One last point he makes is the personal savings rate soared during lockdowns, as key costs like childcare and commuting vanished. “When the world reopened, the costs returned, but now inflated by 20%. The rage we feel today is the hangover from that brief moment where the American Option was momentarily back in the money,” he says.

So people were actually better off during the pandemic. smh

This one’s Japanese (which has a lot of onomatopoeia btw), but ki-ki-ki is the sound of a violin being played badly. I put my poor family through a lot of that when I was taking lessons as a kid. I could hear my aunts in the background saying “mata ki-ki-ki yatteru.” That’s basically Japanese for “there he goes sawing away again”.

A little follow-up on this. Tonight I had a look at what it generated. It produced 2 files: a .wav and a .ass. The latter apparently contains subtitles that sync to the audio. But how do you play them together?

After searching around online, the general consensus seemed that you need to make a video file that throws it all together. For the background image I used a still of the book cover art. Then I ran an ffmpeg command that looked something like this:

ffmpeg -loop 1 -i cover.jpg -i abogen_file.wav -vf subtitles=abogen_file.ass -shortest audio_book.mov

It sounds pretty awesome and looks like this while it’s playing!

I installed it yesterday and started having it chug through the Murderbot series I got in epub format. It seemed to be taking forever, but then I checked a system monitor and discovered it was using the GPU to do most of the work. So whenever my GPU-heavy screen saver kicked in, it slowed to a crawl.

At any rate, it was done this morning but then I forgot to bring the files to work, so I can’t say at this point how good a job it did? It was a bit of a pain to install because it needed Python 12 and wouldn’t accept Python 14 for some reason, and pyenv on my Mac is a bit of pain because it hates tkinter. Go figure. But I got it working in the end.

Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it’s still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?

I wonder if this means it’s less locked down the Deck? Like is it kind of an iPad vs Mac situation? When I got the Deck and it was my only CPU travelling around at one point, I tried installing some general tools so I could get some actual work done on the road. Things were fairly heavily sandboxed, though nothing was a total deal-breaker I guess?

Your coworker is reaching out to you in his own way, and you are making his life more bearable than you may know. What seems a little bump in the road may be a mountain to him. But life’s a marathon, and he might come around yet.

I was just trying to make sure that this is ok and won’t tangle up my code later on.

I guess the main issue there is Python doesn’t like circular dependencies? Like if you try to import dep2 from dep1 and dep1 from dep2, you’re going to have a problem. You’d essentially have to refactor your code to have a dep3 that both can import to use the common functionality I guess.

As others have mentioned, I would add a src/__init__.py file to turn src into a package.

Then, inside dep1.py, you can do a relative import with:

from . import dep2  

I’m not sure why you’re using as to make the module name longer? Usually, if I use it at all, I use it make things shorter. Anyway, once you’ve imported dep2, you can call dep2.some_fn(). You could also go:

from .dep2 import some_fn  
some_fn()  

I lost a close male relative to breast cancer and he had been in the US Navy. It can happen to anyone and with men, it’s often not diagnosed until it’s too late due to the stigma and general lack of awareness that it’s a thing.

I wish they had put snake on there for comparison purposes. They seem to have a certain economy of motion compared to legged animals, though friction could be an issue?

Heck, I’d have bet a Greenland Shark, or a Whale Shark to beat salmon.

They’re only considering “land” travellers. Though they include birds and fish that are not directly propelling themselves using the land, so take from that what you will.

Yeah mine does, but it’s a USB-A. Not sure of its max output, but it’s rather limited compared to what USB-C could theoretically give you.

I suppose with USB-C, you could flip it around and use the bike battery as a giant power bank you can plug your laptop or whatever into?

My first thought reading the headline: Was it a boy or a girl?

I guess it was man baby.

This of course hinges on my parents and uncle staying reasonably healthy and financially secure, if they end up as vegetables with a nursing home draining all of their assets or decide to blow all of their wealth in Vegas or something the whole plan could kind of fall apart.

I’m a Gen X with Gen Z kids and this is literally the kind of thing that keeps me up at night. I don’t want to go through a long and costly retirement. My mom got dementia. My dad lived to be a hundred. Either of those outcomes fills me with dread that there is no way I have saved anywhere near enough to make that work. At least I don’t see myself doing the Vegas thing, unless it’s a side-effect of the dementia?

I read somewhere that when they were envisioning the storyline for The Matrix, the original idea was supposed to be that human grey matter powered it in a computational sense. This kind of tracks, given the brain can perform outstanding feats running at a measly 20 watts or whatever it is, but somehow the story got distorted into its eventual form in which the human body is acting as a grossly inefficient battery.

My sister-in-law lives in Beaverton—a suburb of Portland (the Oregon one). It cracks me up when I visit and see the signs. The Beaverton is a satirical publication in Canada. Basically a Canadian version of The Onion.

That’s interesting. It’s basically what I’m thinking phones should just have by design. Something that can twist-lock it into place. I guess the question with this after market solution is whether you trust that adhesive enough? It would be better if it were just built into the phone, but it’s nice to have some affirmation that my ideas are not totally baseless and that others have been looking into it. Thanks!

I have no problem with functional protuberances. In fact, I wouldn’t mind seeing more, such as a universal mounting connector of some sort? I don’t know if I am atypical in this regard, but I like mounting my phone on things. Handlebars, car dashes, tripods, mic stands, etc. There are solutions for this, but they invariably involve something wrapping around and blocking some of the front side of the phone, which has become increasingly problematic over the years with screens pushing towards the edges. My bike holder sometimes blocks the front-facing camera needed to unlock the iPhone, for example. But if there were something on the back side that a mounting bracket could securely latch onto, none of this would be a problem.

Oh that would be cool!

Hopefully, this new algorithm is not overly taxing. The amount of processing they’ll have to do to keep up with Rubin must be staggering. It’s got what, a 3.2 Gpixel camera mapping the entire night sky every few days. And then all that data has to be processed across the timeline of past observations. I wouldn’t be surprised if the computational demands are what kept it from becoming a reality until now.