When I meet people in VR who are ESL, I can tell based on their accent and mannerisms that they learned English by playing video games with westerners or watched a lot of YouTube.
Do we really want to dilute the uniqueness of language by making everyone sound like they came out of a lab in California?
>Do we really want to dilute the uniqueness of language
I can't speak to whether it's desirable or not, but this has been happening with the advent of radio, movies, and television for over a century. So, are we worse off now, linguistically-speaking, than then? Do we really even notice missing accents if we never grew up with them?
language learning also works fine without emotionality faking, and is depending more on authentic speech recognition (e.g. you want the model to notice if you mispronounce important words, not gloss over it and just continue babble as otherwise this will bite you in the ass in the real world) as well as the system's overall specific ability to generate a personal learning curriculum.
Microsoft came up with some objectively good products both for consumers and developers in the recent decade. For consumers, Xbox would be the biggest one, and for developers, VSCode, WSL/WSL2, Azure.
IPv6 adoption will take place overnight when either google chrome, Android or iOS start showing a warning on IPv4-only networks. ISPs and tech companies will start to get flooded with support calls asking about it and will choose to roll out IPv6 to make the problem go away.
Chrome forced the web to go 100% https, the same thing will happen eventually with IPv6.
In practice the tech giants such as Google, Apple and Microsoft will dictate adoption of technology. When Chrome starts mandating or heavily recommending IPv6, adoption will reach 99% overnight. That's what happened with https: https://www.znetlive.com/blog/google-chrome-68-mandates-http...
I went through this around a year ago. I wanted to postgres for django apps, and I didn't want to pay the insane prices required by cloud providers for a replicated setup. I wanted a replicated setup on hetzner VMs and I wanted full control over the backup process. I wanted the deployment to be done using ansible, and I wanted my database servers to be stateless. If you vaporize both my heztner postgres VMs simultaneously, I lose one minute of data. (If I just lose the primary I probably lose less than a second of data due to realtime replication).
I'll be honest it's not documented as well as it could, some concepts like the archive process and the replication setup took me a while to understand. I also had trouble understanding what roles the various tools played. Initially I thought I could roll my own backup but then later deployed pgBackrest. I deployed and destroyed VMs countless times (my ansible playbook does everything from VM creation on proxmox / hetzner API to installing postgres, setting up replication).
What is critical is testing your backup and recovery. Start writing some data. Blow up your database infra. See if you can recover. You need a high degree of automation in your deployment in order to gain confidence that you won't lose data.
My deployment looks like this:
* two Postgres 16 instances, one primary, one replica (realtime replication)
* both on Debian 12 (most stable platform for Postgres according to my research)
* ansible playbooks for initial deployment as well as failover
* archive file backups to rsync.net storage space (with zfs snapshots) every minute
* full backups using pgBackrest every 24hrs, stored to rsync.net, wasabi, and hetzner storage box.
As you can guess, it was kind of a massive investment and forced me to become a sysadmin / DBA for a while (though I went the devops route with full ansible automation and automated testing). I gained quite a bit of knowledge which is great. But I'll probably have to re-design and seriously test at the next postgres major release. Sometimes I wonder whether I should have just accepted the cost of cloud postgres deployments.
I've got a less robust version of this (also as Ansible -> Hetzner) that I've toyed with. I'm often tempted to progress it, but I've realized it is a distraction. I say that about me, and not too negatively. I know that I want to get some apps done, but the sysadmin-y stuff is pretty fun and alluring but it can chew up a lot of time.
Currently I'm viewing the $19 plan from Neon as acceptable (I just look in my Costco cart for comparison) for me now. Plus, I'm getting something for my money beyond not having to build it myself: branching. This has proved way handier than I'd expected as a solo dev and I use it all the time. A DIY postgres wouldn't have that, at least not as cleanly.
If charges go much beyond the $19 and it is still just me faffing about, I'll probably look harder at the DIY PG. OTOH if there is good real world usage and/or $ coming in, then it's easier to view Neon as just a cost of business (within reason).
The server-side store a full plain text archive with government access is by design.
the weak encryption is NOT by design. It's due to incompetent programmers.
Does anyone have any thoughts on what motivates people to play sudoku or write solvers for sudoku ? I have trouble finding motivation to solve artificial problems. That said I sink hundreds of hours into factorio.
For me personally, I have little motivation to do classical sudokus. They either have a not-so-elegant solve path (usually set by a computer) or are too difficult for me to solve.
Variant sudokus on the other hand are a lot of fun. They often have very elegant solve paths and there are many neat tricks you can discover and reason about.
To each their own, but the puzzles you linked seem really convoluted compared to regular Sudoku.
The last puzzle has no fewer than 9 custom rules, in addition to the regular Sudoku rules, and then it also says “every clue is wrogn [sic]” implying there is some meta out-of-the-box thinking required to even understand what the rules are. That is more a riddle than a logic puzzle.
By contrast, the charm of classical Sudoku is that the rules are extremely simple and straightforward (fill the grid using digits 1 through 9, so that each digit occurs exactly once in each row, column, and 3x3 box) and any difficulty solving comes from the configuration of the grid.
I also mostly enjoy Sudoku variants, most of which I discovered via Geocaches, interestingly.
After solving a few I then implemented a solver with customizable constraints, if anyone's interested, should still be available here:
Like many puzzles, there’s a regular release of endorphins as you progress, and a lot of satisfaction in completing something. I enjoy puzzles just like reading a book or playing a game, it’s another world I can step into for a bit of an escape, but I like to think it’s decent mental exercise. Overall I vastly prefer cryptic crosswords where solving each clue genuinely brings a smile to my face, but that’s more of a commitment of time (and for me sometimes a guarantee of frustration). I also like doing puzzles in the newspaper because me and my kids can sit together and all contribute. Coffee, breakfast, sat in the sun with a newspaper and a good pencil[1], absolute bliss if you ask me.
As for solvers, it’s a very elegant, well-formed problem with a lot of different potential solutions, many of which involve useful general techniques. I used to dabble clumsily in chess engines and honestly it’s the only time I’ve ever ended up reading Knuth directly for various bit twiddling hacks, so it’s always educational.
All games are artificial problems, so your question actually is, what motivates people to engage in pastimes?
Sudoku, crosswords, Simon Tatham's puzzles etc. are an excellent way to pass the time while keep training the mind. Sports are their equivalent for the body.
Finally, writing solvers for a problem, be it real or artificial, for many is just another variety of puzzle to engage in.
idk man, you ask a good question. I think the idea has to do with the saddle you put on the invisible horse that is the game’s problem. Factorio has several complex saddles you must master to tame the beast. In factorio, you can get progressively better at using these saddles to tame even the most unwieldy scenario. Sudoku, at its heart, is not much different than factorio. However sudoku has one narrow problem with many different, increasingly nuanced ways of solving it. Factorio has many different “sudoku” style problems, but each problem needs to be handled differently, with each problem having increasing levels of sophistication. I think you might like factorio more because it’s just a bigger steak to chew on, and you’ve got the right appetite.
I don’t care much for sudoku but I do enjoy crosswords quite a lot, which feels like a somewhat arbitrary exercise. I enjoy the fact that I know a lot of words and it makes me feel clever. There’s probably something to that with most puzzle type challenges.
I wasted too much time in my youth trying to min-max, and now I get bored as soon as I figure out, roughly, what the rules and mechanics look like for any game.
I teach C++ and I made my students code a Sudoku solver last year. It's a very convenient project to give them: self-contained, already familiar, no OS-specific weirdness, you get to use STL data structures, algorithms, very gentle I/Os...
Reminder that if you test a live payment on a new Stripe deployment, you will get INSTANTLY banned. Don't do a live test with a credit card in your name !!
With stripe, the testing environment is sufficiently powerful that you don't need to test in production. With the test environment, you should have enough confidence that the integration will work. If you feel the need to do a payment after going live, ask a friend to do it, not someone from your household.
Stripe knows your name, which you had to submit to go live. If your first payment is with a credit card in your name, particularly if it's a large amount (which the fraud system flags as money laundering), you will get banned with 100% certainty. Ask a friend who doesn't share your last name.
