Even voices skeptical of progress will often allow that one of the few unambiguous improvements in cost-adjusted standard of living has been in the realm of TVs. After years of a 14" Thinkpad, a $100 used iPad, various phones, and a couple of e-ink devices, I find myself in the market. Is there anything in the roughly 65" range for $250 that's more worth buying than the rest, or is it just a matter of whatever's on Amazon? Planning to use it as an output for a PC and never connect it to the Internet, generally in fairly dim rooms. Don't need above 60hz, but I have heard that adaptive sync or one of the proprietary versions thereof might be desirable for some of my intended applications (Zwift, lol). Thanks.
srf0638
2d ago
Peanut butter cups are GOAT, though I'll throw in an honorary mention for Take 5s and (perhaps relatively niche) chocolate-covered Paydays.
I am very partial to regular Paydays, but more for hiking, cycling, and so forth--melt-resistant, not so strongly flavored as to fatigue the palate but still tasty and with some agreeable textures, king size is just about right--but I would not consider them outstanding specifically as Halloween candy.
srf0638
18d ago
We weren't gonna start trying until slightly after the wedding (which is next week), yeah.
fiancee is pregnant
A couple weeks early but here we go.
Edit: thanks all, you guys are the most positive and supportive band of meta^n-contrarians and Internet racists a guy could ask for.
srf0638
20d ago
Sounds like an interesting one, I see what you mean about wanting to pull it sooner. I once roasted a Sumatra that exhibited a very distinct tobacco note in the cup, but haven't been able to find another one like it, though admittedly I haven't tried all that many.
srf0638
1mo ago
Mark Bowden's Bringing the Heat has some good reflections on the psychology of defensive vs offensive American football, kept me entertained even though I don't really care about football. My dad played center in HS and college, and the book definitely tracks.
I've been attracted to strength sport and endurance sport at various points in my life, solitary number-go-up type stuff. Wouldn't say I'm exceptionally well-suited to either, but also not exceptionally poorly-suited, though definitely not one of Nature's grimpeurs.
srf0638
1mo ago
Surely that's not one style but rather a combination of wrestling, BJJ, muay thai, Western boxing, etc., with exact proportions depending on individual background and probably also baseline aptitude and preference.
srf0638
2mo ago
I was expecting youtube.com/watch?v=jaycjYTN5Qw&list=RDjaycjYTN5Qw&start_radio=1&pp=ygUMYm90dG9tIGJpdGNooAcB0gcJCXACo7VqN5tD , which made the rounds in my circles a year or two ago.
srf0638
2mo ago
Not quite that extreme, but https://www.themotte.org/post/3791/smallscale-question-sunday-for-june-7/450717?context=8#context
srf0638
3mo ago
As someone with an occasional craving for frothed-milk coffee drinks, moka pot coffee with French press-foamed milk scratches the itch reasonably well.
Is that really any different than the supposed halcyon days of web 1.0 forums full of cranky grognards?
(Maybe I just haven't judged my specific audience here and you don't think of that as a golden age of online discourse, in which case, fair enough. But I feel like "lurk moar" is generally good advice, and I'd rather get good information and a bit of cranky abuse than bad or trivial information with a "hope this helps <3".).
Very probably true. I'd just rather not get too confident about the virtues of a life we haven't actually lived (if you're not one of the confirmed wife guys around here). Or maybe more precisely, even if it is the best life a guy could reasonably live, he might still expect to feel a certain amount of Bourdain-esque existential despair from time to time, if he's the sort of guy who's predisposed to feel that way. Wherever you go, there you are.
srf0638
3mo ago
Say what you will about the lame conformity of marrying....
Have you tried it? I can well believe it's the way to go on net, but it's not like nobody has ever felt overpowered by quiet desperation on that path either.
Absolutely bonkers take in a finance thread. Obviously there are scenarios you can't hedge against with conventional financial instruments, but there are also a lot of scenarios you can. Edit, to lump everything into one comment/thread: you think furniture and jewelry will somehow hold value when VT won't? Fine china and furniture haven't even held their value now, boomer estate sales being unable to give the stuff away when it represented a sizable outlay at time of purchase is a minor twitter cliche.
(In any case, I for one would a hell of a lot rather have more time and autonomy than more stuff. I suppose the short time horizon strategy is to retire earlier and with less saved, so fair enough.).
radiologist
I recently got a cheap knee MRI at a local facility and wanted to double-check the radiologist's report and maybe learn something about how to read MRIs. So I uploaded the .zip of obscurely formatted images to Claude (highest-powered free model as of a week ago, on high setting) and asked for an opinion. It did a great job of parsing the file and coming up with a plausible-sounding stream of orthopedic gobbledegook, but failed to identify a partially torn quadriceps tendon, which was far and away the most significant finding in the radiologist's report and is generally consistent with symptoms and history. When I nudged it a little bit, it seemed to pick up on the quad tendon, but when I asked it to highlight the finding on the relevant frame it identified a random location on the IT band as the quad tendon. I wasn't quite sure myself at first, not having a ton of experience with either AI or reading MRIs, and I got Claude fairly confused by asking about the difference between sagittal and coronal before I figured out what was going on. (All this took several days, since I was hitting my token cap fairly quickly on high setting.). Super impressive natural language processing, but I'm not sold on its radiological abilities, and I seem to recall hearing quite a while ago that the days of human radiologists were numbered.
srf0638
5mo ago
While Football is ultimately too lightweight to reach that height, they share the one singular virtue that all great nonfiction writing has—the ability to interest the reader in a subject they didn't expect to find interesting.
I felt just this way about Mark Bowden's Bringing the Heat, speaking of football.
srf0638
6mo ago
Any recommendations for pre-pregnancy genetic/carrier testing?
(Fiancee was looking at Natera but pretty sketched out by lawsuits, etc. Both of us have enough Ashkenazi ancestry that we'd want to test for the common Ashkenazi recessive disorders.).
srf0638
8mo ago
No particular connection to Pittsburgh, but I really like these posts. The length, detail, and readability remind me a little bit of Robert Caro.
srf0638
8mo ago
I guess it's a coherent worldview as far as it goes, but, like, how absolutely cloudcuckooland insane to hear "you can just do things" and think "this is bad" with a side of "they should be going to therapy instead". I mean, would it be better to not just do things, to sweat and whine about our condition, lie awake in the dark and weep for our sins? This is particularly baffling when a lot of "you can just do things"-ists are doing things that are in fact fake and gay, and pointing this out seems like a much more penetrating critique of the implicit ideology! "Narcissists driven by an intense psychological need for approval" also seems like a TLP/Internet use of "narcissism" to mean "stuff I don't like", though this is arguably orthogonal to the point.
srf0638
8mo ago
This was funny, but:
The highly agentic are people who just do things.
(neat)
They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like bulldozers through whatever’s in their way.
(yep, sounds good)
When they see something that could be changed in the world, they don’t write a lengthy critique—they change it.
(hell yeah)
AIs are not capable of accessing whatever unpleasant childhood experience it is that gives you this hunger.
Wait, what?
(In fairness, I think he shows a little more self-awareness later on:
Absolutely anyone could have done the same things he did. In 2020, when Eric was subcontracting coding gigs out to the Third World, I was utterly broke, living in a room the size of a shoebox in London. I would scour my local supermarket for reduced-price items nearing their sell-by date, which meant that an alarmingly high percentage of my diet consisted of liverwurst. There was nothing stopping me from making thousands of dollars a week by doing exactly what Eric was doing. It didn’t require any skills at all—just a tiny amount of initiative. But he did it and I didn’t. Why?
But it still seemed like an odd sentiment.).
srf0638
8mo ago
You are in a position of "fuck you".
Surely not, or if so with one very significant exception.
Yeah I think that's probably where I'm at too upon closer investigation. Any important tires to kick for durability or botnet/privacy, when buying used?
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