nitrixion's comments

nitrixion | 3 years ago | on: Can Duolingo actually teach you Spanish?

> I, like half of us, took a ton of Spanish in high school, enough to generally stick even without continuing to build it afterwards.

Can confirm. My wife and I both took 4+ years of spanish in high school and college, over 15 years ago. We can almost get by on just that knowledge alone in spanish speaking countries, but it is difficult and we always have a translator around.

That said, we took a vacation last summer to a spanish speaking country and spent the 2 months leading up to it using Duolingo. We both had streaks for that entire time. Personally, the refresher course of Duolingo made conversing with people in their native language of Spanish MUCH easier compared to other attempts in the past. We didn't need to use our phones to lookup phrases or even ask locals to speak English. I even learned a few new words and phrases.

That isn't to say that Duolingo is the best or only option, just an anecdote about our experience.

nitrixion | 3 years ago | on: Apple blocks Coinbase Wallet

> At this point iPhone isn't a product.

What? This is a weird statement. iPhone is 100% a product. There are many alternatives.

> Imagine if Tesla charged Starbucks money to drive you to coffee. Because that's exactly what Apple has been doing for the last decade.

This is not the current scenario. Using your example, it would be like if Tesla owned a building, a coffee shipping company, and coffee making equipment and Starbucks sold coffee using Tesla resources. In this example, it would be expected for Tesla to charge Starbucks a premium for this full service coffee company being white labeled by Starbucks.

>Apple is taxing the internet, basically.

No. Apple is charging a fee to list products for sale on their store. Similar to every other store in existence.

nitrixion | 3 years ago | on: Sperm counts worldwide are plummeting faster than we thought

I'd be interested in reading more about this. I'm curious if that correlation is due to people with lower bodyfat being more likely to exercise regularly which, in turn, would increase testosterone levels.

Seems like the obvious conclusion, but that doesn't mean it is correct.

nitrixion | 3 years ago | on: Activision Blizzard Is Trying to Stop a Union Vote at Its Albany Office

While they may make above average in the overall assessment of income for a country, they make well below average for the type of work they are doing. Many game companies know they can pay below market wages because of demand for the jobs.

Source: When I quit game dev, I got a 60% raise and I was on the higher end of the pay scale at that game dev job. I know lead developers with nearly 10 years of experience making under 70k in games. I frequently offer them roles that would double their salary and they turn it down because they like working in games.

nitrixion | 3 years ago | on: Alphabet Earnings Report Q3 2022 [pdf]

This is yet another instance where piracy provides the better product.

Installing uBlock Origin and SponsorBlock makes Youtube a much better product than simply paying for premium. If you haven't used it, SponsorBlock is a crowd sourced browser extension that identifies and skips sections of videos like "This content is brought to you by..."

I used to pay for premium and use YT Music, but after getting fed up with YTM I cancelled. I'm noticing a much MUCH better experience using UBO and SponsorBlock. Unfortunately, this setup means the creators don't get any revenue from me.

If only YouTube offered such an experience at a reasonable cost.

nitrixion | 3 years ago | on: Apple is quietly pushing a TV ad product with media agencies

This is what we do also. I have many streaming subscriptions. If a show is not available or is only available with ads (Prime Video does this a lot), then I feel zero remorse torrenting the show.

Additionally, if a show was ever on a streaming service while I had a subscription, I feel zero remorse for downloading that show once it is removed from that streaming service.

These license holders are getting more greedy by the year. If they don't want to provide the content for a reasonable fee through a streaming service, then they don't get my money. Simple as that.

nitrixion | 3 years ago | on: Carmack Unscripted

That reasoning aside, there are an infinite number of ways to solve this that would be less "weird" to look at than simply nothing. Even a simple colored half sphere would be better than just nothing.

nitrixion | 3 years ago | on: The Mac keeps growing in shipments while PC shipments are falling

I'm in the same situation. I have a 2012 MBP but I use my desktop daily and most of it's components are from 2012-14ish, other than a 2080 video card that replaced a dead video card.

There just isn't as good of a reason to upgrade yearly as there used to be. My desktop is primarily used for gaming and it still keeps up with most games in High quality settings.

nitrixion | 3 years ago | on: An inorganic user engine driving ad campaigns on major websites and podcasts

> recently we found that a major podcast network was autoplaying podcasts in order to juice their numbers

This is a tactic that some video game streamers use as well. One big example of this is the fextralife wiki site[0]. I get very frustrated when it is the top result from a web search or if it is the only place to get relevant information.

[0] - https://monsterhunterworld.wiki.fextralife.com/Monster+Hunte...

nitrixion | 3 years ago | on: Google is shutting down Stadia

Yes, you can. Easily!

The point I was making about Spotify is that even if I solely listen to music as full albums, I only get recommendations for playlists. I rarely want to listen to a playlist. There are a number of other things I don't like about Spotify, but it works well enough.

nitrixion | 3 years ago | on: Google is shutting down Stadia

I really miss Google Play Music. For my needs, it was the perfect streaming service.

Youtube Music is a huge step back. Spotify is far too playlist and recommendation happy, I want to listen to albums not curated lists. Tidal is decent, but similar to Spotify. Apple Music is the one I haven't tried for more than a couple of days and I don't recall what I didn't like about it.

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