This is crazy, incredible work.

The small fuzzy spherical things are just what's inside the large oblong things, once the husk has been removed. People who have never really interacted with coconuts may be surprised to learn this.

I briefly lived in Miami when I was a child and interacted with a lot of coconuts. I am surprised to learn this

The Thin Red Line

286082 is still insane though

Labeling midi controllers as theater props is an insane take. Midi controllers are essentially programmable instruments.

A controller is not the same as an instrument, it generates a control signal that can be used to control the actual instruments (synthesizers, drum machines or a well hidden laptop). And I have built both controllers and instruments and have written a MIDI implementation so I got a bit of an idea about those things.

And if you tell me a mechanical engineer made his own instruments for his good sounding one-man music act the most boring, least exciting, least innovative outcome would be him adding some knobs and buttons into a cool looking enclosure. If that enclosure would look less cool he could very likely still make the same well sounding music, meaning it is not essential to the sound, meaning it could be seen as a prop.

I don't argue this is verboten, it is just a bit disapointing that is all.

Cool idea! It sounds like you're offering it for free, with the option for a donation. How are you going to deal with the influx of what I imagine will be hundreds of free requests? Won't that get pretty expensive fast?

The pessimist in me says this is the regular old "If it's free, then you're the product" situation.

This seems like a clever way to collect valid mailing addresses. People are also likely to include personal information in their praise messages, which could be valuable data.

Their Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy state they reserve the right to share collected information with service providers, business partners, and affiliates. They can use your data for "other purposes" including "data analysis" and "identifying trends." They can share your information with "business partners to offer you certain products, services or promotions."

The terms look like boilerplate that only addresses "your" data--not the information you enter about the target. If they end up selling the addresses/names/activities of unwilling participants, their "don't sue us" clause from the video may not hold up in court.*

*ianal

Aren’t there data dumps freely available online with contact information for pretty much anyone? In that context, why would the data from this small project have any monetary value?

It wouldn't. This site just has a strong bias towards reactionary yum yuckers.

OP here - There will be a lot we won’t be able to get to Hahahh but we want to try and send out as many as we can!

Well that's super lame.

A USPS Forever Stamp is $0.73. Unless yall are rolling in VC funds or a lot of extra cash, a few hundred or even thousand orders is going to nuke the entire idea.

Are you still going to harvest and use all of the collected data of people who never got anything mailed?

I think it's interesting how this makes a distinction about what Americans do, because appropriate social interaction is significantly influenced by culture. I wonder if there's a study or something that explored the variations in social interaction norms across cultures.

There's many interesting books on the subject - "the culture map" is a fun and easy read, covering examples on various cultures (and how to create a more welcoming environment by being aware that differences exist)

Sure, language is more than text. It's complex, messy, and ever-changing. But that's exactly why language models are so phenomenal; they can extract patterns from these complex systems.

For instance, 'Longbottom' is translated quite literally, which can feel a bit silly.

As someone with an English "bottom" as in bottom-lands surname, I appreciate the deliberate silliness of "Longbottom" while leaning into a very traditional British sounding name.

Does it refer to a large valley? (lots of fertile ground) Perhaps, it is a punny reference to him being a pure blood.

It's silly in English too. Perhaps some British readers might be familiar with the name and its history/origins, but for most English readers, I suspect, it just sounds a bit silly, like he has a very tall butt.

Washington, D.C. has the famous Foggy Bottom.

Edit: America has a lot of bottoms, apparently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_geographical_bottoms

Nowhere as grand as Aunt Mary's Bottom but South Dakota does have a Big Bottom.

"Talk about mud flaps My gal's got 'em."

It's silly, but it does feel like a real name. There are many such names in Britain.

Longbottom is the serious version, before that it was Stretcharse.

In French he's called "Londubat", which phonetically means "long FROM the bottom", which is arguably even worse than the English name.

Looks like an iPhone...one of the things I like about the other pixels is the curved bezels..

It looks like Bender.

Damn you nailed it. Now I can’t unsee it.

I came here to write the same thing. It absolutely does.

I have heard this for years. Not much you can do with a rectangle that's basically just a screen in front.

It's more about the software than anything. Maybe the camera too

I submit the HTC 10 as an example of a smartphone that did not look like an iPhone but had its own sleek design language:

https://dev.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/s9wsHkNaq6sKCSAzKvfZKo.jpg

That's kind of ugly though, IMO. I'd rather have a solid back.

I mean, the back didn't look a lot like an iPhone, but look at the front in white and compare that to an iPhone 4 in white.

Nah, it just looks ugly and too sterile. Nothing brave, just another double palm sized phone. A girl who tries very hard to look cool, but the bridge on her head just ruins the overall looks.

Maybe ask LG to make a cool looking phone. They have created a lot of brave designs.