Anecdotal, but… I’ve been a musician for 36 years and have fantastic hearing not just for my age but for any age. I know, I have to get it quantitatively tested twice a year!

I can’t tell the difference at all between FLAC and 320 kbps from the same source. I can tell a difference between FLAC and 128 kbps, but it’s not huge. It sounds a bit dull, but I have to be looking for the difference and comparing the two. If you just gave me one or the other with no reference, I might suspect the 128 if it was a simple recording of a single instrument or a song I’m intimately familiar with, and even then I wouldn’t be sure of it. It just sometimes “feels” weird.

So I converted over 4 terabytes of my music stash to 320 kbps and cut the total space into less than 2. Feels good.

I’ll give AI this much credit. I have a rare disease that took me nearly two decades to get diagnosed. I saw over 20 doctors during that time, most of which had no idea while the rest misdiagnosed me.

I had a little intro script I wrote that explained my symptoms to keep it consistent. My roommate is a big AI proponent while I’m AI critical. At his suggestion, I signed up for a free trial for his favorite and gave it my little intro script. It processed for a few seconds, then spit out the correct diagnosis and subtype, then started asking if I had symptoms for a related comorbidity, which I do. That would have saved me 22 years of pain and confusion. WTF.

I’ve had a related chronic injury for this entire time that even my condition-aware doctors have been baffled by. I explained it in detail and AI barfed out its best guess. I worked with it until I had a possible rehab program, which is actually working.

So now I’m AI ambivalent. I strongly believe humans are at best passable doctors, but that the breadth of information for even one discipline is already more than most humans can properly understand and utilize. That’s how you end up with orthopedists that just specialize in one joint or dermatologists who concentrate on just a few conditions - there’s just too much knowledge for one person to handle all of it and that knowledge continues to grow. As medical science becomes even more advanced, I think practitioners will have to lean on technology in some form as the practice of medicine further outstrips human capabilities.

Absolutely. I was raised as a male in the United States, so crying was strongly discouraged.

I recommend “The Tao of Fully Feeling” by Pete Walker. I read it a few times and can cry my eyes out on a regular basis now.

I couldn’t agree more. I got interest in higher-end audio equipment when I was younger, so I went to a local audio shop to test out some Grado headphones. They had a display of different headphones all hooked up to the “same” audio source.

60x vs 80x sounded identical. 60x to 125x, the latter had a bit more bass. 125x to 325x, the latter had a lot more bass and the clarity was a bit better. Then I plugged the 60x into the same connection they had the 325x in. Suddenly the 60x sounded damn similar. Not quite as good, but the 60x was 1/3 the cost and the 325x sure as hell didn’t sound 3x better. They just had the EQ set better for it.

I can’t help but see their comment as a joke. One can only hope

“Remain in your cube - The Freedom Force is en route to administer freedom reeducation. Please be sure to provide proof of medical insurance prior to forced compliance.”

You’re fine! I had to ask myself why I cared so much, and it’s because I love radishes but they also wreck my guts. I have no problem eating them cooked, though the spicy/snappy flavor goes away because that’s the sulforaphane/phene.

It’s yet another vegetable humans love because of the thing it makes to keep animals from eating it. We’re culinary masochists.

Sulforaphane is heat labile, so cooking breaks some of it down. Broccoli and cabbage are fairly low in it, while Brussels sprouts and radishes are quite high. Radishes also have high amounts of sulforaphene, a related compound with similar properties. So it might be cooked vs raw, quantity consumed, -phane vs -phane/-phene, or something else entirely.

Only the R-isomer is found in any appreciable amount in nature, so it’s probably not that unless you’re eating research radishes.

Fuck, you almost sold me on GeForce Now. Owning is still a better value proposition for me because I get my games at… steep discounts.

Act now! They’re going fast and digital copies are limited!

It’s likely the sulforaphane, the compound that doesn’t actually fight cancer at all. Similar to the sulfur containing compounds in onions, it’s an irritant created when radish tissue is damaged to repel pests. In mammals, it irritates the lining of the digestive tract and causes the lower esophageal sphincter, which normally keeps stomach acid from refluxing, to relax.

But wait! They can pay for remote computing time for a fraction of the cost! Each month. Forever.

I fully expect personal computers to be phased out in favor of a remote-access, subscription model. AI popping would leave these big data centers with massive computational power available for use, plus it’s the easiest way to track literally everything you do on your system.

I prefer working at home. I’ve got the home part currently, but not so much the working.

I had no idea! I worked IT in the early 2000s and I absolutely hated Dell computers. Nothing broke faster and more often than the Dell desktops.

Maybe we need a small, private company to come along and start making good consumer hardware.

I’ve always wanted to start a business like this. “Generic Brand” household goods. Not fancy, just solidly functional base models but with modular upgradability. Wish you bought the WiFi capable washer? Buy the module for $30. Everything would be fully user serviceable and upgradable (within reason), so parts sales ensure sustained income once market saturation is reached.

Same, I have a 55" OLED and I game in 1080p. 4K looks a bit crisper, but my video card doesn’t like me when we do that.

So now I have to wonder: what is he doing this to hide now?

Edit: also, can the aliens please take over now? At least just the US? I think us humans have shown we can’t handle this on our own.

It took me a minute. Turn the image 90° anticlockwise. Then it’s easier to see it’s an image of portions of two vertically stacked monitors with the Ubuntu Studio logo on the bottom one and part of the install dialog on the top.

Tell me about it, and there’s always something better than what you have. How to be smart about buying tools deserves its own entire comment chain.

I didn’t know about these until recently, but I now recommend folks check out local tool libraries to get started and see what they want or need for low to no cost.

We have a one car garage full of maintenance and fabrication tools I’ve acquired over my life. They’ve paid for themselves multiple times over in even just the last decade, but the cost and space requirements are prohibitive for a lot of folks. It’s one of those “having money saves money” situations, but tool libraries can help a lot.

Don’t get into woodworking if you have a compulsion to achieve accurate, precise results because wood is fiddly as fuck.

OR

DO get into woodworking if you have a compulsion to achieve accurate, precise results because it will burn that shit right out of you If you don’t die from an aneurysm first. It’ll teach you to build all sorts of wiggle room into everything in life, not just furniture.

People will think what you made was amazing, that it took so much skill.

Nope.

Only you know how you put everything together loosely, then tightened screws incrementally while adjusting clamps and smacking it with a rubber mallet until it looked right. There are pilot holes they can’t see that don’t go anywhere. You definitely missed gluing something important. You might have weighted a piece with epoxy and cat litter because you forgot to buy weights, it was 3 am, and you were unintentionally high as balls on stain fumes, but you really wanted to finish in time to surprise your partner for their birthday.

They don’t know, they’ll never know, and they don’t need to know.