Random

I think there are 3 main reasons to make things: I enjoy the process of making it I want it to exist I am being asked to make it As an employed person, most of the time I spend making in the last category. I never touched any networking or cloud infra stuff until it became my job. I ended up really enjoying it, not because I want to make this stuff or find it particularly interesting compared to all the other things you can do with a computer, but because it’s satisfyingly complex and challenging and I do enjoy the process of problem solving (a bit of the first category). ...

第一次跟我老婆去马来西亚的时候，我一直要等她 帮我翻译。除了她的公公，外公，外婆之外，大家都说英语。 就是有时比较方便讲中文。回来美国我决定学习华语了。现在 我觉得我的中文不错，已经到中级了。前次回去马来西亚， 虽然他们讲中文大我概都明白，但是有时候他们还讲另一个 语言:福州话。 在网上我也找了一个会福州话的老师。上了几次课了， 我很快发现她的福州话不一样！我老婆告诉我，他们的 福州话和中国的，甚至马来西亚其他地方的，都不一样。 他们可能会用不一样的声调，不一样的词汇，等等。那个 中国福州的老师教我他们的福州话已经被普通话影响了。 上次回去古晋，她外公外婆给我一本书：美全八音。这是一本 福州话的字典。我根本不知道怎么用。首先，它用的是繁体字。 其次，它写的语法很奇怪。好像不是普通话来的，或者是古代的语法。 我仔细地用人工智能和OCR来翻译。原来，这就是一本“韵书”。 前面有一个曲子，可是书法很难看懂。 找到了一个人翻译了这个曲子！ https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/96448334 然后说明一下怎么用。 三十六字母 用36个字来表达福州话的语音。有一个小曲子来记住： 春花香，秋山開，嘉賓歡歌須金杯， 孤燈光輝燒銀缸， 之東郊，過西橋，雞聲催初天， 奇梅歪遮溝。 接下来，他们解释那36个字有15个字头（initial sound)： 每字母分出十五字頭 # Initial Roman letter (per book) Exemplar (per book) 1 柳 l 巃 2 邊 — 枋 (???) 3 求 g 公 4 氣 k 空 5 低 d 東 6 波 p 蜂 7 他 — 通 8 曾 — 宗 9 日 — 齈 (???) 10 時 — 嵩 11 鶯 — 溫 12 蒙 — 儍/傻 (???) 13 語 — ngǔng (romanized, rising tone) 14 出 — 春 15 喜 — 風 然后，有7个声调： ...

I want to write about the hard part of this though: the sync engine. I want online persistence for two reasons with Bookchoy: I want everything I do to be backed up and accessible on any device. This is pretty much a standard expectation for any modern app. The chrome extension is an immediate second device, which means (I hope) every user will actually have utility for online persistence. Version one: two columns When I first started developing, there was only a local SQLite. No auth, no remote database, no sync engine. I knew I’d eventually build one, but I didn’t want to overengineer it before I understood what I actually needed. The whole mental model was: ...

building random small things At this point we all know that AI lets us build whatever we want when we want it. It’s especially nice when I have small things I want for myseelf and I wouldn’t have otherwise spent the time bootstrapping and polishing them to the point that they’re daily-drivable. The reason I frequently feel the need for such tiny apps is that most things available at the top of whatever SEO optimized search are pretty bloated. For example, a fitness/macro tracker: ...