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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • In the cheaper price point, IEMs are probably the way to go for noise isolation. If you can get ear tips with a good seal, then the passive noise isolation should be good enough. I’d recommend something like the kz zsn pro (~$20) or the kiwiears cadenza (~$30), along with comply foam tips (~$15) for a perfect seal into your ear. If you have smaller ears like me, then kz IEMs can be a bit uncomfortable, so keep that in mind. If your budget stretches further, then you can try Etymotic ER2SE IEMs (~$100), which have triple flange tips that really plug your ears deep, but I definitely don’t find them comfy enough for long sessions.

    If your device doesn’t have a headphone jack, an Apple USB C dongle (~$10) is plenty good enough for any IEMs, or you could get a Bluetooth DAC from Fiio starting at around $40 (for the longest time I had one doing double duty for my headphones and for Bluetooth audio in my car).



  • Division Bell! It’s punchy and tart with the citrus and slightly bitter aperol, and the mezcal gives a really welcome smoky flavor. I add just a quarter oz simple to the standard recipe, otherwise I find it a little dry.

    -1 ounce mezcal -3/4 ounce Aperol -1/4 ounce Luxardo maraschino liqueur -3/4 ounce lime juice, freshly squeezed -1/4 ounce simple syrup

    -Add ingredients to a shaker with ice, shake well before straining into a coupe and garnishing with a grapefruit twist




  • Cooking is an inherently manual task, and as such any meaningful improvements to cooking tools are enhancements to the manual capabilities of the tools. These are improvements to things like speed/precision/durability of mixing, heating, weighing, etc. Often times the most meaningful improvements are improvements in mechanisms in cooking machines or the materials they are made of, but there are definitely examples of electronics or software contributing in this way. Good examples would be fuzzy logic applied to electric kettles to make the act of heating to a specific temperature more precise by controlling the heating element so the water is brought to temperature without overshoot, or PID controllers in espresso machines controlling pumps to follow a specific pressure curve instead of requiring complex mechanical systems to accomplish the same thing. The problem with many of these internet-connected or heavily software-dependent appliances is that their added features do not improve the manual capabilities of the appliance in any way, sure the machine will tell you how much weight of flour you need for your cake, but your cake won’t be better than one produced by a “dumb” machine because the scale isn’t any more precise than any other scale that would be used for that purpose.

    The other issue with these devices is a fallacy that’s really common in kitchen equipment, which is the idea that more functions = better. Fundamentally, a device designed to do both task A and task B will be worse than an equivalently priced combination of one device for task A and one device for task B, because there is a cost associated with engineering the device to accomplish both tasks. This effect is especially noticable on all-in-one devices that mix, weigh, and heat because there’s a lot more complexity, and thus a lot more cost spent on integrating the components together








  • I think the major difference that determines copywrightability is the amount of control the artist has on the outcome. If a photographer doesn’t like the composition of a photo, there’s a variety of things they can do to directly impact the photo (camera positioning/settings, moving the subjects, changing lighting, etc.), before it’s even captured by the camera. If someone is generating a picture with AI and they don’t like the composition of the image, there’s nothing they can do directly impact what the output will be.

    If you want a picture of an apple, where the apple is placed precisely at a certain spot in frame, a photographer can easily accomplish this, but someone using AI will have to generate the image over and over, hoping that the algorithm decides to eventually place the apple exactly in the desired spot