teawrecks

@teawrecks@sopuli.xyz

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teawrecks ,

Which part exactly are you disagreeing with? Do you think that we should force people to never be allowed to run an OS that enforces a strict update regimen? Because I think you probably actually think that the user should be allowed to choose how they update; whether that be mandatory and automatic, or manual and optional. The reality is, the vast majority of people will opt for the former, and I think we both agree that they should be allowed that choice.

The real issue is transparency: what is being installed and executed, why, and is any data being collected. As long as all that can be audited at will, I don't see any issue with the existence of an OS that insists on being updated for the people who want that.

teawrecks ,

Yeah, I don't think you're disagreeing with my point. I get it, you aren't the person who wants to be treated like an idiot when it comes to your computer, but the vast majority of computer users do.

There are many things in your life that you rely on on a daily basis that you never think about the internals of. Maybe your electrical system, your washer and dryer, your car, the roof over your head, the mail system, or the kitchen at a restaurant. All of these things are black boxes that get you what you want without you having to ever think about how it works. Because you don't want manual control over every single thing in your life you interact with, no one has time for that, you couldn't function in modern society.

Your computer is an exception that you have arbitrarily chosen to have intimate control over, but most other people don't. In their perfect world, they don't even know they're using a computer, it's just a magical box that gets them what they want.

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    teawrecks ,

    I guess it depends on how feasible it is to create a crawler and search engine. If you had bots crawl discord servers, continuously index everything, and then create a search engine for it, you'd probably be breaking their TOS and they'd C&D you. But I don't think there'd be anything preventing someone from doing that on matrix. Matrix is just as decentralized as the web.

    teawrecks ,

    Everyone I know uses discord, and any attempt to try matrix with friends has more friction than discord. We often make use of streaming gameplay to each other, and I don't know if that functionality works in matrix because we never get that far.

    teawrecks ,

    Yeah probably, though any good search engine starts by presuming consent until the owner explicitly says otherwise (robots.txt), and discord would probably take issue with that.

    teawrecks ,

    Ah right, users and bots are treated differently. So yeah, in order to crawl disc servers without first asking every single one permission, you'd have to break the ToS. I have no idea if matrix has a separate "bot" type account.

    Really, I think the matrix protocol needs some kind of support for this. I mean, both discord and matrix do, but I don't think discord would ever do it.

    Arch Linux is suddenly the butt of a lot of memes?

    Over the past couple of weeks, I've seen a lot of content that's ripping on Arch Linux, from pictures of stickers being removed from laptops, to comments about it having a lot of bloat or frustrating package management. Was there a change to their policies, strategies, or distro that has turned this once proud vessel into a...

    teawrecks ,

    I consider it the Linux version of "How can you tell someone is vegan? They'll tell you."

    (I use arch, btw)

    teawrecks ,

    I do think it qualifies as actual Unix, though.

    teawrecks ,

    Same people as email.

    teawrecks ,

    Do they know being frustrated by mice makes them boomers?

    teawrecks ,

    So, basically, if you tolerate the intolerant, the intolerant will eventually wipe out tolerance.

    A more accurate way to say it is, "if you tolerate the intolerant BEING intolerant, intolerance will eventually wipe out tolerance."

    It does not say you should be intolerant of the intolerant while they're minding their own business. I just think a bar owner is free to kick people out for representing Nazis purely because it's their bar and they can do what they want.

    But X's problem is a bit different from the Nazi Bar problem, in that you don't really see the Neo Nazis on X sitting there minding their own business. You ONLY see them voicing their intolerance. Which of course, should not be tolerated.

    Tolerate tolerate tolerate. There.

    teawrecks ,

    gtfo with your nazi apologism

    That was so fast, you make me rub my temples in pain, my guy.

    So, people are people, they aren't their ideals. People have more than one state of mind, they aren't 2D cardboard cutouts (or drawings of red skull). Life would be easier if they were, I agree, but the world is more complex than that.

    People are born into environments they have no control over. People are handed ideals before they know what they are. People learn from their environment. People change their minds about things. You literally wouldn't bother commenting right now if you didn't agree with me.

    If a person is sitting peacefully, let them. If a person is taking any action to impede any other person's ability to sit peacefully, then stop them. But don't attack a person who is sitting peacefully, because they'll probably want to attack you, or someone else, back.

    Now call me a nazi again, and we can agree to disagree. Jfc.

    teawrecks ,

    The difference between us is, I want Nazis to renounce their Nazi-ism. You don't.

    I don't believe you'll always be this way. I believe you can change. Godspeed.

    teawrecks ,

    Back when Spore came out, I was too young to know about most of the hype around it. It was short, yeah, and the end game was odd, but otherwise I remember really enjoying it.

    teawrecks ,

    Also wondering this. It looked really cool in concept, was bummed when it didn't work out.

    teawrecks ,

    Hah, I remember the space end game seeming like an endless slog of fighting the intergalactic evil race that occupied all the systems surrounding the center of the galaxy. Rather than spend forever slowly taking each and every system over, I just made a mad dash for the center to see what was there. I think the strategy was to take my ship into a system as I'm being chased by enemies, down to a planet, lay down a respawn point without dying, then leave the system and race closer to the center, and repeat. I eventually made it there with this strategy. I won't spoil what's at the center in case you don't want it spoiled but...I found it underwhelming lol.

    teawrecks ,

    Yeah that would have been a huge letdown if I had been aware of all that hype.

    But man, if only the huge letdowns of today were as good as spore...

    teawrecks ,

    Cool, didn't know the modding community was the way to go. I would always break it out at a party, it would be fun for a bit, but yeah, eventually it's just the same thing but faster. I'll have to take a look at the mods.

    teawrecks ,

    You're saying you see a bunch of login attempts on your router, but you don't think they actually got into it?

    teawrecks ,

    Is the config for the waybar in your screenshot posted anywhere?

    teawrecks ,

    I would limit it to the "web" in it's heyday. The internet as a whole is more wild than ever. And there's a chance that the fediverse could be just as thrilling in 10 years as the web was 20 years ago (and could be swamped by corporate interests).

    I don't think the internet is getting less thrilling and weird, if anything it's downright scary at this point, it's just really easy to enter a walled garden, never leave, and never find the interesting stuff.

    teawrecks ,

    I just played today's. Maybe I need to play more to really get it. Is it always this trivial?

    teawrecks ,

    I do:
    Guess the Game
    Framed
    Connections

    teawrecks ,

    Ahh ok cool, I'll keep at it. Thanks for the recommendation.

    teawrecks ,

    I would assume that wouldn't cause so much contention that the system is unusable, though, right? Unless they're busy waiting.

    teawrecks ,

    In a situation where wind isn't a factor, and there are no obstacles, this is true.

    But since we're talking boats, I'm assuming wind speed/direction is a factor, so the ship that can adjust their orientation and sails to maximally take advantage of the wind could have an advantage.

    teawrecks ,

    Wind affects all boats, but I may have made an assumption when they asked about it in the context of pirates.

    What do you think about that most big VR technology is owned by big companies like Meta and Tik Tok?

    I mean yeah it's obvious that it's an oportunity for making money on a new marked and so on, but, even if it's a bit silly, dreaming of VR technology like in Ready Player One(minus the distopian world) for real life it feels like the bad guys already won, when we will have the technology. Like the omni One is just about to be...

    teawrecks ,

    The brightness of the sky outside dwarfs that of any display we can make, much less a tiny VR display. If they could squeeze the nits needed to make a VR screen look like real life into a display that small while retaining the quality, they would.

    It might actually hurt your vision because it's not bright enough, much like trying to read under a dim light starts to cause eye strain.

    teawrecks ,

    Phones are different because your eyes are focusing at a point a foot in front of you, whereas in VR that shouldn't be the case. You're focusing on a simulated point a couple of meters out in the distance, though it is usually is still fixed.

    Make no mistake, I'm not saying wearing VR for hours every day is healthy, for your eyes or otherwise, I'm only responding to your claim about screen brightness. I don't think any VR displays have even hit 1000 nits yet, and on the displays that have, that's peak brightness, the whole display can't use all that energy at once, only small sections at a time. Meanwhile the sky is on the order of 10,000+ nits. The brightness of the sun will certainly hurt your eyes at over a billion nits.

    I would love for an optometrist to explain why I'm wrong though.

    teawrecks ,

    Sounds like OP is asking about file storage. Video streaming could be spotted using info leaked regarding traffic behavior. But uploading an encrypted file for storage shouldn't leak anything except the size.

    teawrecks ,

    Narrator: "They did."

    teawrecks ,

    I've always preferred a Tom Collins. Sweet instead of bitter.

    teawrecks ,

    All the more reason why it would be so unsettling.

    teawrecks ,

    This is the eternal stalemate of our two party system. Everyone agrees that there are many big obvious problems that need addressing, both parties want to solve it their own way, but (for better and worse) both only have the power to prevent the other from doing anything.

    teawrecks ,

    Yeah, whoever designed radio waves wasn't thinking about the potential for creative architecture!

    teawrecks ,

    I'd say it's off-putting for the same reason that using technically accurate biological terminology in place of sexy-talk can be off-putting. It could come off as impersonal or alien at best, and objectifying at worst.

    Think of an alien in disguise saying "hello fellow humans". Technically, it's not wrong, it's just weird.

    teawrecks ,

    It's not that "hot liquids hold more things" afaik, it's that hot liquids have more energy to break apart the larger particles into smaller ones, i.e. dissolve them. Otherwise you'd expect the dissolved sugar to settle at the bottom when you cool the tea back down.

    The truth about linux having 15% market share in India.

    I am from india. These numbers are inflated due to our population and government and health sector office pc using linux (ubuntu). These office pcs just require a chrome browser and all the work is done on the browser Nobody here cares what os they use in their office pc. I don't see anyone here switching to linux on their...

    teawrecks ,

    Microsoft is as ubiquitous as it is specifically because of decades long efforts to be the default in government offices around the world. So the Indian government using Linux definitely counts as a win.

    teawrecks ,

    That's not the comparison at hand, we're talking YouTube audio compression vs any actual music track.

    teawrecks ,

    Any sufficiently high quality audio stream from my Plex or Tidal, always set to max volume in app/OS settings -> Topping D30 -> JDS Atom -> Sennheiser HD6XX.

    Good enough for me.

    teawrecks ,

    The goal is to send the exact, unmolested digital samples from the file out to the DAC, which then sends its analog signal to the amp where you worry about how much to amplify that signal for listening.

    When you set everything to 100% volume in software, you can assume that there is no software doing anything to alter the digital signal before sending it to the DAC (scales each sample by 1.0). But when you're under 100% volume in software, it assumes you don't have any analog control over the volume, so it needs to step in and alter the digital signal so that it shows up quieter to the DAC (ex. scaling each sample by 0.25). Depending on how that's implemented, it can result in losing resolution and thus quality of the signal.

    I think this mattered more on older software that's more likely to use a smaller bit depth, but bugs happen, so why risk it and spend those extra cycles on a process that can only result in a worse signal, right?

    teawrecks ,

    Yes, if everything aligns perfectly, there is no impact. The bit shift would be when you set the volume to exactly half, but that's probably not going to be the case. The app volume control alters the signal slightly, multiplied by the OS altering it slightly, which has a virtual certainty of introducing a floating point rounding error on every single sample, so now the ratios between your samples is ever so slightly different. And for what reason? What did that operation gain you?

    And no you're not going to hear a difference, but the point of being an audiophile is less about hearing a difference, and more about good quality preservation practices.

    teawrecks ,

    Interesting point. What about the case where you have your digital volume set to 1%? Would this not squeeze the samples into 1/100 the dynamic range? If I set my volume to 1% it seems to me like those samples now have to all exist within the bottom 1% of the 16b range. Do you not lose at least 5-6 bits of precision on your signal doing this?

    teawrecks ,

    I'm sorry you have to type so much, I am familiar with most of it, but I appreciate your effort to make sure we're on the same page without being a douche about it lol. It sounds like we're saying similar things, but I don't understand why lower precision is different from losing information. To me, that's the same thing, it's a lossy operation.

    So the thing is, I have a pair of desktop speakers without any physical volume control that I primarily use for convenience. And for whatever reason, a comfortable listening volume with them is between 1-8% in the OS volume control. I guess the internal amp is just hardwired to be way too loud?

    Anyway, I assume that this setup is resulting in objectively lower quality output than if I were to have a 100% signal going to a decent quality DAC/amp with analog volume outputting to the same speakers. And not in a "technically" kind of way, but in a very real "we just crushed the signal into 1/25th of its original scale" way. Would you agree? Am I mistaken?

    teawrecks ,

    it doesnt matter if you achieve attenuation by dividing the 16 bit level component of a stream of samples or by using a resistor as a voltage divider.

    This is the part where I'm not following. In my head, if you're using analog hardware of sufficient quality, you can attenuate the signal to be very quiet, but still preserve it's dynamic range. In fact, the DAC is already outputting a very weak, but faithful analog reproduction of the signal, and an amp with a decent S/N ratio is able to bring that very weak signal up to a listening volume without introducing enough noise to matter.

    Hypothetically, if for some reason, you took the signal post-amp, used a pot to attenuate it again down to the energy of the post-DAC level, and again ran it through another amp you would theoretically have the same signal still (I understand that in the real world we would start amplifying noise and the signal would degrade, but stick with me). Nothing about the process necessarily introduces noise and thus destroys the signal, you're only limited to the quality of the components at that point. If you had an infinite chain of theoretically perfect amps and pots, you could repeatedly attenuate and amplify the signal forever without ever losing any quality. It's an analog process that theoretically preserves the signal, +/- some amount of error due to physics.

    Meanwhile, 16b is 16b. If you start shrinking all samples relative to each other (ex. down to 1/64 the original volume, or 10b of resolution), different values inevitably have to clamp to the same values (fitting 64k values into 1024 values), losing information and resulting in poorer quality. If you then try to send that 10b signal through a DAC/amp to achieve the same listening volume that you would have had before digital attenuation, it's just a 10b signal bit shifted up. All your LSBs are 0s. You can't possibly attenuate digitally, and then amplify it in any way and hope to get the same signal back. It's a discrete math process which destroys the signal by design.

    Would you agree?

    teawrecks ,

    Ok, the analog attenuation part makes sense now I think. I assumed that an amp increases the amplitude of a signal, and that a pot achieved the inverse (i guess dividing the signal?) but it's not, it's effectively subtraction?

    Back to my DAC/amp, realistically am I ever intentionally attenuating the analog signal in order to get it to a listening volume? Or am I only ever amplifying it? I think that's the main difference in my head. If I output my digital signal to the DAC at 100%, and then only ever amplify it to a listening volume, then there's no way for the signal to be attenuated at all, right?

    is the quiet sine wave of lower quality than one that's using the full bit depth of the adcs output because it's intended to represent the maximum level that the adcs input saw from the preamp/microphone/whatever?

    of course it isn't. it just wasn't loud.

    No, yeah, that makes sense. I was thinking that, it didn't matter how strong the signal was, as long as the full sine wave was still present, then quality is preserved. So dividing it down to be a very small voltage, or amplifying it up to be super large, as long as the relative voltages of the signal are retained, we wouldn't lose any quality (is my, likely flawed, impression).

    I think I just don't know how to think of analog signals. I understand frequency response in theory, but I can't talk about a signal intuitively in terms of frequency space like you do. Does perfectly amplifying a signal change its frequency response? You don't have to keep answering, at this point I'm just poking your brain lol.

    teawrecks ,

    if you don't use the volume control on the amp then there's no attenuation. the downside is that it's really loud.

    Ahhh, I think this is the part I was missing. So I should think of an amp as "injecting" a fixed amount of energy to the signal, way more than I need, and then the volume pot attenuates it back to a comfortable volume. That makes sense since we've established that pots attenuate, which necessarily destroy the signal. I still had it in my head that the amount of energy used to amplify the signal was proportional to the volume knob position.

    I didn't know how air affected frequency response, but that makes sense.

    As for how clean my ears are, I'm completely deaf, so who cares?

    jk 😁. Thanks for the talk, I learned some things!

    teawrecks ,

    Ahh ok, that makes more sense. I think I never saw the connection between a transistor and an amp until now. Using a small signal to modulate a different, larger signal. Or like a relay.

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