ben7799

This article is mediocre because smartphone is perfectly happy to take pictures that look like the "beginner photographer" pictures. You just have to know what you're doing.

- Don't use the super wide lens and stand too close to people

- Use the super easy edit features to fix distortion

- Pay attention to lighting & exposure

- Don't just accept the iPhones default settings

If you want toned down contrast and color smartphones are perfectly happy to do that.

Otherwise.. I do configure my fancy digital camera to capture reduced contrast and color saturation compared to the defaults on a smartphone. So a lot of the time my samples would look like his.

Average people want contrast + saturation turned up like crazy. This is why the defaults ship that way. This is why a lot of the beginner non-phone digital cameras often shipped with the defaults that way. This is why TVs ship with the brightness/contrast/saturation boosted. The average person might look at your more subtle photo and appreciate it as better than theirs but then they will go right back to being super happy with their high contrast/saturation images.

This is just what the bike companies are selling right now since an Aero bike with disc brakes and electronic components that comes in at the UCI weight limit is like $15,000.

If you can have it all you want it all.

I raced in the early 2000s. Power meters were expensive, but Pros had them.

The only thing back then is they sometimes didn't use them on race day for fear they were too heavy.

Bikes are actually much heavier today than they were back then. Almost all bikes were near the weight limit back then, I just read an article where they weighed riders bikes at the TdF this year and some bikes were over 18lbs.

Disc brakes + Aero + Electronic components have really made the bikes heavier and have made it much more expensive to get a bike at the same weight as 10-15 years ago. You're either spending about the same money and getting a bike that is 1.5kg heavier or you're spending 2-2.5x more money to get a bike as light as what you would have bought in 2010-2015.

The Tour de France was around for several generations before amphetamines became available.

But otherwise that's probably correct, whatever they could find, they used.

I have always thought the fact Boston was a hotbed of revolution and New York city was a loyalist stronghold (as the article mentions) has had some small subconscious effect on the ongoing rivalry between the two cities all the way to the present day.

We joke about the Red Sox and the Yankees but deep down there is this smidgen of it that goes all the way back.

Also from the article, amazing how William Franklin has been almost erased by history even though Benjamin Franklin is endlessly discussed in elementary history in the US. A fascinating addition to the story. I'm sure historians are familiar with this, but it's likely something every day Americans should all know about. I know it was not mentioned in my education through high school, including AP history. There was scant discussion of loyalists, the Tories were definitely mentioned but it was not covered in the same way the community & family divisions of the Civil War were.

I think he's just using the wrong date range.

2012 things had already matured.

2009-2010 eReaders were a lot more expensive.

The "Kindle 2" in 2009 launched at $360.

So basically by 2012 prices had tanked, and there's a limit on how much cheaper they could actually make them in the years since.

I never played enough Settlers to pick up on this but I totally get it with Monopoly, and I feel like this is bad game design when it happens.

Monopoly feels like the game might take 4 hours but you know 20 minutes in that you're hopelessly behind and cannot come back. Then it's just 3 hours and 40 minutes of torture.

If you're doomed to lose the game should be over quick.

Java beta & 1.0 were released my Freshman year of college and I've been writing Java ever since. With the exception of one job where we tried to write a Java-style Enterprise security cloud application in Python every commercial product I've worked on has been built in primarily Java, often times with other languages on the edges of the application.

The key thing I think with Java is the programming model & structure scale well with team size and with codebase size, perhaps even in a way that tolerates junior developers, outsourced sub-teams, and even lower quality developers. All of those things end up becoming part of your reality on big Enterprise products, so if the language is somehow adding some tolerance for it that is a good thing.

The other things around Syntax and such that people complain about? Those are often minor considerations once the team size and code base size get large enough. Across my career there has always been the lone guy complaining that if we did everything in a LISP derived language everything would be perfect. But that guy has almost always been the guy who worked on a small tool off by himself, not on the main product.

Java has changed a tremendous amount as well. A modern Java system has very little in common with something written before Generics and before all the Functional code has been added. Where I work now we have heavily exploited the Functional java add-ons for years, it has been fantastic.

Car speed in the zone.. that graph is really telling, showing that in NYC cars never really travel faster than even the slowest bicyclist, and slower than a modest runner.

That alone tells you this is the right path. All that infrastructure and work for cars to not actually allow anyone to travel fast.

9mph is very very slow even for the weakest/most timid cyclist.

These comments just read like a whole bunch of people who never rode a bike and yet are somehow experts on everything about bikes.

This thing is not for Le Tour and you don't go fast on it and you don't go up giant hills on it. That makes a lot of the concerns here go out the window.

These types of bikes shaped objects often have all kinds of issues with trying to use bike parts designed for standard bikes on something that is very different. Issues with needing enormous chains, huge cable runs, etc.. when designers try things like this they are worrying about issues like that more than whether you can climb a mountain on it or stuff it into a corner at high speed without going out of control.

The thing with these is the cost to design & manufacture components that need to be different than normal bikes can be astronomical, so anything they can do to design the frame to use normal components in a normal/non-compromised way pays off in a huge way.

The ideas behind this aren't that different than the Cruzbike being front wheel drive to get rid of a lot of the component/drivetrain issues that recumbent bikes are famous for.

I agree with this.

I think the overall experience with the modern setup is worse in every way than 20 years ago with the exception of picture quality since we have 4K now. (Of course mostly we watch heavily compressed streaming video). 20 years ago I had a 5.1 system and would watch DVDs. The sound was vastly better than TV speakers/soundbar, compression was lower on the video despite being SD. By 15 years ago this was no longer true with a Blue Ray player of course, everything was better. My setup back then even had an audio compressor ("dynamic range adjustment") so you could actually hear the dialog when you needed to turn the volume down at night. No need to use subtitles!

But the old setup doesn't make sense anymore either as you would have had to keep replacing the receiver a bunch of times for no good reason as AV standards changed.

I got rid of my old setup at some point. I have a new system in another room that doesn't do video at all. It's just stereo with a CD player, a Turntable, a digital media player (doesn't get used much) and a Bluetooth input for streaming.

Also every time Duolingo comes up people criticize it based on where the free tier was years ago.

The LLM based explanations actually explain what is wrong with the user's specific answer, not a generic explanation. They are of the form:

"You entered X, because of Y grammar rule you should instead enter Z".

So they aren't something that can be pre-generated for all possible inputs. Some of these questions are free-form input.

Obviously I've had access to those for a long time. I would still say they are nowhere near as good as published material. And sometimes I've seen the community text ones actually be more correct.

Really a question of how much you pay for it. Sounds like some plans are $25/month, that's enough to just buy tons of published material instead. I paid $5 for a lifetime membership.. very worth it.

As others have said this is interesting but use of Ultimate Guitar is flawed as the tabs/scores are so bad on that site, very often not even being close to the real chords.

On top of being simplified tons and tons of songs get rewritten with a Capo so people can just play G-C-D shapes, if your analysis doesn't look for "Capo" and then transpose all the chords then you end up overrepresenting the key of G and it's chords. Then very often 7th chords, Sus chords, etc.. all get transcribed down to major chords & minor chords due to the beginner focus. Interestingly he doesn't include 6th chords as their own thing.

To be fair there are tons of songs that do actually use those chords, so they may still end up coming out as the most popular.

I have a grandfathered in lifetime membership to UG that I only had to pay once for. It was cheap so worth it, but I really find the site kind of icky as they are mostly monetizing crowd sourced low quality work and it's very often wrong. And they nerfed their iPad app recently which is really annoying.

It happens because we act like calories are calories when it's clearly not true.

Calorie counts in nutrition data are generated by something like burning the food in a bomb calorimeter. Which is most definitely not what our bodies do. We have all kinds of different biochemical ways of metabolizing different types of foods.

So someone eating 1000 calories of day could be eating very healthy or they could be ingesting a whole bunch of garbage full of sweeteners. It doesn't seem like anyone really understands how it works but all those sweeteners are more likely to make you gain weight.

I can't remember exactly what I was listening to, maybe some kind of NPR podcast.

But the doctor was mentioning that none of the influencers influencing young people to try T and Steroids (which is rampant right now) are ever mentioning that you are on a ticking clock to infertility as soon as you start this stuff. Some people can regain their fertility but it might take years, and some people are going to be permanently infertile even staying on HRT.

Plenty of those "alpha male" guys on social media are shooting blanks.

It has nothing to do with the pandemic. The ban on masks is about whether or not protesters are actually students. Masks have been used to conceal identities when taking over buildings or shutting down classes.

Spending massive amounts of money on sports is something state schools are very much into.

They will shutter academic departments but continue to pay a football coach more than the University president.

Not all schools do this but it is part of the conversation, sports spending has grown out of control along with everything else.

This still works if you get your phone too close to an electric guitar!

This is actually more common than we might think in the music world. TC Electronic and a few other guitar/effect companies also had audio based ways to transmit program data into effects pedals.

This is what I had to do. It was probably beneficial. I was pretty young.. 10-12? My dad is also an engineer and would help me debug the programs after I typed them in, teaching me BASIC as we went. I wasn't necessarily able to understand it all but it probably built me a foundation for programming no different than introducing children to a 2nd language earlier rather than later.

There were also books I checked out of the library. These sometimes presented additional difficulties as we didn't have a computer powerful enough to take advantage of everything in the book, or had a completely wrong environment.

I must have been weirdly motivated but in some way I think this was better than the way everything is spoonfed and easy for kids today if they want it? My son is not motivated the same way, it's just too easy to go over to a game or something else that's less challenging. Quite a few of my friends who also became software engineers/computer scientists had a very similar experience in the late 80s and early 90s.

It's easy for Jon Stewart to feel that way cause it can't hurt him. There is no minority Jon Stewart to take his job, and he already has so much money he will be wealthy the rest of his life even if he loses his job today and never works again.

I think that is where democrats often run foul of average voters.. they see very wealthy democrats pushing something. It won't hurt the wealthy democrats, but it could hurt them. Average non-wealthy people don't want to be punished for the sins of past wealthy people who happened to have the same skin color as them.

I have a kid with celiac.. he has eaten exactly 0 school food ever. They have never been able to make us feel confidence in their preparation safety.

I was in college in the mid-late 90s. There was this brief period where all of a sudden it became painfully aware how much Mac OS was crashing. I was regularly using SGI, Sun, and IBM Unix workstations and Linux had just become available. I don't think I ever saw any commercial unix workstation "crash" and Linux the crashes were usually my fault.

If you were only using Windows you barely noticed, but if you used much Unix Mac OS got pretty painful. I mostly remember this from taking a digital music/video class and that was basically the only thing I used Macs for at that time. You never really got through an hour or two editing video or audio without a crash or two. We had Avid workstations where they controlled this by tightly controlling the software on the Macs, but I never actually got permission to use them.

There were also behavior patterns. If you only used Mac you were in a behavior pattern where you'd crash the machine less. If you were using Unix workstations a lot your behavior subtly changed and you tried to do more stuff at the same time. If you then went back over to the Mac and overloaded the Mac the same way it was a bad time.

I can't remember which of these it was but one of these actually "bricked" my Mac Pro on the OS upgrade, at least from the casual Apple fan perspective or the Genius bar perspective.

I took it into the Genius bar and they had nothing other than "we will wipe it and get it working."

It turned out I was able to boot to single user unix console mode and clean up the issue in an old school style. I have no idea if that is even possible anymore, but in any case I have never had another issue with OSX as severe as that one.

Modern Mac OS got really quite high quality at some point but it's easy for people to forget it had a lot of growing pains between 1999-2008 or so.

Where are they at with power supply? All these videos are now showing the robots untethered (and they have been for a while), but how long can they operate untethered?

Are they just running on Lithium Ion batteries? And the new electric joint motors are more efficient than powering hydraulics?

Part of this was that sales for networking gear actually did tank because there were so many companies going under all at once that suddenly weren't buying any more gear.

There were so many companies going under lots of people I knew ended up with racks in their house with servers from work that they got for free.

I never did that but I had free furniture!

I graduated in 1999 and probably should have stayed for grad school. I had good enough grades my Alma Mater was basically sending me letters my senior year "Hey you're just about guaranteed to get in if you apply!" It's hard to say as if I'd just gotten a master's I would have been getting out in the middle of the crash (bad) but if I'd stayed through getting a Phd I would have had a very different traectory.

But the whole .com boom was way too exciting. I knew lots of people who dropped out. I started out working at Cisco but then left to go to a networking startup and got there just in time for stuff to start blowing up. When I left Cisco the assigned Financial Advisor I had a Morgan Stanley recommended I take a loan for something like $200k to take my options with me or something. I was like 24 and had almost no savings, there was no way I was going to do that. Cisco ended up tanking from 200+ down to the 10-20 range months after I left IIRC. I remember telling a co-worker who got laid off at the same time that I felt stupid as I had spent a lot of my earnings paying off my car I had bought brand new and I also had a motorcycle. He remarked he had kept driving his 20 year old Honda Accord but had no more money than me because he'd lost everything in the stock market crash.

As others have said 9/11 was some kind of weird marker for a lot of us that it was all over. The company I worked for made it about another year after that but I have vivid memories of everyone doom watching the news in the kitchen at work before the CEO came and told us to go home for the day on 9/11. I went home and went out and rode my bicycle all afternoon where I had no way to get any news, it made me feel better.

When I got laid off it was like every single one of my friends was laid off too. All of us at once, and it wasn't layoffs, it was companies completely going under.

There was a lot of malfeasance too. I knew people who had jobs where there was almost zero work as the company was a borderline scam. People were either playing video games at their desk all day waiting for management to figure out what they were going to work on or they were studying for their next job.

I was super lucky. Both my roommate and I got laid off at the same time, we ended up breaking our lease and going separate ways. I lived with my parents for a while, but I only actually was laid off about 6 weeks before finding a contract job. Neither my finances nor my career really took much of a hit, but my confidence took a major hit that realistically took 5-6 years to really come out of.

The percentage change in resolution you ran the games at was also absolutely mind blowing too.

For the most part we went from running the game at 320x200 or 320x240 to 640x480 in that first round of acceleration. I think in terms of % change it is a bigger leap than anything we've really had since, or certainly after 1920x1080.

So you suddenly had super smooth graphics, much better looking translucency and effects, and the # of pixels quadupled or more and you could just see everything so much more clearly.