My 84 year old mom uses AirPods Pro 2 as an aid for moderate hearing loss and has been satisfied. As others have noted, the difference is night and day; I went from having to yell just to be occasionally understood to being able to have a normal conversation.
My understanding is they are pretty good hearing aids, but they don't have the battery life that purpose-built aids do (4-5 hours vs 18-24) so they're not optimal for full-time use. This is fine for her use case, since she only uses them when she wants to talk to someone, but could be an issue for someone who wants to wear them all day, every day.
I question this assertion. What 'out of the way' exists in the parking lots you frequent? Every one that I can think of offhand consists of parking spaces, areas for people to walk from their cars, driving lanes and little else. Anywhere you could leave it other than the designated place is causing a problem for someone.
I wouldn't personally go that far; having recently replayed all three back-to-back, I'd say that they're just very different types of games.
ME1 is a an excellent story-driven action RPG with clunky combat and issues with environment size/complexity due to technological limitations of the platform it was built for.
ME2 is a very good story-driven third-person shooter with excellent combat and a thin veneer of RPG elements that has overcome a lot of the technical issues with ME1 despite the same platform/engine.
ME1 by far has the better story and I enjoyed it more than ME2 on my first playthrough years ago, but now, already knowing the story, ME2 was more fun to play this time. It's a shame they couldn't have improved on everything good about the first one instead of turning it into a shooter.
Personally, I'd love to see the whole trilogy reimagined and remade as a single giant open-world action RPG, but that's probably never happening.
I'd like to point out that the student's advice, "of course the news is ridiculous propaganda, just ignore it and go about your life and focus on your friends and family" is the the response desired by the authoritarian Chinese government who has carefully engineered the situation in the first place.
The purpose of constantly publishing obvious lies is not for people to believe them (though some always will), it's to devalue the idea of truth in general. Combine that with overt (but unpredictable) penalties for supporting the 'wrong' cause, and a disinterest in politics becomes the easiest and safest path for a member of the public. As long as the economy's good, people just don't care about anything that doesn't harm them directly.
Exactly this. Without an active interest in politics people stop caring if their rights are taken away one step at a time. The thought process becomes - the government will do what the government will do, I just need to toe the line and be happy that I am not in jail.
You see a common theme in some people talking about science related things, aka "The science was wrong", which is very rarely the case. Most of the time when that is said it's "The conclusion was slightly incorrect because of statistically insignificant findings" (probability based) versus wrong (binary). You end up with a class of people that start thinking all science is wrong and at any moment their crackpot crap is suddenly going to be correct.
I mostly blame bad journalism for this. Always looking for sensational content to capture attention, outlets publish credulous articles on single journal articles without providing enough context for their unsophisticated audience. It would take much more time and effort to properly contextualized them, and in many cases, it would be apparent that it is too early for the general public to draw any conclusions from the research. It wouldn't be newsworthy.
I don't have particular knowledge about how things are in China, but the underlying strategy is real and employed by authoritarian regimes against their citizens and adversaries.
In the US, the right-wing media and Trump have been doing it to us, in addition to our adversaries.
In the old days, propaganda was used to make people believe specific things. But information streams aren't as easily controlled today, so instead the idea is to create confusion and distrust. It's a DDoS on reality. Sadly it can be very effective.
Regarding the good economy = apathy, my conclusion is the opposite. I think our good economy is the reason a significant portion of the US population with overwhelming outgroup preference exists at all. As quality of life deteriorates I think that behavior will be selected out and those remaining will get back to the basics of tribe survival. I think it is the fundamental fallacy of the modern socialist that if things get bad enough, people will undergo some personal revelation about climate or vote Bernie or something. I think when you look at extremely poor places like Yemen, you don’t see fertile ground for progressive idealism.
You're strawmaning the socialist view. The stealman version is that people who are feeling economic pain are more likely to want to do something about it, and may be primed to develop class consciousness and become politically mobilized. Socialists generally consider material conditions to be more important than identitarian concerns, which in their view, are often used as a wedge to divide working class people who might otherwise be united by their common economic interests. They don't think poor people are somehow magically less likely to be bigots.
> is the the response desired by the authoritarian Chinese government who has carefully engineered the situation in the first place.
But they are an "authoritarian" government so they don't really care what their citizens believe. Right? Doesn't your logic apply more to "democratic" and "free" countries. No?
> The purpose of constantly publishing obvious lies is not for people to believe them (though some always will), it's to devalue the idea of truth in general.
"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day." -- Thomas Jefferson
Are you saying the US was "authoritarian" from the very beginning?
> As long as the economy's good, people just don't care about anything that doesn't harm them directly.
Isn't this true for every government? "Democratic", "authoritarian", "monarch", "anarchic", etc?
The article implies that it's not a liquidation or bankruptcy, though, just a sale.
I don't know how you can buy a company without buying its stock from the shareholders, given that they are the owners of the company, but there must be some special circumstance that's not mentioned in the article.
There are tricks. I've been through such an acquisition. The purchaser sets up a new "Philz Coffee Co LLC" then purchases assets and operations for the exact amount the preferred stock holders want. They then liquidate the old company. Because the old company was never legally "bought" the common stock holders are SOL because they now own stock in a fictional company. That's not to say they don't have options... but I am not a lawyer and that definitely involves lawyers.
I agree with you and don't know enough to speak authoritatively. That being said, I did find this definition of liquidation (below). The article hints the business was in trouble, the way I'm reading it, if the sale doesn't cover all obligations, its would be a liquidation.
"Business liquidation involves selling off a company’s assets, such as equipment, inventory, and real estate, and using the proceeds to pay off debts and obligations. This process usually occurs when a business is no longer profitable, facing insurmountable financial challenges, or the owner decides to retire or pursue other opportunities."
This is precisely the reason for accredited investor requirements to invest in private companies, it’s extremely easy to be screwed over as a small-time shareholder in a private company.
If there was no money (aka bankruptcy) then board, top management and other investors would also not get anything (divide remaining assets between all stock). But this is different, this is sale, not bankruptcy. Some people get money while common stock owners (aka company owners) don't get anything.
Indeed. The oldest things on earth are the hydrogen atoms. Literally all of them were formed in the first 3 minutes after the big bang. So all of them have the same age, billions of years old, down to a few seconds difference at most.
> The oldest things on earth are the hydrogen atoms. Literally all of them were formed in the first 3 minutes after the big bang.
Stable hydrogen wasn't able to form until several hundreds of thousands of years after the Big Bang when the universe cooled sufficiently for electrons to bind to protons.
Even assuming you're counting lone protons as hydrogen atoms, it's still absolutely false. I don't know if that's true for the majority of protons in the universe, but there are mechanisms by which new protons are made all the time. Neutrons can turn into protons through beta decay, and high energy particle interactions like those involving cosmic rays can produce brand new protons. These processes can and do happen terrestrially.
> the amount of non-big-bang hydrogen is not even a trillionth of a trillionth of the total.
I didn't say it was a huge fraction of the total. You said "literally all of them" were from the Big Bang, which is just wrong. Plenty of other processes produce protons/hydrogen
>If he didn't understand the question how could he know the model answered it perfectly?
Also, 'thing that I don't know about but is broadly and uncontroversially known and documented by others' is sort of dead center of the value proposition for current-generation LLMs and also doesn't make very impressive marketing copy.
Unless he's saying that he fed it an unknown-to-experts-in-the-field question and it figured it out in which case I am very skeptical.
My understanding is they are pretty good hearing aids, but they don't have the battery life that purpose-built aids do (4-5 hours vs 18-24) so they're not optimal for full-time use. This is fine for her use case, since she only uses them when she wants to talk to someone, but could be an issue for someone who wants to wear them all day, every day.
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