"Because all of the included participants were from infertile couples, this appears to be a limitation of the study..."
Pretty big limitation, and their discussion really is just there to justify publishing anyway. Both groups, bald and shaggy, may as well have been shooting blanks.
I'm not convinced that Scott's suggestions will move the needle. Most are good ideas (e.g. term limits, more vocational training opportunities), but some I find distasteful (e.g. forced identity verification for internet services, not being entitled to social security if you've accumulated too much, etc.). We've made too many terrible decisions for too long as a nation, to the point now I feel like the spiritual malaise for the young can only be cured by hard asset prices collapsing by 30% or more.
His end slide recap is below.
Economics:
// Increase minimum wage to $25/hr
// AMT for high income and corporations
// Re-fund the IRS
// Negative income tax (i.e. UBI)
// Eliminate capital gains exemption
Technology:
// Remove 230 protection for algorithmically-elevated content
// Identity verification
// Break up Big Tech
// Age-gating
I don't know how anyone can look at what's going on with AI and think that now is a great time to make it illegal for people to work for less than 50K a year. It would be absolutely devastating for young people especially.
Can you actually outperform the KEFs and Perlistens of the world? They seem to have so much engineering put into their designs I don't believe a hobbyist can realistically match them.
I will admit that stuff like "speakers with quasi-active noise cancellation behind them" sounds intriguing. That's probably a good reason to get into this rabbit hole!
> Can you actually outperform the KEFs and Perlistens of the world? They seem to have so much engineering put into their designs I don't believe a hobbyist can realistically match them.
Absolutely. Don't forget, these guys are: a. Humans, and b. Operating for a company to make a profit. When you're DIYing you're (generally) not concerned about the latter part at all.
There's a few more reasons why DIY is so capable:
1. High quality drivers are available to purchase. There are companies like Tymphany/SB Acoustics etc that are OEM/ODM manufacturers selling to the big names. You can get the same/very similar models from parts express and other sites.
2. A lot of the engineering principles are well understood, public science. In fact many experts hang out on websites like DIYaudio.com. They're human. You can see their workings, opinions, doubts etc up close.
3. Some speakers like the Dutch&Dutch 8c's started their lives on forums like diyaudio. Which is to say, they went from DIY level to "well-reviewed" level in a manner that's quite clear/transparent to anyone familiar with the forum/DIY. No "hidden" black magic involved.
4. You have a lot of amazing designers on these forums putting their designs out for free. Jeff Bagby, Paul Carmody, Troels Gravesen, Perry Marshall etc. Check out Perry's comment on his speaker below. Btw, he's a professional designer having worked across a number of audio & car companies designing AV systems.
Now, if you want to design your own speakers and not use an existing model, yes you'll need to learn a lot. But it's very much doable. It may take time/money/effort, but beating a top of the line system for a fraction of the (material, not labour) cost is possible and has happened.
BTW Perry had made another comment about how his speakers sounded better than almost all other speakers at AXPONA and his kids agreed, but I couldn't find it right now. And many of those speakers were high 5/6 figure speakers.
Bing is pretty great now. You get Bing points (redeemable for ~$100 in swag per year) and free Chat GPT that usually answers your question before you decide which link to click on.
You're not alone, I also got stuck in that opening sequence as a child - thankfully the game was just a rental. Honestly at that stage in my life I didn't understand what was going on in the battle sequences since they were so text heavy. RPGs were too foreign of a concept at the time. Couple years later went on to enjoy the crap out of FF6, Chrono Trigger, and SMRPG, so I really should revisit Earthbound.
I've been on various projects that utilized Express, Koa, and NestJS (which wraps Express or Fastify).
Of the three, I'd choose Koa again over the others. Their design works better with modern javascript (async/await). While there may be fewer middleware packages for Koa than Express, it's usually not that hard to write your own if you can't find what you need.
For NestJS I didn't care for the decorator-driven "Spring-like" design. In JS codebases it's more natural to take a functional approach.
Games just don't respect your time any more. Usually 80+ hours to experience an open world game with a handful of side quests.
While I don't share the same love of "emotional experience" games, at this point I'm thinking about only sticking to mission-based and "wide linear" games so that I leave plenty of time for other pursuits in life.
This is usually the Typescript team tightening up some "loose" behavior that should have had saner defaults. For instance, the catch block default typing changed from unknown from any.
The bigger issue I've found is when you're using 3rd party type definitions for some library you can't always trust them to be correct or updated. It's a major risk for the soundness of your build.
Pretty big limitation, and their discussion really is just there to justify publishing anyway. Both groups, bald and shaggy, may as well have been shooting blanks.