emursebrian

Eki-melos are the things that I really liked about taking trains in Japan.

The chirping bird sounds to help blind users find their way to and from the platforms is also a pretty interesting design decision.

Emurse | https://emurse.io/jobs | Outbound Sales Specialist | Remote | Part-Time

Emurse is a platform for learning languages with a focus on instructor-led courses, phonetics and comprehensible input.

Your mission as an Outbound Sales Specialist is simple: identify high-value targets, craft compelling email sequences, and turn cold contacts into warm introductory meetings.

To apply, review the instructions and job details at https://emurse.io/jobs.

I mostly get AI slop ads for scam products, though slop videos do creep into my shorts feed.

We're using Stripe to run our marketplace where teachers can sell their language courses. It does MOST of what we want/need.

I've done numerous checkout/payment processing integrations over the years. Stripe is still pretty easy to use and full-featured compared to what I've used in the past. It does have its annoyances, shortcomings and API inconsistencies - but it's still better than the alternatives, in my view.

Support has been good when I needed more documentation on something. Their chatbot performs very poorly, however.

Most of these are common sense. As a tourist foreigner, you also aren't expected to know all the customs but it's appreciated when you try. The one about which direction to NOT point the chopsticks in was new to me. If you just watch what other people are doing, then try to do the same thing, you're probably on the right track.

Related to eating, one pro-tip I got from a local is that when you're ready to close your tab or get your check at a bar or restaurant, you can make a small X with your index fingers.

Really useful in a busy bar!

The UI for loopmaster looks really good. The color scheme is really pleasing to look at and it is easy to jump right in and start editing stuff.

I've owned a bunch of different synthesizers and used a bunch of DAWs over the years and it was clear to me where I needed to make my edits to affect the signal chain.

We do real-time client-side audio processing in Emurse, and there were definitely a bunch of challenges to overcome there, so it would be interesting to hear more about what went into building the tool.

Fish sauce is also really popular in southeast Asia and Worcestershire sauce is often made with fermented fish so can also be considered garum adjacent.

Anki is great for what it is, but it has some annoyances when studying languages. They were annoying enough for me that I build some tools for Anki to try to address the problems. Eventually, I migrated my SQL scripts and JavaScript code to a lightweight .NET Core app that replaced Anki entirely.

This app was the starting point for presenting interactive content in Emurse. We're currently focusing on filling in areas of language learning that are missing - like phonetics.

If anyone is interested, they can checkout Dogen's Phonetics Course on Emurse: https://emurse.io/courses. There's also an "instant demo" for the Thai Course where you can try a demo without creating an account.

Multiple variations "per-card" are the way to go. It was one of my big gripes about Anki too! My other big complaint is that it only really is tracking one metric when it comes to study - whether you remember the "card" or not.

This is where Anki falls short for language study, because we as language learners also want to look at listening & reading comprehension as well as pronunciation.

Any reason why you're using SM-2 over FSRS? In Emurse we're using an algorithm similar to SM-2, mainly because FSRS wasn't out when we started building it. it works well enough because we've come up work arounds for Anki's problem of workload distribution. Looking into FSRS a bit, I am definitely interested in giving this a shot and seeing if it improves it in that area.

It's hard for even developers and small companies TRYING to make a living there. Keeping an app active in the app stores requires a lot of extra overhead, but doesn't add significant value to the product in cases where it's a native cross-platform or browser-based app.

So many of the apps installed on my phone could be PWAs, but since the implementation of PWAs is quite limited - a native app is required in most cases.

I've been developing with .NET since version 1.1. I feel like it's always been pretty easy to use for beginners. You install Visual Studio, create a new project and BOOM you've got a program that builds and runs.

Having used Turbo Pascal and Turbo C prior to Visual Basic and Visual C, Microsoft's "Visual" IDEs and other Windows based IDEs of the 90's were a step up in ease of use even if they did require more files to build a project.

I am working on a platform for learning languages called Emurse. It has some neat features, like tools to help improve your pronunciation. You also have the ability to study content presented in courses in new ways.

We worked with Dogen, a YouTuber that does Japanese comedy videos and pronunciation lessons with a course on Japanese Phonetics and Pitch accent - you can find a link in my profile.

AI has its place, but I am also tired of all the AI slop. That's why we're partnering with creators who have already been producing excellent content to build courses on Emurse.

I just got back from Japan. I did not notice a difference in performance between tapping with a Blink credit card and tapping with an IC card. I only used the ICOCA card. There were never lines at the gates. There were only ever brief lines at the ticket counters and terminals. I was there during golden week, which is one of the busiest travel times of the year. My travel partner and I used almost exclusively public transportation to get around, usually riding a few trains per-day. We only experienced one two-minute delay in Tokyo on a Friday evening during rush hour.

Japan's transportation infrastructure is great!

I am working on making it easier to learn languages. We provide a platform for teachers and educators to create their own language courses. The platform offers features similar to software like Babel or Anki, along with some unique features for phonetics study and customizing the learning experience.

We're currently working with language influencers to build courses on Emurse. This year, we launched Japanese Phonetics course created by the YouTuber Dogen https://emurse.io/course/japanese-phonetics.

If you want to try out Emurse, we have a free Thai reading course available. You can view the first lesson without out creating an account: https://emurse.io/courses.

The author specifically said he didn't ready the book.

We had a history teacher in high school who noted that. He always tried to cover the factors that led up to an event happening. I always appreciated that.

Ultimately, there's only so much you can cover in a history class on a very broad topic like "Ancient History" or "American History".

I struggle when trying to solve math problems without context. I learned enough trigonometry to pass the final exams in high school, but I didn't REALLY understand it until I took a graduate-level graphics programming class.

Some people enjoy the process of solving equations and math problems. For me, it's a tough process. Unless I have a tangible goal, I struggle to visualize the problem.

Starting with basic algebra, it would be more effective if mathematics were paired with some practical problems. Computer graphics, engineering, construction, finance and the analysis of data would be good areas to do this in because it's exactly where you'd need said math!

Browser based apps are better than ever. As a developer who has delivered applications on CD-ROM and downloadable installers, I do not have a strong desire to return to these times.

Browser-based word-processing and spreadsheets pretty great. I love VS Code. The multimedia capabilities of browsers are pretty good and up to the tasks I need them for.

I've been following Mattias' work for a while now. It's impressive the amount of really big projects he has finished over the years. His YouTube channel has all sorts of interesting projects on it.

If you're into homemade instruments and the process behind making them, bellowphone is fun one to check out. He goes into detail about his builds and also has performances of himself playing his wacky creations.

jQuery UI was a step up from the time, but it was still painful to do basic things compared to now. I much preferred developing front-end for apps deployed on the web in Flex and later Silverlight. I moved to Knockout and then Vue. I have used Angular and React, I just prefer Vue.

I was doing consulting work up until a few years ago and it still showed up on a lot of projects, and the integrations were usually full of buggy spaghetti code. You can build low-quality apps in any framework, but the more full-featured frameworks at least to try to set the developers up for success.

This will be great for custom maps.

I am on QGIS 3.30 and many of the street labels at 1:31860 scale show up in red and are not aligned correctly.

I didn't check to see if Thai was supported, but it hangs when I try to perform TTS on the text "ฉันพูดภาษาไทย" and then comes back with an error message several minutes later.

Using an AI for A/B testing. Hmmmm.

At the end of the day, the AI model would produce a prediction of what your modeled users would prefer. The quality of the results would depend a lot on how accurately your users were modeled.

I could see it potentially making an A/B test go faster IF the predictions were accurate.

I'd be interested to hear if anyone is using AI tools for A/B testing and how effective it is compared to conventional tools.

Kaoss Pad!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaoss_Pad

It still is.

Do other browser vendors add special cases in their codebase for specific sites? It seems like a really bad idea.

Since around 2020, I've been working on an app that makes heavy use of audio playback and recording. I feel like I am frequently making Safari specific updates because something related media playback or recording stopped working on Safari.

I don't recall this kind of regression ever happening with Chromium-based browsers or Firefox. It feels weird in 2024 to be adding work-arounds and hacks specific web browsers and anecdotally, it seems to be getting worse.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40134383. On BrowserStack, still no Safari dev tools on iOS 17.4+

Thanks for checking.

It looks nice. If WebGPU is adopted by more browsers, it will probably be pretty useful for doing real-time visualizations of audio.

In Emurse, we render waveform, and also pitch plots of audio recordings using canvas. It's pretty fast, but ours are a bit lower-resolution. The most resource-intensive part of the operation is actually processing the processing the audio.

WebGPU only works in Chromium based browsers.

I've never had trouble finding work except right after graduating in the early 2000's. My employment has been with software consulting practices, though I have worked for some manufacturing companies as well. Hiring managers generally appreciated my experience as an entrepreneur.

I value that experience because it means that that candidate is going to have many soft skills that come from such an experience. Just make sure to keep your relevant tech skills up to date.