hellotheretoday

Then don’t sell a lifetime license

I don’t disagree with you. I’ve had several “lifetime licenses”, some of which were quite costly, become varying states of useless. Some were acceptable (no more updates because the vendor was acquired/folded but the software still works and can be activated) and some were hostile (no more updates because we ran out of money and decided “lifetime” isn’t actually “lifetime” or “we folded and shut down activation servers that are required to install the app without patching out drm”)

But the solution is very simple then. Just don’t promise what you can’t deliver? Why mislead customers with fine print double speak when you could just be upfront and say “license for until we run short on cash” or whatever

Yeah. Grant and Nick worked on modernist cuisine but it’s become clear they were more of the chef side where Chris was more of the food science side.

Chris does have a youtube channel now that has some okay content but the best stuff is like a lot of the peak Chefsteps stuff: rehashed fat duck recipes. It’s a shame Heston blumenthal seems to have stopped making as much around 2014-15 because his books and tv content were truly excellent and most of the modern “haute cuisine” stuff goes right back to him. More recently it appears he had manic depression, was pushing himself far too hard, and finally got treatment. I hope he is doing well. His contributions to the culinary world are tremendous and imo under appreciated.

I never got a joule because I couldn’t fathom why they would build a device without physical controls. It seemed like such a hostile decision imo bc even back then I had cheaper “smart” devices like lightbulbs where the apps were quickly abandoned and then delisted/no longer working after 3-4 years and several iOS updates. I had some confidence Chefsteps wouldn’t do that (and tbf they didn’t) but why risk it? If they hadn’t been successful, purchased by breville, etc, would that have come to pass?

The control freak is really what gets me. It does look like a very well made piece of kit tbf. And the feature set is quite nice, there are comparable devices for 1/3rd the cost like https://www.sunpentown.com/product/sr-658rt/ . Also I already mentioned this but given the extremely high price of the control freak I would expect more than a 1 year warranty

Are you saying this based on actual evidence or based on supposition and anecdote?

The oft repeated claim is the replication crisis as you mention but this isn’t limited to social science nor is social science the worst offender. Replication rates for psychology have ranged between 36 [1] and 62% [2] in a few metas I just pulled up

A notable paper in biology is the Amgen paper that shows an 11% replication rate for landmark cancer research[3]. There’s a paper from Bayer that shows only about 25% of published preclinical trials could be validated [4]

Similarly in economics there have been papers finding replication rates of 54% [5]

So maybe the issue is not a wildlife ecology study from the 40s that was definitively debunked by a biology study in the 90s. Maybe it’s p-hacking, journals that focus entirely on publishing novel research over replication (and grant funders that act similarly), refusals to share data and methodological details/process transparency, etc that apply to all fields.

[1] DOI: 10.1126/science.aac4716 [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-018-0399-z [3]10.1136/bmj.e2555 [4]10.1038/nrd3439-c1 [5]10.1038/s41562-024-02062-9

Chefsteps has been in that direction for a very long time. I was in their community early on, like 2013 or so, and the content they put out then was truly excellent. A paywall was reasonable really; the classes were well researched and informative and I am sure their operation is quite expensive.

But over time they became a bit less focused on interesting stuff and more focused on stuff that would play to social media. Their candy class was a hallmark - very informative, very interesting, and several great recipes that you typically wouldn’t find anywhere else. Like they have a starburst clone recipe that honestly most sites wouldn’t bother with because it’s unbelievably labor intensive. But I made it and it was extremely satisfying

If you go on their YouTube and go back a decade you can see the change in content. Their current stuff is basically cloning Epicurious but occasionally shilling really expensive brevile appliances that have very short warranties despite being 5x the cost of comparable products.

we go to other counselors, generally. although some do specifically specialize in counseling counselors, often who have quite a bit more experience and act as supervisors

supervision in counseling is odd. it's ethically obligated but not enforced. continuing education in many areas is loosely enforced too. this leads to other critiques about the field becoming, for lack of a better term, crappier. there are and (hopefully) always will be inspired, ethical, and passionate clinicians but there are also a lot of lazy ones who just burn through the checkpoints so they can bill insurance or clients $130/hr. Once they get licensed no one will check to make sure they do CEUs (depending on state), no one will check to make sure they consult with supervision for outside feedback, etc

it's one of those "we will self regulate" things but I don't know how well the field self regulates

For what it’s worth I’m on the other side of this. I’ve been a licensed counselor for 13 years and working in behavioral health for 17-18 years and I’m itching to change careers. Basically the opposite of the post above.

The work can be rewarding but it can also be emotionally demanding and the pay and benefits can be quite shit, frankly. The mental health system (assuming USA) is designed to be exploitive to someone; either it’s going to exploit you, your clients, or both.

You can get an administrative job that pays a bit better and has better benefits but your work life balance will be poor and you’ll still generally struggle to make what tech workers make in equivalent roles. You can work outpatient but you’ll make less unless you charge a lot but then you’re excluding a large segment of the population who have a high need for services. Depending on where you live this may not be feasible even if you’re open to it. It’s dependent on your ability to keep a stream of somewhat affluent individuals coming in, obviously

Or you work with insurance but then you open yourself up to a great deal of red tape and financial liability that you either eat or pass on to clients, thus creating financial burden and worsening their mental health. It’s not your fault but it can feel really awkward and shitty to charge a client $800 when their insurance claws back 6 sessions worth of appointments. Alternatively you eat the loss, which can be something that inherently happens because (rarely) they’ll claw back appointments from 12+ months ago. This can also be challenging from an obtaining clients perspective. I run a private practice and contract with a group and right now I have 0 people coming in with no wait list. This isn’t common but it does happen and it means my income dries up a bit. It’s not the end of the world because the holiday season was a heavy period and it will likely pick up again soon but even people with insurance struggle to afford therapy now. More and more people have high deductible health plans with sizable deductibles so they end up paying $70-150 a visit, pretty considerable weekly/biweekly expense. Around summer I start getting a strong uptick because the high deductible people start meeting their deductibles (although young healthy ones often never do)

Sometimes it’s hard to leave work at work with this job. That’s any job of course but with this job you can hear some real heavy shit sometimes. That’s generally not the norm though; most people are just not doing so hot or having relationship troubles or whatever. But every once in a while you’ll get a person that has had some truly awful experience that sticks with you for a bit. Or a person that is manipulative, constantly tests your boundaries, and sticks with you in a bad way.

There’s a lot of positives to it too of course. I set my own hours, I don’t have dumb staff meetings, I set my boundaries with people so if a client goes too far or is outside my scope I can cut things off, etc. I earn 100% of my money minus minimal overheads (telehealth practice is really light on overheads). There are tedious clients of course but many clients are interesting and challenging in an intriguing way. But I feel like people don’t advertise the ugly side really

Conspiracy theorist contrarian

this argument comes up every time and it always ignores a critical aspect of medicine: not all procedures can be “shopped for”.

If I have cancer and I need to start treatment as soon as possible I’m not going to waste precious time comparing rates of infusion centers, especially given that one may be able to take me in for treatments 2 weeks sooner. That two weeks could make all the difference

If I have a heart attack, stroke, car accident, etc, that incapacitates me, I am simply incapable of shopping around for the best price. I am going to be taken in for emergency care and treated to the point of stabilization (or better, depending on whether I have a guardian who can approve more. Said guardian could theoretically shop around at this point but it is difficult given the potential emotionality involved and danger in moving someone who is critically injured)

Increasing provider supply is certainly a huge part of fixing things, if it’s done correctly. If you merely lower standards you just increase supply with substandard practitioners that overall worsen outcomes

Microcenter still does but it costs 50% more for worse quality parts and the selection is still not great. Handy if you need flux or solder in a pinch though

The limit was mainly due to lack of hdmi support. There are obviously some crts with hdmi but they’re fairly uncommon as display manufacturers basically abandoned crts quickly in favor of significantly lighter yet larger display tech that was much more popular with average consumers. Obviously crts can do much higher resolution over dvi or even vga. with home av stuff they abandoned those connectors as well as component early on in favor of hdmi.

One of the other niceties associated with crts as a result. A monitor that you could just plug in to a source and it would work, from a time when manufacturers didn’t have the ability to kneecap your setup with handshake bullshit. Now hooking up stuff is just a bit more likely to be frustrating and nonstandard setups are much more likely to simply not work without pricey extra hardware. Want to split your bluray player or playstation 5 between a an oled television and a projector? It may just work with a basic hdmi splitter, or it may not. It may only work with certain hdmi splitters. It may only work if one display is on at a time. With dvi you could’ve gotten a basic splitter and it would’ve worked guaranteed regardless, but hdcp means that hdmi splitting will give you headaches because god forbid you hook up a secondary source to record a copy of content you purchased. Despite that, it’s still easily defeated with relatively cheap hardware, making it completely and utterly pointless as well

I’d imagine it has to be a regulatory nightmare. There’s really no options on the market. First alert at this point just has the zwave one that can’t be hardwired or interconnected so it’s not to code in many locales. Nest is pretty good but it won’t work intranet only and that’s a dealbreaker for me; I do iot but it has to be gear that can cope with being on a vlan with no internet access. The only other options are sketchy brands that don’t give a fuck about us regulations. Sometimes it’s a chinese company that has some staying power like xiaomi but sometimes it’s one of those random ones that likely won’t exist in 2 years

A shame because I would really like to be notified if my house is burning down while I’m away from it. Would be pretty handy.

Yeah 0 chance I would drop that much cash on this from an unknown brand. Even from a reputable brand I would be wary. I still feel burned from buying a few hundred dollars of “smart” smoke detectors from firstalert, a smoke detector company that has been around for ages and is still around. They were a terrible product with terrible support and instead of just hiring better people to rewrite a decent firmware they abandoned the whole product line after a year or two offering a $40 smoke detector as a replacement for the $129 unit that was a buggy piece of shit.

Less downsizing and more no longer upgrading and buying new shit.

Agreed and why when I do purchase I only purchase physical. The digital downloads of games I have are either games that were so hilariously cheap on sale my moral compass didn’t matter (eg marked down to sub $5) or the free downloads I get from various promotions like the epic store. I don’t pirate video games but I don’t have any qualms with someone who does given the gross anti consumer practices the industry has been getting away with for ages

Unfortunately consumers don’t seem to agree and have no problem shelling out billions of dollars for these things. The current console generation is clearly pushing hard to shift things entirely to digital; it is actually becoming difficult to purchase physical copies of games. The recent yakuza game didn’t get a physical release in the USA and I had to import a copy from play-Asia. It works fine on my us ps5 but they were clear as it’s a region 3 release any future patches/dlc/psn support may not work correctly unless I create a region 3 psn account specifically for that game. Quite a headache. Although funny enough the game itself was $10 cheaper so even with tax and shipping it worked out to be the same as if I had bought it on psn.

I can sort of understand ending life for allowing purchasing on the platform but why would you not create servers for the new consoles in a way that allows you to continue to serve downloads or at the very least whatever licensing necessary to launch the software to old hardware?

If I buy a game I should be able to launch it and redownload it. If the above is not feasible then strip the drm at the consoles end of life and allow me to download my library and launch it indefinitely until bitrot destroys it. Absurd that we have this current system of “purchase digitally and play until the servers are shut off, which is a timeframe that is unclear”

That actually highlights the other issue of fragmentation: sometimes I would bother to download the app and register but then we’d fall out because I wouldn’t regularly check an app for 1 or 2 people. It’s notifications get lost in the sea of notifications

If I could just have one app that allows me to cross platform communicate that would eliminate this issue. And of course let it go both ways

I suppose that would be the inherent problem with such a thing. And twitter, google, etc are probably no better tbf

I disagree. I’ve lost touch with numerous casual acquaintances over the years because they went to one app and I didn’t or vice versa. If there was a better effort at standardization it would have been easier to maintain these connections rather than lose touch because some people went to Facebook messenger while others went to WhatsApp, discord, snap, etc and the fragmentation made it a nightmare to keep up with everyone. SMS is the standby but a surprising amount of people hate using text messages or email despite being completely comfortable with asynchronous text communication on other platforms. It makes no sense to me because it is functionally the exact same and the people I have met who have this concern are definitely not worried about things like message encryption

Additionally nowadays it’s becoming more common to be ideologically against usage of platforms and it sucks to be locked out of communication because of that. I don’t use meta products because I think they’re a disgusting company but a lot of my older family members refuse to move from the platform. If there was an open standard that allowed for me to use a platform I was comfortable with that could interoperate with Facebook messenger I could live with that.

A core element of the problem is that Americans are vehemently opposed to involuntary long term psychiatric treatment. Long term, in this context, meaning anything longer than 72 hours or so.

So there’s a push to decriminalize because the alternative is jailing non violent drug offenders. This is counterproductive in many ways and keeps them in cycles that enable addiction like preventing gainful employment, increasing access to network of people that can provide hard drugs, increase hopelessness and worthlessness, increase likelihood of violent behavior, etc.

A better system would be to decriminalize with the alternative of connecting people with serious and persistent mental health issues to significant inpatient mental health supports. Not someone that smokes pot or drops acid every once and a while, but the people like you describe that abuse hard drugs like methamphetamine or fentanyl to the point that they become homeless and frequently experience psychosis. Programs that provide housing, counseling, rehab, etc. but again most people vehemently oppose this for various reasons. Distrust of psychiatry, refusal to fund government programs, a libertarian belief that a person should be able to let themselves self destruct even if it destroys the community around them, etc

So here we are

440 is the international standard as of around the 18th century iirc. Before that it varies a bit from 430-450hz depending on region and time period. 432 is mostly about preference although its origins go back to setting c as perfect integers. With this tuning c4 is 256hz, c5 512hz, etc whereas at a4=440 c4 is 261.63hz.

https://roelsworld.eu/432-tuning/the-scale-of-fifths/ this goes far more in depth

It’s ultimately just preference though. To that end some symphonies use other options, ny philharmonic uses 442, Boston symphony 441, etc. When I marched and teched drum corp we did 442 because that’s what the marimbas were tuned to plus we performed outside in the cold so going up a touch helped as the cold would generally pull everything flat.

If he lives in the United States see if your state has a coalition of the blind. If you contact them for services and make it clear you are not looking for financial support but help with activities of daily living they may quickly help you with many things including this. If he does need financial support that is fine but be aware that might put him on a waiting list whereas if he has adequate income from social security/pension/401k/etc that makes the whole process significantly easier (usually, this likely varies wildly by state tbf)

Advice in this thread will be helpful but a person who can come to his home on a semi regular basis to help continually train will be far more beneficial. Additionally they can assist with a broader range of tasks like caning, adaptive equipment for meal prep, braille instruction, etc.

Disordered eating presented as a “hack”

I worked in a place that had several apple trees in the parking lot that led to a similar issue. The apples would ferment then drunk squirrels would chase people around sometimes. It was pretty funny unless it happened to you

Because god forbid you not be inundated with ads and have every movement online tracked and catalogued

Some manufacturers don’t allow this. My partner got a 22 Subaru forester and the audible alerts cannot be turned off without disabling the system altogether. although to be fair they are relative unobtrusive most of the time unless they are critical

This is a disturbing trend though. The car has in cabin cameras to identify the driver. So if I drive it I’m recognized and the seat is adjusted automatically. Handy, right? However, they also have “features” like gestures to adjust the climate control where you make a fist in the air to adjust the temperature up. This is remarkably easy to false trigger. There is no way to turn it off except via the dealer who assured us at delivery that it could be turned off (I was certain this feature would be stupid and annoying during test drive and was right). However, it’s still on a year later because none of their stupid techs can figure out how to turn it off. We almost want to return the car over this. It’s very frustrating to be driving down the highway and having a discussion and suddenly the heat is set to 80F because you talk with your hands. Absolutely moronic design

I get a lack of ability to disable alerts and controls for the stuff related to autonomous driving/lane assist/acc/etc; I’m sure that’s rife with legal liability and allowing the system to work without alerts has some lawyer on their team all freaked out. But hvac control schemes?? Seriously??

I got to see a ball painted with vantablack in real life. It was surreal, it looked almost flat when you glanced at it but then you realized it had depth if you looked more closely. I wasn’t allowed to touch it, the man with gloves was very serious about that. I really wanted to touch it. I bet it would’ve been weird to feel it as you looked at it.

This is apparently more black than vantablack. I have no need for this but I kind of want to buy some to paint a ball and finally see what it’s like

YouTube premium pricing is ridiculous. $14 a month for android and $19 a month for iOS? Get out of here

How much could they possibly make from ads in a given month off a single user. Best case scenario with a user that watches YouTube like 4 hours a day 6 days a week and clicks through once every week. $4? Probably not even that. And yet somehow YouTube premium needs to be almost $230 a year for apple users?

I bet they’d make way more with a lower premium tier that just removed ads and had no other premium features for like $20/year. Wouldn’t make as much obviously but I bet they’d do way more volume. I wonder if they have some dipshit mba arguing against something like this because it “makes them seem cheap” or “delegitimizes the platform against more traditional streaming networks” or some nonsense to justify charging Hulu prices for YouTube content

Can that progression even happen anymore? Call me cynical but I think we are long past the days of “the digg migration to Reddit”, “MySpace exodus to Facebook”, leaving vbulletin forums en masse for social media, leaving irc and Usenet for vbulletin forums, etc

How could a viable competitor to YouTube even begin to pull away YouTube’s inertia without massive vc funding? That VC would want the platform to eventually end up with the same shitty ux issues, intrusive ads, and data collection as YouTube. Guaranteed. Unless someone finds a way to store and serve tons of hi def video for free.

Not to mention even if you get past that step you’re going up against a Goliath. If you’re actually viable and potentially going to make a serious dent do you think google is just going to do nothing? They’ll leverage their gigantic market share and huge amount of resources to take you down. Whether it’s by suing you for some nonsense, replicating your service model in their own platform to recapture customers, straight up buying your platform, etc