I don't think those bottles have been altered in anyway, a lot of standard glass bottles will have imperfections in them that look like that, amplified by the thickness of the bottle itself. You don't see this with jars because they tend to be thinner than bottles.
The rubik's cube inside a bottle is a fairly easy one, if you've ever seen a disassembled rubik's cube then you will clearly see that it's possible to just feed each piece in one at a time and put it back together with some tweezers and a lot of patience.
The article doesn't actually have a paywall, it's more of a blocking message asking you to donate, but you can click it away and read the whole article for free.
One example is chess positions. I render them in Unity and take screenshots to determine if my ML architecture and loss function can read the board from just and image.
Well I know you could definitely render the same thing in blender and it would probably be faster as blender is actually designed to render images and animations, as opposed to Unity being primarily a game engine.
As far as generating them procedurally I'm not sure. I'm assuming you're using 3d models of the chess pieces, and while it is possible to do procedural animations with the animation nodes add-on I haven't used it much myself so I'm not sure if it will me your use case.
Blender also has a great python API. AFAIK it has an API for every single function so the sky is the limit really. I don't think it would be too much effort to create a blender file that on startup would execute a script that generates a random chess board arrangement, inserts the corresponding models, and sets up the camera.
Blender can even render from the command line, so you could probably just setup a loop that keeps rendering the same file over and over to generate a whole bunch of positions.
I see this somewhat frequently among some parts of the online language community. For some reason people seem to think that you're not immersing in a language unless you're in a country where that language is frequently used. They somehow equate being immersed in a language with physically being in a country where that language is frequently used.
Don't get me wrong, being in a country is a great way to immerse yourself in a language, but it is by no means a requirement.
In terms of exposure to content in the language you're learning, what's the difference between someone who is living in a country where they see that language on TV, in the newspapers, hear it on the radio, and speak it with native speakers, versus someone who watches content in that language on youtube, reads articles/newspapers online in that language, talks online with people who speak that language, but lives somewhere where they don't speak it? Not much.
Setting up a "local immersion environment" requires putting effort into finding native resources and trying to reduce your exposure towards your native language. It's certainly more effort than being in a country where you can't help but be surrounded by your target language, but it's definitely not impossible.
The idea that listening to music, listening to podcasts, watching youtube videos and reading articles in your target language is not immersion is silly, since this is what native speakers living in their country experience on a daily basis. Environment is everything, not location.
Author here. I see your point but I still prefer to say I wasn't "immersed" because I think actually living among native speakers and using the language carries an enormous advantage over what I did, a sort of "pseudo-immersion." This pseudo-immersion isn't 100% equivalent to typical immersion, but as you say, captures at least a significant part of it. Trying to imitate the immersion environment is the best I could do, and clearly is enough to get to a pretty decent level.
Regarding differences between this pseudo-immersion and "true immersion", I think there are a ton of things that I never picked up that I would receive had I lived in the country, which is a big reason why I still make this distinction. For example, I haven't shopped at a French grocery store and asked for help, and while I could do so, I'd probably use some uncommon wording. Or, for example, IIRC French people say "I'm having X" in restaurants instead of "I would like X", as all the online resources tell you to do, but I would have never picked up on this if I hadn't read it in a random article once. This sort of expression-mimicking you get from interacting daily with native speakers is, I imagine, hugely important in actually becoming natural in a native environment and is completely lacking with what I did.
I've never been to a French hospital, or complained about cigarette butts on the sidewalk, or explained how I stepped in dog poop on my way to work this morning, or told anyone how sweaty I became after rushing to catch the train. I could say all these things, but they'd all be new situations and there would be unnatural wording and a distinct lack of common expressions and idioms in my speech. Theoretically, I could watch enough movies or read enough books to catch a decent chunk of this, but in my immersion method I read 1 book and 0 movies or tv shows, (aside from a kid's cartoon for a bit.) This doesn't even include the massive amount of slang and idioms that are only said among very informal friends that I've never used with my Italki teachers. Perhaps including a lot more media in my method would be significantly more "immersive", but in any case I think the distinction is warranted. That being said, immersing yourself as much as possible, even at home, is definitely a very useful and effective way to learn a language.
The difference between this and an unmaintained salt water aquarium is that the aquarium isn't a closed system. Whatever gases are created by the life in the aquarium being mixed with fresh air and eventually diffusing into the surrounding environment. I'm no expert on the subject but I would imaging this makes a huge difference compared to a completely closed system.
Except that's not what the algorithm does at all. It shows you things SIMILAR to what you've already watched, but not exactly the same. Of course no one wants to listen to the same songs over and over, but Spotify recommends you SIMILAR music so that you have a chance of finding something else that you like.
Sure, if your goal is to broaden your horizons and find media that's different to what you normally consume, then those algorithms probably won't allow you to do that. But for Youtube and Spotify, it means their users are constantly finding more things on their platform that they enjoy, which means more time on the platform and ultimately more ad revenue (or revenue from other premium services they offer).
It was about YouTube, not Spotify. YouTube will happily put you in an autoplay recommendation loop, cycling back and forth between the same 2 or 3 songs.
That certainly has not been my experience for music on Youtube; for the most part, it's very much in line with stuff I'd want to be listening to.
I can't say the same for "Content" trash like "Bill Burr destroys feminism" and "Louis CK owns Parkland kids", because those do repeat heavily. Absurd recommendations when you consider that my view history in the comedy arena are Eddie Griffin and Dave Chappelle, two old-school comics who did not make their name off of culture-war "controversies".
The pitch accent ShinTakuya mentioned is actually a huge part of why attaining a native-like Japanese accent is so hard. It's more than just individual words having an accent that can affect the meaning of the word.
There are rules for the pitch accent of conjugations of verbs and adjectives, rules for compound words, suffixes, prefixes and even a combined sentence level accent that changes depending on the accent of the word contained within that sentence.
And to wrap it up, there's exceptions to most of these rules. Not to mention that names of places and people have their own accent that, while one can gain an intuition for over time, are still something to be aware of.
Edit: There's also the fact that English doesn't have a pitch accent system, so it's harder for English speakers to acquire an unconscious understanding and production of the correct pitch accent than it would be for someone whose first language is Chinese. While Chinese's tones aren't as complicated as Japanese's pitch accent, the fact that Chinese speakers have to pay attention to the relative pitch of a phoneme gives them an advantage when listening to words in Japanese as they will be unconsciously aware that the pitch of a word is important and most likely reproduce it correctly without conscious effort.
Source: check the language breakdown on zig's repo: 0% rust (what swc is written in).