waffles
breakfast food
No bio...
User ID: 3250
waffles
breakfast food
24d ago
I feel that, just like all technology, its use can be both beneficial and harmful depending on how we approach it. An avatar can help us remember and honor those who have passed, and perhaps even help us get over their death. There's a reason why people put photos of their loved ones on the wall - you look up at them from time to time to think about how they would say, or how they would react to something. On the other hand, the avatar can make us indulge in our worst neuroses - Using it as a crutch and refusing to grow, or clinging to the past and being untruthful with oneself.
waffles
breakfast food
25d ago
We had a death in the family recently. It will be a simple funeral - a viewing, a cremation, and a burial of her ashes. I chuckled a bit when the funeral home asked us for a DVD for the photo slideshow during the ceremony. It got me thinking - how is AI technology and AR/VR going to change the future of the funeral industry?
Imagine that an AI avatar was trained on voice recordings, videos, photos, and text of the deceased. You visit the cemetery with your family and you all don the VR goggles, stepping into the living room of grandma's house. She's tending to the garden and her avatar ad-libs about her tomatoes and the recent weather. Just as you remembered from a few years ago before she had to go into the nursing home.
If you've seen the incredible improvements in image and video generation in the last 2-3 years, as well as the improvements in text-to-speech (see a previous Friday Fun thread post that I shared) you'll probably agree with me that this is something we'll see in our lifetime. Yes, we'll have a period of uncanny valley, but when it's fully ironed out, there will be a convincing digital copy of ourselves floating in the ether.
Everyone spends some time chatting with grandma then she excuses herself to take the cookies out of the oven. You decide it's about time to grab lunch with the family and say goodbye for now.
The funeral home charges you for the disposable insert in the VR goggles that soaks up your tears.
waffles
breakfast food
1mo ago
Is it just me, or is it normal for babies to cry very loudly right before they go to sleep for the night? Our baby cries for maybe 5-10 minutes in the evening as she drifts off to sleep.
I have a pet theory that babies who loudly cry before they go to sleep ensure that they sleep in a safe location. From an evolutionary perspective, imagine you're a hunter-gatherer with your baby in a questionable place: This loud baby is making me think twice about settling in here for the night. Best go back to our cave since this thing is making such a racket.
Those quiet and compliant babies were probably taken away by saber-toothed tigers and didn't pass their genes down.
Thanks for taking the time, this is fantastic. A couple of questions, I'm sure I'll have more if you're willing to write more:
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What kind of inputs (like industrial gases, chemicals, etc.) go into the tools? Are they connected with fixed pipe or are they manually loaded in?
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How is the entire end-to-end process controlled at the fab? As in, is there a centralized control room that oversees the entire operation, or is it understood that the individual tool stations run as close to 100% utilization as possible?
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What kind of redundancy is built-in to the process? For example, if a tool went down, does it cause everything behind it to grind to a halt, or are there tools in parallel? Can wafers be stored until they need to be used, or do they have a short "shelf life"?
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Do you know where your finished products are used? (i.e. do they go into cars? consumer electronics? defense tech? communications? etc)
I think we have a very similar professional role. I'm manufacturing-adjacent (oil & gas, electrical engineer working in maintenance of power systems) and had an idea of doing a similar type of Q&A. Because of the nature of the industry there aren't a lot of people who have both firsthand knowledge and are able to publicly write about it. There was an interesting book I read a while back from a former controls engineer called "A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Control Room" which might be of interest to you or anyone else following this thread. It's unfortunate that there's so many interesting anecdotes that can only be disclosed after one retires.
Edit: It looks like there's a similar version of that text here: https://www.emersonautomationexperts.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Process-Control-Case-Histories-Greg-McMillan.pdf
waffles
breakfast food
2mo ago
I'm in coastal California so my humidity meter typically hovers around 50-60% most of the year, sometimes dipping into the 40% range when the regional climate shifts in the wintertime. A small desktop humidifier usually pushes it up about 15% maximum, depending on the setting, which means I'm covered for most of the year. I feel like 65% is the sweet spot between breathability and not having the room feel excessively soggy.
waffles
breakfast food
2mo ago
I have some form of nasal congestion, it took me til my mid-twenties to figure it out. There could be a number of reasons - having allergens is a common one. Check that your sheets are regularly washed and carpets are regularly vacuumed. I took out an old blanket from storage once which must've released a whole bunch of dust in the house and I had nasal congestion for the next two days. I also noticed that if I ate a lot of heavy foods at night, my body wouldn't have enough water to keep my nasal passages moist. So I've been conscious about eating earlier in the evening and consuming lighter meals. I think that's generally good practice anyways, allowing your body 4+ hours of digestion before going to bed whenever possible. Also perhaps try a humidifier - higher humidity in the room prevents nasal passages from drying out.
waffles
breakfast food
2mo ago
Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery. A popular nonfiction book written by a practicing brain surgeon, that explores the profession from a medical, historical, and social perspective. Who knew that the surgeons, in order to access the brain, literally drill four holes in the skull, slip a cutting wire through two of them, and saw back-and-forth, repeating on all the holes until a square is cut out? It's a glimpse into a field that is usually inaccessible to outsiders. I'm only about a quarter of the way through but I would highly recommend it.
waffles
breakfast food
2mo ago
If anyone browsed through the Small-Scale Question Sunday question thread a few weeks ago, I was talking about ChatGPT voice mode and how it was somewhat awkward and felt like an extension of the normal text-based chat with some text-to-speech grafted on it.
This just got released yesterday, and it's breathtaking - https://www.sesame.com/research/crossing_the_uncanny_valley_of_voice#demo
The amazement I feel now about the capabilities of this voice engine is similar to how I felt when GPT-3 first came out.
waffles
breakfast food
2mo ago
Never tried that, might have to incorporate that into the many pushup variants I am familiar with. My favorites include:
Archer pushups - pushups where the torso is biased towards one side, to put more weight on each side of the chest. Decline pushups - feet are propped up on an elevated surface, putting more weight on the upper body Diamond/kettlebell pushups - place a kettlebell in front of you and do pushups with your hands on it, really works the center chest.
Once you start getting to 40+ pushups at once, the variants start making things interesting!
Edit: I think the parent post was supposed to be on the Wellness Wednesday thread
waffles
breakfast food
2mo ago
Happy Valentine's Day everyone. Any of you folks have a spicy date for this weekend? Hoping to live vicariously through you all here - my wife and I have a newborn so we have put the romance on pause for a minute.
waffles
breakfast food
2mo ago
We're a little over 2 months in with our first child, and unfortunately our baby doesn't like sleeping on her back like the literature recommends. I was on baby-duty last night, and about an hour after feeding and burping her, I tried putting her down in her crib to try to build those self-soothing skills. Unfortunately she just ended up crying so hard that she coughed/spat up the milk she drank earlier in the evening. She seems to enjoy sleeping at a 45-degree angle, so she went on a pillow and I ended up sleeping next to her that way. Babies sure are a handful. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
waffles
breakfast food
3mo ago
For those of us in restrictive states, the best part is that you don't even need to jump through all the hoops and pay all the fees for purchasing and transferring a modern firearm - you can purchase a black powder firearm and have it shipped directly to your house!
The only thing that is keeping me back is the lack of quality ranges nearby. Those of us in urban areas have to spend quite a bit of time traveling to and from the range when we want to do some blasting. I will have to add black powder in the ever-growing "someday" list.
waffles
breakfast food
3mo ago
During my drive into work the other day, I realized that I could have a voice conversation with ChatGPT, to keep my commute productive and explore some ideas in the morning. It worked out for some simple back-and-forth but as soon as I tried lengthier conversation, the flow just wasn't quite there. ChatGPT thought that pauses between sentences were the end of my prompt, and would start responding even though I was still thinking about what to say. Voice mode currently feels like a glorified text-to-speech engine with shorter responses.
Note that I'm not belittling the effort it has taken for OpenAI to release voice mode, but its capacity for natural conversation is still far away, though given the advances the AI space has made in the past year, it's probably sooner than we think. (You can even dial 1-800-ChatGPT and it'll allow you to use voice mode without the app!)
Has anyone here had any success with LLM services that are tailored for natural conversation?
waffles
breakfast food
3mo ago
I'm quite far away from the fires, though the ash has drifted down to our area and the air quality has not been so good. On a clear day I can see Malibu/Pacific Palisades/Santa Monica from nearby, but smoke is clearly visible.
From a human perspective, most of us are going about our normal business. I haven't heard an official statistic of how many people have been displaced yet, but it's at the point where you hear about distant relations getting affected - nobody I know personally, but friends of friends having to evacuate, co-workers's wife's cousin lost their house - that sort of thing.
You were lucky with the timing of your trip, if the fires started two weeks prior you'd be wearing an N95 everywhere!
waffles
breakfast food
4mo ago
Currently starting Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization
Not sure where I heard about this book, but it was fairly recently. I burn through these lightly-technical nonfiction books really quickly. Similar books that I have read in the past few years include Energy: A Human History (Rhodes), Structures (Gordon), The Box (Levinson), Living on the Grid (Thompson)
waffles
breakfast food
4mo ago
It's difficult to recognize the essence of home until you leave and come back.
waffles
breakfast food
4mo ago
Yeah, I ended up buying a 3-axis adapter from a company called Move Shoot Move. I think it was a bit pricey for what amounts to be a few pieces of CNC'd aluminum and some screws, but most of the cheaper adapters on the market don't really allow for adjustment on the third axis (bringing the phone closer/farther from the eyepiece). It's high-quality and I'm pretty satisfied with it, and I can even use it on other devices in the future as well, such as a telescope or binoculars.
waffles
breakfast food
4mo ago
I bought an adapter for my microscope, which allows me to affix my phone camera to the eyepiece and take photos/videos of reasonable quality.
The photos/videos are at 1000x from the microscope with maybe 2x (?) optical zoom from my phone camera. Two are from standing water samples from the garden. The yellowish one that looks like modern art is a stool sample. The second link contains an earwax and dandruff sample. No eyebrow-mites to be seen.
As suggested by @5434a and inspired by a story from @George_E_Hale, I acquired a sample of semen and found, surprisingly, that the sperm were quite visible. Of particular note was the variety of behaviors that they had - some had broken tails or were stuck or sluggish, while others were quite energetic. If only they knew how futile their efforts would be. It was also interesting to see that the heads were more computer-mouse shaped rather than egg-shaped. I was always under the impression that the heads were radially symmetrical.
I was rather enthusiastic to see that sample, so the deed was done before the adapter arrived in the mail, which means I don't have any photos or videos to share. Perhaps another time.
waffles
breakfast food
4mo ago
I have two kettlebells, one 12kg and one 16kg. I agree they're an excellent purchase, I've been using them pretty consistently almost two years later, though I feel like I haven't been taking full advantage of them. I've been doing swings, clean & presses, squat & presses. The drawback in only having two kettlebells is that some of the movements feel like they aren't challenging enough, but others feel like they'll mess you up very quickly. Any particular movements that you particularly enjoy?
waffles
breakfast food
4mo ago
Thanks for the suggestion, I'll have to check it out. You're completely right in that they're all over different streaming platforms. Somewhat unrelated, but I ended up installing the PBS streaming app to my TV, a lot of the stuff requires a subscription but there's still a vast library to watch from. We just saw a nice nature documentary on Portugal and its island territories ("Portugal: Wild Land on the Edge"). Seems like it depends on your local PBS station, YMMV.
waffles
breakfast food
4mo ago
Our family has been watching wildlife documentaries ("Our Planet" and "Predators" on Netflix and "Raptors" on Kanopy) the past few weeks and the improvement in quality of the footage has been exceptional, relative to only a decade ago. The improvement in rugged audio/visual equipment that can be used in the remote wilderness, such as drones, action cameras, and trail cameras has allowed for some seriously good footage to make its way onto the screen in the last few years. This is not even mentioning all the improved post-processing techniques like slow motion or filming at nighttime. Compare this to a studio TV production from 2014, it's probably hard to tell the difference between that an something that came out a year ago.
If anyone has any other recommendations, do share below. Bonus points if they're on either of those streaming platforms listed above.
waffles
breakfast food
4mo ago
I picked up a used microscope a few weeks back. Got it off a former veterinary student on Craigslist who no longer needed it. It has 4x-10x-40x-100x objectives with a 10x eyepiece and it came with a bunch of accessories (slides, slide covers, dyes, tools), enough to keep an amateur microscope user occupied for a while. I just bought some slide mounting media (for making permanent slides) and immersion oil (for the 100x eyepiece, I learned that some high-magnification objectives are designed for a drop of oil between itself and the specimen being observed).
I have scraped off various samples from around the house to look at. They include:
- Slime from the bottom of the kitchen sink (surprisingly not very interesting)
- Wool fibers (pretty neat)
- Moist soil from the garden (found several energetic critters in the sample)
I found a dead bee on my patio outside and brought it in with the intention of making a permanent slide, but while waiting for the mounting media to be delivered, my cat found it and ate it, so there goes that.
Next time I am out and about, I will try to gather some interesting samples (pond scum? tide pools? decaying plant matter?)
At some point I intend to get an eyepiece camera so I can connect it to my computer and take photos and video, which would be cool.
Anyone have any suggestions on other things I can do with this thing?
waffles
breakfast food
5mo ago
I do have one of the gradual brightening wake lights. I purchased it probably 6+ years ago now, but I believe it's the Philips HF3520.
Dumb idea, but you might be able to try a fluorescent light in the fixture. Those usually take a few minutes to get up to full brightness, especially if it's cold in the room. The wake light I have can be programmed to brighten over about half an hour.
A couple of baby books that I thought were worthwhile. Our first was born about 6 months ago.
The learning curve to taking care of a baby (speaking for the first six months, and assuming your baby does not have any special needs) is incredibly simple. I went from never having touched a baby in my life, to being able to feed, change, carry, swaddle, burp, put to sleep, etc. within a week or so.
Thousands of years of evolution have given you the tools for this - read a couple of books, talk to parents or grandparents for family-specific topics, and you'll be good. Wishing you the best.
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