vslira's blog

I just opened youtube to waste a few minutes, as one does when their coding agents are hard at work, and a video caught my eye: " Buenos Aires accent in the 1990's ". I don't speak Spanish, but I do speak Portuguese and I know that the Porteño accent is considered very particular in Argentina, so out of curiosity I clicked on the thumbnail. To my surprise the two women being interviewed on the video, and the interviewer, were speaking English. It was YouTube's auto-dubbing functionality, helpfully breaking down communication barriers between content creators and their fans around the world. But old people like me (34) sometimes enjoy listening to different, foreign languages, even if they don't fully understand them. So I tried finding the button to turn it off globally, to spare me the annoyance of manually selecting the original audio every time this happens. I'm pretty sure I did this a year ago or so, but maybe it was a different helpful and well-inten...

     For the past couple of months I've been participating in private history lessons organized by a historian with almost two decades of teaching experience. The classes are organized as weekend courses, two hours a week, usually Saturday morning, and students can opt to join only for the topics that interest them.      The participants are currently mostly from his network, many of them former students, but the audience is growing: just today the parent of a member of a previous session joined because he saw his son watching it. The group of members (no more than 8, usually) makes the class closer to a "book club", with their comments and questions allowing the professor to explore some points in more detail.      He also organizes longer sessions on topics on demand, which are charged per hour of presentation, essentially private lectures. I've also joined a few and I love the format, but it does involve a bigger time and financial commitm...