There was, I believe, a hairdresser rounded up by ICE and sent to CECOT with images/video of his head getting shaved and audio of him crying for his mother. I think about him all the time, and wonder what happened to him because it's so horrific. He doesn't strike me as the kind of person who would survive a situation like that, and yet nothing on his status, or his family, has noticably trickled out as information in the last nine or 10 months. My short little comment here will do nothing to encompass the context of the situation, but to have this humiliating experience documented and highlighted only to have it disappear so quickly and easily it's downright depressing.
Check out the wide breadth of tuts provided by Digital Ocean. This is just one post, misleadingly titled at that, whereas DO has LOADS of excellent and clearly explained tuts.
Because corporate blogs are predominantly nothing but marketing fluff that dominates search results so thoroughly that they drown out any actual useful information.
> Now imagine for a second, that the whole universe was a big cycle, and that you are going to be repeating this very same life in a “future” cycle, and maybe infinitely many times
I've heard this called 'Eternal recurrence of the same' in a past life (pun not intended). It fascinates and terrifies me at the same time.
Thank you. Hadn’t heard the name. Apparently it was a central part of Nietzche’s thought and similar to the concept of Eternal Return. Fascinating!
And yes, it’s a bit like the scene in Dune 2 when Paul’s mother, after taking the water of life, tells him he needs to drink it too, that his mind will open so he can see «the beauty and the horror»
Borrowing from signal processing, you could also call this “life aliasing”
Litter box cleaner: A kinect, a digital weight scale, a couple of cameras, a robot arm, a litter box, an internet connection and I would pay 25c for people using Amazon's Mechanical Turk to manipulate the robot arm and clean the litter box for me. And people would wait in line to take the job.
This blows my mind, and I love it. What sort of limits did you put on the Mechanical Turk service to keep people from farming the... you know... turds.
It posted a MT task when it detected weight in the litter box that was less than a cat but more than a little pee. Very sensitive digital weight platform and some fine tuning of the heuristic to get it just right. Then the MT task had to be finished in X minutes from when they start, but the Turker could request extra time on the task. But if they didn't, it would time after N minutes. Then, if they have clicked "done", two more MT tasks would get generated for two new people, where the MT worker would be asked to look at a before and an after shot of the litter box and decide if it was clean.
I kept it online for about six months. It was obviously a "dumb idea taken to the extreme" project, which included "and what can I do with computer vision and robotics for my final project with this really expensive Fujitsu robot arm I picked up from a surplus auction?"
You may be referring to the "farming" to be first in line to get the job. I didn't really prevent anything like that. Cats poop at different times, so no real way to predict when the job would pop up on MT. The Kinect and weight sensor in combination determined there was no cat present, and then the job would post. The job would always be gone in seconds. People got very creative with their cleaning, treating it like a Zen sand garden. I would come back and see pure art at times. Once, the MTurker stacked up the excrement like they were recreating the mashed potato scene from Close Encounters. They were not invited. Much like the popular meme: "Except for Billy. Billy has created the opposite of art."
I did have the usual "if the person who cleaned it last didn't do a job that passed review, they would be barred from taking future cleaning jobs."
I need hearing aids. I even want hearing aids. After finally getting to see an audiologist I looked at the $5000US price offered by the in-house shop and could not stomach it (in part because they were not covered by my insurance). This was back in February of this year, so OTC hearing aids were officially a thing, and I'd hoped against hope that the prices would reflect that. After surveying the OTC hearing aid landscape for the past 10/11 months I may just go ahead and get them, because I've not found any good sources of information on them. Just lots and lots of marketing copy.
First let me say I purchased OTC hearing aids for $799 (Jabra Enhance) out of frustration and the particular ones I use are adequate at best. They tune to your hearing loss via a crude test which only has three frequency ranges categorized as high, medium and low frequency bands. They additionally have three modes that change the mix of in room sound to help to adapt to different listening situations.
The biggest frustration with them is they aren't particularly discrete around amplification or rejection of sound: want to hear someone speaking? You're going to get lots of room noise too because of the wide bands which just amplify everything rather than say just speech and/or where your specific hearing loss is deepest.
In fact even though my insurance does cover hearing aids, it's through a certain discount supplier, and their offerings strike me as lower-end. As you've discovered the most expensive options are eye-poppingly expensive, but they are also have the most features. For example I was quoted between $5k and 7.5k for the best performing hearing aid. And here's the frustrating bit: for that difference in price it's the same fucking hearing aid, just with features unlocked! The audiologist told me the real difference in price is mostly more discrete bands. lol. From memory it tops out at twenty four bands.
I'm currently debating between going to Costco and using my insurance with Amplifon. I suggest you investigate both as Costco's hearing aids get decent reviews. Also apparently the prices vary by state, but here in Texas the cheapest ones are $1,499; less than half the price you quoted.
I went to an audiologist and they found nothing wrong with my hearing, but yet, I have trouble hearing normal conversational tones. Hearing completely fucking annoying sounds like fluorescent lights? That I can do with abandon, but hearing someone in the same room as me comes out muffled, particularly if there is a noisy background. The audiologist actually had the audacity to tell me that my wife may just be making things up.
So, OTC hearing aides may be a solution for me, but while they are far more inexpensive than prescription aides, they are still expensive ($1000+) and what if they do not work or do not work to solve my problems and only exacerbate the issues I have?
Does anyone have recommendations on which ones to try when I eventually bite the bullet?
You may have some form of APD [1], and if so there is basically nothing on the market for you. It affects me, and it's frustrating as hell when people get angry at you for it, and especially when they think you're just making it up.
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