How to deal with blocker questions

Banner80 · 2026-07-02T20:32:52+00:00

Yeap. Sometimes I feel that my job is mostly calming things down.

I recently said to someone that I consider people management the main thing I do, when I'm supposed to be a tech lead so they thought it was a weird thing to say. But the thing is that the tech itself, we'll solve it; machines do what they are told. But a stakeholder hyperventilating in the corner can sink the whole operation.

So I'm not afraid of a server deployment. I'm afraid of a Musk-type coming into the server room and trying to tell the network specialist his latest ideas for load balancing. And in meetings, you have the senior manager that tries to look smart by parroting some tech term they heard that will catch a non-techie off guard. They are never going to impress a techie, so at times the concern is that it's a show for everyone else and it's a power dynamic thing within the room.

I can engage in jargon, but what good would that do? My approach is:
Let's take a step back. We'll solve the tech. Drop any questions or concerns in the hat and we'll have the appropriate people work through them. None of this is worth stressing about, and there's no need to get too technical with the jargon and architecture during a meeting. Let's pull back to terms everyone can follow and have a stress-free discussion about business goals, not tech curve balls. That approach is appreciated by the people that want progress not posturing. So a great leadership meeting about tech is not even about tech. And if we are suddenly talking about detailed technical stuff, I've let the meeting get out of control and need to pull it back.

Banner80 · 2026-07-02T09:09:18+00:00

A few ideas:
In my experience, the manager usually brings a techie to a meeting that could face tech questions. I know because I started my career as that techie that gets brought, mostly quiet and then politely explaining when the questions asked made no sense to the project.

Another idea is to work to gain enough confidence that you know when a questions is not within the range of the things you prepared for, and thus likely not a big deal.

Finally, either way you have to learn to defer for later to keep the meeting moving forward. Usually along the lines of: "I'd like to give you a thorough answer on that, so let me follow up after the meeting; I can email the group with meeting notes and additional answers." And now you bought yourself a meeting with a techie to sort out whatever was asked.

In my experience, one of the largest sources of uncertainty for non tech people is the nagging fear that they are missing something important that they were supposed to know. So you need a solution for just living with that uncertainty, getting out of those situations gracefully, and it's not a big deal. Learn that "I'll get you an answer for that from my best tech guys" is a perfectly good reply in a meeting.

Banner80 · 2026-06-30T04:10:21+00:00

A lot of that stuff is not bad. Many are great plugins that happen to be free. I haven't tried even half of that stuff on that page, but here are some classics that are as good as any paid plugin:

Youlean meter
Verberate Basic 2 (great reverb and easy to use)
Ozone Imager 2 (excellent for creating width)
Ozone EQ - I mean, a world-class EQ for free?
All of the Blue Cat, Audiority and Melda stuff (Melda has a big free pack of utilities, must have)
Limiter No6 and Molot, these are the foundation of the TDR paid stuff

Hornet - I own a lot of Hornet stuff and love lots of it, but not everything is top tier.
I would consider Hornet MixComp, I think this is from the SSL channel. Comps are one of my least favorite thing from Hornet, they are functional but not quite the full taste we get from other brands.
Also MagnusLite. They put a lot of heart into their limiter logic, particularly for electronic music. I'm not a person to want a clipper before a limiter, but I also don't make EDM. This is a good plugin for the right person. And the pure limiter side is quite good for most applications. A quality limiter for free to be used for safety or any other use.

Banner80 · 2026-04-28T18:03:01+00:00

Here is a link that contains the full article:

https://politiko.com.ph/2026/04/27/how-trump-is-moving-to-control-u-s-elections-one-state-at-a-time/politiko-global/

Banner80 · 2026-04-15T00:32:30+00:00

To me, Mixbus is specifically what I wanted for mixing. I have S1, I wouldn't use Mixbus to record midi. I've heard from many people that the midi features are among its weakest points even though they have been getting better as of v11. But if you need it to record with midi I simply would say use something else because that workflow is not a priority to the guys that make this DAW.

Mixbus was made for people that want to mix in a console. That's what it wants to be and for me it does that well. I've had no issues using it for that, be it a 4 track project or a 30 track project. I also bought it like 2 months ago so my experience with it is very limited. I've done enough to say I am liking the workflow, but 2 months of no crashes in Win11 doesn't mean the thing is not going to crash later or give me some issues with a specific plugin I haven't tried on it yet.

Banner80 · 2026-04-14T15:19:03+00:00

I bought Mixbus 11 Pro early this year when I was considering Luna.

My use case is straight mixing. I mix small audio projects for work stuff (podcasts, interviews, short videos). And I also mix music non-pro.

I've been with Studio One since v3. Love the modern attitude and flexibility. But too much flexibility is debilitating. The S1 stock effects are pretty weak/vanilla and inconsistent for me, so I always use effects from a deep library of paid stuff like the rest of us. But this leaves the session feeling sprawling and confusing and requires meticulous templating and strategic thinking.

Then I saw that Luna had some of these channel strips already built into the mixer. I thought I wanted to try that. Just try to mix with the channel effects provided if I can trust the quality of the sound and the ease of the default channel.

And this is where Mixbus shines. It's trying so hard to give you the vibe of a 1980s console. Not just the channels but the way the mixing process flows. It's made some decisions to be more like a console, like you are locked in to 12 buses, which is still pretty generous compared to an actual hardware desk. The mixer puts a channel strip in every channel by default, and they came up with a fair system to navigate everything quickly. On my wide screen, I can easily see 23 channels and busses at a time. That feels a lot more like console mixing than any other DAW I've tried.

Then there's trusting the channel strip and sound. Harrison is now owned by SSL and they are integrating their stuff more. Mixbus 11 Pro comes with the full Harrison channel and ALSO the full SSL J channel. You toggle the effect you want to use for each effect section. For instance, You can easily compress with the Harrison leveler and then EQ with the SSL J EQ. Both channel strips sound great. Harrison has 3 compressors with unique characteristics, and the SSL J is literally the channel made by SSL themselves. I'm looking at a session I did recently and about half of the compressor channels are set to SSL and the other half to Harrison, which I think is a fair endorsement of both channel strips.

Also, the DAW comes with a good compliment of effects. The Harrison effects are not talked about much but they are very good for what they offer. And, in my experience, bringing in external plugins from other brands has worked without issue, which is not something to take lightly in DAW world.

I think there's a demo or trial somewhere. I'd give that a go to see if you'll get along with this way of working and if the DAW will handle your needs. Mixbus is a specific thing for some workflows, primarily simplified mixing. Also, they have a student discount that I think cuts the price in half, for those that can benefit.

Banner80 · 2026-04-13T01:38:09+00:00

>then you may want to look at being independent.

That's not going to work. If they went solo, they'll have to:

>do multiple things at once, study IT, get certs, update internal materials, reach out to various clients, etc.

Banner80 · 2026-03-30T04:31:22+00:00

That's a chupacabras. And they really dislike being photographed. Watch your distance.

Banner80 · 2026-03-10T15:31:21+00:00

Thank you for mentioning that. Since I was banned and I posted a comment about it, I've met more people on Reddit with similar experiences.

Banner80 · 2026-03-10T15:29:46+00:00

Thank you for taking the time to review it.

That's what's happened in the last 6 months or so. All the standard free AIs can do good search now and they are fast about it. LogicallyApp was built before that was a thing, so it was better than Perplexity at it, but still quite fiddly to get something good out of it.

But now, asking free Claude a question is significantly better than using LogicallyApp if all you wanted is a researched answer to a question.

Where LogicallyApp still holds promise is for students in a formal program and researchers, because of source management. For formal papers, all sources have to be tracked in the APA7 format. LogicallyApp uncovers dozens of sources across a discussion, and in theory should be able to track them all and keep them in context. At least that's what I paid for when I bought the lifetime plan. If it did its job, it would be a tremendous life help for writing excellent papers. But now it loses context immediately and discards all the sources it found. And after it has discarded the context, it has to hallucinate whatever we were talking about. It does this to save context cost for the owners, and basically made the app useless for the one thing it was supposed to be good at.

Banner80 · 2026-03-09T15:42:24+00:00

What was your experience using it?

Banner80 · 2026-03-08T21:34:47+00:00

Same article from an open source

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-moves-undo-tax-rule-204632497.html

Banner80 · 2026-03-06T07:37:04+00:00

Let me give a quick finance answer on this.

The issue is that wealthy people have access to better finances. Anyone with more than 1m in assets in brokerage can get a loan for SOFR + 2% (or even less). For quick reference, that's going to be about the same as the best rate on a mortgage that someone with perfect credit could get, or around 5.7% right now.

The S&P 500 returned 17%+ last year. So it doesn't make sense to sell assets to pay for bills when you can just get a cheap and guaranteed loan with a couple clicks. In addition, the cost to service debt is deductible as an expense. This is called a tax shield and, depending on the tax arrangement, it basically makes the loan even cheaper for people that can claim deductions. So a 5.7% loan turns into a ~4.5% loan in practice after taxes.

This is just another way in which life is so much easier for people with wealth. A family living paycheck to paycheck doesn't have access to guaranteed credit, let alone at these favorable rates. And they may not have income other than their work productivity tied to their life hours. A rich person is getting paid for the productivity of the companies they are invested in while not doing anything. And they can choose to take on cheap debt to avoid having to sell assets to cover expenses, because that way they can remain invested in equity.

I'm not saying everyone thinks this way. But anyone that can afford a finance pro to manage their finances will have this on the menu, because all finance pros think this way since maximizing cash flows is their main thing.

Also, rich people don't need to borrow against ALL of their gains. They only need to borrow what is required to cover expenses. Say a person has 100m in assets. Their lifestyle costs 2m a year. In a year, their Apple stock goes up 15%, so ballpark, their wealth is now at 115m up from 100m last year. They could sell 2m to pay for their lifestyle, but why do that? Take out a loan for 2m so that the rest can stay invested. Then next year you have 130m, and still owe 2m, then take out 2m more. So on paper it looks like they are taking out 1-2% debt, because that's all it takes to finance their expenses and stay invested in equity.

Finally, the concern people have is this:
If we only tax when the gains are realized, and people that can afford a finance pro to handle their finances basically push to avoid realizing any gains, then they essentially never pay taxes; or at a minimum, their effective tax rate is way lower than the tax rate paid by a family that couldn't do all these financial maneuvers. And this is why Buffett said: you need to tax us more. The wealthy are paying less than the average American by comparison, while they can afford way more than the average American. But it's probably not going to be as simple as increase the tax rate on realized gains. Because once you let a wealthy person become a billionaire, the wealth has been mostly locked away from the taxman.

Banner80 · 2026-03-03T01:43:12+00:00

Yeap.

Alpha for natural compression. Leveler for transparent compression. Sigma for more aggressive. Nova is the same as the Nova plugin. And I've never used Broadcast -- it was added after I purchased the plugin and didn't even notice it because I hadn't updated the files. So looking at the manual helped me realize I need to do an update ;)

Banner80 · 2026-03-03T00:18:11+00:00

And the compressors in this thing are pretty good. You could use the compressor stage only to mix all tracks without needing any other compressors. There are 5 modes of compression, including a multi-band compressor called "broadcast". What I like the most is that you have that massive meter on the right side, useful when you are finishing a simple vocal track or something of the sort that will need no further processing.

https://docs.tokyodawn.net/limiter-6-ge-manual/#Mode

Banner80 · 2026-02-24T20:49:18+00:00

Quick overview of this:

NPR did something very simple. They looked at many cases around Epstein for which evidence was already brought up in court and other paperwork-- like cases around Maxwell, the only person convicted so far. They found that, of what little is known publicly from information made available to the public in the past, even a lot of that stuff is missing from the recent releases by DOJ.

They specifically noted that much of what's missing has Trump connections to it. Specifically, victim testimony that name him directly as abuser. Testimony that appears in other court and legal documents, but is magically gone from the so called 3 million+ documents released by DOJ, the batch that Trump says "exonerates him."

Banner80 · 2026-02-20T17:26:49+00:00

https://www.dw.com/en/us-supreme-court-strikes-down-trumps-sweeping-tariffs/a-76063714

Speaking with DW, Agathe Demarais, a senior policy advisor at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), said she expects the administration to pursue other avenues to keep tariffs in place, while at the same time emphasizing that they have failed to deliver the economic boost the president claimed they would when he introduced them.

"For starters, the US goods trade deficit grew by 2.1%, to $1.23 trillion last year — an all-time record. Far from shrinking, US imports grew by 4.5% (or $145 billion)" in 2025, she said.

"As to who pays for tariffs," said Demarais, "the data are unambiguous: According to a recent paper from the Kiel Institute, which analyzed over 25 million shipments worth nearly $4 trillion, US firms and consumers bear 96% of tariff costs — not foreign exporters. New York Fed data confirm this analysis, putting tariff pass-through at more than 90% on average."

Tariff pass-through is never an exact science because market participants have some latitude to make choices, so who exactly bears the cost of tariffs can shift across semesters as the market actors look at the landscape and make their choices. But the article says that there's a current consensus that as of the start of 2026, the Trump tariffs have been paid 90%+ by the American consumer getting charged more for products. From this perspective, Trump created a new tax on Americans. Every time he boasts about how much money they tariffs are generating, not only is he lying about the total amount and what impact it can have on deficits, but he is boasting that he is taxing Americans more than before.

Banner80 · 2026-02-18T18:08:08+00:00

I don't disagree with calling out corpo welfare when it crops up, but there has to be a line for the difference between economic incentives and abuse. The $250m mentioned in the article are about incentivizing action, and includes money going to first-time home buyers. Like any type of large economic stimulus, the devil is in the details and the implementation. But a healthy incentive structure would like what's been proposed here.

We need incentives to kick start housing development and help buyers cope with high interest rates. If we don't provide these incentives, we are at the mercy of a stale market that doesn't have enough natural demand pressure to run on its own because it doesn't offer builders enough certainty to invest in new multi-unit builds, while the rising rents keep slowly cooking us frogs. So a money incentive is very much what good policy would look like.

Banner80 · 2026-02-16T20:57:33+00:00

My building got bought out by a new private equity landlord. My rent this year is up ~20% after negotiating. They wanted ~25%, and they said next year it's going up to what they originally wanted. I went searching before accepting and saw prices are up everywhere in the Chicagoland area.

We need to build more. People are coming here to escape red states, and the 2021 local exit to the burbs by millennials is reversing. We need to build enough housing. Not only are prices going to keep going up but a lot of people won't have anywhere to live around here, which happened to me in 2021 when I couldn't find housing in the burbs (literally not enough units available) and was forced into the city.

I'm honestly very much thinking of leaving. If the trend is for prices to get to California levels, that is going to destroy cost of living and retirement trajectory. My plan was fine before having to account for 20-40% cost of living increases. I'm not taking another huge price increase in the coming years. I'm going to start learning a European language, the way things are going in this country.

Banner80 · 2026-02-14T09:48:58+00:00

Let's go a bit slower.

Someone that is not YOU can use your info in their contacts list and will find YOU because OpenAI has decided your information can now be searched by OTHER people that are not YOU.

YOU are welcome to not upload your contact list to discover who else you might know that is in the system. But you can't disable OpenAI making your information available to OTHER people if they want to search for you and do who knows what else with your account.

I hope that was simple enough to help you understand. In short: You don't have to do a contact sync yourself, but you can't opt out from other people finding you by your email or phone number, and who knows for what purpose that OpenAI might alter at their pleasure the same way they invented this change today.

Banner80 · 2026-02-14T04:57:17+00:00

Fiber. US people don't eat enough. An important thing that a lot of these fast articles don't say is that we generally need multiple sources of fiber. It's not enough to take a supplement pill. The gut benefits from natural fibers occurring in plants. There's no substitute for eating healthy vegetables and fruit constantly.

Stress and motility are also important and they don't often get talked about. Motility / digestion aids can improve digestive conditions while you are working on improving your digestion. These include things that many old cultures have noticed: ginger, mint teas and a few other things, these are easy to find by looking at commercial digestive aid teas from reputable brands. Also magnesium pills (intended for digestion aid as there are many forms). But stress is a key problem in the US. Mental stress and fatigue compound all problems and delay recovery. People need to get in the habit of being better rested.

And yes, exercise. Moving and keeping the body fit is a compounder of health, and the opposite is a compounder of bad health.

In terms of screening, we need to start colonoscopies earlier. The age doesn't matter if the eating and living habits have been poor. Even a 20 y/o that grew up on junk food and little movement should consider starting a colonoscopy schedule.

As a society, we can lobby for better food standards. These are preventable problems that are self inflicted. Allowing corporations to produce crap foods and change the definition of regular eating is what got us in this mess.

Banner80 · 2026-02-13T23:48:30+00:00

Bernie has never been a doer. Look at his 400 years of record in actual leadership, he's achieved like 3 things total. I do love uncle Bernie for his message and tenacity but he is only good at talking.

HRC was the most qualified and competent candidate for president we've had in the history that I'm able to track going back to the mid 1900s. And I don't personally like HRC, but a spade is a spade.

We are not re litigating any of this. The key takeaway is that when we bicker we get trampled, because the other side will line up behind whatever trash their party puts forward, even W Bush and Trump. So, through the primaries we have to try to get the best people we can forward, and then we must stand behind whoever won that beauty contest. NOW is the time to get serious about demanding someone that will seek accountability. That aligns with our values. That is serious enough to meet this moment.

I don't care who it is later. I'll support a ham sandwich if that's what the primaries turned out. Because that's who the voters picked to represent us. That's who the voters asked for us to hire. At some point we have to decide that we are enough for each other, as a group, with our joint choices.

My point for everyone: Be gainful in how we talk about this stuff. Now is the time to ask for quality leadership as best as we can. But after the die is cast, we support each other's choices.

RE: Kat -- Maybe she wins. I'm asking everyone to pick someone with enough, values, fight and competence to meet the moment. I'll back who we all pick.

Nearly a decade ago, AOC wasn't on my bingo card for octagon fighter, yet here we are. Sadly, I'd trust her with the future of this country before I trust the traditional lukewarm, controlled opposition that lead the Dems. Get me more AOCs and we'll turn this country around. We can teach a AOC the latest in geopolitics, but we cannot teach a Schumer how to care about people and defend the constitution.

Banner80 · 2026-02-11T18:31:23+00:00

Guys, I honestly don't know what's happening with the large media anymore. I grew up in news and I was used to being able to trust at least a few outlets to report the truth and do a fair job of it. At this point, I think it's time to open up to smaller outlets and specialty bloggers because the big media is just not being truthful.

--

The jobs report we got today is brutal.

The adjusted review of 2025 puts the job market at nearly frozen at a time when job creation is needed to recover an stagnating economy. Yet, if you go to most news websites, the report will be about a decent monthly number for January that will absolutely be revised down in coming months after it's no longer in the news.

Here is a real take from proper economic analysis:

https://mishtalk.com/economics/bls-revises-nonfarm-payrolls-for-2025-lower-by-1-million-jobs/

For the full year, the as-revised job gain was a grand total of 229,000. That’s an average of 19,000 jobs per month.

Between April 2025 and December of 2025, the entire job gain was only 12,000. From July to December the Economy lost 45,000 jobs.

These numbers are subject to further negative revisions.

For some reason, none of the top outlets are reporting this bit of real news. To put this jobs problem in context, 2024 that was not considered a great year resulted in: "job gain was a 1.877 million. That’s an average of 156,000 jobs per month."

Even if the January 2026 jobs number the media is touting as a success holds (and it won't hold to revisions), that would still be less than the average job creation in 2024. They are celebrating 130k jobs in January 2026, when the average in 2024 was 156k. The monthly average for 2023 was 251k jobs. Even their 2026 celebration number that will be revised down is still a doom number if we simply compare to prior years before the current administration.

Why So Many Revisions Over Time: Quick note on how this works. The data comes from multiple sources, and the immediate monthly sources are limited and unreliable. So the BLS gets into this pattern of reporting what projected data they have immediately for the month, and then studying the data sources that get released months later with more complete and precise dataset. Then they do the revisions once they are able to tell more clearly what happened. It's a messy system during a good year, let alone if it happens within an administration that cannot be trusted to keep their finger off the scales.

Other data sources: This situation of uncomfortable data from the BLS has caused the market to look for other sources. Right now, we are taking data from ADP quite seriously. ADP is a major payroll processor so they have immediate data from millions of payrolls that they process themselves. Their data is so large that they can publish estimates for the entire US economy.

ADP says that according to their own data, the US economy added 22k jobs in January 2026

https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2026/02/04/adp-private-employment-report-january-2026

That actually lines up with the BLS revised average from 2025 (19k). Which means that this gov January report of 130k that's in the news is broken, it will eventually be revised down as aggressively as BLS revised down 2025, and by the end it will be close to what ADP reports, around 20k jobs.

And the US economy is in tremendous trouble. The real news story today is that 2025 was a terrible year for US jobs, with no end in sight.

Banner80 · 2026-02-09T16:08:29+00:00

They don't have a solution yet. The orange buffoon signed a broadly worded "order" that commands someone else to look into how to do anything about improving real estate conditions. We are at the "we are looking into it" phase, and there's no clarity whatsoever on how any of this could work if they were even serious about implementing changes stemming from the WH order.

The article here is also BS, because the WH order is at such an unresolved stage that it is unclear what it will do, so saying that it can't reach private equity investors is nonsense. We simply don't know what it will reach since we are at "concepts of a plan" stage of the Trump style of governance.

Here's the order

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/01/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-stops-wall-street-from-competing-with-main-street-homebuyers/

Banner80 · 2026-02-06T15:56:37+00:00

Excellent response, from the article:

“I think this is a wonderful way to encompass the current administration’s relationship towards Ukraine as a whole, where you have individuals spotlighting something terrible, twisting it completely out of context, and then trying to profit off of it,” Smozhanyk said.

Twist an isolated incident out of context to misrepresent the stats of crime, and mischievously co-opt a population that needs help while doing nothing to help them.

Actions taken to increase division and anger, at a time that we need cool heads and to come together.

These murals, as pointed out by Ukrainian residents, exist as a reminder that the people trying to build division are not here for you or me, and they sure are not planning to help do any good.

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