I just got one of these the other day. I picked up an Nvidia Shield because I was tired of my shitty Samsung TV not being able to stream Plex correctly and Google is the only data devil I’ve made a deal with. I hadn’t watched much YouTube on it I guess until last night and I couldn’t believe how many ads I saw.

Holy. Shit. YouTube has ads in the middle of fucking videos now? And then I paused and saw another ad and about lost my shit. Immediately looked up how to adblock on Android TV. Jesus it’s invasive.

SAS so I could get more work. Plus it’s crazy fast and great for statistics and economics, which is my field. It’s also easier to learn for non programmers than Python. It’s a great language, and its only real fault is terrible naming constraints. It sucks to be the guy pushing for more C# and Python because no one knows SAS, but at this point the cost is just prohibitive.

Whoa whoa whoa - the Jumanji reboot was excellent. It’s still a kids movie, but Jack Black was amazing, and even Kevin “Homophobe” Hart showed some chops. And the Rock and Karen Gilliam are both good as always.

Yes, it’s a derivative recycle of existing IP capitalizing on nostalgia, but everything now is a derivative recycle of existing IP capitalizing on nostalgia. At least they updated the board game idea to have fun 80s video game call backs and tried their best for a good script and good acting. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Totally hear where you’re coming from, and I think in a perfect world, a journalist could recuse themselves of reporting on things where they are hopelessly biased (see Cuomo incident before the later revealed stuff), but I still argue the goal should be to examine and eliminate biases as much possible, and avoid the appearance of minor ones unless they are somehow damning. The introspection necessary to examine your own biases rather than just avoid them helps make you more capable of being more impartial overall, in my opinion.

I think there’s real debate on if through such a concerted effort to not give into to one’s own biases, you swing too far and start favoring the opposition, but that happens with anyone trying to avoid appearances of impropriety. Not giving your kid the starting pitching slot even if he deserves it because you’re the coach, a judge not accepting a free ride to a conference everyone else gets, etc etc.

Then you get a spot writing op-eds so you can dunk on strawmen who don’t have the reach or voice to argue with you!

It’s wild that we live in such polarized times that every single comment in this thread is talking about how this is wrong because of some variant of “she’s being fired for calling it like it is.”

That’s not what happened. She was fired (forced to resign, same difference) because she went on record with a political viewpoint and made value judgements. YOU DONT GET TO DO THAT AS A JOURNALIST. It doesn’t matter if she’s right (she is, in my opinion, before someone accused me of supporting apartheid and misses the point). What matters is she has taken away any appearance of being unbiased, both for her and by association for the paper. It’s crazy damaging and the Times should have fired her instead of letting her resign. This is like journalistic ethics 101. My parents were both journalists and wouldn’t even talk to me about who they voted for - and they weren’t even in hard news.

I know these days there are so many biased news agencies and lots of opinions masquerading as news, but for hard news agencies this kind of thing does not, and should not fly. The woman was dumb and I hope she was ready for a career writing op-eds and being a partisan talking head, because she’ll never write hard news at a reputable source again.

Ah yes, no true gatekeeper.

The article didn’t say she was a settler in an occupied territory though, she was in a Kibbutz on the border of Gaza. The settler problem is in the West Bank. The article DID say she advocated for Palestinian rights, which I don’t understand why you’d deny unless you have some proof otherwise? Hamas killed civilians indiscriminately - they were bound to kill some very good people. I don’t understand why someone who advocated for Palestinian rights is so hard to believe. It’s just super sad.

Just move to NOVA. It’s not that far and it’s an entirely different world. Plus you’ll make more money and your paycheck will go farther when you go anywhere else.

Yeah, I’m not saying Libre office isn’t…fine, or that development tools on Linux aren’t good or even better. But the idea that all Microsoft software sucks is as demonstrably false as an opinion statement can be. They’re really good, and with Office the alternatives aren’t close. Do most people need all the functionality in Excel or PowerPoint? No, but they’re great pieces of software and ignoring that is just plain tribalism.

ALL of their software sucks

Let’s not get carried away. Office suite (particularly Word, PowerPoint and Excel) is some of the best software I’ve used. Crazy powerful, easy to use, consistent across iterations. Outlook could have some QOL things but it’s still better than Thunderbird. VS Code is awesome too.

You’re getting at my favorite article of all time, The Shockingly Simple Math of Early Retirement. Say what you will about Mr. Money Mustache or even early retirement in general, but this article really is the absolute simplest and best way to think about retirement savings. It’s why I often feel poor or pressed for money but never worry about retirement, because I max it all and pay myself first, and I know as long as my percentage is high I’m on track.

Plus even before I could max my 401k and Roth (and we recently had a kiddo so had to stop Roth for a bit) or get a high savings rate, I put in way more than was comfortable because the power of compounding is worth rice and beans and not going out drinking for a bit. Now that I’m middle aged my nest egg is huge, and we’ve been slowly able to lifestyle inflate. But I am soooo glad my younger self saved like crazy. Time flies by, and money compounds before you know it.

Pedants pedanting, pedantly stylelessly

Recruiters chase misery like sharks chase blood.

I mean, accurate but Jesus Christ that’s brutal haha.

Well frankly I don’t think the original point was super well made, since folks are talking about entirely different points now, but I’d agree with soccer, and tennis and golf in particular really being comfortable with far more silence in broadcasting - but that’s true on both sides of the pond. But the idea that surface level analysis is unique to American sports coverage is pretty false in my experience. Every sport I know a lot about seems covered at surface level - every sport I don’t know a ton about seems covered great. But I’ll say despite knowing a ton about amfootball the broadcasting is still pretty impressive. The soccer analysis I’ve seen is pretty good too but I’ll admit my depth of knowledge is much shallower. But there is definitely a size of audience and sportscaster population issue as well, because small sports I know a lot about have much worse coverage.

I absolutely agree that US broadcast networks show more player centric fluff portions than English or Spanish broadcasts (the only other languages I’ve watched). But the original post was more about surface level analysis, and that’s more about audience size and quality of broadcasters IMHO. But yeah, fluff, particularly between plays/matches, is crazy annoying. I hate US Olympic coverage when I can juxtapose it with BBC.

This is hilariously false. It’s a major vs minor sport thing and having a population of talent to draw on. Top top top euro soccer announcers are just as amazing as top top top US basketball and football announcers, but as soon as you start watching a handball broadcast there is very little separating it from a rowing broadcast or a darts broadcast or whatever. Sometimes you get a good play by play announcer but color is almost always rough, because it’s insanely hard, not because Americans are bad at it lol.

I’ve done sports announcing, and come from a journalism family where my dad taught radio broadcasting.

Sports casting is hard. Like really, really hard. It is very easy to criticize the way someone does it, but it is incredibly difficult to fill hours of silence. I did live commentary for college wrestling, and I was a very knowledgeable high school wrestler, but frankly sometimes there just isn’t something exciting or even describable happening. Jockeying for control, positioning, or feeling out an opponent - sometimes the announcing is “they continue struggling!” Then you think of a sport that isn’t nonstop action like American football, or God forbid, baseball? Huge swaths of time where there is nothing to say. This is why professional sports casts on major networks have huge teams. They can pull up obscure stats that don’t really mean anything, instant replay analysis done nearly live, and a ton of graphics to keep things moving and exciting.

Then you have the issue others have talked about, where your audience may have almost no knowledge of what to you is a deeply technical sport. So every time you explain a wrestling move, or defensive pass coverage, you have to assume no knowledge. You have to explain why someone is doing something, but luckily that actually fills up a bit more time because God forbid you have dead air on a broadcast, so of course you do it. And the type of deep analysis a knowledgeable fan might want is actually really hard to not only come up with live, but while watching something live without the benefit of watching a replay or a better camera angle.

Anyway, my point is that you should try to do an entry level sports broadcasting exercise. Turn the sound off on a game, and try to cast it and record yourself. You will be absolutely shocked at how much silence there is, or how many asinine things you say. Even the “worst” broadcasters that you experience on any major network have such insanely deep knowledge and an ability to just keep spewing information and anecdotes out that I promise you would be so much more impressive if you heard an amateur, or better, tried to do it yourself.

They used to be good. They were cheap, you could flash them with custom firmware, they were very need friendly. They just gradually got worse and worse though, starting with them wanting to keep you in their app. It’s always garbage profit seeking. No one is happy being good to consumers if they can make more money not doing so.

It’s crazy there isn’t an open source community around it. 3d printing and CNC have been democratized, it’s wild that printing and cutting vinyl hasn’t.