I moved from California to Montreal a few years back to study, and now I’m staying for good. I tried duolingo on and off for far too long, but I found it super uninteresting and hard to remain committed to.

Best strategy I’ve found is called comprehensible input. The idea is to find books or other reading material that you can get the basic gist of when reading, despite not understanding every single word and phrase and grammatical construction. The more you read, the more you’ll find yourself able to understand, which is also very motivsting!

Also, make sure it’s material that actually interests you. The idea is it’s better to read extensively, reading things that actually interest you to some degree and keep you mentally engaged, than to just really intensively study a much smaller amount of (less interesting) material.

This actually mirrors how we acquire languge. The idea is to intuitively understand French by having seen a lot of it rather than to basically memorize French. You ultimately want to be able to glance at a sign, for instance, and just know what it means without having to translate in your head.

Some resources I found useful were these French illustrated books in Dollarama, but even better is a series of books designed to be comprehensible input by Olly Richards. He’s a native English speaker and polyglot who has written a bunch of graded readers that gradually increase in vocabulary and difficulty. He has several books for French, including beginner short stories, intermediate short stories, beginner conversations, intermediate conversations, climate change, WW2, and philosophy. The nice thing is he actually does a good job of making the stories and content interesting to an adult learner, unlike the children’s books at Dollarama.

Even his beginner books might be a little too advanced for your level so far, though, from what you say. If they are, it’d be best to find some material at a lower level that you can understand a little better. After all, if it’s too hard for you, it will make the process much slower and less enjoyable, which will make it much more likely that you quit. You could even simply try googling “french comprehensible input” to try to find material suitable for your level.

One last resource is the government of Quebec offers free in-person courses for immigrants and many French learners. They are part-time, and they offer multiple options for hours per week, so you could pick what works best for you. It would be worth checking to see if you might qualify for those courses once you move here.

Yeah, I’m working in embedded ML, and it’s an insanely exciting time. We’re getting more and more microcontrollers and single-board computers with special AI accelerators, many of them RISC-V, by the day it seems. One of the next steps (in my opinion) is finding a good way to program them that doesn’t involve C/C++ (very fast but also so painful to do AI with) or Python (slow unless it’s wrapping underlying C code, and unsuitable for microcontrollers). In fact, that’s exactly what I’m working on right now as a side project.

What’s also cool is RISC-V promises to be the one instruction set architecture to rule them all. So instead of having PCs as x86, phones and microcontrollers as ARM, then all sorts of other custom architectures like DSPs (digital signal processors), NPUs, etc., we could just have RISC-V with a bunch of open standard extensions. Want vector instructions? Well, here’s a ratified open standard for vector instructions. Want SIMD instructions? Congrats, here’s another ratified open standard.

And all these standards mean it will make it so much easier for the compiler people to provide support for new chips. A day not too long from now, I imagine it will become almost trivial to compile programs that can accelerate tons of scientific, numerical, and AI workloads onto RISC-V vector instructions. Currently, we’re stuck using GPUs for everything that needs parallelization, even though they’re far from the easiest or most optimal devices for many of our computational needs.

As computing advances, we can just create and ratify new open standards. Tired of floating point numbers? You could create a proposal for a standard posit extension today if you wanted to, then fork LLVM or GCC or something to provide the software support as well. In fact, someone already has implemented an open-source RISC-V chip with posit arithmetic and made a fork of LLVM to support it. You could fire it up on an FPGA right now if you wanted.

This talk, given by David Patterson (a legend in computer architecture and one of the people who helped create RISC-V at UC Berkeley) is an excellent (and accessible) introduction.

It’s especially dumb because RISC-V is – dare I say it – inevitably the future. Trying to crack down on RISC-V is like trying to crack down on Linux or solar photovoltaics or wind turbines. That is, you can try to crack down, but the fundamental value proposition is simply too good. All you’ll achieve in cracking down is hurting yourself while everyone else gets ahead.

People complain about the UN doing nothing, but it’s also important to remember it was literally designed to not be able to do anything if one of the security council nations – USA, UK, France, Russia, or China – vetoes it. And USA always vetoes anything against the Israeli government.

Considering the UN’s hands are tied, I’m very glad they’re at least using their figurative microphone and international influence to call attention to how fucked up the treatment of Palestinians is.

I don’t know for others, but growing up American, Israel and its friends in Washington had done a terrific job of conflating any criticism of Israel with anti-semitism. What finally got me to re-evaluate my stance on the Israeli government a few years back was when well-known, respectable organizations like the Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International started using the word “apartheid” to describe the situation of Palestinians.

Hearing sources like the UN Office for Human Rights, the UN Secretary General, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International calling out the Israeli government’s actions in strong, unequivocal terms like “war crime” and “apartheid” is a start. I wish they could do more, and I sure as heck am angry with US foreign policy in this, but I’m just glad the UN has the balls to actually call this a war crime.

They don’t just look like diamond; chemically they’re extremely similar, too. Diamond is just a bunch of carbon atoms covalently bonded together into a 3D crystal, which is why they’re so incredibly hard. Moissanite is basically the same but it’s carbon and silicon atoms mixed together. Silicon has the same number of valence electrons, so it can function similarly chemically as carbon, hence why it works. Thus, moissanite is also extremely hard and refracts light in beautiful ways, too, except imo even more beautifully. Instead of a colorless luster, it’s a subtle rainbow luster to moissanite.

Source: I got my fiancée a moissanite ring, and it’s lovely. And because it’s lab-made, I got her blue moissanite (the coloring is just from adding certain impurities) that matches our cat’s eyes perfectly. It’s way more unique, cheaper, and more ethical than diamond, but doesn’t sacrifice on quality one bit.

Yeah, definitely. It’s far better to have an admittedly weak UN that still tries to and often succeeds in being an influence for good in the world than to not have it at all. Thanks for your insights you’re able to bring into this thread.

Exactly. Everyone complains that UN doesn’t act as world police, but we collectively created it so that it couldn’t be world police.

Yeah, Canada and its closest allies (US, UK, etc.) have absolutely every reason to not want to stir the pot with India, considering India is considered critical in countering China in Asia. It’d be insane to pull a stunt like this unless they actually have damning evidence. I guess we’ll all see what comes of this with time, but I’m strongly inclined to believe Canada for now.

That and India’s response has basically been bald-faced whataboutism and “bUt He WaS a TeRrOriSt”. Doesn’t exactly endear me to believing India had nothing to do with this.

This is exactly what I don’t understand about people who want peace in Ukraine as soon as possible and at all costs: capitulation for the sake of short-term peace endangers long-term peace.

If we globally set the precedent that you can invade whomever you want and win just because you have nukes, that makes for a vastly more dangerous world. Every country with nukes will suddenly be more willing to go all imperialist, and all the countries without nukes will want to have them as a guarantee against invasion. And I don’t know about y’all, but a world with way more nukes in way more hands is way more dangerous.

Plus, Putin has shown he’ll keep on invading neighbors so long as he can get away with it. Delivering a crushing defeat to Russia and specifically Putin is the only way to achieve a more lasting peace.

I mean, the whole point of the fediverse is self-moderating. Each instance is allowed and encouraged to operate how it pleases, so instances that don’t tolerate hate speech, brigading, Nazis, and tankies are, imo, justified in removing such content as well as defederating from instances ripe with those issues. Likewise, instances that are more permissive of those kinds of things are free to defederate (or not) with whomever they please. If people are unhappy with how their local instance has acted, they can just migrate to another instance. This “drama” is just the fediverse working as it is supposed to.

Going and meeting with the wedding officiant with my fiancée. Also meeting her aunt and uncle and cousins from another city. Probably playing some Cities: Skylines as well.

This is an unpopular opinion, but I actually thought the show was very well done (until the plot twist at the end; it had zero foreshadowing and just kinda cheapened the whole show retroactively).

Extremely difficult and uncomfortable to watch? Absolutely. Objectively bad quality show? I don’t think so.

I definitely understand, as I was on reddit for several years as a lurker, then I started to occasionally comment, and then occasionally post. It was really only in the past 2 years that I became a pretty big poster and commenter on reddit. I think I actually post and comment more here on lemmy than even on reddit, if for no other reason than to help produce content and engagement here. Becoming a prolific poster and commenter ain’t a quick or easy transition, but I think even just upvoting niche stuff helps regardless. Like some of the smaller communities I’ve made here and been posting largely into the void, I still notice when I get like 3 upvotes instead of none at all. Every tiny bit of engagement here helps encourage others to keep on doing the same.

Yeah, I get the same thing as you. What I’ve done so far is I made a few communities here and am trying to fairly reliability populate them with content. Some of those communities are niche and I feel like I’m posting into the void sometimes, but occasionally I’ve gotten someone else actually posting some content in them. It does definitely take some commitment to bootstrap a new community, as people just won’t start posting on their own there until there’s a critical mass. So you just gotta take the hit, post into the void a while, slowly increase that subscribe count, until finally others start to join in.

It’s easiest with communities focused around memes or links, but I think it’ll take more effort with more niche hobby or technical communities, e.g., for programming languages or niche hobbies.

I agree also by rules-based utilitarianism. It’s important not just to consider the immediate, short-term utilitarian outcome, but to consider the utility of a world whereby we regularly make the same type of decision.

In a world where a riot is all it takes to sentence unpopular people to death, you create a perverse incentive for people to riot – or threaten to riot – in order to pervert the proper carriage of justice. Who knows how much net harm would be done in this world ruled by mob justice.

But the alternative is a world where rule of law exists, which I think is a far better world to live in.

Others have covered the details of labor laws in the US, so I won’t touch on that, but your question does make me think about why those kinds of labor protection laws are even seen as a necessity. And I think the answer to that is we (most people, not just Americans) view jobs as equal to livelihood.

But it makes you wonder what the world could be like if we had a universal basic income, where getting fired wasn’t actually the worst thing that could happen to you. It might still suck, but you’d still be able to have a roof over your head and food on your table while you searched for new work. This, critically, would give you more negotiating power when finding new jobs, as you’d likely be less desperate for a job, meaning you could credibly insist upon better pay and better conditions.

But we could take this one step further. In economics, there’s this concept called an externality, which is when you do something that affects someone else as a side effect. When you do something that harms someone else as a side effect (e.g., pollution), that’s called a negative externality. Negative externalities are actually a major problem in completely unregulated economies, because they cause the “invisible hand” of the free market to fail to achieve optimal distribution of goods, i.e., a market failure. The classic example of this is carbon emissions – the true cost to society of carbon emissions (from climate change) is not reflected in the cost of providing carbon-intensive goods, thus we have a tendency to over-produce and over-consume carbon-intensive goods and services. That is, the economy would be better off in the long-run if we emitted less carbon than we currently are, despite the short-term profits of polluting. Anyhoo, this mismatch between sticker price and true cost to society is why carbon tax is almost universally regarded to be the single best climate policy: by accounting for the costs of the negative externality, you can fix the market failure, and the invisible hand can once again work as it’s supposed to.

But where this relates to where I was going is there are also positive externalities, where you have a positive impact on someone else as a side effect of your activities. An example might be doing regenerative agriculture or rewilding a patch of land – the pollinator habitat you provide or the carbon you sequester has positive impacts on other people. And like how negative externalities tend to lead to overconsumption, positive externalities tend to lead to underconsumption. I.e., the economy would be net better off of more people did rewilding and regenerative agriculture, despite the short-term immediate costs they incur. And much like taxing negative externalities (e.g., carbon emissions) is a good way to correct those issues, subsidizing positive externalities is a good way to fix the issues of insufficient good activities.

So imagine if we not only had a UBI, but if the government also would pay you to plant trees or develop/maintain open-source software or any number of other activities that produce positive externalities. If we had these alternative means of maintaining a basic level of livelihood, then maybe we could decouple existing from jobs, and we wouldn’t feel a strong need to coerce businesses into holding onto people, nor would we need to coerce them into paying people enough or giving good enough working conditions – companies would have to pay well and offer good conditions and not fire for unfair reasons, else they’d struggle to fill vacancies.

We all saw how companies begrudgingly had to pay more during the “great resignation”. Or look how the professional class (e.g., doctors, engineers) get good pay and good conditions, precisely because they’re hard to replace. Give workers more options, make them less desperate, and they’ll be empowered to negotiate better pay and better conditions for themselves. Sure, some regulations would still be necessary, but I think there’s a lot of elegance in a bottom-up approach to labor relations.

Plus, banks actually serve an important economic role. When you put money in a savings account, the bank can lend it out to someone else as an investment, allowing enterprising individuals access to startup capital to build productive businesses or even just mortgages to buy homes, while also providing a quite safe means of storing your savings. Essentially, they connect those who have spare capital with those who need capital. And sure, there’s a lot of tomfoolery that goes on in the industry, but the core idea of banking is good.

It looks like it might be Lake Baikal. It’s a huge lake in Siberia that freezes over like this.

I have a pasta maker attachment for my stand mixer, and it makes it surprisingly easy to make fresh pasta. So I’ll knead together some semolina, egg, and warm water until I get a nice dough (using the stand mixer, of course), then feed it through the pasta maker attachment to make fettuccine. Boil and make a simple sauce with browned butter, pasta water, a splash of heavy cream, a spoonful of whole grain mustard, a spoonful of garlic paste, then topped with some freshly grated pecorino and a drizzle of olive oil.

Sounds fancy, and it does take a bit more time to make the pasta from scratch, but it’s not hard at all and it’s ludicrously delicious. Plus, 99% of people are impressed by even the idea of fresh pasta.

If I’m going for “easy” as in “fast”, too, I’ll use a package of storebought gnocchi and chop in a zucchini instead.