Maciek416

Looks to have been acquired by Gear Patrol at the very last moment before shutdown

There are one or two nice people from Switzerland (assuming you are there, just guessing from comments) on bonsainut if you are looking for local resources and helpful people. A decent-sized collection like that is a real testament to unbroken continuity (especially during the growing season where you can't skip a day or even a few hours sometimes), other hobbyists can help you fill the gap when situations come up. Stop by the r/bonsai beginners thread any time if you wanna talk trees!

It affects seedling recruitment for sure. Some species love to start beneath leaf mulch and there is probably something out there that would colonize your leaf field hard and fast if it were given the chance. I collect red alder seedlings in timber clearcutting areas, and often find that they've had to twist/push their way through 6-12" of slash (clearcutting debris) to reach light and finally grow upwards. Quite a few conifers can push upward through many inches of needle duff as well.

I think conserving energy in cold months is close to the biggest factor.

Regarding the dropping of biomass, in both deciduous and evergreen species, some of the substances from the retiring leaves/needles are reclaimed by trees ("retranslocation") and pulled out of the leaf before letting go of the leaf. In species like pines it'll be the second or third (or older, sometimes much older) retiring needles and in species like maple or beech it'll the be the entire foliage. Mass useful to soil ecosystems still falls but the tree grabs what it can in the late months of the year, hence the color change.

One thing the grandparent comment doesn't talk about much is the cost (in sugar) of both building and thereafter maintaining leaves and the related tradeoffs. Building a fully winter-tolerant broadleaf is more expensive sugar-wise than building a winter-interolerant leaf. A sugar maple in Quebec, where the season is shorter than (say) Oregon is going to compete in its niche better if it can attain surface area quickly at the start of the growing season, and that is better done with a winter-intolerant, more relatively delicate leaf. An evergreen leaf takes more time and mass to build and has to have more limited surface area or armor (cuticle) to tolerate such winters.

Winter root growth is widely-observed amongst people who work with tree roots annually (bonsai hobbyists and professionals, commercial ornamental tree growers, especially propagation-adjacent roles) in milder temperate climates (eg: Pacific Northwest).

In my time studying bonsai (past 7-10y) in every winter (Jan-Mar) I've repotted (anywhere from partial to full bare rooting, partial to full root structure editing) many PNW-native deciduous trees (alders, bigleaf + vine maples, cottonwoods, etc) as well as non-PNW-native deciduous (birches, beeches, elms, maples, hazels, hornbeams, stewartia, bald cypress, cherries/plums, quinces, snowbells, etc). In somewhat-mild-and-milder climates there is always some root growth going on. Such winter root growth is much more aggressive in conifers, particularly pines, but also in spruces, cypress-family species (junipers).

Here's a diagram from a paper showing scots pine and rowan/ash adding either root or vegitative growth in various parts of the year:

https://imgur.com/a/qF4oQ8a

Temperate trees collect or spend carbon in the warm parts of the year, i.e. between bud-break and mid-summer. In cooler parts of the year, they do various things: store it in the wood, move it around (redistribution + retranslocation), spend it (future-season buds + cambium + root expansion) or carefully avoid spending it (dormancy).

Even in these periods they're still collecting sunlight if they can, quite a few deciduous species can photosynthesize at least a little bit directly through their bark -- young twigs have much thinner bark even in trees that get very rough bark (eg: black cottonwood). And evergreens are collecting sunlight any time mild-or-warmer conditions are in play.

Trees are active in some shape or form any time they are able to be. If you live in USDA hardiness zone 7 or warmer and have trees/shrubs outside you can notice this more easily than in colder climates (where the grow/no-grow seasons are more sharply bounded). Roots are not the only thing expanding in winter. Take a picture every day of a branch on a deciduous or evergreen tree and you'll see bud expansion.

The title seems inaccurate at time of commenting. This library is called “nv_cluster_lod_builder”

Nanite is Unreal’s implementation of a similar thing. The README even links to Unreal’s implementation in the references section.

I've studied bonsai with a professional who trained in Japan for a number of years. Bonsai is a well-developed professional craft that should be learned from people who already know it rather than guessed at from absolute first principles (or from completely illiterate/nonsensical web slop, whether AI or not), as most beginners unfortunately try to do.

The known-good techniques that produced long-term bonsai don't in any way whatsoever resemble the naive approach of "trimming" in the hedge pruning sense. This (along with the mistake of growing indoors) is why the vast majority of the public concludes bonsai is a dark art / impossible. Guessing at bonsai is like throwing rocks at a computer hoping that C code will just "happen" somehow.

If you have a sun-facing outdoor garden, know what the term "binary tree" means, and can describe a tree in terms of a data structure (nodes etc), then you have within you the ability to learn bonsai for realsies if you make contact with people who do it in real life. Olive bonsai trees are relatively common in mediterranean-climate bonsai scenes, like that of California's bonsai scene: https://bonsaitonight.com/2023/10/20/preparing-an-olive-for-...

Trees like this are not grown on kitchen counters or in living rooms. _Maybe_ in a world-beating cannabis tent, but the hassle is extreme, and (going back to the topic of this thread), fighting diseases in the indoor cultivation environment is much much harder than outside.

Pines have a hard time pulling on the water chain due to their needle design (silhouette/waxy coating). To move water to a location on a pine branch, you usually need needles or a strong tip bud that was already emerging just as the needles were lost (i.e. the needles already drew a lot of sap to that location just before their demise). If at a given junction you can trace to a descendant shoot that is green / has needles, then the live vein traces through that junction. If no descendant shoot with needles, you're looking at dead wood and inspecting under the bark won't find any trace of green cambium, or only fading cambium.

Understood -- the big multinational I was working for employed an immigration law firm that tracked many such crossings, and they practically begged me not to try crossing by land based on their statistics (which suggested a higher probability of trouble in land crossings). I joined that statistic and learned to never take any chances with any part of this.

I am not an immigration lawyer. Something you should be aware of is that when applying for a green card, your status as a Canadian (whether permanent resident or citizen) or as a Brit (ditto) is completely irrelevant. The green card process sees your application solely through the lens of your birth country. The GC backlog for Chinese-born people is very lengthy. So lengthy that it tests the longevity of a visa or a set of visas -- it's not a marathon you want to still be running 15 to 20 years from now.

For that reason, if your goal is ultimately the US, focus on the US, because you will otherwise be adding _many_ years to the process.

One very notable asterisk to the above: If, while applying for a GC, your spouse is from a no-backlog country (born in Canada, UK, or other no-backlog countries), then your application can essentially adopt that country as the birth country, and you can get through the GC process in a relatively short time (all other things equal).

From your perspective "good timing for a green card application" is ASA-F'ing-P.

I am not a lawyer. The transition from TN->GC is possible too under the right (narrow) circumstances. The big tradeoff is not risking travel while within the lifecycle of one TN term, and likely not being able to straddle a GC application across the boundaries of a TN renewal period at all. For some countries of birth, a TN term is not long enough to get through the GC pipeline. But for Canadians born in Canada, ones who have family willing to visit them instead of the other way around, it may be doable. Or for folks born in other countries which have no GC backlog or a short one. YMMV, but I have personally seen someone go L2->TN->GC. An unusual sequence but necessary given the particulars of that case.

Much like the other commenter, I learned to never ever do any of this stuff (ordinary travel or renewals) via land crossings. You can have a major trajectory change to your life on the whims of a border guard who is just having a bad day even if all of your ducks are lined up and perfectly documented by a large multinational. Bend over backwards to avoid land crossings until you can secure yourself a greencard.

It's like TSA pre but for certain steps in the USCIS flow chart.

True. I get the same volunteers (+ thuja + bigleaf + etc) and put quite a few of them into pots.

Eventually though, doug fir reverts back to a sort of weed status later on, when the accumulated effects of human fire suppression causes doug fir to start crowding out other species and interferes with the typical succession pattern. Harder to notice in the PNW, but if you look at NorCal especially, there are areas that would typically be a more open woodland with (say) oak. Instead these are jam-packed with doug fir due to lack of fire. From the perspective of anyone (whether human, animal, or plant) who misses the pre-suppression woodland state that's normally regulated by regular "good" fire, doug fir is indeed a weed. There normally isn't _this_ much of it stretching all the way from Alaska to Mexico.

H-1B data is available for public view.

This is not really true, and if you'd like to learn more than you ever wanted to know about this topic then you should start following Zeke Lunder from The Lookout and review some of his wildfire analysis videos on YouTube. He often talks about the idea of "good fire". Not all fire is "good fire". A lot of megafires, the kind that might be sparked by an arson technique ignorant of modern wildfire management practices, do not necessarily lead to "good fire". They may at certain stages (especially when wind dies down) exhibit some traits of "good fire", but for the most part, these are forests that are the way they are due to too much suppression for too long, and now require "good fire" if our goal is to still have a healthy forest after the fire. An arson that starts a megafire is going to potentially transition to a very different type of forest, or an un-forested wasteland, as seen in various places in the Sierra foothills and SoCal.

Hi, sorry for the late reply but hopefully you'll see this: Linnstrument lights the keyboard up so that you see where C is at for each octave. It also lights up notes similar to a piano's black/white keys. It took a little while to get situated, but I got used to this. Note that each row of a Linnstrument is like a flattened piano roll. This page might be helpful: https://www.rogerlinndesign.com/support/support-linnstrument...

Additionally, Linnstrument, like all other grid instruments that implement all-fourths or a closely-related layout, has redundancy of notes on the board. That is to say, the same note often appears at least a couple times on the board. There's a setting (default on older firmware, easy to activate on newer firmware) where you can tell the board to light up ALL other redundant individuals of a note that's currently being played. For example, when I play C3, I will see C3 lit up all over the board simultaneously. This has a huge training wheel effect both in letting you witness the shape of your tetris-tile chords elsewhere on the board, but also, always gives you a sense of the geography of the board -- where you can jump to next if you want to dance your way up/down or to another chord or note.

I use an all-fourths tuning on the Linnstrument and absolutely love it. As a person who approached both music theory and learning to play with their hands for the first time (after clicking around in a piano roll for years) with an all-fourths isomorphic keyboard, it removed whole categories of mental gymnastics and time sucks and let me pick up big chords and bits of jazz/rnb much quicker as a result. The benefits of being able to transpose and dance around the keyboard effortlessly without having to account for that major 3rd gap can't be overstated. You've got one unified mental model for everything and can skip directly to the good stuff. There are a number of grid instruments on the market that implement all fourths (Push, Launchpad, etc etc). If you have an iPad, Musix Pro can also act as a MIDI output (either for iPadOS instruments or for external hardware) that gives you an equivalent layout, but also many other interesting layouts that may work better for the music you want to play.

As a side note, after learning linnstrument, I picked up an 8 string guitar and found it much easier to translate my knowledge by tuning in all-fourths. With all-fourths, you really can learn chords as a set of (essentially) 2D glyphs that interact and fit together like Lego pieces. Inversions are easier to remember, transposition is always effortless, training your hands is quicker. Highly recommended.

IMO, a major ingredient of raytracing running well enough in a game that also looks as good as any other current AAA title in raster-only mode has been DLSS. Raytracing is (or at least, at time of 2xxx series GPUs, was) still quite expensive to run at full res at resolutions (1440p, 4K) and framerates (60,120,144) that PC gamers demand. However, rendering raytraced games at a much lower resolution is just within reach for dedicated CUDA hardware. So DLSS makes up the difference with very sophisticated upscaling. Without DLSS, I think the raytracing in titles like Cyberpunk 2077 might not be performant enough.

In light of this, you might go back and see that AI and RT for NVidia have gone hand in hand, because one enables the other to be performant enough for AAA titles. Opinions may vary greatly on this, but personally, I don't think AMD's FSR upscaler is capable of matching what DLSS can do in this regard. (Intel's upscaling does seem to be capable of doing it, but very high performance parts are still some ways away from release).

Bonsai. Hobby for me, but unusual job for my mentors.

At least _prior_ to knowing anything else about regolith, aside from it sometimes having volcanic origins: Speaking as a person who grows a wide variety of woody tree species (pines, maples, junipers, cottonwoods, azaleas, etc) in inorganic substrates like pure perlite, pure lava, pure pumice (+combinations of those and other volcanic media), and has seen all of these tree species happily send roots into things like IKEA astroturf or blocks of Rockwool, it doesn't surprise me that regolith could maybe work as a grow media.

Big droughts have come and gone over the years. Here’s a nice historical data explorer: https://www.drought.gov/historical-information?dataset=0&sel...

Yes, there is information related to that:

  "The applicant does not intend to reside in Iceland for the long term."

Mildly similar to the concept of "dual intent" in the US immigration system

Can you speak more about the resurgence? I'm one of those who saw some of the promise and have been wondering if it'd ever come back and am curious what you've seen.

Search for something like "milsim <your geographical area>"

Fellow Linnstrument owner here. Agree completely on your point about the diversity of chords. It's really really hard to imagine going back to a piano layout and attempting to get back to the high water mark of where I'm at with a Linnstrument today. If something could be described as a gateway drug to harmony and music theory in general, this would be it.

For people who haven't used one of these, a 2D isomorphic layout (as seen in the Linnstrument and others) enables you to see chords, scales and progressions initially as 2D glyphs, and later as a lattice structure as your eyes/hands become more accustomed to the layout. Learn the pattern for a given scale or chord once and you can relocate it anywhere with almost no mental cost, so transposition is effortless compared to a piano.

I agree with the other poster in this thread on the "four corner" problem, which comes up surprisingly often. I think Roger Linn has spent a lot of time making a big deal about the Linnstrument's sliding and MPE capabilities, but the isomorphic layout is really the workhorse.

If any iPad owners are looking to try out an isomorphic layout and don't want to shell out for a Linnstrument, check out Musix Pro.

The tulip boom and bust didn't have much of an effect on the overall Dutch economy. According to this Smithsonian article, the story has been overblown significantly:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/there-never-was-real-...

If you live in Oregon, you can now take your EV to Mount Hood and charge it while you ski: http://www.oregon.gov/ODOT/HWY/OIPP/pages/inn_ev-charging.as...

Granted, it's not a supercharger, but considering that something like 25 to 30 miles of your trip home consist of un-interrupted descent (i.e. regenerative descent down a mountain), it's not too bad.