I used https://learn.mangolanguages.com/ to get to something like ~b1/b2 in French after a year. I did a lesson or two every day, and did all of the review, pretty much much every day.
I spent 8 years in jr high - college studying German without having any real competency in German, it did however teach me something about learning another language.
Mango isn't gamified. Its basically a curated set of flashcards, and the lessons are essentially flashcards themed together. There are some extra explainers throw in that are helpful. I really enjoyed it.
On top of Mango as the primary lessons, I've been listening to podcasts, watching series in french, reading books, etc.
I didn't pay anything for mango, it was entirely funded by my local library so that was great.
I did full CS / Software Engineering curriculum. There was a lot that I taught myself because I was curious / passionate. I learned a lot about things not covered in classes. But the classes also taught the boring details of things like data structures that you can generally ignore until you hit some level of scale/success.
I've seen self-taught software engineers build great looking UIs and during the code review point out things like "data structure X" would work better. I get a response about "Premature Optimization," when in fact the right data structure would be less code and I have to show them.
I've also met self-taught engineers who read detailed research papers on topics on and sometimes made things perhaps more complicated than they ever needed to be.
passion & formal education definitely play interesting roles in what people produce.
PNGs are also ideal for color accuracy since one of the things you lose quickly when converting to JPEG is the ability to have an exact RGB value flow from input to output, even at a high quality level. So if you want i.e. a banner graphic to seamlessly blend in with your site's background color, JPEG is worse for that.
JPEGs are intrinsically YCbCr not RGB, so I don't know how you would avoid some precision loss when you combine that colorspace conversion with things like the quality level and (potentially) subsampling.
JPEG can be YCbCr, RGB or even CMYK (usually from Photoshop or similar software). There can also be unusual subsample ratios for YCbCr, such as 4:2:1. I created some WASM Go bindings for jpegli, and I recall that such images cannot be represented in Go; therefore, for these images, I force RGBA output.
Also, XYB is an option; I use the adaptive quantisation option from jpegli (with progressive level 2) to get smaller files. I never bothered with XYB, as it looked complicated.
I think this makes sense for applications applications that are just managing data maybe? But if your application needs to do things when you change that data (like call to a third party system)... Syncing is maybe not the solution. What happens when the total dataset is large, do you need to download 6gb of data every time you log in? Now you've blown up the quota on local storage. How do you make sure the appropriate data is downloaded or enough data? How do you prioritize the data you need NOW instead of waiting for that last byte of the 6gb to download?
It is like a useful tool, but not the only future.
Sure in an ideal world we don't need to worry about resources and everything is easy. There are very good reason why they are separated now. There have been systems like 4th dimension and K that combine them for decades. They're great for systems of a certain size. They do struggle once their workload is heavy enough, and seem to struggle to scale out. Being able to update my application without updating the storage engine reduces the risk. Having standardized backup solutions for my RDBMS means is a whole level of effort I don't have to worry about. Data storage can even be optimized without my application having to be updated.
In very simple systems that makes sense. But as soon as your validation requires talking to a third party, or you have side effects like sending emails you have to suddenly move all that logic back out. You end up with system that isn't very easy to iterate on.
You can model external system interactions with tables representing "mailboxes" - so for example if a DB stored procedure needs to call a third-party API to create a resource, it writes a row in the "outbox" table for that API, then application-level code picks that up, makes the API call, parses the response (extracts the required fields) and stores it in an "inbox" table so now the database has access to the response (and a trigger can run the remainder of the business process upon insertion of that row).
Surely some RDBMS has the ability to run REST queries, possibly via SQL by pretending it's a table or something.
I can imagine that working on a good day. I don't dare imagine error handling (though would love to look at examples).
Ultimately, it probably makes no sense to do everything in the database, but I still believe we're doing way too much in the application, and too little in the DB. Some of the logic really belongs to data (and needs to be duplicated for any program using the same data, or else...; probably why people don't like to share databases between programs).
And, at a higher level, I wonder how far we could go if we pushed all data-specific logic into the DB, and the rest (like REST calls) into dedicated components, and used a generic orchestrator to glue the parts together? What of the "application code" would remain then, and where would it sit?
I've definitely worked in places where "Move fast and break things" tended to focus on breaking things. There would be bugs that we didn't fix because "We can just fix the database when it happens." It would take 2hours to fix a bug that would cause of 10's of hours of weekly support request, but the focus would always be on building new features, of which 10% got any real usage.
That may be true, but this isn't exactly a new drug overall. It has been available as a diabetes treatment since about 2005. So we should have some longer-term data on the topic.
The article is from thehollywoodreporter, so it is expected to not go into great detail. There is real research around these lines and links between Alzheimers and insulin resistance. I'm not in the field to really be able to vet, but it seems more than pseudoscience. Here is some more research on the topic: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2769828/
And the biggest consumer of hormonal treatments as children (in the 99% range)? Cisgendered girls and boys who have no desire to transition.
And though you didn't mention it, let's do a quick aside on gender affirming surgery: Boys with gynocomastia get mastectomies while girls get breast enlargements to improve their perception of their bodies.
I spent 8 years in jr high - college studying German without having any real competency in German, it did however teach me something about learning another language.
Mango isn't gamified. Its basically a curated set of flashcards, and the lessons are essentially flashcards themed together. There are some extra explainers throw in that are helpful. I really enjoyed it.
On top of Mango as the primary lessons, I've been listening to podcasts, watching series in french, reading books, etc.
I didn't pay anything for mango, it was entirely funded by my local library so that was great.