Wow this is a really nice idea. I also have been learning italian with Duolingo for quite a while but have hit a plateau once I finished the course.
So far I've only listened to the beginning, but that sounds like exactly the right difficulty to improve my listening comprehension.
Do you have an approach to improve speaking italian (not only understanding)? Because that is the end goal for me and something that Duolingo doesn't really teach that much.
I've started taking some tutored classes from Preply, that helps.
Watching shows on Netflix, listening to random podcasts also helps.
But bridging this Duolingo-to-fluency gap, that's exactly what I'm trying to explore at the moment with the other projects on https://hn.lingually.ai/. I think AI can give something no other approaches can.
So essentially, I've now got a Chrome extension to get immediate feedback on text I write. Then I have a POC for a text-adventure game to practice chatting with GPT-powered characters (dm me at https://twitter.com/LukasPlatinsky and I can set you up with a link to test). Now the podcast for some content to listen to. I next want to explore some daily short writing prompts with immediate grammar check by AI. Adding Whisper could unlock speaking as well.
Lots of opportunities! Let me know if you're interested in trying any of these out :)
Once you want to be done for the day, shut off your (work) PC and meditate for 10 minutes or so. This gives all the work thoughts time to go away and afterwards the brain is ready for whatever plans you have for the evening. If you don't know how to meditate, just use one of the various apps, they really help get started. It's not hard.
I also sometimes did this when I wasn't working from home - when there was something that I was still thinking about after getting home. Meditation is generally a good way to put the work-mind away and give the leisure-mind its space :)
You can also fill water bottles with hot water (I usually use two) and put them next to the dough in the oven. My oven gets slightly too warm if I turn it on to the lowest setting / light only.
I reduced my time at work to 80% at the beginning of July. Every Friday is my day now. This week I had to switch it up so today is my day off. It's 1pm and I have already worked out, ran some errands that had been bugging me and am now reading this in one of my favorite diners which I for some reason almost never found the time to go to before.
If you have the chance and it seems intriguing to you I encourage everyone to try it out. I guess not all workplaces support it in the same way as mine does, but it was possible for me to have a three month trial phase after which I can go back to 100% or decide to continue the 80% for a year. Maybe your workplace would be open for that but you just don't know!
Of course it's quite the pay cut, but as a developer with few obligations I can still manage quite well. I feel much more relaxed over all and I enjoy my work more when I'm there. It even subjectively feels like I'm getting more done at work. The weekend feels so much longer and relaxing, because stuff I normally do on the weekend often is already done.
One problem for me is that I tend to cram a lot into my Fridays. I feel like I have to use them to their full potential. Then when the weather doesn't work out or something else falls through I'm pretty bummed. But I think that is something that can be improved over time.
I would do this in a heartbeat. Life is too short to believe that we seriously need to spend 5/7 days working for our entire adult life, no matter the type of labor or how much you enjoy it. If you can live comfortably with 20% less income, do it. Money ain't everything.
This sounds awesome. I'm held back a bit, I have always been warned against working less than a full workweek, since it would presumely substantially harm my (European) retirement build-up (unless I would make a lot more money than I currently do). I have never investigated yet, but would before cutting working hours.
I did the same thing a few years ago, moving to a Mon-Thu working week, taking a 20% pay cut in the process - I'm so glad I did this, and I wouldn't want to go back to a 5-day week.
I get more time for family, side projects and me - and yet I honestly don't think my productivity dropped!
It's certainly something I'd love to trial. I think most people probably look at their take home pay and imagine that taking 20% off of that figure would be a big cut. In the UK at least, as a higher-rate tax payer (40% tax) it wouldn't be nearly as bad as that seems.
At the moment we're looking at nursery for our 7 month old 2 days per week. If instead I could work 4 days a week it would be a wash financially. I'd get the benefits of spending more time with her but obviously looking after a < 1 year old isn't 'a day off' by any stretch.
The problem with this is that once we've reached a "perilous level of global warming", it is quite possible that there is no way back.
The 2 degrees target seems to be already out of reach and everything beyond that gets closer and closer to being unpredictable. Of course no one knows what exactly will happen anyway. But as an example: If the arctic permafrost starts to melt methane gets released into the atmosphere which further accelerates everything [1].
I would not hope on some not-yet-existing or not-yet-usable technologies to fix everything we're messing up now. The "eventually" when finally everyone stops using fossil fuels because other kinds of energy are cheaper might be just too late.
This is where geo-engineering can come in. I think climate scientist will be much more comfortable discussing it if it seems we are on track for fixing the underlying causes.
There are bunch of different ideas, most of them involve directly interacting with global temperature by reflecting energy back to space. Injecting sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere for example, mimics how some volcanic eruptions cause temporary cooling. Another is massive scale cloud seeding over the oceans.
One of the scariest things about these ideas is how cheap could be are. What happens if Canada decides it would really prefer a milder winter and sprays the hydro dioxide up there like a bunch of unruly mounties? Then they cut it out and Uzbekistan do the same.
Purely my (possibly terribly misinformed) opinion, but geo engineering (used here to mean the bundle of blue-sky proposals to manipulate the climate intentionally after we've completely screwed it up unintentionally) is a red herring and, at best, a high-risk hail-mary.
It is a red herring: in discussing climate change, it is brought up primarily as a reason not to worry about doing anything now, we'll fix it in post. The sheer number of otherwise smart, educated people who blithely assume that attempting to modulate a huge chaotic system we don't fully understand and can't model is a tribute to optimism and not much else. Add to that the fact that we only have one atmosphere on which to practice, and, well, I'm not optimistic.
And that is before we get in to the (alluded to by the parent post) public choice questions on an global scale, something that history demonstrates is, politely, extremely difficult, extremely slow, mostly toothless and prone to cheating. To pick one example, we, as a species, cannot agree that leaving explosive objects scattered around to randomly maim and kill is, on balance, a bad idea.
If, in 100 or whatever years, the options are go extinct slowly or pump tons of reflective gas into the upper atmosphere and see what happens, well, I'd vote to go for broke, too. But that is all the "geo-engineering" approach is at this point.
> And that is before we get in to the (alluded to by the parent post) public choice questions on an global scale, something that history demonstrates is, politely, extremely difficult, extremely slow,
If we could agree on global-scale engineering projects to manipulate the climate, we'd probably be able to agree on reducing dependence on fossil fuels...
Many types of geo-engineering could in theory work to cool the planet. But none of the proposals I'm aware of will decrease the CO2 in the atmosphere. Without fixing that, we'll still have ocean acidification, which will dramatically change how the oceans support life. It's possible that most forms of seafood we know today will become extinct.
http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/What+is+Ocean+Acidificati...
So on which climate sensitivity estimate are you basing your comment, and why are you choosing it in preference to others?
A compilation of at least 30 published studies based upon satellite and ocean observations demonstrate climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 levels after all feedbacks is only about 0.5 C, which is ~7 times less than the 3.2C claimed by the IPCC AR5 modelled mean estimate.
> The problem with this is that once we've reached a "perilous level of global warming", it is quite possible that there is no way back.
IIRC, there have been significant periods in prehistory where there were no ice caps, and technically we're currently in the middle of an ice age [1]. That's not to say that the effects of global warming won't cause severe stresses on our current ecosystems and civilization, but it's an overstatement to say "there's no way back."
As far as I understand it (please someone correct me if I'm wrong):
1. In this case you would not have to manually accept anything, as the root certificate (the CNNIC cert) is already in your browser/os and the certificate chain for certs created by MCS would be OK (because their cert is signed by CNNIC).
2. As CNNIC issued them an intermediate CA cert, MCS was able to create certificates for any domain they wanted and these certificates would be considered valid by everyone that has CNNIC in the root store. So the MCS cert is not valid accross multiple domains, but it allows MCS to create certificates for every domain which kind of has the same consequences.
3. I think it would pose a threat when leaving the MITM network, but not as a consequence of having been in the MITM network. Only the root certificates are stored locally. Websites have to send a complete certificate chain that anchors their certs in one of the root certs. This means that the cert generated by MCS is not stored and therefore not used when leaving the network anymore. The danger is that this intermediate cert allows MCS to generate certs for any domain and use them outside their network, too.
4. A self signed certificate would have to be installed on the machines in the network. Otherwise users would get a certificate warning and would have to add the cert to their rootstores themselves. Other than that I think that this would grant you the same MITM-powers as this intermediate cert did for MCS, with the only restriction that you couldn't create certs for domains not in your control that would be accepted by users outside your network/that don'd have your self signed cert installed.
So far I've only listened to the beginning, but that sounds like exactly the right difficulty to improve my listening comprehension.
Do you have an approach to improve speaking italian (not only understanding)? Because that is the end goal for me and something that Duolingo doesn't really teach that much.