germinalphrase

Density supports local businesses though. An apartment building was built a block from my home about a decade ago. I was promised congestion, parking issues, and petty crime - but what I got was a brewery, a cafe, and a restaurant that survived COVID. Feels like a win for me.

It is that, just not only that. You saying dialogue is "just another sound effect" collapses all nuance out of a broader artistic preference on Nolan's part for authentic performance recording and diegetic sound (of which the dialogue is one part of many). You may not care about this-vs-that filmmaking choice, but they are intentional decisions with a rationale. In a movie theater setting, the problems introduced by these choices aren't as acute because there is a physical and spatial separation between speakers dedicated to primary dialogue vs environmental sounds, etc. The same is true for scenes being "too dark" or characters being framed too widely to read their performance because it was framed for IMAX not an iPhone.

It's mostly that Nolan makes camera and sound decisions based on the theater experience which assumes a certain visual scale, projector dynamic range, surround sound system, and so on. Because the format and equipment utilized in a high end movie theater is significantly more capable than everyday home televisions, these choices often lead to a poor viewing experience at home. All these issues could be resolved technically, but home theater formats are kind of a mess in general.

I used to have a substantial collection of very rare Euro/US short and performance art films on DVD that were lost to the sands of time during a period of my life where my work led me to be mostly nomadic. In retrospect, I wish I would have ripped the collection onto a hard drive as most of them are completely irreplaceable now on DVD.

To through one more contemporary example into the pot, Arcteryx (the outdoor clothing company) is working with a company called Skip to create a mobility exoskeleton product called Mo/Go. Unclear if it's going to become a real product.

https://squamish.arcteryxacademy.com/mo/go

Cloudynights is another good forum for optics discussions and reviews

Potentially. Depending on the style of skiing, you may only need a 2-3 ft wide pathway. That said, ski paths tend to be cleared of trees/large rocks and span about 10-15 feet wide.

I explored reviving an old iPod for my son, but that route proved cost prohibitive. Instead, I bought an Innoasys Y1. It supports RockBox (and, somewhat uniquely, Bluetooth with RockBox) and I was able to create a customized CoverFlow landing surface so my son (still learning to read) can listen to music and podcasts freely. It’s been great.

The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) is the educational equivalent to HIPPA.

Do you have a water drain in your bathroom floor?

This is uncommon in the US, so a bath overflow quickly becomes a significant structural issue.

For a long time, no - it was completely unusually for my work that references biological information about migratory birds/other (innocuous) seasonal phenomena.

About a month or two ago, they must have tightened the black list on bio topics as it became more willing to process requests without visibly downgrading to Opus.

There is ~10-15% markup for Costco online delivery orders vs in-store prices.

For anyone trying start a small business, it’s frustrating to go through dozens to hundreds of potential company names before you can find a reasonable URL that isn’t being squatted for 4-5 figures.

What positive outcome comes from squatters sitting on unused domains?

Have you tried getting a good, unused name today? Anything remotely close to a dictionary word, if unused, is squatted with a $xx,000 price tag. Do registrars get a cut of these sales prices because it seems ridiculous to allow squatting.

I grew up in a small town in the upper Midwest and always had a strong pull toward the neighboring forests, streams and wetlands. There was a lot of wonder at that age, but I wasn’t prepared to really start contextualizing the depth/breadth of information until I was much older (which has obvious parallels to the systems/complexity thinking I enjoy elsewhere in my life/career).

As an adult, I have found great value in assistive tools Merlin and Seek/iNaturalist for bird and plant identification. I would encourage everyone to try out Merlin at least once to learn more about all the great variety of birds in your neighborhood.

I am also building a personal tool that captures and analyzes various environmental data sources (GIS, weather, phenological factors, species-specific habitat factors, etc) so that I can explore landscapes/ecosystems in my area (Minneapolis and MN/WI more broadly) to make the ecology/terrain legible and support observing various target species (fungi, migratory birds, fish runs, wildflower blooms, and so on).

The format of the tool is very map/visualization/dashboard heavy which is fine for me - but carries too much bulk for friends and family. The project for this fall/winter is rewrapping the iOS experience around a quiet phone/watch/earbuds field-mode that only surfaces information/guidance/cue-stake recognition in skill-preserving/developing and eyes-up/phone away experience.

It’s a fun project.

Let’s assume that all human labor goes through the same transition as agriculture: within a single human lifetime, 98% of all the human work is replaced by highly efficient machines and a small minority of highly productive people. If only 2% of the population have the required skills/talents/ownership to remain productive, on what basis does the remaining 98% participate in the economy? The answer has always been: people will invent new ways to be economically productive, but if the agriculture ladder of labor generalizes across the economy - what is left for the average, unexceptional, run-of-the-mill man on the street?

Increasingly, the answer is a “what”, not a “who”.

That’s interesting. I find it completely unusable for even simple reviews of existing project documentation that I wrote for an iOS app that isn’t even in public distribution.

Or link sales commission to delivery success, and have no sales people...

You have a source to share for that framing of the tax spend?

I actually think it is not cheap enough. Start adding basic, standard features and the price doesn’t look as competitive against legacy manufacturers. Do those manufacturers offer an equivalently cheap EV today? Maybe, but probably not. Though they could, and if they did, Slate is probably toast.

Someone created that environment within which you thrived. What is preventing you from doing the same for some other small group, early in their careers?

insurance compliance?

Communication is not deterministic. Communication cannot take place without a selection of communication method, and there are inherently subjective and lossy parts to any communication attempt. Aligning my communication method to the specific audience could be "just telling them what they want to hear", or it can be telling them what I intend to communicate in a manner that are prepared to/capable of understanding, i.e. "reading the room".

North-facing (in the US) tends to produce earlier due to the increased warmth with south facing producing mid to late season. Fruiting has been suppressed by me due to lack of rain. Best of luck!

My maps aren’t in public release, but reach out if you want to give it a look.

I’m building a small map application that allows me/friends/family to explore data overlays about morel mushrooms phenology and habitat (ground temp/moisture/terrain/aspect/tree species/etc) in our area. There’s some lightweight forecasting and timing models to help guess at near-term fruiting. I had a big push about a mouth ago to tighten things up, and initial experiences in the field this year have been very promising.

I’ll keep chipping away at it this year, and probably expand beyond morels to other seasonal natural phenomena that my people enjoy like smelt/salmon run, wildflower blooms, etc.

Yes - there’s interesting research on subvocalization.

Sky Rover is releasing binoculars that are very comparable to alpha tier Euro brands. I tested their Banner Cloud 6x32; the total build quality package isn’t quite there against my Swarovski 7x42 SLC, but optically the Sky Rover is excellent.

I started hand carving and painting fishing lures a few years back, mostly from gathered or gleaned materials.

It started as something to keep my hands busy in the Minnesota winter evenings, but there is actually quite a lot of depth to the materials/buoyancy/fluid dynamics that dictate how the lure moves in different water conditions. Each one is also a little work of art which is nice.

“ I've looked at three non-engineer vibe-coded businesses in the past month, and can tell that without taste, they're building a pretty mediocre product at best.”

Are you doing this altruistically for friends - or as a consultant?