bleepblop

Man, do I have some bad news for you.

These guys have been at it for a few years now: https://www.replicastudios.com/

And the list is growing quickly.

I envy that you have never experienced missing "key" pieces.

Understandable. I am pretty selective when it comes to a kit. Dare I say autistic? Box condition is a consideration, along with down to how I open them. It's noticeable.

I am totally on the same page with you. It definitely boils down to what are you doing. There are a ton of cool pieces these days that would've been a pipe dream when we were kids. And lego's MO has always been imagination and creativity. I feel like the addition of stickers in essence sort of rules out the variable, but forces the builder to use it if they are following the kit by the book. Where as with a printed brick the person gets to choose whether they use it or not.

It's really splitting hairs at that point, but ascetically speaking it doesn't fit their ethos.

I am fully aware of the customer service side of lego. That's why I still use their stuff. But I suppose that is where our agreement will lie. Knowing what they are capable of and where they are now is noticeable.

I don't have children and I do all sorts of kits besides lego; with even smaller pieces. Either I have bad luck or I am careless. But you'd think with multiple decades under my belt I'd eventually find the "missing" pieces. When it's like a 4x12 left wing, or a 2x1 it starts to get suss.

I wish I could say the same. The extra little guys is to be expected. I am talking about key pieces to the puzzle.

I go on some wild stints. But if I had to average it out; somewhere around 10-20 kits a year.

I have a new metric when it comes to lego kits these days. How many stickers are in the kit? And honestly it's too damn high. I have been pretty vocal to lego about this in the past and current times. If they can mass produce an uncountable amount of minifigs with detailed paint schemes; they can do the same for bricks in the set.

I have a hard time believing it's nothing more than a cost cutting measure. And to add insult to injury; I have noticed their quality control slipping over the years. For example: in the past 40 years or so, I might get a kit with a piece missing once a decade? Within the past 10 years I have had at least 7 kits missing pieces. And the frequency keeps growing. As a long time lego enthusiast; they have been slowly losing my trust.

The irony is I can use steam link with an ipad. On top of that I can use it as a second monitor for when I am on the go among some other productivity. From what I saw with the vision pro, nothing compelled me in that department. And I have to agree with you, not having some sort of controller interface was an additional no go as well.

Thinking about it. If apple had dropped their vision pro with something like you can play Half Life Alyx on it like they did with Death Stranding with the M2chip/M3? they might have had a larger buyer pool.

Hiring managers who want to make rejections feel less impersonal can do it by sharing the news in an email initially and then offering a phone call for feedback if the person wants one,

People are getting offers for feedback? Every time I have asked for feedback I get met with nothing. Like, how am I supposed to improve if I don't know what is missing?

I'll stick to boiling water and purification tabs thanks. If I'm feeling like I haven't done a good job, I guess I can run it through your filter.

I prefer silent keyboards. Mechanical boards drive me up a wall.

Exactly. Being poor is its own kind of prison.

The government will garnish your wages and any benefits such as social security to the end of your life.

I once got a spoofed call from the number 666-2012. They told me I was going to hell with an obviously modulated voice. I just replied, "Finally!!" The person on the other end didn't know how to react to that. This was probably around 2009ish? After that time though, random calls were never fun like that.

They became predatory from then on out. I tried to play around at first, messing with them and such. Then it became relentless and the blocking never seemed to work. Then I just switched to letting random numbers go to VM. That seemed to have cut off about 50% of robocalls over time. Then eventually I got a pixel phone. Just the call screening alone is worth it. I may get 1 or 2 random numbers calling me a month now. And I usually don't even know they called unless I look at my call log.

I am happy that trend is starting to be picked up by other phone makers. Good on the FCC for clamping down on this stuff. It has been a long term problem and there is still a lot more of these people out there. I hope they learned a lot and can utilize this knowledge in the future to shut more people down.

Understandably and I concur. However, I haven't met anyone outside of the apple company that would pronounce it OS 10. That being said, they don't even use the nomenclature anymore.

Reminds me of the OS X logo honestly. Maybe apple has a leg to stand on in terms of trademark? Though I find that highly doubtful due to it being a letter of the alphabet.

Yeah and Bell Labs had developed cellular technology in the late 40s. When did we get commercial use for that tech? Oh yeah, nearly 40 years later.

Yeah that's the big rub. Once apple abandoned their 32bit systems so did all the developers including mozilla. I was able to find pale moon. That worked for a time, but even those guys gave up support.

It sucks because perfectly good software just was abandoned almost overnight.

Edit: I'd like to add that I have gotten to a point where I felt comfortable upgrading to apple silicone (3 years in), but now I am experiencing the opposite problem. Where the same develpers were more than happy to drop support overnight; are now slow to develop for the new chipset.

My main issue with apple is the lack of backwards compatibility. They sort of plugged that hole, but I was running mountain lion for a good chunk of time and over time things just stopped working. Mostly internet things like a simple web browser. Whereas, I could run the same programs up into windows 11 and who knows how far into the future.

Unfortunately, at the time, I needed to run legacy programs and apple just left a lot behind.

Where I see the benefit is in dialogue replacement. It takes a lot of time to call back an actor to the stage after they have finished the project. They might have moved onto another project or depending on how in demand they are they have a tight schedule and you're time with them is limited. Then on top of all that, some actors are just not very good at the process. So you have them in a room for a long time trying to get the right performance; sometimes which is difficult because that performance was done in some type of specific environment.

Having a tool at my fingertips where I can feed it some of the actor's previous lines and be able to belch out something to fill the gaps with set parameters and be able to move along in the project without all the logistics would be heaven.

It would however, kill an entire field of expertise. It would also devalue the actor as well. Though it's already happening. There are already programs on the market that replace voice actors all together and are being used in the video game space.

For the work I do, I can see the benefits it could bring. But I am also fully aware it probably will be heavily abused.

My mistake was speaking with an audio consumer and not an engineer.

If you're sending audio and audio only then sure. Wouldn't be my solution from my professional opinion though.

Might I suggest reading up on how both DTS and Dolby encode audio then.

Again, that is fine. Besides getting an uncompressed 2 channel signal; anything above 2 channels is going to be compressed and frequencies carved out of the additional channels due to the encoding process. Thus a loss of fidelity. You "may" get a multi channel signal, but it is not 1:1. There are plenty of papers written about the subject since it's nearly a 50 year old technology.

That's fine. Let me rephrase: if you're not using the latest and greatest HDMI protocol you're not getting full fidelity audio.

If your receiver doesn't support eARC, you are definitely not getting full resolution audio.

Thanks for that and I did. I looked into it a bit further because I felt the article was ommitting a lot of information. Apparently the current governor was an educator, so I'm sure he has an additional bone to pick with the current legislature. However, over the past 20 years or so there has been a huge push, nationally, to gut education. So I'm not surprised by this governor's move. He's playing the game with the rules he can.