Huge fan of my Anker Soundcore A20s w/ a mixture of noise colors over conventional ear plugs. Much more comfortable and don't create such a closed in effect. Easy to take in/out if I need to chat w/ a partner.
Agreed. These have been a game changer especially for those with partners who snore. It took a few days but my ears got used to them after that. They are very comfortable.
To the person who asked, I can sleep with these in on my side without a problem after I made sure to use the right tip size.
I’ve been using fans as white noise generators for decades. When staying in a hotel room, I run the bathroom fan if it’s loud enough. It’s a great way to drown out thoughts if you have trouble falling asleep.
You might want to consider investing in something like a Babelio sound machine. It's tiny, quite loud, kinder to the environment and will guarantee you have a solution if the bathroom is too far away or the outside noise is a bit too aggressive.
They're designed for side-sleeping, but may present a bit of pressure on your ears... they do for me, I've adjusted. It's minor as the materials are quite soft.
They have a newer model that is slightly slimmer w/ more features like active noise cancellation, but has a smaller battery that is marginal for full-night sleeping, so I didn't bother upgrading.
One thing to note is they have some bad reviews due to issues with batteries dying or depleting quickly - my right bud wouldn't charge past 50% after 9 months of daily usage, which only lasted about 6 hours or so before dying. That said, Anker's tech support promptly sent out a new pair with minimal friction, which I received just days after reaching out. I've had 4 months of usage on those new ones without a hitch. Hopefully those kinks have been worked out.
Even if these new ones die outside of warranty, they're so good that I feel I'll have gotten my money's worth and will immediately buy them again.
I mean, this is semantics. Production is not the same thing as "important", but to me production code means customer facing. Internal tooling isn't production.
There was a book I read a couple years back called "Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity", by David Bessis.
He discussed this topic and how generally it's left to those who are more notable in a field to ask the 'dumb' questions everyone else is afraid to ask. And such questions often need to be asked to get the audience on board and open the floodgates with areas of niche research - the speaker themself is often too far into the rabbit hole to discern the difference between opaque and obvious.
So it stands to reason, at smaller conferences this would be a big problem, with fewer thought leaders in attendance whose reputations are intact enough that they wouldn't mind looking foolish.
“Capitulating to the current regime on everything is in shareholder’s best interests” is neither a foregone conclusion nor a statement of fact. It’s economic myopia at best.
Let me be clear - I'm not happy about it. But ignoring such a reality reminds me of that quote comparing Job's best friend to a lawnmower.
That said, I'd love to enlightened to how it's myopic, or rather, what course(s) of action you would take, keeping in mind that Apple is a multi-trillion dollar public company.
I’m telling you that thinking a->b is myopic. It could be that shareholder value would’ve been higher had Tim Cook told Trump (or Biden, or Trump, or Obama) to go fuck himself. Perhaps the people who spend money on iPhones, specifically, would’ve been more inclined to buy a new iProduct, than they are now that he’s bent the knee.
Myopia is thinking “well he did it so it must have been good”. There are myriad other things he could’ve done, that have a strong argument towards higher shareholder value.
Edit to add: Think TSLA, if you want a concrete example. If that stock was at all trading on fundamentals (and if they had a remotely capable or competent board) and not Magic Memes, Musk’s hard right pivot was inarguably bad for the brand and shareholder value, even if it made the President temporarily happy.
Given that Apple is doing well, the onus is on someone claiming that Apple would have done better, having a strong argument.
Not "could" have done better, because things could obviously have gone better, worse, or anything else, given any substantive or random difference. Could means nothing.
(And I say this as someone very disappointed with how Cook handled that.)
Ah, "If you can't definitively and completely prove a negative then you're wrong (but also I'm like, totally not carrying water for those people)" is definitely not a weak opinion, though.
That said, maybe you should read the discussion a bit more carefully before jumping in with "OMG PROOOOOOF" or whatever the fuck this was supposed to be? The entire, plain English discussion, revolved around one thing not being the only possible "fact" just because it happened. None of the posts were particularly long, and none used challenging words.
My point isn’t that anyone’s view is wrong. I can’t make that claim either.
I hate what Cook did.
I would be happy and open to anyone who can point out how Apple was supposed to handle the actual threat of major tariffs in their components and systems better than he did.
But simply asserting a counter factual, a plausible way it might have been better, isn’t that. What would Cook be expected to do with that?
But what?
Not dismissing that there was a better way. There must be. It’s very worthwhile figuring out, even as a counter factual. That’s how we all learn.l
Not judging anyone. My answer is just or even more weak! I have really thought about this too, and come up with nothing so far.
(I appreciate and take note that my comment didn’t communicate my point well enough. It’s important to recognize weak reasoning. But that wasn’t meant to discourage, or show a lack of respect for another person’s efforts. I want a better answer too.)
> Myopia is thinking “well he did it so it must have been good”.
You're writing words that I did not say or imply.
The point is going against any (current) admin is almost always bad for a publicly traded company. Any public entity is going to have to have extremely good reasons to "fight back", how doing so is good for business. As a CEO of such an entity you're having to answer to many people who want a concrete plan and a belief in your strategy.
In the first rodeo, when all this was novel, it was believed such social signaling would pay off. Obviously silicon valley as a whole no longer feels this way.
TSLA is an outlier being grounded more on some superior man theory, that Apple did have in the past w/ Jobs, who is no longer there. Religious fervor stuff. It doesn't really apply. Rational moves here, please.
> There are myriad other things he could’ve done, that have a strong argument towards higher shareholder value
This is what I asked you to expound on. Please state a few.
Most shareholders may not care beyond the next quarter, but CEO action that led to those results were made couple of years ago at least, and current action will do as much to determine not the next quarter, but one slightly further in the future. Hence Jamie Dimon, for example, making a different decision in a similar matter. As Dimon explained: “[…] we have to be very careful about how anything is perceived, and also how the next DOJ is going to deal with it. So, we’re quite conscious of risks we bear by doing anything that looks like buying favors or anything like that”[1].
Until my late 20s, I was bad with both pitch and rhythm despite playing guitar for over a dozen years. Then I took singing lessons with a professional opera singer for 9 months, one hour a week.
She stressed how important it was to record myself and listen back, in fact she encouraged me to do it for hours at a time. The immediate reaction the first few days of trying this was "holy crap, not only am I pitchy and can't hear it naturally, I'm constantly slowing down and speeding up like +/- 10bpm."
The experience was so distressing that I tried to quit my next lesson, but she pushed back with "Hey if you can hear it, you can fix it. It won't be tomorrow, or next week, or even next month. It could take a year. Improvement happens little by little. And I guarantee you'll see progress as it happens. But you have to put in the work."
After a few weeks of working up to it, I settled into a pattern of spending ~3-5 hours most weeknights in the darkness of my closet, recording myself playing Beatles songs along with an acoustic guitar into a 4-track. Usually just going back and forth over 4-8 bars of a song for 30 minutes, then 30 minutes another section, really just focusing on a couple songs like that. Toward the end of the session I'd attempt several full run throughs, get super frustrated (over increasingly minor issues), and end the session.
And she was right, by about the third month I was comfortable enough to perform in front of the person I was seeing, and by month five, I could get through a song with barely any mistakes, maybe one out of three chances. By the ninth month, after a 15 minute warmup, I could get through a 3 song stretch with just minor errors, enough not to totally embarrass myself at an open mic night.
At that point I felt I hit my goal and took a break from lessons. Never did an open mic night. Continued practicing a bit in my closest, but after a month or two I stopped as well.
And here 20 years later, my rhythm actually is pretty solid... I've been a consistent bedroom guitarist, and routinely record myself, and sometimes I don't bother with a metronome because it sounds that consistent. That said, I stopped singing and that ability is completely gone. But I am starting a similar process learning classical guitar.
So I go back to that original bit of advice with just about anything I try to tackle now... if you're self-aware of your issues, and can actually critically hear them in a recording, then there is a path forward.
Understood, but to be clear, I felt the same way after I heard how off I was, as if maybe there was something defective with my brain.
Just start small, record 4 bars of something, play it back. Use a metronome to gauge the actual amount of drift. See if you can hear what the metronome is telling you. Try to improve it with a few more attempts, then call it a day.
Try again after a good night's rest. Over time you should be able to naturally feel when you're slowing down or speeding up.
In recent years Japan has been cheap due to the weakness of the yen, which has been trending 160/1 USD. Just 10 years ago it was nearly twice as strong. When I visited a couple years ago (2 weeks in Tokyo/Osaka/Kyoto), everything seemed to be surprisingly cheap.
- Yes food, as well as alcohol, was quite cheap. Had very few meals that came out to more than $10, alcohol (about $3-4/drink) included.
- I purchased a couple pairs of running shoes that were about 30% cheaper than they were offered for sale in the US.
- I purchased an umbrella for $45 that sells in the US for $75.
- An all-access pass at their premier amusement park, Fuji-Q Highland, was only about $40 - when entry to comparable parks in the US can easily be twice as much.
- I recall the subway came out to around $1.50 a ride, roughly half what the NYC subway costs and the 1 and 3 day passes made it ridiculously cheap (IIRC something like $5/$10).
- I only used capsule hotels, but those were only $15 to up to $38 for a luxury one, almost all in desirable/touristy areas.
- I also took a look at apartments, and in decent areas in Tokyo you can find small apartments for about $1500 that would cost ~$3500 in Manhattan, or maybe $2000 in medium sized US city centers.
My first 'real' machine was a Price Club (now Costco) 386sx for $3800 in late '89, which would be nearly $10k adjusted for inflation. 16 MHz, 1 MB RAM, 40 MB hard disk.
That was bargain basement for that era. IBMs, Compaqs and the like were ~$5k similarly configured, and the first 486s were in the $7-9k area.
Look this isn't an ad. I've been building my own desktops since I was 14. It's always been a CPU and motherboard and memory separate type of deal but this thing has it all integrated. Look how small it is. I use Gentoo. I compile all the things. I know exactly how long it takes to compile gcc because I do it all the time.
This thing compiles the linux kernel in 62 seconds. And it uses less power than my current machine to do it. I am jealous. The computer age is not slowing down. It's in fact speeding up. Am I the only one excited as fuck about what's coming?
You don't even need a GPU because it handles gaming tasks like it's nothing.
I bought one of those 6 months ago when the top spec was $2k, now it's $2700 yikes. Very happy with my purchase. I picked this precisely because it's the only non-apple with that unified architecture for memory. I still wanted to put kubernetes on it so it's important it's not a Mac.
I'm assuming he's in some sort of high-end communal housing, a trend that began emerging in SF ~15 years back ... ie. where multi-millionaire startup founders and the like choose it on purpose for the synergistic benefits.
There were definite geopolitical signals of an impending conflict - ie. warships moving into the region, Iran increasing oil exports just days before the attack.
I guess what might be more interesting is how many people bet $1000 the day before that, and the day before that. That would be more helpful to determine what is noise from well-informed outsiders vs. insiders.
> There were definite geopolitical signals of an impending conflict - ie. warships moving into the region, Iran increasing oil exports just days before the attack.
As a noob to this area, how would [Iran increasing oil exports] indicate [higher chance of impending conflict]? Is the idea that Iran exported more oil to raise some funds in expectation of the conflict? Surely if Iran expected conflict it would have done more than just increase oil exports?
That is, if it's 20:1, say, then I can bet $1000 to win $20,000. I can do that several days in a row (if I've got that kind of money). If I think there's, say, a 25% chance that the US is going to attack, then I only have to be within four days.
Also it was impressive when someone was good enough to play 40 minutes. Usually a small crowd would gather, which could inspire bad players to plunk in more quarters to improve.
I remember beating Zaxxon when I was only 6 years old in '82, in large part because I probably spent at least 100 hours watching older kids do it.
Also a simple noise machine can work wonders.