spoon theory

Thanks for introducing me to a new concept (or at least a term for it), always nice to learn something new.

Agreed. Future carbon capture capabilities are used to justify current emissions.

Importantly they tried to enter the market with a $40 purchase price, when the existing competition is mostly free to play.

I am also from Germany and get payed for donating thrombocytes at my university hospital. The compensation is actually quite substantial imo at (up to) 75€ per session, which can be done every two weeks. The money is however mean to offset the time required, not the thrombocytes donated. So it is correlated to how long it takes.

You get 15€ (?) for up to 15min (if they have to abort very early for some reason or at your first visit where they just draw blood to test), 50€ for up to 1h (which equals to 1 instead of 2 pack of thrombocytes, usually done at your first real donation or if you maybe dont have enough for 2 on this particular day), and 75€ for anything over 1h (which is the norm).

Timewise the hospital is on the outskirts of the city, so most will have to travel a bit, then you have to fill out forms, have a quick talk with the doctor, and finally depending on your parameters it takes anywhere from ~55-70min to extract, during which you are tethered to a machine (which takes out some blood, then seperates out the thrombocytes with a centrifuge, pumps back the rest, and repeat).

One could get philosophical about the topic, but from a practical perspective the money makes a lot of sense imo:

• It costs them a lot of money to investigate new prospects, so you want reliable repeat donors

• Each donation already has other costs associated with it. Like for example the kit used during extraction, the staff handling everything and so on. So even those 75€ are just one more expense among many, and from donation to usage probably vanish in the overall costs.

• For the donor it is quite a substantial time commitment, especially when done regularly every two weeks. Unlike for example full blood donations you’d maybe do twice a year. And you should be reliable and not randomly cancel at the last second, so ideally it also has priority over some other things in your life.

• the small amount of blood that remains inside the machine is sometimes used for other research (if you agree to it, which i do)

From my own experience i can say that i might still do it without, but certainly not at the same frequency. And considering the time and effort required i don’t think anyone could be blamed for doing it less frequently without the incentive. So at least in this case it imo is a fair trade and net positive. Although it does also help that this is a university hospital that directly uses it themselves, rather than a for profit company.

Agreed. The difference is that the prequels were a failure in execution, whereas the sequels failed on a conceptual level.

Kind of late, since i just came around to seeing it. Some thoughts:

• I really liked the visuals and i’m glad i got to see it in the cinema on a really good screen, so more or less the best possible experience. But i agree that the Rook animatronic looked a bit off (i’d have to rewatch it again).

• As someone else already mentioned i also liked the dystopian setting of the first act.

• I liked that they were leaning more into the horror, rather than action genre. But imo unlike the first Alien movie it had a few too many jump scares and overused the xenomorphs. Where the original was able to build tension with what you can’t see, here you had a whole pack of them. And somehow they get mowed down way too easily.

• Agreed that there were too many callbacks and easter eggs, rather than letting the movie stand on its own. Especially the Ripley line was just too obvious and imo breaks the immersion into the movie.

• Not a huge fan of the third act

I never used it myself, but rather than a dedicated alarm clock app, maybe look at tasker?

Looking at their website they actually list your use case as an example of what is possible

wake up with a random song from your music collection

(Third point under “usage examples”)

To be fair the article mentions that they did have it figured out, but later canceled the connection, which was part of a separate project.

Seems like the exact problem that could happen with anything, but ofc shouldn’t. Because it really is such a simple mistake that anyone with a brain, who is in charge of making those decisions, should look at the plans and see it. There for sure are systemic issues, if something this basic can fall through the cracks.

Besides the obvious fuck up, just judging from the picture in the article I also see a complete lack of solar panels or charging stations.

Feels like when you are already spending such a huge sum just for a fancy place to store some cars, then you could at least add that functionality.

The issue is that would at best “reset” their reputation to zero. But the state that they’d like to go back to would be similar to “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”, which ofc only works with the existing name. And this line of thinking is what got damaged by the degrading processors (and maybe how they handle it).

But Intel has never been in worse shape. So I think it’s less about Intel considering it and more about if it gets forced on them either by activist investors (I remember seeing an article that Intel prepares to defend against that) or necessity.

I don’t think so. The degrading processors are certainly bad, but in the grand scheme of things won’t move the needle. The reputation loss is probably worse than whatever fine they end up paying (and they will drag it out).

The split would be between design and manufacturing. And it would mean a massive shift, not business as usual.

The design side is probably in better shape and would increase their use of TSMC instead of using the now spun off Intel fabs.

The manufacturing side would have it rough. But we are talking about only one of 3 manufacturers of leading edge chips here (together with tsmc and samsung), not something you “conveniently let go bankrupt”. They’d try to raise more money to finish their new fabs and secure customers (while trying to make up for the lost volume from the design side). But realistically I’d say that similar to Global foundries they would drop out of the expensive leading edge race.

So like the Stillsuits in Dune?

I think the satellite based cellular networks like ASTS is currently trying to launch will be ubiquitous.

The tech already seems good, so it’ll happen much sooner than 34, but I imagine by that point it will just be one of those things everyone takes for granted.

I can also see small autonomous drones playing a much larger role with various tasks.

I think in reality I would milk it for personal gain, but in this hypothetical thought experiment I’d also like to imagine putting it into public domain.

Yes we would certainly see a lot of trash, but I’d imagine that it would also lead to a lot of creativity. We really are hampered by the insanely long copyright durations.

Sherlock Holmes for example has been part of general culture for a long time, and yet the last novel only became public domain 2023. Considering how much the world changed between now and 1927 (when it was published) it really doesn’t make sense. And the argument for copyright that invention needs to pay also falls flat, when it extends so long even after the authors death.

That is one aspect of it: if you are 10, then 1 year is 10% of your whole life, more if you consider the first few to not really be conscious. If you are 50 it’s only 2%.

But I think another factor is what stays in our memories vs what gets filtered out. If you are young, you’ll experience lots of “first times”, major changes, and defining moments. As you get older there are more parts of your life that are routine and repetitive. Looking back at a year/a whole life what are the things you can vividly remember?

This is also what imo causes the shift in perception for the covid period. Suddenly a lot of events that usually create memorable experiences didn’t happen. No parties, festivals, meeting new people, or vacations in foreign places. For most of us it will have been a major change initially, but relatively quickly routines setting in.

Yeah, hadn’t heard about it until today either. But Steam also kind of torpedoed their launch by lifting their NDA for Deadlock on the same day. Not sure how similar they are, but that’ll grab most of the attention from gamers right now.

Photo manipulation has been around as long as the medium itself. And throughout the decades, people have worried about the veracity of images. When PhotoShop became popular, some decried it as the end of truthful photography. And now here’s AI, making things up entirely.

I actually think it isn’t the AI photo or video manipulation part that makes it a bigger issue nowadays (at least not primarily), but the way in which they are consumed. AI making things easier is just another puzzle piece in this trend.

Information volume and speed has increased dramatically, resulting in an overflow that significantly shortens the timespan that is dedicated to each piece of content. If i slowly read my sunday newspaper during breakfast, then i’ll give it much more attention, compared to scrolling through my social media feed. That lack of engagement makes it much easier for missinformation to have the desired effect.

There’s also the increased complexity of the world. Things can on the surface seem reasonable and true, but have knock on consequences that aren’t immediately apparent or only hold true within a narrow picture, but fall appart once viewed from a wider perspective. This just gets worse combined with the point above.

Then there’s the downfall of high profile leading newsoutlets in relevance and the increased fragmentation of the information landscape. Instead of carefully curated and verified content, immediacy and clickbait take priority. And this imo also has a negative effect on those more classical outlets, which have to compete with it.

You also have increased populism especially in politics and many more trends, all compounding on the same issue of missinformation.

And even if caught and corrected, usually the damage is done and the correction reaches far fewer people.

I’ve had two USB C ports fail on HMD phones.

Yeah, that’s what got my HMD made, Nokia branded, 7 plus. And from a search at the time this was a common problem

Yeah it’s pretty insane, for that kind of money it better be fantastic. Although I think nowadays the link between money and quality (to whatever degree it ever existed) is weaker than it’s ever been.

I’ve always wondered, how do streaming movies make money at all? Does Netflix really make enough money to justify spending this much on a movie?

Well they certainly make enough money, last quarters revenue was roughly 9.5 billion dollar. Sure you got server costs, salaries and licensing for old content that eat up a lot, but if you are getting over 3 billion per month from your subscribers you should be able to find some budget for expensive content.

I don’t think a movie like this will be efficient in $/h watched, those will go to cheap series and people putting on their favorite comfort show in the background for the 10th rerun. But they probably still need those big tent pole movies for psychological reasons. It’s good for marketing towards new subscribers and for user retention you will need the occasional blockbuster movie. Don’t need to be that many per year, since as said the vast majority of time will be spend watching some simple stuff, but you do need fresh content for the occasional movie night. Or people will start looking at the competition that offers those and which also has plenty of mindless entertainment.