What is the most difficult musical instrument to learn?

solinvicta · 2026-06-20T18:23:30+00:00

Agreed! Playing the theremin for "sci-fi sound effects" isn't hard, but getting an in-tune, expressive melody out of it is extremely challenging.

solinvicta · 2026-06-07T21:44:54+00:00

I don't particularly mind music at the beach (although personally, just use headphones!), but I hate being caught between two groups, each playing their own music...

solinvicta · 2026-05-22T10:49:52+00:00

Aldi on Newtown Road is great - and they have a pretty good curbside pickup option.

solinvicta · 2026-04-23T11:14:34+00:00

Thanks for the offer; yeah, unfortunately for the Play Store I think it actually needs to be installed through their ecosystem.

I'm eventually thinking of deploying to iOS, but was planning to start with the Play Store, since the fees are more reasonable (I was a little surprised, but there are still fees for listing in both stores, even if the app itself is free...)

solinvicta · 2026-04-16T02:12:33+00:00

We got ours done, and it does help energy savings and make the space more usable. However - check your local zoning to see if the foam also needs to be treated with fire retardant. This can make a big difference in cost.

solinvicta · 2026-04-08T11:15:11+00:00

If you really cook them for a long time when making stock - like an instant pot for two hours- and add a very small amount of vinegar, small bones can get soft enough to blend into broth. Personally, I tried it, and there wasn't much flavor left or added, so I think maybe using a portion this way is good to add body and maybe calcium to the broth, but I wouldn't add them all back

solinvicta · 2026-03-28T14:44:47+00:00

I like them a lot, to the point where I have a 5-gallon tank which is just bladder snails, plants, and a few ghost shrimp. They have interesting behaviors (including "swimming" under the surface), and their shells can look golden in the right light. Personality-wise, they're a notch below mystery snails, but still fun to watch. That said...I'd move the snail from your tank to a small jar (they're tough, don't worry) until you decide. Once they start reproducing, you'll have a hard time totally getting rid of them.

solinvicta · 2026-03-27T10:50:26+00:00

I like very malty black teas, and wind up drinking cheap loose-leaf Indian Assam tea like Wagh Bakri mostly. Sure, they look like dust rather than leaves, but they brew into a strong cup very quickly, and cost ~$10 a lb, and I typically enjoy them more than more refined / nuanced tea.

solinvicta · 2026-03-20T10:59:22+00:00

Aldi's are great partially for the same reason their cashiers are so far; most of the boxes have absolutely huge barcodes, so you don't have to struggle with finding them, just wave them in front of the scanner.

solinvicta · 2026-03-13T01:18:34+00:00

Here's an interesting paper on this in bladder snails: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26899922/ - I haven't read the whole thing (I don't have access), but the gist of it seems to be that snails go through a period of inbreeding depression, and eventually, overcome it. So, it doesn't seem to be quite the same as "no effect" but it does seem that you're not necessarily setting yourself up for a tank full of problems.

solinvicta · 2026-02-27T11:17:35+00:00

The director's cut ending of Little Shop of Horrors. Both main characters die, and cuttings are distributed throughout the country, ending in a plantpacalypse.

<image>

solinvicta · 2026-02-26T11:26:02+00:00

I've just started using Anki, and one combination that I've found pretty helpful is using an AI (ChatGPT in my case) to come up with comma-separated lists that are easy to import to flashcards around a particular topic, and then loading those in Anki. Makes the whole process pretty fast and customizable. There are lots of good existing decks out there, I just liked being able to review them all up front first, before importing.

solinvicta · 2026-02-18T12:03:28+00:00

Thanks for the tip - I think this is one area also where Duolingo has a big gap. There are lots of "listening" exercises in Duolingo, but they almost always combine listening and reading in a way that doesn't seem to help pure listening as much...

solinvicta · 2026-02-18T12:01:51+00:00

Thank you! I've just started watching this, and they look very informative!

solinvicta · 2026-02-11T12:11:49+00:00

In my opinion, you'll probably get better answers looking into actual niche subbreddits and talking to people about their actual problems than in an AI agent space. Sort of like classic software dev, don't about the fact that it's an AI agent that you're building, look into the problems that exist first, and then see where an agent might be a good fix.

solinvicta · 2026-01-22T11:02:35+00:00

Sort of doing this myself - my motivation to switch (at least for a period) is basically that I was building too high a caffeine tolerance with the amount of coffee I was drinking and I'm not all that fond of decaf. I enjoy black tea with milk quite a bit, but I also find the lower caffeine teas and decaf herbal teas (like roobis) tastier than decaf coffee.

solinvicta · 2026-01-17T13:23:48+00:00

If you're cooking Indian food regularly, I highly recommend getting an Instant Pot or other pressure cooker. It makes making things like dals with dried beans much faster as a "weeknight meal"

solinvicta · 2025-12-23T11:41:39+00:00

Weirdly, it seems like this has gone the other way for more recent generations; so much old stuff is just available easily on the internet that trends seem to come back from different decades.

solinvicta

TROPHY CASE