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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • One thing to keep in mind, just to get your expectations right. Kids are more neuroplastic than us, and it takes kids about 5 years of practicing every day to get fluent at their first language. They are learning a few more things for the first time during that too. But you can expect it to take about as many practice hours. So if you only practice 1 hour a week, it’s gonna be a long time. But also, you don’t need to hit the bar of “fluent” to solve your problem. Where kids are at after 1 year is very serviceable for it instead being a second language. If you plan to move to an english speaking country, that would be plenty to get by in your day to day life while you all of a sudden start also spending every day practicing.

    Learning to read and interpret a new language is more than 10 times easier than learning to speak it. Even just writing in it, where you have all the time in the world to compose each sentence is going to take alot of practice to get good at. For speaking, you have to be quick enough to form full sentences in seconds, at a time where it’s not the main thought process going on in your head.



  • When my siblings and I were kids, our parents considered themselves christian and we went to church. But as we grew up, we all stopped believing, and we convinced our parents to stop too. I don’t generally want to convince most religious people to stop, but we were kids at the time and didn’t really know the ramifications of disillusioning our parents. If religious people can believe in “heaven”(or equivalent) and think they are going there, it’s a really nice thought that I don’t want to take away from them. But people that use religion to hurt people, yeah I kind of want to take it away from them. I guess like anything else in life, if you are using it to be nice and constructive, cool. If you are using it to hurt people, take it away.

    The real version of death kind of sucks. It honestly kind of physically hurts/feels bad to even think about ceasing to exist permanently. I feel like that has always been the true purpose and main point of religion. Pretending death is absolutely anything else other than what it really is. I don’t want to take that aspect away from anyone.


  • A gimmick that is already in up to 10% of households, with a further 10% of those households using it more than 4 hours a day. Sure, it sounds like a small amount when put that way. But that’s already getting to be a pretty targettable market, and if you look at the growth chart, it’s not slowing down.

    You may individually not have liked it, but it is indeed here to stay. I don’t think an apple headset will be worth it for a bit, but apple sold alot of Quest 3’s at the very least. So they sold people on the idea of VR, and then once they were in the door, they bought a reasonable headset. In that way, apple has helped alot. They helped to establish it as something that is “ready” for apple to take it seriously. That conveys alot of legitimacy to “normal” people.

    I personally am, of course, in the minority of people that use VR for 8+ hours a day. It has replaced TV, Consoles, and gaming monitors for me. Plus I do my exercise in VR. I made a virtual 4k 120hz screen for my PC, that I use from the comfort of my recliner. It’s like if you had a steamdeck to stream your desktop to, except you don’t have to hold the weight of the deck, the screen is not near your hands, and also its 10 feet wide and at a comfortable viewing distance of 20 feet away, and is 4k 120hz. And you can use whichever controller you like holding. Also it’s cheaper. The downside is that if you want someone else to be able to see your game, you have to stream a video of it to their device, or a nearby TV. And speaking of a nearby TV, while playing on my Virtual screen, I can also just see my real TV too. On Quest 3, the passthrough video is clear enough to see about a 720p equivalent resolution at a comfortable viewing distance(40 degrees of your field of view). 720p may sound low, but it wasn’t that long ago that we were happy to see 540p (DvD quality) as a huge upgrade to what movies used to look like before. And Quest 4 will improve upon that too.

    VR has only just crossed the first threshold into main stream adoption. The Quest 3 was the first headset that is worth it to non early adopters. They will only get better from here on. Not to mention they are also coming the other way, with AR stuff starting as light weight and unintrusive as possible and slowly building on what is possible to pack in without getting in the way at all. Step 2 of the AR sunglasses is coming soon.

    While VR is the “console” of the future, AR is the “mobile phone” of the future. And eventually they will meet and blur the lines, kind of like how we use phones now. Modern smartphones are both what cellphones used to be, as well as surprisingly capable portable console gaming now.


  • It’s also available in VR for anyone that wants to play it that way. But heads up, it’s not the version that is currently heavily discounted. It’s pretty good in VR though.

    If you want a VR lego full on sandbox style game though, there aren’t any with the official lego brand, but there are plenty of “plastic building brick simulator” type games. Basically just like playing with real legos, except no one else can see them. But you can also have whatever bricks you want and your wife won’t stop you. Hehe.


  • Well, you got the answers you were looking for, here is a different answer. To your other implied question, how to not worry about dust getting in other holes.

    Main thing is to develop positive air pressure. You want more powered intake than powered exhaust.

    Use fans for all your filtered air intakes, ignore powered air exhaust, run it at lower fan speeds if you can. Air will get out fine. If you force the air in where you want it to go in, dust will only go into the easily removable filters, it won’t be on your components. Any extra hole in the case will just be exhausting the already filtered air. Then just remember to actually check and clean your filters. That’s the hard part. But if you clean them when they need to be cleaned, you will never have to actually clean the inside or the fans or components or anything else, just the filters.


  • It depends if “public comment” is akin to going on the record. Then staying silent means they didn’t say anything, and not making a public comment means they said something to us that we promised not to make public.

    Saying something not on the record is actually pretty common. And is most of what private sources are about and for. They might be able to point a reporter to someone or something that would be able to be reported on. Trust is a super important difference between an established reporter and a new reporter.







  • Wow, that sucks. I guess Canada is further ahead in that. Electric car charging is 20 minutes per 3 hours here. I can see why it would make a big difference if it’s an hour for your chargers.

    It could also be the software for your car isn’t well optimized, they should ideally be having you stop around 25% battery and charging up to around 75% if you are trying to make the best time. The software should inject the stops as close as possible to that ideal if you tell it to prioritize speed.

    But if the only chargers you have on your route are that slow, then I guess there isn’t much you can do but hope companies don’t stop funding the R and D and contsruction of more up to date ones.




  • I do think someone would immediately buy the charging network if it were an option. I mean gas stations have all kinds of stuff spring up around them when anyone stopping there won’t even be very long and only passengers will be bored with nothing to do for that short amount of time. At a charging station, you are taking a longer break and even the driver is participating in that break.

    Owning the charge network is going to be a much bigger deal when it’s common to use your EV for long trips. And whether people want to or not at this point, it’s steadily becoming more and more normalized. It’s certainly more enjoyable overall to take a long trip in an EV. The downtime is nice. And healthier than sitting down for hours straight. Even before electric cars, people were encouraged to stop every 2 hours on a road trip anyway.

    The old advice was to plan recreational stops along the trip, to prevent embolisms or cramps. What if charge stations had electric scooters or bikes and maps to fun 15 minute activities in range. Not to mention meals of course.

    I know many people don’t take road trips in a healthy way currently, so gas cars seem like the better choice for them. You’ll “make better time” if that is the only important thing. But for people that already followed best practices, a road trip in an electric car is already the same.


  • You say “you need a gas car for long trips”, and “Chargers didn’t factor into it”.

    Isn’t that directly contradicting? Why else do you feel like you need a gas car for long trips if it isn’t related to either not enough chargers or chargers still not being fast enough for you? Chargers absolutely factor into that part of why you didn’t buy electric yet.

    But also, the notion that they can’t do long trips is already pretty outdated. There are very few places left where you would even need to take a detour to take a long trip in an electric car. The only downside is that charging at max speed takes about 3x as long as filling with gas still, and not every charging station is max speed. As that continues to improve, it’ll be less and less of a difference.

    So, funding the R and D department of the charging network, as well as the construction of the charging network, are absolutely fundamental to more people adopting electric as their single vehicle choice. And not as their second vehicle only for one small purpose.