tunetardis

One last point he makes is the personal savings rate soared during lockdowns, as key costs like childcare and commuting vanished. “When the world reopened, the costs returned, but now inflated by 20%. The rage we feel today is the hangover from that brief moment where the American Option was momentarily back in the money,” he says.

So people were actually better off during the pandemic. smh

A little follow-up on this. Tonight I had a look at what it generated. It produced 2 files: a .wav and a .ass. The latter apparently contains subtitles that sync to the audio. But how do you play them together?

After searching around online, the general consensus seemed that you need to make a video file that throws it all together. For the background image I used a still of the book cover art. Then I ran an ffmpeg command that looked something like this:

ffmpeg -loop 1 -i cover.jpg -i abogen_file.wav -vf subtitles=abogen_file.ass -shortest audio_book.mov

It sounds pretty awesome and looks like this while it's playing!

I installed it yesterday and started having it chug through the Murderbot series I got in epub format. It seemed to be taking forever, but then I checked a system monitor and discovered it was using the GPU to do most of the work. So whenever my GPU-heavy screen saver kicked in, it slowed to a crawl.

At any rate, it was done this morning but then I forgot to bring the files to work, so I can't say at this point how good a job it did? It was a bit of a pain to install because it needed Python 12 and wouldn't accept Python 14 for some reason, and pyenv on my Mac is a bit of pain because it hates tkinter. Go figure. But I got it working in the end.

Yes, Steam Machine is optimized for gaming, but it's still your PC. Install your own apps, or even another operating system. Who are we to tell you how to use your computer?

I wonder if this means it's less locked down the Deck? Like is it kind of an iPad vs Mac situation? When I got the Deck and it was my only CPU travelling around at one point, I tried installing some general tools so I could get some actual work done on the road. Things were fairly heavily sandboxed, though nothing was a total deal-breaker I guess?

I was just trying to make sure that this is ok and won’t tangle up my code later on.

I guess the main issue there is Python doesn't like circular dependencies? Like if you try to import dep2 from dep1 and dep1 from dep2, you're going to have a problem. You'd essentially have to refactor your code to have a dep3 that both can import to use the common functionality I guess.

As others have mentioned, I would add a src/__init__.py file to turn src into a package.

Then, inside dep1.py, you can do a relative import with:

from . import dep2  

I'm not sure why you're using as to make the module name longer? Usually, if I use it at all, I use it make things shorter. Anyway, once you've imported dep2, you can call dep2.some_fn(). You could also go:

from .dep2 import some_fn  
some_fn()  

I lost a close male relative to breast cancer and he had been in the US Navy. It can happen to anyone and with men, it's often not diagnosed until it's too late due to the stigma and general lack of awareness that it's a thing.

My first thought reading the headline: Was it a boy or a girl?

I guess it was man baby.

This of course hinges on my parents and uncle staying reasonably healthy and financially secure, if they end up as vegetables with a nursing home draining all of their assets or decide to blow all of their wealth in Vegas or something the whole plan could kind of fall apart.

I'm a Gen X with Gen Z kids and this is literally the kind of thing that keeps me up at night. I don't want to go through a long and costly retirement. My mom got dementia. My dad lived to be a hundred. Either of those outcomes fills me with dread that there is no way I have saved anywhere near enough to make that work. At least I don't see myself doing the Vegas thing, unless it's a side-effect of the dementia?

Oh that would be cool!

Hopefully, this new algorithm is not overly taxing. The amount of processing they'll have to do to keep up with Rubin must be staggering. It's got what, a 3.2 Gpixel camera mapping the entire night sky every few days. And then all that data has to be processed across the timeline of past observations. I wouldn't be surprised if the computational demands are what kept it from becoming a reality until now.

So ground based observatories have long benefited from the development of adaptive optics. That's basically where you have a small mirror that is synced to the movements of the upper atmosphere and essentially cancels out the shimmer that makes stars twinkle to the naked eye, bringing them into a sharp focus more like what you would get from a space telescope. But the tech can only achieve this feat over narrow patches sky, meaning wide field observatories were left out. I think that's what they're talking about here? You can't get much more wide field than Vera Rubin.

It's depressing. I was reading an article about how plant-based alternatives are failing and there's some kind of meat eating renaissance going on now. I was not aware of this, having reduced my own animal protein consumption over climate concerns and wide-scale industry practices. But even lard and beef tallow are making a comeback after being largely replaced by vegetable oils decades ago. Fuck.