This is completely incorrect. The process of Tukdam has nothing to do with diet.
I can’t say what the actual process involves with too many details because it’s not appropriate to share with outsiders, but it involves meditating through sleep, which is considered a similar process to death.
The people doing this are good enough to practice through the night that they recognize a certain part of the death process and temporarily abide in it. When they stop, they die for real and their body decomposes.
For the past three years, I have been working on Trane (https://github.com/trane-project/trane/), a deliberate practice engine that helps users master complex skills. I showed it in a previous Show HN post. I wanted to build something on top of it that would be useful to a wider audience and showcase its full potential.
I learned about the literacy crisis and figured creating a literacy program would be cost-effective and impactful. After researching the science of reading and writing acquisition, I created Pictures Are For Babies, a literacy program that integrates Trane with a full curriculum to teach literacy to the college level and best-in-class pedagogy.
Two products are being released today. A Lite version available for free with no time limits and no payment required. And a Full version that aims to develop true mastery of literacy at the college level and beyond. The Full version is available via a $1000 one-time payment or a $20/month subscription with lifetime software and content updates included.
The first release of the Full version is the first step to accomplishing the ambitious goal of developing literacy to the highest level. It includes the completed curriculum for reading and writing at the symbol, word, and sentence levels. Upcoming releases will add the remaining tracks of the curriculum, focused on reading comprehension of a variety of text types and explicit writing instruction at the sentence and paragraph levels.
The Lite version includes the first levels of the curriculum. The value of the Lite version goes well beyond its content. By integrating the correct pedagogy from the ground up, it serves as a complete and professional tool for detection, prevention, and remediation of reading difficulties in early readers.
From its very first version, Pictures Are For Babies goes beyond all other literacy programs in its scope, depth, and ambition across multiple dimensions:
- By integrating Trane, the student receives a personalized learning experience that enables them to practice at the edge of their current abilities, all at the click of a button. It enables the student to learn more efficiently and the tutor to focus on delivering instruction and support instead of managing scheduling.
- It is one of the few programs that incorporates the concept of orthographic mapping from the ground up. Orthographic mapping is the process by which words are stored in long-term memory for instant retrieval. Programs that incorporate these findings develop true fluency, fix most reading difficulties, and deliver effect sizes that are multiples of those delivered by phonics-only programs.
- It includes a comprehensive and systematic curriculum that covers the entire journey from learning letter names and sounds to reading and writing sentences of college-level complexity. The initial curriculum contains over 1,200 lessons and teaches over 18,000 unique words.
- It includes no pictures, and does not engage in any form of gamification or other distractions. The choice is not arbitrary. Orthographic mapping research shows that reading and writing acquisition are at their core phonological processes. By removing these distractions and focusing on fostering the conditions for deliberate practice, Pictures Are For Babies shows respect for the science and for students as capable learners who can rise to the challenges and learn to love literacy for its own sake.
Let me know what you think! I am happy to answer any questions about the product and about the science behind it. For screenshots of the software, please visit the user interface page at https://picturesareforbabies.com/manual/user-interface/.
Projects seem broken as well. Does not follow instructions, talks in Spanish, completely ignores my questions, and sometimes appears to be having a conversation with itself while ignoring everything I say. I even typed random key presses and it just kept on giving me the same unwanted answer, sometimes in Spanish.
Finally got access to it. It's so awful. I asked it something, answered in Spanish with something completely different. In another conversation, it kept giving me completely different answers to something I didn't even ask. Telling it to stop doesn't do anything. It ignores it and continues a conversation with itself.
So the reason some kids seem to read with some instruction, even if it's not formal and super explicit, is that they have a good phonemic system. That is, they quickly understand that words are made up of smaller units (e.g. cat is /k/ + /a/ + /t/) and can manipulate them without much trouble. That ability is essential to map words efficiently in long term memory for effortlessly retrieval, which in turns creates a sight vocabulary (a large bank of words that are instantly recognized).
Kids with phonemic deficits, on the other hand, cannot efficiently develop a sight vocabulary. Even if they are taught phonics and can decode, that decoding is effortful and leaves little room for more complex tasks.
So direct instruction (the philosophy behind this book) has been shown to only have modest gains compared to the best interventions, which have more than double the effect size.
It works fine (not the best) for kids with no reading difficulties, but it completely lacks the understanding and the tasks that fix phonemic deficits, the actual source of most reading difficulties.
It's not entirely a bad book, but won't be of too much use for kids with reading difficulties. Since it's only a few bucks, it's not a bad investment. Just be aware of its limitations. If your kid is not developing fluent and effortless reading (not just decoding), you will need to use a method that is aware of how to fix phonemic deficits.
trane_project is selling a $20/mo subscription or $1000 perpetual license to their own reading program and folks should read this and their other comments aware of that context. It's disappointing to tell a personal story, come back, and see it was someone's jumping-off point for just slightly indirect self-promotion.
Sure, no problem in pointing it out. I did not hide the fact and I invite anyone to do their own research. The comments mostly draw from David Kilpatrick’s book “Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties”.
It’s a very academic book and I didn’t see anyone in the comments aware of orthographic mapping. The critique of direct instruction can also be found there. No intervention that does not train phonemic awareness to the advanced level had the massive results of those which do. That also applies to OG, which was mentioned in the thread.
Not selling anything yet, that page is a placeholder. But I will have a free and untimed version that should be enough to fix most reading difficulties caused by phonemic deficits.
Which I can do without worrying about cannibalizing my own business because I am not selling a reading app, but a complete path to mastery of reading and writing to college level and beyond. That hopefully helps clarify the difference in price.
Why? Obviously the person who replied to you has experience and a POV. I think that's a useful addition to the conversation.
Plus, I wouldn't have even thought to check out the profile if you hadn't mentioned it. It's not slightly indirect self-promotion, it's not self-promotion at all.
See my other, more detailed, comment on this thread, but the reason for this is that phonics is part of the solution, but it's not what creates fluent readers.
Most phonics programs do not treat automaticity as the goal, so kids with effortful and slow decoding count as "reading". The science is very clear on what causes this lack of automaticity and what exercises best correct it, but most programs ignore it.
So kids with no deficits will develop mostly fine, but those with them will look to be "reading" but will have trouble once the material requires too much of them.
I'll keep the self-promotion to a minimum, but I have been spending lots of time reading on the science consensus on how children actually become fluent readers as part of my upcoming product Pictures Are For Babies (https://picturesareforbabies.com), a literacy program that uses a deliberate practice engine I created to teach literacy from A-B-C to post-secondary level.
Phonics is all the rage, and I was planning to make it central to my pedagogy, but it turns out the answer is a bit more complicated, especially if you want to work with children with reading difficulties.
Phonics is part of the answer, but it's only the first step. Introducing children to the explicit mapping of graphemes to phonemes (letter to sounds) teaches decoding, but skilled reading is not decoding.
Actual reading is developed through a process called orthographic mapping. The result of this process is storing the grapheme to phoneme mappings in long-term memory for immediate retrieval. The words stored in this way form a sight vocabulary that spans tens of thousands of words in fluent readers.
When taught only phonics, kids run the risk of plateauing in later grades. It's not evident at first because the material they are given is simple and deals with concrete subjects (e.g. "Mike got a bunny for his birthday"). Later material uses many more words that don't follow phonics "rules" and deal with abstract material. Under these circumstances, decoding is too slow and effortful and leaves little remaining capacity to deal with harder tasks like comprehension.
The main cause of issues in developing this sight vocabulary is phonological deficits, not IQ, motivation, intelligence, visual processing, or attention like one might imagine. Kids with these deficits have trouble understanding that words are made up of smaller sound units and cannot work with them. Because of that, they cannot store the mapping efficiently and their vocabulary and fluency is limited.
Thankfully, the best interventions that fix these deficits are not too complicated and can correct the issues with as little as a dozen of hours of correct instruction. The main drawback is that finding and targeting those deficits is time-consuming for the instructors, but my program deals with that through the practice engine, which automates all that work.
The bad news is that most teachers are not aware of this and are simply being moved to phonics, which will not work for all children unless those phonemics deficits are identified and remediated. Worse news is that most commercial products that claim to be evidence-based or backed by the "science of reading" still use phonics and make no mention of orthographic mapping, the actual process that produces fluent readers. Again, phonics instruction is part of the answer, but nowhere near the entire story.
You can look at my pedagogy document for more info. Although it's meant to be about my product, it still contains a primer of the actual research on how full literacy (not just reading, but writing as well) is developed: https://picturesareforbabies.com/home/pedagogy/
> Nonetheless, Bloom was on to something: Tutoring and mastery learning do have a degree of experimental support, and fortunately it seems that carefully designed software systems can completely replace the instructional side of traditional teaching, achieving better results, on par with one to one tutoring. However, designing them is a hard endeavour, and there is a motivational component of teachers that may not be as easily replicable purely by software.
I've been working on an implementation of mastery learning and other related techniques called Trane (https://github.com/trane-project/trane/) for the past three years or so. Mastery learning is the main one, but it also integrates spaced repetition, interleaving, mixing difficulties, and reward propagation (doing well or bad in an exercise affects how related exercises are scheduled).
I think it works pretty well, but you need to pair it with proper pedagogy of the skill you want to learn and the proper curriculum. The latter is the hardest part, so it's being my main limitation. I've used some external resources to build courses, and they work well, but obviously it would work much better with a full curriculum built from the ground up.
Currently working on Pictures Are For Babies (https://picturesareforbabies.com/), which is meant to do just that for literacy. I am hoping to do a first release soon. As for the motivation angle, the solution in this particular instance is fairly simple. Use the software to enforce scheduling andpedagogy,y and a human tutor to provide emotional and social support. This division allows any literate person to become an effective tutor with a few hours of training.
I am hoping that the average student can complete the whole curriculum in five years. That would mean that (assuming they start at between 4 and 5 years old), the average student would have college-level reading and writing skills by the time they are nine or ten.
Blaming Intel is a poor excuse. Apple could have done some actual design and built a laptop around the hardware they had. But they didn't want to. Instead, they ignored the reality, stuck to the flawed design, and shipped mediocre laptops several years in a row.
I agree, but I think they didn't care. For some years, some Apple execs believed that the iPad was going to replace the Mac. After that they knew that the Apple Silicon Mac was nearby, so they probably didn't want to make an investment in a 'legacy' platform. Did suck for all the people who bought one.
Perhaps, but pretty much every high performance Intel laptop between 2017 and 2023 is exactly the same unless it's in an heavy, enormous and unpleasantly loud gaming chassis. Supposedly the Core Ultra Series 2 are an improvement but I haven't tried one yet.
For a while, you could get the thermals a bit more tolerable by undervolting them, but then the plundervolt mitigations blocked that.
(Typing this comment from a Lenovo X1 Extreme sitting on a cooling pad, sat next to an X1 Carbon that we can't use because it throttles too much. :)
Apple is generally really good at trying to keep their machines silent. When they originally transitioned to Intel, their Core 2 Duo laptops were both cheaper and more silent than the competition. As a Linux user, that's one feature from Apple I'd like most manufacturers to copy.
Regarding your X1, tweaking Linux kernel parameters and downvolting a bit can work wonders in terms of reaching an pleasant heat : performance ratio. Obviously, Lenovo should have taken care of this. However, they release so many different machines that it's hard for them to pay attention to details.
It’s a company laptop that runs Windows, and the newer BIOSes now block undervolting because of the plundervolt mitigations.
I replaced the thermal paste with some of that PTM stuff which helped a bit, but not enough. I also found that for some reason it tends to BDPROCHOT-throttle when powered through the official Thunderbolt 4 Workstation Dock, even though it’s meant to be 230W and provides power separately to the USB port - but using the standalone AC adapter when docked fixes that.
Ultimately, until there are some decent X86-64 laptops released, the choice is between slow, thin and quiet vs less slow, but big, heavy and noisy. AMD is a bit better than Intel but still weak on mobile and nowhere near as good as the current Apple offerings.
On another note, why are PC manufacturers still putting fan intakes on the bottom. Maybe it’s theoretically more efficient, but tell that to my users who always do things like resting their laptop on a book then wondering why their Zoom screen sharing goes jittery.
I've never had an Intel laptop work well in the efficiency and thermal department, Apple or not. I used to blame Apple too, but seeing the difference, it's hard to argue who the main culprit was. Can't design around a bad foundation.
Apple had the design ready for an Intel chips that didn't arrive. Rather than revisiting their design they opted to just chuck the chip into a design that couldn't accommodate it's thermal characteristics.
I spent way too much time figuring out that around 53W is the maximum that the last Intel MBP can sustain over longer periods before the VRM (converts power for the CPU) poops out and throttles you.
Your 2019 Macbook also uses a different chassis, designed by Jony Ive. Apple knew it throttled the chips they used but shipped it anyways, presumably because Ive liked his thinness even when it results in a bendgate.
You'll note that Macbooks don't quite look the same after Ive left and his influence went away.
Beefier. Bulkier. Quick google search says Intel 16" was 4.3 lbs whereas M4 16" is 4.7 lbs. Not a big difference you say but 1) it is going in the opposite direction where the newer product is bulkier and 2) imagine the years of thin-ness that would have been forced under a different regime.
I can’t say what the actual process involves with too many details because it’s not appropriate to share with outsiders, but it involves meditating through sleep, which is considered a similar process to death.
The people doing this are good enough to practice through the night that they recognize a certain part of the death process and temporarily abide in it. When they stop, they die for real and their body decomposes.
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