AFKBRBChocolate

Would have loved to have had a job I could read at. Retired now, so I can read as much as I want, which is kind of an unhealthy amount.

I'm with you, I like written things that I can digest and refer back to, though it's worth mentioning that if you have questions, it much quicker to work through those face to face.

Eleven Labs Reader

Thanks for the recommendation. For it to be useful for him, it would have to work on Windows (where the emails and documents he's reading are). I'm seeing a phone app, do you know if there's a windows one? I'm sure he'd have to have a paid version for corporate use.

It’s definitely a motor brush.

Yep. Here's an example.

There are different types of fossils, some of which apply to soft tissue:

• Impression: A shallow imprint of a fossil organism that does not retain any organic material.

• Compression: A fossil that has been crushed or flattened but retains some organic material, although it has been chemically altered.

• Carbonization: A process that occurs during fossilization in which complex organic molecules are converted into a more stable carbon compound that generally has a dark brown color.

This appears to be an impression fossil.

Podcasts tend to be pretty conversational. I'm sure Obama didn't put the thought into the comment that he puts into his speeches, where every word and every sentence is crafted. I just took it to mean that he had this diversity of experience with people he looked up to, and that helped him grow as a person. I personally didn't have a lot of people growing up that I thought of as role models (not that my life was in any way bad, just that I didn't tend to relate to people that way). So maybe the way I took it was slightly different than he meant it because of the differences in our experience of growing up, or maybe he was just trying to equate exposure to diverse people with the development of empathy, and did so in the way it worked him him. Hard to say.

I started reading more a couple years ago - like a lot more. One day my wife (who paid the bills) said "I don't want to discourage you from a healthy hobby in any way, but I want to make sure you know that you've spent close to $300 on books in the last few months. I had not realized it was that much. I started looking into alternatives and someone here on Lemmy mentioned the Libby app. I live in Los Angeles county and it turns out I'm legitimately allowed to have an LA city library card, an LA county library card, and a San Bernardino county library card (theirs are available to anyone who lives in the state).

I got all three and connected them to the Libby app. When I search for a book, it will check all the libraries I have cards for. So far this year I've read more than 50 novels (well, a few of them were novellas, but a few of them were really long novels, so it balances). I'm a big fan.

I'm good with distilling information in whatever form, but I do get impatient with audio/video sometimes. I can read faster than people talk, so I want the audio to go faster. I've tried upping the playback speed, but we encode a lot of information in the pauses and cadence of speech, and the faster playback screws with the perception of that. Doing that is fine for technical information, but I don't care for it with a novel.

Oh, yes, we use BLUF at work a lot, but it's not really useful if you're trying to pass along detailed knowledge.

The text in question would be behind a firewall, but I believe there's a corporate LLM now. I'll suggest it.

Every element of this pic except the trees and grass looks shopped in.

I'll take a shot. "Detritus" is the easier part: it's decaying plant and animal matter. So the worms are eating leaves and stuff after it's started breaking down.

"Dirt" is a little more difficult because it doesn't have as crisp of a definition. Usually when people say "dirt" in this context, they mean "soil," but that's only a little better. The relevant definition for soil is, "the upper layer of earth that may be dug or plowed and in which plants grow."

That detritus gets broken down by bacteria and becomes soil even without worms, but worms do basically the same thing faster. Plus their moving around helps loosen the soil, which also is helpful for growing plants.