect
@crazybutable Thanks! Glad you like it. I imagine you're one of about 7 people total using the app...
@jwz a few years ago it was my 4 year old’s favorite app
I think he called it glitch clock or something like that. He thought he had broken the phone and was delighted and slightly mystified when I told him it was on purpose
Thanks to my friend S. for providing the initial recording.
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seed: 2026-06-28T05:45:07.968824
size: 64 x 64
shape: GS_CIRCULAR center=(0.7498, 0.6404)
color pick method: COL_AUTHORED_PALETTE (aejenk_sunsky)
blends:
(94, 52, 255) -> (223, 153, 255), 0.4310 (ramp 1)
(223, 153, 255) -> (162, 103, 255), 0.4039 (ramp 1)
(162, 103, 255) -> (162, 103, 255), 0.1652 (ramp 1)
dither: DT_PATTERN (map: 8x8_dpaint2e)
flags: SORT_BLENDS_BY_SIZE
Reviewers noted that while Vim for Gameboy featured one of the deepest command systems on the platform, its soundtrack consisted primarily prolonged silence punctuated with occasional terrifying beeps.
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A picture of a game boy cartridge for VIM the Editor, Linux journal 2001 Readers' Choice editor. Embossed in the top grip section is the text "FRONT TOWARD ENEMY"
@NanoRaptor Exiting is *so* much harder in this version. You'd think you could just turn the Gameboy off, but that only makes it very cross at you.
@NanoRaptor I accidentally thought I could play this game, but *still* haven't figured out how to get the cartridge out of my gameboy :’(
@NanoRaptor Tom Christiansen (one of the authors of the original "Programming Perl" book) once said that vim was a video game that also got things done
BREAKING: Goose meme stocks rise for third day in a row
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Stonks meme but the guy is a goose and instead of stonks it says honks.
New version of “when ur soft but someone hurts ur friends” dropped #FarahDrawsThings #Procreate #StabbyChicky
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A digital illustration of a yellow fuzzy chick, wielding a plastic knife with a pink handle on a round green background. Some white sparkles scattered on the background to represent the chick’s enthusiasm and determination
when I was younger I used to think music production was mostly about inventing interesting mic techniques and it’s actually about just recording things really well and not fucking around with them too much
we should invent vegan leberkäse
@hades You would think that all the „mostly salt and fat“ foods could be easily replicated and yet…
from my link log —
mlibc: a fukk-featured portable C standard library
https://github.com/managarm/mlibc
saved 2026-06-25 https://dotat.at/:/QZR06.html
@fanf … ah, that was a typo for "full", not a weird hipster spelling of "fuck"! I was imagining "fukk-featured" being some horrid neologism for "fuck features, we're only going to do the simple stuff".
(Which in other circumstances is _also_ a kind of C library people want.)
"fukk-featured" being some horrid neologism for "fuck features, we're only going to do the simple stuff"Reminds me of what the suckless crowd is doing, but their neologism is arguably better (?)
if your article is headed with an AI image then i'm not reading your article
@eniko - and the same goes if any of the other articles in your sidebar/links are about how useful AI is.
@eniko @ThomHartmann keeps on tossing slop over the fence here and doesn't even read replies or do anything besides throw slop at us and people boost it right up.
@eniko The instant I notice some plagiarism machine generated content in a piece of art, exhibit, job posting, really anything. I walk away. It makes it abundantly clear to me that the rest of the thing was not executed with care, and I see no reason to give it my time.
@eniko but actually nobody invented AI this far. If I'll ever be the first and it will outperform my lost inspiration, it surely will create for me. And do not read or watch, I won't give a fuck :)
Still don't know
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A panel from the cartoon Calvin and hobbes by Bill Waterson
Calvin is shown bundled up in his winter coat and a knit winter beanie, standing next to his lunchbox. He poignantly asks, "How old do you have to be before you know what's going on?"
I’m on the puter
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Design consisting out of a lot of elements related to computers videogames and tech, with momo on his keyboard on top. Upper and bottom text reads “not now, I’m computering!”
@heyheymomo i think i might need this on a t-shirt. you know for the days they make me go work in the office instead of at home.
@heyheymomo Isso resume exatamente meu estado mental desde 1994. O diskete ali no canto me deu uma saudade criminosa.
Saw the word "accessibility" referred to "A11Y" recently.
A shortening that only works in English.
About accessibility.
Let that sink in.
That's almost as bad as "internationalization" being referred to as "i18n"
From the "Pivot to woodworking" department
#InfoSec #ShitPost #DevOps #Logs #VennDiagram
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Venn diagram:
left: forest ranger
right: devops engineer
middle: looking for bugs in logs
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anthropomorphic cellphone with keyboards for wings
(modeled after the Nokia N900)
@moses_izumi
he is real btw
@prahou
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siemens sk65, a candybar phone with a qwerty keyboard that rotates out the middle, making it look like a cross of 2000s business productivity
@ozzelot holy fuck
@tibi2
I've missed out on the ability to buy a few :D And not sure I want it now. I proclaim I'm done with phones, done!
@tibi2
also look up xelibri and the sx1 (though tbf the nokia 3650 isnt much better, and nokia's fashion line of phones...)
siemens went hard on the weirdphone market!
@ozzelot oh I remember these. I had a m65 around this time. not nearly as wild but it was an aluminium reinforced? phone with rubber gaskets fucking everywhere. I lost half of them by the time I was done with it
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seed: 2026-06-21T16:52:08.217152
size: 256 x 256
shape: GS_VERTICAL
color pick method: COL_RANDOM_TRIAD
blends:
(157, 84, 210) -> (148, 140, 154), 0.5292
(148, 140, 154) -> (243, 163, 50), 0.4708
dither: DT_PATTERN (map: 8x8_dpaint2e)
flags: LOCKED_LIGHTNESS, ALL_CONTINUOUS
“I could do that before breakfast” turns out to be a Boast Most Ancient.
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Handwritten notes: a sentence of Classical Chinese translated as: The Lord of Qi said “One moment — I need to crush my enemies before breakfast.”
What is the platonic ideal of an IC package? or an SMT component?
The ideal LED shape? Those most True and Correct LCD elements?
I KNOW YOU ALL HAVE OPINIONS
Oh, that's easy.
The ideal IC is a nano-cube maybe 0.1 by 0.1 by 0.1 mm with one BGA ball on each side, able to be stacked infinitely in all directions.
The closest existing copy in the physical world are BGA and chip stacks.
The closest copy that could be reached for tinkering would be BGA with balls on both sides so twice as much contacts can be made, sandwiched between two PCB - which in turn can be repeated as often as needed.
8 pin DIP probably housing a 555
Every SMT is an abomination and will not be spoken of further.
5mm through hole red
Middle horizontal element of any 7 or 8 segment display
@Cdespinosa I would change but one.
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A picture of four rectangular LEDs in a jaunty little curve laid out on a black background, all with a matte finish. from left to right are white, orange, green, blue, yellow, and red.
Tell me this isn't the best package. It is an enormous ceramic DIP with a metal plate on it because shiny.
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a very large metal-bodied DIP package, an intech RGB DAC
@NanoRaptor
The ideal IC package is the Rockwell zigzag package from the '70s and '80s. I will brook no dissent.
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A Rockwell R5313 in a 64 pin double dip package.
I made an approximation of notorious foodie tuna melt and I went to heaven and back.
I didn’t take pictures. But man, this was sublime. I substituted his spices for just plain chipotle as that all I had:
@Migueldeicaza you need to try the kimchi tuna melt next 🤤
I don't always know if I should post my poetry attempts. I don't think of myself as "poetic" at all and kinda feel like my little stabs at it are maybe kinda insulting to actual poets, lol (this can't be true).
BUT! I have a conviction that art isn't only for those good at it, and that writing bad poetry is better than not even trying to write poetry at all, and maybe if I share a bad poem someone with more talent but less confidence than I have might see it and think "hey, maybe I can write a poem if this guy thinks he can" and then they'll write a better poem than I could ever write and the world will be a better place.
So, if you see me posting my bad poetry, know that I'm doing it in the hopes it could lead to better poetry.
My brother in computation, name one other media player that survived, much less that you have not had to relearn every 18 months, over that time span.
@mhoye VLC is, like, the platonic ideal of open source software. The low level bit-banging parts: absolutely top notch for decades, frequently updated. Human-facing parts: hasn't changed appreciably since the Nineteen Hundreds, weird, confusing, 40,000 configuration options, makes designers drop to the floor in tears. Might as well have "TBD, WRITE ME!" at the top of the window.
@jwz @mhoye Also it has a terrible name: originally "VideoLAN Client", a TLA embeddeding a TLA in classic nerd form, it is now just VLC which doesn't stand for anything except possibly Very Loud Cone, after its logo, which is also a terrible placeholder but somehow so instantly recognizable that remote tribespeople who've never seen a traffic cone and toddlers who can't reliable identify the Coke logo can tell you it's the "pointy video thing".
@jwz @mhoye I really thought MPV can do most things now. Atleast everyone keeps telling me so, atleast. I'm not a video guy by any means, but whenever I have an odd job, it does well? Idk, is there something VLC does that mpv doesn't? (Apart from the GUI, MPV is just a box playing the video, the CLI is the interface)
@innocentzero @mhoye Even in testing contexts, I never got mpv or mplayer to even basically function. And then a few years ago the developer had a hissy fit and removed support for "xdg-screensaver" (the "maybe don't blank the screen while a movie is playing" module) so they are dead to me.
does religion imply belief in the supernatural?
| yes: | 35 |
| no: | 17 |
| [heavy sweating]: | 10 |
Portable cassette players found at the ReStore today!!
@themaritimegirl I have a fancier model of that Panasonic with a digital tuner and VMSS (Virtual Motion Sound System), which originally came with headphones that vibrate your ears along with the bass notes in the music to make it feel/sound like "subwoofers for your head". Yeah, it's super gimmicky and the novelty wears off quickly.
@purpleidea ok so I am trying to use tabs instead of spaces for indentation and within two days I've already found a failure.
yaml rejects tabs as indentation. lol
Of course I fucking find this.
RE: https://retro.pizza/@mrencyclopedia/116767709992953410
Hi it’s me, “English speaker who learned grammatical nightmare Dutch and then randomly decided it was time to get serious about Chinese, and did in fact learn to read Chinese”
Make your own flash cards. Write your own notes. Ideally with pen and paper, but if that’s not an option, type it letter by letter or use speech-to-text. Don’t copy-paste. Don’t autocomplete. Don’t generate with AI. You need to use YOUR hands or YOUR voice if you want to change YOUR brain, YOUR own inner neural network weights.
I’ve been trying an Obsidian plugin called HiWords. You select a word, right click, and add a definition; from then on, that word will be highlighted in Obsidian notes, and you can hover to see your definition. Elegant, helpful, I like it.
They have a (completely optional, opt-in) functionality to shell out to an LLM for filling in the definition. I imagine that a lot of students requested this functionality, and it wasn’t hard to implement, so I understand why they added it. I can see why the students want it; it sounds so much more efficient, so much more ✨data✨ per effort to get the vocabulary collection up and running. But it’s self-defeating. It’s drowning your senses in noise that won’t stick in your memory. Two or three words you took the time to look up and write down yourself are vastly more helpful than a paragraph churned out by a machine.
Do it by hand, learn it by heart. 📓💖
@0xabad1dea This is why writing cheat sheets before exams was always helpful even when they were not used in the exam.
@0xabad1dea I'm curious? Why do you consider Dutch grammar as a nightmare?
@agturcz take the weird edge cases of English and turn up the knob, because Dutch is in even more of a half-eroded Indo-European state. And the rules about word order in complex clauses remain mystifying after speaking it daily for years.
You know why I can read Classical Chinese? Because I have spent the last year slowly but surely making a complete handwritten copy of my favorite textbook. Every explanation. Every example sentence. With my own original translations and margin notes. On nice sturdy paper with a pen I find comfortable to use. I’m at 183 handwritten pages so far.
(Gonna repeat again that a lot of people who think they hate writing by hand actually hate cheap ballpoints that hurt their hands.)
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Photo of my Classical Chinese notebook lying in front of the open textbook on a book stand
@0xabad1dea ¿Is that a Jinhao 82?
@Illuminatus it’s a Pilot Falcon with a gold nib, my most expensive pen that isn’t an antique. But I also have some five dollar Jinhaos I’m happy with :)
@0xabad1dea The shape is so obviously similar.
You are <so> right on the ball-point thing. I've never conventionally written with them, because I always "carved" the paper and never felt comfortable with them. I wish I had got regular with fountain pens much earlier, but I got used to write with dipping nibs back at the start of uni for my personal stuff and I for everyday stuff I used liquid ink Pilot V-balls. Cannot even conceive having taken so many notes in uni with regular biros.
@0xabad1dea that looks like so much more fun than the not very constructive (or effective) activity on various chinese language apps that I has been my not very well thought out 'strategy' over the last years.. Would you mind sharing what your favourite textbook for Classical Chinese is ? Does it assume any level of knowledge of modern Chinese ?
@joost_rekveld unfortunately yes, every serious full-length textbook of Classical Chinese I’m aware of presumes a strong working knowledge of modern Mandarin. In fact, that’s why I started working on my own website that approaches it from the angle of people who are interested in ancient languages in general, but there’s not much there yet. https://厄.net/classicalchinese/
The book I’m working from is “Classical Chinese: A Functional Approach” by Kai Li and James Erwin Dew. The orange edition is typeset in Simplified, the green edition is typeset in Traditional.
@0xabad1dea many thanks for the pointer to the book, and what a good idea to make such a site ! I certainly feel part of your target audience...
I'd like to hear more about your thoughts on choosing a pen, is there anything more to it than 'try a lot of pens until you find one that works for you?' 
The three most important factors in finding a pen that's comfortable to use are:
1) Barrel thickness. Cheap ballpoints tend to be very skinny, and adult hands cramp up holding them. A chunky pen can be much easier to hold for long writing sessions.
2) Softer grip area with no sharp faceted angles. I have found that if I use a wider pen, a rubber/foam grip is not necessary, but many people find them a lifesaver.
3) Smooth, flowing ink. Ballpoints are the WORST for this. Their grease-based ink has many virtues, such as waterproofness and being very cheap per page, but you have to press hard and drag the pen like a knife to get a clear line. IMO fountain pens are the best for this, but if that's too much fuss, a nice gel pen from a serious brand is the best all-around option.
Unlearning a painful death-grip acquired from ballpoint use may take some time and practice.
Here are some specific model recommendations from a serious pen fan. https://www.penaddict.com/top-5-pens
@0xabad1dea @einsiedlerspiel just throwing out there that pilot g2s are available most everywhere. Come in various ink colours and line thickness. And they’re not very expensive.
ya that makes sense, having this enumerated is helpful thanks!
(I learned my death grip in school with a probably ill-fitted fountain pen, and have mostly experimented with different tips in a thick (and heavy!) ball-tip housing. That's tolerable -- but it still takes discipline not grip and press too hard; maybe I should try fountain pens again)
@0xabad1dea @einsiedlerspiel I'm quite a big fan of liquid-ink rollerballs. Bit of a halfway-house between fountain pens and gel-inks
I'm curious to know how many chinese symbols you were able to learn in that time!
@abhayakara I started studying (modern) Chinese at all about four years ago, and got serious about Classical specifically, which has some different vocabulary, about a year ago. I stopped keeping formal count at about two thousand characters, because at that point, you know all the common ones and flash card drilling doesn't help much. The number that I can recognize in-context in a sentence is probably between 2500-3000, which is the low end of fluency. (A highly-educated Chinese person will know 4000-5000).
In the Chinese public education system, they take a tactic of pushing 700 crucial characters in the first year and then slowing down a bit, with a target of 3000-3500 by the end of 6th grade. I think I did about 600 in my first year, which feels fair because I wasn't a full-time schoolchild.
@0xabad1dea that's fabulous! Did you in fact use any tools like Anki?
@abhayakara I used Skritter, which has an expensive subscription but I recommend it over Anki because it's specifically designed for Chinese/Japanese characters and has you hand-write the characters in stroke order (on your phone/tablet, with finger or stylus)
@0xabad1dea Using AI to help learning is like doing athletic training by using machines to lift weights.
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🆘Bill Cole 🇺🇦 [Honestly I don’t care but no one will understand if you use she/her.] » 🌐
@grumpybozo@toad.social
@0xabad1dea Like medieval monks learning Latin on the fly…
@0xabad1dea I had exams where we were allowed to bring one single sided A4 page of notes. The act of trying to write the entire course on one page meant nobody actually used their notes in the exam.
@0xabad1dea oh this is so true. In ye olde school days, I used to prepare cheat sheets for class tests; they were made so that I could potentially use them for cheating (Poland in the 90s had a bit of a different approach to cheating than some other countries :D it was very normalized), but the mere process of making it, digesting information into small portable form and writing it down was always enough to actually... teach me the material. And pass the test without cheating.
@0xabad1dea @quixoticgeek Ooh, HiWords (minus the “AI”), sounds very useful! I want to try it for adding hidden furigana to my Japanese grammar notes. Any other Obsidian plugin recommendations?
@0xabad1dea This is what I try to tell anyone learning Chinese characters. Even if you never plan to write any character in a "real" situation, writing them by hand makes it easier to recognise them, because you don't truly know the character if you don't know how to write it.
And even copying characters is such a great skill to have when put in a real situation. You can get away with a lot if you're just able to copy your address or whatever onto a form.
@0xabad1dea Better to chose Dutch and not German. Dutch has much easier grammar than German, and much more consistent pronunciation than German and especially English.
I'll give HiWords a try, that seems useful for learning 日本語 :)
@0xabad1dea what makes Dutch a grammatical nightmare? what study i've undertaken tells me it's quite a lot like German grammatically
@drolltergeist like globally notorious for nightmare grammar German, yes
@0xabad1dea haha fair enough. i hear Mandarin grammar is actually pretty easy to wrap your head around, and hey! no case system ;)
if you have a 4 functions (act, item, draw, willpower) arranged in a cross pattern (one at the top, left, right, and bottom) and two of which can be disabled, how should the arrangement be?
| always available left/right, disabled top/bottom: | 88 |
| always available top/bottom, disabled left/right: | 55 |
Closed
@eniko oh instinctively id split it diagonally (like controller face buttons, A/B is essential stuff and X/Y is usually more exotic stuff)
@eniko I'd pick neither, and use the most accessible buttons as the always available and the others as possibly disabled.
oh no not again
Alt...
50/50 results split
@eniko Given that the first option in a poll is biased to get more votes, I think if this was the final result, it means the second choice would have won by a small margin. 😆
Depends on the screen I'll be using, I guess! The screen's supporting surface (hand/table) and dimensions (can be held in hands of various sizes) etc. are going to shape the exact experience.
...Could just say "PC vs Mobile" but listed out the *reasons* up there...!
Anyway: I voted for **Disabled L/R Buttons** because *no matter* you're on a touchscreen, ONE OF the top/bottom buttons is always going to be accessible...!
On a phone, I find my fingers' vertical movement easier.
@eniko the correct solution is "do it like CSS reflow, where you end up with all 3 commands in a row but the 3rd one is 80% off screen"
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