• 0 Posts
  • 58 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 19th, 2023

help-circle
  • I don’t enjoy my current three days a week in the open office, but I’ve found that noise blocking headphones and running podcasts and YouTube videos as background noise just makes it all, for the most part, go away.

    You don’t even have to go expensive with them to pull this off. I bought these off of Amazon a few months back, and they’ve been fantastic. I’d say about a 75 - 80% noise reduction, and the background stuff you play makes up the rest of that difference.




  • I’d honestly love to see something like that become an actual universal language. Simple grammar, sub 500 words, a little more meat on the bones to eliminate some of the ambiguity, but be easy enough to teach every kid in early grade school. Something that just allows basic communication and is accessible to everyone.

    Don’t think it’s going to be an evolved toki pona though, it feels like most of its fan base just wants to keep it an impractical art hobby instead of allowing it to grow up to be something useful.


  • Airplane 2 (1 actually had pretty common “disaster movie” plot for the time)

    Your fun trivia fact for the day is that Airplane! was actually a remake of a 1950s plane disaster movie called Zero Hour! Same plot, even long stretches where they go same plot points and sometimes even shot for shot…

    Airplane! just had a tonal change caused by throwing a bunch of ridiculous gags in, essentially becoming a parody of its origin movie.

    If you need a YouTube rabbit hole to fill a couple of hours of dead time at some point, well, there you go.




  • My advice would be to ask a variety of adults (who you know) what they wish they knew when they were in the time period of being your age through their early 20s.

    Not everything they say will be applicable to you, or will be impactful, but you’re bound to pick up a few valuable insights that might give you head starts in several areas, if you implement them while very young.

    The toughest part of youth is that you can’t know what you don’t yet know, and any strong life lesson shared with you by someone else who endured the pain to get it, so that you don’t have to, is worth its weight in gold.


  • If they addressed the privacy nightmares that they are likely to present… by not being directly connected to the internet, by using a local and contained personal AI instance, by never being able to film anything with them without it being clearly obvious to others… then I’d be excited for that kind of tech.

    But we all know that it’ll turn out to be the dystopian, corporately-connected, data-leaking version of the tech that’ll spread everywhere. So, I’m actually not really looking forward to it.






  • I use it at work for stuff where it would be inefficient for me to pick up entirely new side skills to only be used rarely and sporadically.

    For example, I made a spreadsheet tool to compose ordering spreadsheets in Excel for a system at work that needs them. Most of it uses basic macros that you can record with the basic macro recorder in Excel, with no special skill required, but every now and then I need to introduce functionality into it that’s far more complex.

    Instead of learning obscure VBA coding for something I do once every two months, I can just tell ChatGPT that I have spreadsheet A called this and spreadsheet B called that, assume that they are both open, and write me a macro that does A and then B and then C and then D between them.

    It does it in five seconds, I plug the code in, test it, and then go about my day. That’s its positive use case for me.


  • Guns were never the problem

    Places in the world that have far less gun proliferation statistically, objectively have far less gun violence per capita, and less injury and death resulting from it.

    It’s almost as if guns aren’t used to hurt people as much if they aren’t available to most of the population to use. Not sure what else to tell you.






  • The simplest wind instruments are things like your basic wood flutes, recorders, ocarinas… simplest stringed instruments are going to be 3 and 4 stringed stuff like cigar box guitars, tenor guitars, and ukuleles. But none of them are just pick up and play.

    Realistically even the simplest instruments are going to require at least 50 to 100 hours of practice and instruction to reach an advanced beginner / early intermediate level, where you start to be able to intuitively do things that sound good. The great news is that good YouTube teachers can help you reach that point, if you’re willing to put in the time and practice.

    I learned to play guitar and tenor guitar in my 30s, and it’s been extremely rewarding to just be able to unwind and create some music whenever the mood strikes. It was work… but enjoyable work, if that makes sense? I liked the practice and getting the results of my progression. I’d definitely recommend learning to play an instrument to anyone with the time, patience, and inclination.