Oh for sure. And that’s kind of my point. As someone who didn’t know a lot of music or know any musicians, it was goddamn magic.

But meet a few musicians, and you start to realize that it’s just a learnable skill.

Reminds me a lot of this video (tw: typical Xbox live homophobia).

People in this clip assume the guy has somehow memorized every song ever written. It doesn’t occur to them that with enough study and practice (and talent), a person can more or less figure out how to play a song just as easily as you can hum it.

I remember being super impressed when my high school friend banged out the intro to Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground on the first try (it’s just power chords). Then I went to college and met a dozen people who were similarly talented on their instruments of choice.

Anyway, it makes me wonder if people who think Harris was fed lines just haven’t met enough people to understand that, while commendable, her achievement on Tuesday was not supernatural by any means. Some people are just that good at what they do.

Not saying OP is fibbing but I used to work alumni soliciting and they’d absolutely track your call duration and success rate. If you spent that long on the phone, you’d better have something to show for it.

We had one of these. It was terrible. Spring force was super weak and slow and there was no lever to manually lift the toast if it got stuck.

I heard that part of the motivation behind games like Pokémon Go is that they can collect data on previously unrecorded pedestrian routes between major landmarks or points of interest.

So Google’s directions may be based on crowd sourced routes that have never been vetted as safe/legal for pedestrians and cyclists.

My solution? Buy an emulator handheld and get into retro gameboy games. Just finished Yoshi’s Island, Link’s Awakening DX, and working on Oracle of Ages.

Having missed the gameboy in my childhood, I’ve been surprised by how fun and engaging the titles are.

https://youtu.be/N5Rs8zdEHJw?si=jFusKJdAzHXCaTBh

MIT students call elaborate pranks “hacks.”

Source: class of 2011

Yeah this is back when human beings needed to hand-draw the big yabos on the generic fantasy women. There was no AI to do it for you.

Maybe not relevant for this specific discussion, but a decent quantity of Americans are stuck with fucking Dollar General for their groceries and they sure as hell don’t deliver.

He probably just mixed up the line from when he saw it in theaters.

The solar sail reflects light instead of absorbing it so you get to double dip on photon momentum.

And sure, you can steer with the laser I suppose, but with that kind of super weak deltaV, you’re not going to be exactly doing donuts in the solar system.

Even the massive solar sail only imparts a super small amount of force. It’s only useful because it does so for free over a long period of time with no air resistance.

You’d be better off using a conventional thruster to do whatever steering you needed to do before letting the sail take over. It’s not like you need to steer around any obstacles.

The R3 is much smaller. My wife and I are looking at it to replace our Model Y and exit the Tesla ecosystem.

I think one of the coolest bits about Aptera’s approach is how you don’t really need to worry as much about cooling. If you trust their 100Wh/mi estimate, that’s an average draw of around 6kW compared to 15kW in even a Model 3.

Assume 90% efficiency (conservative), and its the difference between dissipating 600W of heat (midrange computer) vs 1.5kW (hairdryer). Passive cooling options especially around the batteries become more viable at that point.

Aptera eat your heart out

MP3 players are commodities now. Anyone who just wants iPod functionality can get it cheap, and there are even upmarket options for audiophiles with support for things like low impedance headphones that the iPod never supported.

There’s just not enough room in the market for Apple to re-insert themselves.

Also, they’d never ship a product that couldn’t somehow use AppleMusic.

Sure, but it would be less efficient than a sail, and since the incoming radiation would impart inertia on the solar panels, you would still be limited on where you could steer.

I ditched my smartphone spring of 2023. Still use it on WiFi at home, but every time I leave the house, I only carry a fliphone.

Every time a stranger asks me about it, they say something like “I wish I could ditch my smartphone.” Like I get it. It’s not easy. I can’t even go to a baseball game unless my wife has our tickets on her phone. Paying for parking sometimes requires an app.

Yet apparently everyone hates this thing that they are now required to carry around.

How did we get here?

Ironically, it didn’t break, but when I was on the road and needed a power drill to fix something, I didn’t feel bad about dropping $500 on a new Milwaukee from Ace hardware.

Power tools. If you are not a professional and need to buy a tool (if you can’t borrow one), buy the cheap one.

I used a $30 Ryobi drill for over a decade and it was fine.