foxensly's recent activity

  1. Comment on How soon might the Atlantic Ocean break? in ~enviro

    foxensly
    Link
    Useful analogy in the article: Very intersting historical tidbit: The scary prediction:

    Useful analogy in the article:

    TIPPING POINTS ARE absolutely everywhere. Throw water on a fire, and the flames will shrink but recover. Dump enough water on and you’ll cross a threshold and snuff it out. Tip a chair and it’ll wobble before settling back onto its four feet. Push harder, and it topples. Birth is a tipping point. So is death.

    Very intersting historical tidbit:

    In 1749, an English slave trader who was sailing off the western coast of Africa lowered a special bucket with valves and a thermometer into the water. He did this again and again, hauling up the bucket and noting the depths of the sample and the water’s temperature. He was surprised to find that deep water was always cold. His heat-weary crew immediately used the deep water to take baths and cool their drinks. From then on, other voyagers sporadically dropped buckets into the Atlantic and jotted down readings, either out of scientific curiosity or as a potential navigational aid—to identify a useful current or get a warning of icebergs ahead. They collected their data in many different places, depths, times of day. They also used all manner of buckets, thermometers, and units of measurement (Centigrade, Fahrenheit, Réaumur). The data was a mess. A century later a consortium of seafaring nations standardized the method of measurement. But it was only in the 1970s, when instrument-packed drifting buoys and weather satellites were deployed, that the temperatures of the seas were systematically recorded.

    The scary prediction:

    The siblings spent two years refining their approach, doing more tests. Across a thousand runs, the model cranked through the temperature data and settled on a year. Sometimes the model spat out later dates. Sometimes earlier. The two scientists made a plot of the numbers and a neat cluster emerged. Yes—2057. But that’s just the middle point: In 95 percent of the model’s simulations, the AMOC tipped sometime between 2025 and 2095.

    19 votes

  2. Comment on Making tough decisions: what’s your go-to approach? in ~talk

    foxensly
    (edited )
    Link
    There's a really great article by Michael Loop that I stumbled upon last year that does a great job talking about this. I expanded on it with some additional info back in March - I would start...

    There's a really great article by Michael Loop that I stumbled upon last year that does a great job talking about this. I expanded on it with some additional info back in March - I would start with these, but some highlights.

    There's four types of decision making:
    1. Command - You make the decision.
    2. Consult - You gather opinions, then make the decision (good for gathering opinions without bogging down the decision-making process).
    3. Vote - You take a vote, and the decision with the most votes wins (good when there are lots of good options, and everyone agrees to be bound by the vote).
    4. Consensus - You discuss until everyone comes to the same decision (risky / very time-consuming if misapplied, this should only be used with (1) high-stakes and complex issues or (2) issues where everyone absolutely must support the final choice).
    If you're having trouble, it's usually of two things:

    If you're having trouble deciding, you're either missing information (and you should go do the thing that helps you think), or you just need to decide (you have all the info you need, and you gotta trust that you've thought through this and are ready).

    One final thought - Jeff Bezos famously identified two types of decisions - "one-way doors, and two-way doors". As a few other folks in this thread have mentioned, how you think about the decision depends on whether it's a one-way or a two-way door.

    7 votes

  3. Comment on If happy people do nothing? in ~talk

    foxensly
    Link
    There's a book called How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell that I highly recommend. There's so much good content in that book it's almost hard to find the right quote to respond with, but I'll give...

    There's a book called How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell that I highly recommend. There's so much good content in that book it's almost hard to find the right quote to respond with, but I'll give you this one by Thoreau to start:

    I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to tach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived...I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to life so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swatch and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. - Henry David Thoreau

    To answer the question on focus, Odell actually argues that we need to focus (i.e pay attention) more to things; just different things.

    If it's true, that collective agency, both mirrors and relies on the individual capacity to "pay attention" then, in a time that demands action, distraction, appears to be (at the level of the collective) a life and death matter.

    I wrote a little bit about this the other day, too. Attention is something the modern world has unitized and turned into a sort of currency to be collected for profit. But in doing so, we are starved of context. We continue to outsource much of what makes us human, and sometimes we don't even realize the tradeoff we're making.

    Spacial and temporal context both have to do with the neighboring entities around something that helped to find it. Context also helps establish the order of events. obviously, the bits of information were a sailed with on Twitter and Facebook feeds are missing both of these kinds of context. Scrolling through the feed, I can't help but wonder: what am I supposed to think of all of this? How am I supposed to think of all this? I imagine different parts of my brain lighting up in a pattern that doesn't make sense, that forecloses any possible understanding. Many things in there seem important, but the total is nonsense, and it produces not understanding, but dull and stupefied dread.

    There's also a really interesting concept I was first introduced to in the book about "I-It vs. I-Thou Thinking" that really resonated with me.

    • I-It: - In "I-It" thinking, the other thing (or person) exists only as an instrument or means to an end. It's something to be appropriated by the "I". An I-It thinker will never encounter anything outside of himself because he does not truly "encounter" in life. He only encounters the "feverish" world to use it. When he says "you" he means "my ability to use you!".
    • I-Thou: "I-Thou" recognizes the irreducibility and absolute equality of the other. One meets the other ("thou") in their (or it's) absolute fullness by giving them/it full attention. You don't project/interpret the other. The world collapses into a moment of magical exclusivity between the two.

    If we go through the world as I-It thinkers, we end up in situations like this:

    "If I don't make a conscious decision about how to think, and what to pay attention to, I'm going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to food shop, because my natural default setting is certainly that situations like this are really all about me, about my hungriness in my fatigue, and my desire to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way?" - David Foster Wallace

    The world is so rich, and tapping into that requires some pushback against a myriad of instincts that are maladapted to the modern world. It requires a little more Thou, and a little less It. Or as Odell put's "an I-It world without Thou's is an impoverished and lonely place to live."

    28 votes

  4. Comment on Survey documents that American viewers are increasingly using subtitles - Gen Z uses them most frequently in ~tv

    foxensly
    Link
    It's important to keep in mind that a good portion of this has less to do with anyone's loss of hearing, and a lot to do with a changing industry. From The Guardian (but emphasis mine):...

    It's important to keep in mind that a good portion of this has less to do with anyone's loss of hearing, and a lot to do with a changing industry.

    From The Guardian (but emphasis mine):

    But if you’re switching subtitles on because you simply can’t make out what the actors are saying, it’s (probably) not your ears that are to blame. Hard-to-hear dialogue is a known issue in the industry, says the sound mixer Guntis Sics, who has worked on movies including Moulin Rouge! and Thor: Ragnarok.

    There are a lot of contributing factors but, paradoxically, it all comes back to advances in technology.

    “As technology evolved, especially when it took the leap to digital, a tsunami of sound appeared all of a sudden,” Sics says.

    The problem starts on the movie set. In decades past, actors had to project loudly towards a fixed microphone. The advent of portable mics has allowed a shift towards a more intimate and naturalistic style of performance, where actors can speak more softly – or, some might say, mumble.

    It’s an approach to acting Sics says has been around for a long time now, but something he’s certainly noticed more in younger performers.

    Anecdotally, that last comment seems to line up with why younger generations would be using more subtitles.

    Additionally, I only recently learned that Foley artists exist, which just seems like a super cool profession. As it relates to subtitling, quoted below from this article, it seems like Foleys are adding a lot more sound into movies than what they used to, which would also line up with a changing industry / changing film.

    In 2019, things are vastly different. Foley artists mostly cover any sort of customizable sound effect that must be performed and imbued with the energy and aesthetic of the moving image. We perform and re-auralize sounds that must be created at the moment of recording and can’t be pulled or edited together with a sound library or field recordings. We also create impressionistic sounds that the audience needs to feel but are non-existent in reality: guns typically don’t rattle, handshakes are usually imperceivable. We craft sounds that are dependent on an understanding of the film’s rhythms and are tightly synced with the emotion and storytelling in a very kinetic way. We depend on life experience to find that middle ground between impressionism and technical accuracy to help immerse the audience into the emotional world of the characters.

    Algernon_Asimov's comment in this thread links to a good Tildes post that I also read through, but it seemed like most of that thread was focused on surround sound mixing.

    Just my thoughts.

    1 vote

  5. Comment on Survey documents that American viewers are increasingly using subtitles - Gen Z uses them most frequently in ~tv

    foxensly
    Link Parent
    Having CC on ruins more than just comedies. A lot of times, I'll be re-watching a drama that I really wanted to show a friend. CC can affect some of those most dramatic moments as well! Also, this...

    Having CC on ruins more than just comedies. A lot of times, I'll be re-watching a drama that I really wanted to show a friend. CC can affect some of those most dramatic moments as well!

    Also, this seems silly (and not that I watch a lot of it) - but reality TV too!

    8 votes

  6. Comment on iOS 17 is available for iPhone users in ~tech

    foxensly
    Link Parent
    I completely agree on the app bar! That thing felt so out of place.

    I completely agree on the app bar! That thing felt so out of place.

    3 votes

  7. Comment on iOS 17 is available for iPhone users in ~tech

    foxensly
    Link
    Just a PSA, as it’s something I look forward to each year and sometimes I miss the actual release date / time! One of the features I’m most looking forward to is the new transformer model for...

    Just a PSA, as it’s something I look forward to each year and sometimes I miss the actual release date / time!

    One of the features I’m most looking forward to is the new transformer model for autocorrect on the keyboard.

    Any features you all are looking forward to?

    19 votes

  9. Comment on Tesla reinvents carmaking with quiet breakthrough in ~transport

    foxensly
    Link
    As controversial as Elon Musk is - Tesla really has been a pioneer in a lot of different ways. This article reminds me of a similar interview that Kara Swisher did with Elon (before they became...

    As controversial as Elon Musk is - Tesla really has been a pioneer in a lot of different ways. This article reminds me of a similar interview that Kara Swisher did with Elon (before they became estranged) when she had a NY Times podcast called Sway.

    It was a few years back, but I remember specifically the intense focus Musk was putting into Tesla at the time to try to keep it alive. From the interview:

    Smart people on Wall Street have, usually, not the faintest clue about manufacturing and how difficult it is. They think that once you have come up with a prototype, well, that’s the hard part. And everything else is trivial copying after that. It is not. That is perhaps 1% of the problem. Large scale manufacturing, especially of a new technology, is somewhere between 1,000% and 10,000% harder than the prototype. I would really regard, at this point, prototypes as a trivial joke. The press coverage of this event was sad.

    The thing that Tesla has been able to achieve is to get to a volume manufacturing and have sustainable positive free cash flow. From a car company standpoint, this is the real achievement of Tesla. There’ve been hundreds of car company startups over the years, hundreds. And yet, the only companies that have not gone bankrupt are Ford and Tesla. Even GM and Chrysler went bankrupt in 2009. It is insanely difficult to reach volume production as a car company and not die. And the only way a new car company breaks in is by making a car that is so compelling that people are willing to pay extra for that car.

    There was another podcast that I can't find where Musk was talking about trying to "build the machine that builds that car", referring to manufacturing and the supply chain issues related to it. There was so much focus on production that he (and others) were calling it production hell. In part, this was because every mistake, every inefficiency was a compounding problem as they worked to ramp up production. Supply chain delays were about ~6 months for some parts, so there was a really long tail for each mistake.

    The whole thing was really interesting, and separately it's an interesting point that a real car company hasn't come about and not gone bankrupt when trying to compete with the incumbents.

    14 votes

  10. Comment on What is a simple tech tip that changed how you use your computer or other devices in a significant way? in ~tech

    foxensly
    Link
    Having a clipboard manager (there's lots of them out there - but Alfred for Mac is great, and as others have mentioned Windows has one that's built in that needs to be enabled) is a game changer....

    Having a clipboard manager (there's lots of them out there - but Alfred for Mac is great, and as others have mentioned Windows has one that's built in that needs to be enabled) is a game changer.

    Option+Command+Escape on Mac opens the force-quit window for all apps (including if you need to reset finder for some reason). Rarely needed, but a life-safer when you do.

    4 votes

  11. Comment on Online payment methods, are there significant upsides or downsides of one vs another? in ~tech

    foxensly
    Link
    It doesn't feel like credit card fraud (having your credit card number stolen from entering it online) is much of an issue as it used to be. For me (anecdotally), it is often more about wanting...

    It doesn't feel like credit card fraud (having your credit card number stolen from entering it online) is much of an issue as it used to be. For me (anecdotally), it is often more about wanting some more control after you give out your credit card number.

    Free trials, or low cost trials often ask for your credit card up front so that they can charge you after "X" number of days when the trial ends. If you forget to cancel, or they make cancelling hard (by making you call, hiding the option, or generally tricking you with dark patterns, it can be very frustrating.

    Cashapp, Venmo, and PayPal don't really address this at all, but but there are other tools like Privacy.com that let you create virtual credit cards that you link directly to your bank account where you can control what merchants it's used with and set spending limits. I haven't used it in awhile but I also know Do Not Pay had a virtual card option as well that worked similarly.

    Not exactly on topic but thought it was relevant to this discussion for paying for things online.

    13 votes

  12. Comment on What was the best piece of content that came out as a result of the pandemic? in ~misc

    foxensly
    Link Parent
    +1 for Inside Outtakes - just stumbled across it a few months ago and was such a pleasant surprise! It's on Netflix too.

    +1 for Inside Outtakes - just stumbled across it a few months ago and was such a pleasant surprise! It's on Netflix too.

    4 votes