If you're going to drink decaf, be sure to drink decaf prepared via the Swiss water method. It has the least additives, healthiest option and tastes pretty good.
James Hoffmann did a video on decaff coffee recently[1]. In it he basically says the "scary chemicals" aspect of other caffeine removal processes is basically overblown, and the reason why decaf coffee sucks has less to do with the solvents used and more to do with how the decaffination process makes the beans more prone to staling. In short, there's nothing really special about the swiss water process in particular and there are more important factors to worry about.
The point I really liked about that video is that decaf drinkers are probably the most passionate coffee lovers. We're drinking it for ONLY the taste/experience. It's a shame coffee roasters and coffee shops tend to not take it seriously. I know when I'm traveling I often want to stop in a coffee shop and get a nice decaf and relax for a bit, but most shops make it pretty clear it's not going to be a good experience by not putting any effort into featuring/caring about the decaf options.
The Ethyl Acetate (aka sugarcane) method is also good, as long as the resulting beans are complemented by the slight fruity flavor added by the process. There's a new plant in Colombia which makes some excellent coffees (provided they are roasted well).
It can be difficult to find roasters who actually care about their decaf coffee beans - they are more difficult to roast and some roasters still turn up their nose at it. Decaf beans stale faster (both before and after roasting) so it's even more important to get fresh beans from a good roaster.
And chances are the roasters actually care about making it taste good. It's rare but you can find great decaf coffee if you look for it.
To me, it is weird that all coffee revolves around caffeine; I find the complex tastes way more rewarding than the milligrams of caffeine I get from it.
Citation needed. It’s possible it may taste the best, but I am skeptical of your claim that it is the healthiest.
One of the common methods of decaffeinating coffee uses supercritical CO2, which is in my view significantly less scary than the “proprietary green coffee extract” used by the Swiss Water process.
I suspect neither is actually harmful. And neither is the chemical solvent based decaf, honestly. Not in levels that are meaningful to health.
Swiss Water's Green Coffee Extract is literally just the soluble elements found in a coffee bean, minus the caffeine. (This allows the caffeine from new batches to then migrate out of those beans and into the extract.)
I know what it claims to be. At what ratios seem important to me, as not everything in coffee is the greatest for you.
Something that has literally nothing potentially bad for you in it (eg co2 process) seems like it would by necessity be healthier. Again I don’t think any of the processes are actually harmful. Even the scariest MC process (ie dichloromethane) seems perfectly safe to me.
I'll take this opportunity to plug an instant decaf that recent surprised me (very pleasantly). Our hotel offered this for free in the lobby on a recent trip and I ended up buying some for travel purposes.
It's a swiss water method decaf instant that rivals some of the best cafe regular coffees I've had.
At stores/roasters, most will tell you the decaffeination method somewhere on the bag. If they don't it's probably not a brand that cares much about their decaf, so skip it. Make sure you go for as close to roast as possible - decaf goes off a lot quicker than regular coffee.
It’s actually hard to find brands that don’t use the water method if you buy “freshly” roasted beans. Unless you go super budget, medium budget beans like Peets, SF bay, etc use water process method.
It’s worth noting one important caveat: GPT-4 cannot do super complicated coding.
Don’t get me wrong; I use frequently when coding but it can’t handle the complex stuff; it’s insanely good at boilerplate and low-hanging fruit though.
Yes absolutely go work at Meta. The person in the post had worked there for ten years; they’re likely a millionaire.
It’s very challenging, but you should definitely get in and try it yourself. Move to the Bay if you haven’t done so yet, it will keep your motivation up.
Just quickly from a technical perspective: web3 is like a useful wrapper around json-rpc which etherereum nodes use as a comms protocol.
You can just use whatever off the shell cli thing that supports json-rpc and talk directly to the mainnet.
Web3 is more of a concept that involves wrapping those complicated and cumbersome raw json-rpc calls(deploy a contract, compile a contract etc) into simple libraries. There’s literally a bazillion web3 libraries in many different programming languages. It simplifies talking to the ethereum mainnet.
I think they tackled it a little too high level in their post; missing the fact it’s really just a costly distributed state store you interact with via json-rpc with a shitty wrapper everyone basically calls web3.
I quit drinking once for three years. Usually, your friends will ask you in the beginning to just have one drink or to just drink moderately. After about a year of no drinking, most of your closest friends and family will stop asking you entirely; even better is they'll answer other people that maybe don't know you as well aka "he doesn't drink".
After that, for fun, I basically would go to all the same places, bars, parties etc with the same friends and I'd just drink water; they'd be drinking booze. That's what I did for three years.
After about three years, I traveled abroad and I wanted to take in the full experience so I started drinking again.
Absolutely nothing wrong with wanting to stop drinking for a bit; it's a fun experiment.
The most fascinating part was that they raised $45mm in seven days from people from all over the world using really nothing but solidity contracts on the ethereum blockchain(no complicated PayPal integration, or Stripe etc., no web hooks or callbacks or AWS lambdas etc)
Take a look at any of the defi providers and you'll see that there is a lot of money floating around in pure crypto payment infrastructure. If you're not in the defi world, you could pick https://curve.fi as a good example because you might have heard of uniswap but probably haven't heard of curve. I see on their website that the weekly volume of deposits and withdrawals to their liquidity pools is $7bn. All done on solidity, no direct payments infrastructure at all. If you looked at any of the others (aave, balancer, yearn) you would mostly see a similar story. People who onramp and offramp to fiat currencies and therefore handle real money are actually in the minority.
As a tangential aside we wanted to be able to handle crypto and real money payments for something so actually used stripe for credit cards and "coinbase commerce" who offer a stripe-like slick checkout experience and api for accepting crypto payments. The only real downside to the coinbase checkout that we've found is that the blockchains take long enough to accept transactions and the price fluctuates enough that you constantly get people under or overpaying by very small amounts that are expensive to deal with. Still not sure what if anything to do to elegantly handle this.
Did they actually hold $45 million or was it the equivalent in ETH? My understanding at least is it would be hard to turn large amount of ETH into dollars without taking a chunk out of the worth of ETH.
As much as I'd like to take your word on that you'll need to offer something more to actually demonstrate it's true as there is other speculation here it caused a dip and I have no idea which of you is correct.
I get the daily trading volume of ETH itself is large but don't see ready statistics for ETH->USD.
Samsung started marketing their ISOCELL Vizion 33D camera in 2020 with 640 x 480 resolution. So it's likely we'll see better ToF resolution announced in some phones in the next year or two.
Thank you! Actually, my understanding when I started this project was that I would get a 640 x 480 image (IMX516 sensor). However, I could only get a 320 x 240 image from the sensor through the Android API, so that was a bit of an oddity.
Hm, if "ToF sensors" are LiDARs.. why does only Apple market them as LiDAR? Why are all the "3D scanning" apps only for Apple's "Pro" devices? How come no one knows that some Android devices can do the same things? I didn't know until this thread!
My understanding is that not all ToF sensors are LiDARs. There are also different types of LiDARs, e.g., some of them scan the environment and others just emit a single beam in the same one direction. I think iPhone Pro has the scanning one, but I haven't read much about it.
I assume one is active while the other is not. With two cameras you have the option of stereoscopic analysis where you have to match pixels of two cameras looking on the scene from a different angle. That uses significant cpu-time though, difficult for real time applications. Results vary because the matching isn't trivial and the difference in angle in smartphone cameras is very low.
If you have a projector, you can do more. I believe Apple uses a flash, which has a low resolution, but is perhaps less cpu-intensive and less error prone, although it has a lower resolution. That would be a real Lidar, which is an active measurement. Of course combining that with sensible stereoscopy nets better results.
There's a lot of marketing involved in this naming, with Samsung calling it DepthVision and Apple calling it LIDAR. There may be a difference here, however. My understanding is that Apple LIDAR is doing what we call "direct" ToF, where the round trip travel time of laser pulses is actually measured (this can be in nanoseconds). This lines up with what self driving car (and other expensive) LIDARs do.
Most other ToF sensors use "indirect" ToF, where they measure the phase difference between incoming and outgoing signals to derive distance.
However, it gets murky as cheap 2D LIDARs on say, robot vacuum cleaners, use geometric techniques to find distance (basically return angle of a reflection). I explored this in a previous work.
TLDR: I would recommend not taking any naming at face value and reading the actual datasheet or more commonly, technical marketing materials, since few ToF manufacturers that I see have a public datasheet.
It's no coincidence this system launched around the same time the whole NSO scandal broke. The NSO leak shows what government-sponsored exploit analysis against a large tech company may yield. I mean the NSO exploit could've worked the same but been a worm; it could've been absolutely devastating for Apple, imagine something like every phone infected. Something like that was possible with that exploit.
Apple has been a thorn in the side of the IC for a long while. IC probably saw an opportunity to gain a bit of leverage themselves via the whole NSO thing, and likely offered their cyber support in exchange of some support from Apple.
I mean c'mon they've been consistently pressed by IC for tooling like what they just launched; it's the least invasive thing(compared to something like a literal backdoor like that NSA_KEY that MS did for Windows) they can offer in exchange for some cybersecurity support from the gov.
idk if that's what's happened, but it's odd Apple would do this at all, and do it right around the time of the NSO thing.
People hate this because it’s not the all-in-one all-nighter over-the-weekend hacker stereotype I think we all want to be; rather it’s a slow movement towards success over a much much longer period of time.
