Same here ~ it's a challenge to go to parties or just go out to dinner because I literally can't hear the other person speaking. It's like an overloaded radio receiver frontend that can't hear the station right next to it because it's drowned out by the stronger signals around it. Hearing aids helped the tinnitus some and the reduced hearing more but nothing to be done for helping distinguish who is talking. My hearing aids have the ability to change the "focus" but it doesn't work very well.

Power budget is all that really matters on the watch as everything is translated into that. You are allocated x amount of power swappable in a certain way and thatâ(TM)s it. Battery life is everything so anything that improves it or allows algorithms to run more often (the optical hardware consumes a fair amount) is a good thing

Walks out to shed and grabs Roundup Brush Killer concentrate purchased at Lowe's last week... looks like the label claims active ingredients of triclopyr triethylamine salt 2.5%, fluazifop-P-butyl 2.0%, diquat dibromide 1.5%. That's what I purchased here in the Bay Area; interestingly enough Home Depot doesn't carry the brush killer and claims it is not available in California but I've always been able to purchase it at Lowe's. We have 2 acres of poison oak forest that I've been working to eliminate. Once I've purchased enough Tecnu to counter the effects of the oil we'll go in and clear it out manually. I'd love to use goats but they are really quite expensive.

ya, doesn't work well with the forests of poison oak we have here. Roundup brush killer seems to work the best on it although if I could afford it I would prefer to use goats but they're super expensive.

Feelings of nostalgia?

San Francisco - notoriously anti-robot. They will kill the robot and take the cargo. Oakland will just take the robot and cargo and set it all on fire after using it to burn donuts in the sky.

It remains to be seen if the states will drop their suits; 24 states have indicated they are not intending to follow the US on this settlement.

Not really. Itâ(TM)s because PG&E is anxious to get NG off their liabilities list after blowing peopleâ(TM)s homes in San Bruno and more recently in Hayward. The noxious gas thing is a red herring they use as leverage to force you to pay the highest electricity rates in the nation. We are remodeling our kitchen and we are not replacing our gas cooktop with induction. PG&E doubles our electric rate in the evenings as well just when weâ(TM)d want to cook dinner so fuck them. I know the right thing to do is to get rid of gas but there are really good economic reasons to not do it. Until that changes we will continue to cook with gas.

How is accessing slack deactivations the same as accessing HR data?

This baby boomer will be more than happy to kick your ass into oblivion should we ever meet IRL because one thing I can't stand is people who have no concept of complexity and nuance and then cry in their milk when life gets hard. Fucking wanker. I sure as hope you don't call yourself an engineer with godawful mindset - how do you get out of the way of your own hubris?

Where I live pedestrians have the right of way so when they step into the street you must stop for them whether a crosswalk is painted there or not. Yes I hate the phone zombies as well - I always wonder what they seek as they look so intently into their behavior control erm, I mean, communication devices.

DOGE doesn't exist any longer - https://www.reuters.com/world/...

If you limit "AI" to mean a chatbot then who knows? There's plenty going on in lots of different teams but you'd have to be part of those teams to actually know and even then you'd only know a part of it. Apple has lots of algorithms that would qualify as AI in the current marketing terminology since any algorithm seems to be called AI these days. A few are the health algorithms that operate on the Apple Watch - some of those are neural net based and some are signal processing based algorithms. The most recent release of the hypertension detection is probably the largest neural based algorithm currently and it took a very long time to bring that to bear because you can't just grab any data from anywhere to make a model that will pass FDA muster as a consumer medical device - something most folks seem ignorant about and just assume any data will do. You have to run studies on humans and set those experiments up appropriately but I digress.

Electricians who do house level electrical work and those who work on things like data centers or industrial sites/fabs are not the same skill set. The industrial folks need to take engineering drawings and make them work according to code and reality and this requires engineering-level skill and experience to get right without blowing things up and killing people. Running Romex and 240V EV chargers isn't quite the same as working with 30KVA. So those electricians who work on the industrial stuff don't have a lot of those things going on all the time - it's rare they will have a job within driving distance of their family - it does depend on lots of external factors. For example my brother helped build the Intel Beaverton fabs and that was great while it lasted but projects of that scale and power consumption are uncommon and far between.

In his book, "The Inmates are Running the Asylum", Alan Cooper describes how nerds in high school don't learn the social graces that others do. Others do things in high school and are "taught" the error of their ways - maybe they duke it out behind the school, they dis someone and here in Oakland they're shot, whatever - the point being that nerds didn't get that social learning that helped others learn how to not be dicks to everyone else. Then the nerds grew up and (in Cooper's book) build UIs that SUCK because normal people don't think in terms of file system hierarchies, for example. These then become the bullies you see everywhere in tech - and believe me, they are everywhere. They grow up to then become manages who have no clue how to communicate and motivate people and teams but they know how to bully. They know how to belittle and tell people they are stupid and that's about it.