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austinprete

307 karma · joined June 19, 2014

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austinprete··on 1977 Jazz-Funk Musical Adaptation of Dune
Seconded! Also, Adventure Time and its spin-offs are fantastic and deeply weird at times. Over the Garden Wall is another one.
austinprete··on I tasted Honda's spicy rodent-repelling tape and I will do it again (2021)
Well, presumably he isn’t drunk after polishing off a few cartridges in a sitting.
austinprete··on Collection: More Doctors Smoke Camels
Hmm, which one do more doctors use?
austinprete··on A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'
The documentary “Jodorowsky’s Dune” presents a fairly strong argument that the “Dune bible” that was assembled for that movie and shopped around to production studios strongly influenced many of the great sci-fi films (or at least iconic scenes in them) in the years to follow.

Specific examples from the documentary were Star Wars and Alien. The latter of which included Dan O’Bannon (screenwriter) and H.R. Giger (effects+concept artist), reprising their roles as staff on Jodorowsky’s Dune.

Highly recommend the documentary by the way. I actually just saw it a couple weeks ago, so the comparison made a lot of sense to me.

austinprete··on Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologizes to families of children harmed online
> Says the person with 120k fake points on a social media site.

Wouldn’t that make GP even better qualified to comment on the harms of social media use? :p

I certainly wouldn’t say that a pack-a-day smoker with lung cancer isn’t qualified to speak on the dangers of teen smoking. Quite the opposite in fact.

austinprete··on Japan to crack down on Apple and Google app store monopolies
Huh, surprised by this because the Hue app runs great for me, don’t think I’ve ever seen it lag as a daily user for a couple years. Honestly kind of blown away but how well it (and the Hue platform as a whole) works coming from a company that I don’t usually associate with tech.

Goes to show that experience doesn’t always generalize, and I’m curious what’s different in our cases to cause that (since I’m also using on a iPhone 14 Pro).

austinprete··on $8B Sam Bankman-Fried criminal trial starts today
If we’re all automatons, there’s no _point_ in prison, but it also doesn’t matter.

It’s just something we (automatically) place certain people in so they don’t (automatically) perform actions that society as a whole (automatically) disagrees with.

But there’s no point arguing it because in your hypothetical free will-less world we don’t have a choice in the matter. But also we might argue it anyway because we don’t have a choice not to :)

austinprete··on Paris says au revoir to rental e-scooters
The author disagrees (and used “au revoir” accordingly):

> Free-floating e-scooters have been around all of five years. Nothing has replaced them. Unlike the horses, I can't help feeling that at some point they'll be back.

austinprete··on Cormac McCarthy has died
Since I haven't seen mention of it yet, let me recommend one of his (seemingly) lesser known works: The Sunset Limited.

It's a play of 2 characters and 1 setting, and has an (IMO very good) HBO adaption starring Samuel L. Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones.

Like most of his work, it's an existential contemplation of sorts and perhaps raises more questions than it answers. But I find myself going back to it a lot, maybe as a divining rod for my own meaning to life and death.

RIP, Cormac.

austinprete··on Ryujinx: Experimental Nintendo Switch Emulator written in C#
Not really sure what this means. There certainly aren’t 4K assets included in Switch games, which run at max 1080p resolution normally.

I know many games do drop frame rate at 1080p docked vs the 720p built-in display… so is this just getting back up to 60fps while running in 1080p on a 4K monitor?

austinprete··on Playing video games can help to reduce stress and anxiety, and improve mood
There’s also the concept of anesthesia awareness [1], which does apply to general anesthesia.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anesthesia_awareness

austinprete··on Lockheed Martin achieves first flight of its 50kW laser-powered weapon
The press-release [1] title that this mostly just rehashes is “Lockheed Martin Achieves First Light In Latest Laser Lab Demonstration”.

After reading the linked article I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how “first _flight_” was an accurate description of the test of a land-based laser weapon.

[1] - https://news.lockheedmartin.com/2023-01-23-Lockheed-Martin-A...

austinprete··on Big Pharma Greed’s Knows No Bounds
I’ve been curious about this as well, turns out these ads are classified by the FDA as “reminder ads” and aren’t legally required to list any risks since they don’t list uses [0]. Presumably great for reinforcing positive associations around a drug once it’s already somewhat well known, but morally questionable at best.

[0] - https://www.fda.gov/drugs/prescription-drug-advertising/basi...

austinprete··on Roland’s 50th Anniversary Concept Piano
Did the same search about a year ago, ended up ordering the CLP-775 after testing Kawai and Yamaha in stores. It _finally_ arrived last month, completely love it so far. On the somewhat cheaper side the 745 also felt great in store.

I don’t think you can go wrong with the equivalent Kawai models either. They somehow didn’t quite do it for me when I played them in store (compared to the CLPs), but couldn’t quite pin down what it was, and it was probably just a personal thing.

Anyway, definitely second FlyingRobot’s recommendation about Piano World (though seems like you’re set on that) and trying before settling on anything.

Good luck, sure you’ll end up with something you love!

austinprete··on Starlink speeds in US dropped from 105Mbps to 53Mbps in the past year
1080p is 1920x1080 ~= 2.1m pixels versus 1280x720 = 921,600 .

So a little less than half but definitely not a quarter. And neither dimension is actually halved.

austinprete··on Being fatter than Homer Simpson
I’m confused about your edit.

Taking the numbers from @gduffy you end up with (4.5 to 7.0) * 10lb = 45 to 70 Calories.

So more like a half mile run for most people.

Unless I’m missing something?

austinprete··on Pele's Hair
From the article:

> While fragile and brittle, they are also sharp. As tiny pieces of glass, they can become lodged in human skin and much worse, eyes. Caution around the fibers is necessary to avoid injury from the slivers.

austinprete··on Undetectable very-low frequency sound increases dancing at a live concert
Damn. Consider myself pretty into sound but have never heard COTS and Googling was less than successful :(
austinprete··on Jerry Lee Lewis has died
Highly recommend the episode about him from Mike Judge’s Tales from the Tour Bus. A lot of overlap with the Rolling Stone article but a little more dynamic!
austinprete··on How Brian Eno Created Ambient 1: Music for Airports
Tidal Cycles! https://tidalcycles.org/

As layer8 mentioned, it is technically Haskell but more specifically a DSL and environment for live coding music.

Pretty fun to play around with!

austinprete··on It’s raining PFAS: rainwater is unsafe to drink even in Antarctica and Tibet
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make things cheap —- Leonard Cohen
austinprete··on Theranos former president found guilty on all fraud counts
20th Century is actually owned by Disney now though (as of 2019), so the link back to Murdoch ends there.
austinprete··on Nintendo's big piracy case is a sad story
Interestingly enough the president of Nintendo of America is Doug Bowser. So this case is basically Bowser v. Bowser
austinprete··on Johns Hopkins Beast
Probably implied, but I’m assuming this requires relocating to Baltimore?
austinprete··on A 2030 Self-Driving Car Bet
Wait where did that “original bet was from 2003” fact come from? Atwood’s post doesn’t mention 2003 at all, and looking at Carmack’s twitter thread didn’t bring anything up for me either.
austinprete··on Peloton replaces CEO and lays off 2,800 people
From Peloton’s point of view (bottom line yadda yadda), you’d have to think that dropping to this price would 20X their subscriber count. Which is not to say that $40 is the correct profit maxima, but it almost certainly isn’t $2.

Just because something can be offered cheaper at scale, doesn’t mean it should or needs to be.

austinprete··on Massive animal species discovered in half-billion-year-old Burgess Shale
Wow, that’s a lot of extrapolation from one comment.

First of all, TheSpiceIsLife is Tasmanian according to their bio.

Second, even if they were American to then assume that all Americans can’t pick up on irony or sarcasm because one person on the internet missed an instance of it is quite the stretch.

austinprete··on Tokyo’s 7-Elevens and convenience stores
I don’t know the specific place you’re referring to, but at least all the restaurants I know of with Poke in the name are referring to Hawaiian Poke [1]. Although it’s influenced by Japanese cuisine, it has absolutely nothing to do with Pokémon.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poke_(Hawaiian_dish)

austinprete··on Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley reaches one billion views [video]
2.5M actually, 62K likes :)
austinprete··on Why is the Gaza Strip blurry on Google Maps?
I read the GP as saying that SA GPS was originally made available as a result of the KAL007 crash, so presumably they didn’t have access to GPS at all on the flight? Then much later the SA restriction was removed, unrelated to a plane crash.
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