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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Those are applicable to this line from the original poster: “Have mixed classes not based on age, with adults and teens.”

    We’re talking about schools here. Are you suggesting that public school wouldn’t happen daily?

    People hired by schools that are going to be in contact with children go through background checks for their past employment and criminal histories. The last thing a school would want would be to hire a child sex offender to be in unsupervised contact with the underage students. Are you suggesting that the school that now has these “mixed classes not based on age, with adults and teens” is going to perform full vetting and background checks on the adult students?






  • It seems like the forbidden fruit of knowledge is giving us problems instead of only solving them.

    Assuming you’re not homeless right now and located in most of the western world, consider the absolute luxury you have of having a solid roof over your head right now, a climate controlled room to your preferred temperature, some amount of long life shelf stable food in your kitchen, light, an infinite amount of clean drinking water on tap 24/7, a bed not made of agricultural products that were still growing outside in the last 3 months, the ability to read and write from a young age, vaccines against diseases that used to wipe out entire families, and healthcare (while expensive) can save your life from extremely critical injuries and maladies.

    The most powerful kings of ages prior would trade everything to have what you have right now.

    Or just imagine you were a person of color or a woman even 75 years ago.




  • A promising start, but a thousand transistors at 25 kilohertz puts it where silicon tech was 60 years ago, so they’ve a long, long way to go.

    If you’re talking about the desire to replace today’s modern CPUs, sure. However, in the world of electronics there are lots and lots of support electronics and ICs that run way slower than 25kHz. All of this assumes the technology can scale for cost effective manufacturing yields at this current speed. If its both expensive AND slow, it will have far fewer use cases.


  • Study co-author Maitreyee Wairagkar, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Davis, and her colleagues trained deep-learning algorithms to capture the signals in his brain every 10 milliseconds. Their system decodes, in real time, the sounds the man attempts to produce rather than his intended words or the constituent phonemes — the subunits of speech that form spoken words.

    This is a really cool approach. They’re not having to determine speech meaning, but instead picking up signals after the person’s brain has already done that part and is just trying to vocalize. I’m guessing they can capture nerve impulses that would be moving muscles in the face, mouth, lips, and possibly larynx and then using the AI to quickly determine which sounds that would produce in those few milliseconds those conditions exist. Then the machine to produces the sounds artificially. Because they’re able to do this so fast (in 10 milliseconds) it can get close to human body response and reproduction of the specific sounds.


  • I think this highlight the problem with this approach. $500 MSRP would likely not be cost effective for a phone manufacturer to invest in the design, construction, inventory of replacement parts, and multi-year long support of the rugged and long lasting phone. An important part of the premise of the author is that the phone lasts a long time, and your stated desire for long software support.

    This is likely a money loser for a phone manufacturer from day one. My guess is that this phone would likely have to cost $2000 to $3000 for a chance to be economically viable. The biggest expenses are going to be on the human labor parts of a staff to provide the regular software updates, maintaining humans that run the manufacturing lines for the replacement parts, and the repair staff to effect the repairs over time for customers. Considering the only time the phone manufacturer gets money is from the initial sale of the phone, they have to price it high enough to cover many years of these support operations.

    At the higher, more realistic, phone sale price it likely drops the number of potential customers so low to not even pay for the initial design and tooling to be created.

    This is likely why no manufacturer makes this theoretical phone.



  • The article is disappointing. It appears author of that article only has one narrow view and assumes the rest of the world has the same.

    They buy the most fragile and aesthetically pleasing phones, and complain they are fragile. They advocate for manufacturers to stop making fragile aesthetically pleasing phones, and only make rugged or repairable phones instead. They make an inference that phones should be repairable like cars with accessible parts and non-proprietary tools, but they appear to not know that today’s cars have difficulty getting replacement parts and absolutely contain mechanical and electronic proprietary tools to repair the cars.

    Mr/Ms author, if you want a phone that doesn’t break so easily when dropped, you can buy such a thing right now. Something like CAT phones:

    … or other ruggedized Android phones.

    I think the last time I dropped a phone an broke the screen on it was maybe 2007. I don’t even use phone cases. If your particular use case has you dropping your phone more, buy one that exists and is designed to take those kind of conditions. There’s no shame in that, but don’t advocate for an entire industry shift because of just your own use case.

    Smartphones/technology are still incredibly young in the grand scheme of things. Each of the new generation of devices that comes out adds more functionality for features that people want. Until that stops, it doesn’t make sense to try to switch everyone to a “buy it for life” approach. My Commodore 64 computer still works, and is very easy to service, however I wouldn’t have wanted technology to stop back then just because its a sturdy built machine. Today I have the paper thin laptops with 8 hours of battery and high speed CPUs are not as rugged or repairable as my venerable C64, but I’m quite glad to have the fragile laptop instead.




  • However critics complain that while buyers for western markets only want to buy certified tea they rarely offer to pay a premium for it. While UK consumers are happy to splurge on coffee, the same is not true of tea. The average price of a teabag is “just 2 or 3p” despite the fact that the cost to grow and pick tea is increasing, according to a recent Fairtrade Foundation report on the subject.

    I’m going to need more info on these’ critics argument, because these statements by themselves don’t pass the “sniff test”. A company buying tea for resale won’t pay anything more than they need to. If their customers are demanding certified sourced tea, then the company will source that. The way customer demand this is if they stop buying your tea because it doesn’t have certified sources.

    If a tea company could make just as much money buying cheaper non-certified tea and they’d retain all their customers and continue with their projected growth, they wouldn’t buy certified tea.