Btrfs, the file system I use, utilizes zstd for transparent compression. That's using a lot of CPU all the time on laptop. So more efficient compressing is great news! Is this for future CPUs?
This is tangential, but seeing the 8086 opcode table organized in octal groups made me realize the same applies for the instruction set of the Z80 (my home CPU). Your articles are always very insightful, thank you!
The 8080 has 7 registers and a single addressing mode for accumulator-based instructions (which is most of them), therefore base-8 organization is pretty natural. Likewise for 8086 which has 8 registers and 8 ways to use registers to form an addressing mode (with absolute addressing and three different displacement modes, there would be 8*3+1=25, but they sacrificed [BP] to fit everything in MOD={00,01,10}). Of course one wonders if the choice of 8 registers and 8 addressing mode was due to some kind of fixation with base 8, or vice versa.
Compared to the 6809, the 6502 or the 68000, the biggest reminiscence of the Z80 is the difference between AX/CX/DX/BX having 8-bit parts and SI/DI/SP/BP not having them. Though the low/high parts of IX and IY were accessible on the Z80 via undocumented opcodes (maybe even SP? I don't remember).
From a Czechoslovak video game archivist, well done! We have our own databases of video games and even a dedicated person reviewing every single public release on 8-bit micros, but no website with such a clear presentation. Inspiring!
It's Angular/nestjs/mysql combo, CMS kidna "works", but if Czech friends would like to use it to share it's own creations i'll surely willing to help :)
Which brings us to, should wikipedia have more domain specific wikis? Why does everyone end up on fandom or some other random wiki site when wikipedia is already ad free, hosted worldwide and ain't going anywhere.
Wikipedia doesn't _have_ to be just a encyclopedic overview of topics, it should have dive ins as deep as you want if there are people willing to write it.
A wiki "is" its maintainers. Separate editors — separate wiki. Wikipedia stops where the interest of Wikipedia's editors in maintaining pages stops; which is usually where the interest of another, distinct group of editors in maintaining those pages starts.
That other set of editors could all just be Wikipedia editors, but then they'd have to play by Wikipedia's rules. They'd rather play by their own set of rules, and more importantly, have the ability to define their own rules. Autonomy. Sovereignty.
Now, in theory, there could be some "hierarchy of wikis" all maintained within one system, where different namespaces are maintained by different groups of editors (similar to e.g. Reddit with subreddit moderators) — but, because the goal would remain the creation of a single cohesively-presented encyclopedia, this would result in terrible inter-group conflicts about things that don't fall crisply into the magisterial domain of one group of editors or the other — e.g. rules for when a wiki page in one namespace, should link a topic of a wiki page in another namespace, and how that citation should be done.
(Imagine if editors in namespace A believed that a page in namespace B really should exist, and so kept linking to it, despite the editors of namespace B disagreeing; and the system hosting all of these constantly bubbling up the non-existent page to the attention of the editors in namespace B because it received new external links.)
The solution to this is decentralization. No hierarchy, no shared system, just reusable open-source software and federation through hypertext linkage entirely controlled by the origin. Which is exactly what you get when each wiki is its own website.
Fandom has become incredibly scummy. I only try to use it on my PC where I have adblockers and a userscript to cut out all the BS they push, and even then it's not enough. They've now turned all searches into cross-wiki searches with absolutely no way to tell if something's on the wiki you're already on until you mouse over it. If I go to The Orville wiki and search for Moclans, it gives me that wiki's page on Moclans, but also pages on Moclans from the "Aliens Wiki", a wiki for some weird ironic cartoon drawn in MS Paint, and another vastly inferior The Orville wiki where the only text on the page is "The Moclans are an alien race in The Orville." All these pages look the same in the search box, and there's no way to turn off cross-wiki search (as far as I could see). I get that they gotta make money somehow, but you should not be able to make your site horrible to use while still dominating the market because you're the easiest product to use.
It was alright until you wanted to leave, suddenly you were banned and "no longer represented the community", and wikia employees had wide latitude in doing whatever they could to frustrate any attempt to migrate off of wikia.
It's a paid app, but I enjoyed Speakly's approach of "endless stream of open cloze exercises". It forces you to actually type words in the target language (unlike Duolingo which is mostly translations into the source language), it has a clever spaced repetition algorithm, and it lets you practice for as long as you want and stop immediately at any point, unlike Duolingo locking you into 20 question long lessons.
We made something a couple of weeks ago, you might like it, needs login but is 100% free. Endless (depending on language) listening exercises, sentences are selected (from tatoeba) based on vocabulary (no selection based on grammar yet). It's also integrated with a flashcard system (also free). If you set a small vocab (100 words) and do lots of cards, you start to get a feel for the grammar of a language. Something like 40 languages are supported.
As a contributor to Tatoeba, I'm always interested in checking out how people use our data.
The interface needs work to be usable on mobile, but I guess you know that.
I'm not sure whether the TTS you're using is really good enough to be usable for learning a language. I tried it in German and noticed quite a few TTS bugs, like pronouncing "Tu" as if it were an acronym "TU" instead of the verb "Do", as well as switching to an English pronunciation next to English names (pronouncing "Hallo Roger" more like "Hello Roger").
Oh, thank you for your contributions! Mobile, we're planning a RN app (site is MobX/React), but we got our hands full at the moment (who wants a job?).
TTS, I used to be of the opinion that TTS is something that should be kept far away from langauge learners. But, it got so damn good: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-service...
At least for many langauges. Didn't check the German much, interesting. For Hungarian, it screws up question intonation. But often it just seems completely human-like.
I was concerned about the license for the audio recordings, and I assume recording quality could be mixed, but I'll take a more careful look.
That looks great so far! Pair it with open cloze with translation once you determine that the user should know the word and you've got magic going. You could even "beep" the word out of the recording (I'm assuming they're TTS).
We use microsoft TTS, was trying to figure out if they can give time ranges for beeping out words.. didn't see it. Holy grail would be just generating audio files to listen to, no front end at all. :)
