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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • A key feature of authoritarianism. Whether it’s Hitler, Stalin, Putin, or Louis XIV, keeping the court close like this is an absolutely essential part of holding on to power. For one they’re too busy with the king to have time to get bored and start scheming against him. For two the courtesans are around each other and competing for attention so they scheme against each other instead. We know that Trump listens to his advisors very haphazardly; it keeps them on their toes, constantly begging for attention (even if the end result is unbelievable political flip-flopping, that’s irrelevant to Trump himself).

    People have this image of the Third Reich as super organized, but in reality the top command was a complete mess as everybody was trying to backstab each other and to please Hitler who didn’t necessarily even have a clue what was going on. The utter incompetence of Nazi leadership was always going to cost them the war, but it did keep Hitler in power until the very end even though the outcome of the war was long considered inevitable by his own generals.

    Putin does the same. Remember the feud between Wagner guy and Shoigu? Putin intentionally encourages internal squabbles because it means in an environment where everyone mostly hates everyone, the only consistent loyalty is to him.

    Anyway, there’s plenty of reason to be concerned about Mr. biggest-nuclear-arsenal-on-the-planet going at a Hitler speedrun, but the only saving grace right now is that the whole thing is an inefficient mess and a large chunk (but not all) of them are too dumb to be truly dangerous. When he starts exclusively listening to his war hawks or the project 2025 guys… We’re fucked.


  • Yeah it’s Ctrl+D. I do use bookmarks on occasion (especially for stupid websites with non-intuitive URLs and page titles I can’t easily find by typing in the omnibar), but not as a way to organize my work.

    The reason I mention ADHD for this in particular is I saw a home organization tip for ADHD that I related strongly to: ADHD brains really benefit from having everything spread out on a table, visible and immediately available. Trying to force an ADHD person to constantly put things away is super counter-productive even if it’s apparently good advice for neurotypical folk. Though of course ADHD is not an excuse not to clear the messy table once the project is finished.

    My computer desktop follows the same principle. I’ll have as many workspaces as I do ongoing projects, and every workspace has all the tools I need open. And the good news is it’s much harder to run out of virtual space than it is to run out of space on a real table.


  • I feel like it’s often bad game design from developers who think they need to put in consumables without understanding their gameplay value.

    In too many games using up all your consumables is just A Thing That Happens. So the game is balanced to allow you to survive anyway. But then the corollary is that if it works for a bit then you can finish the game without using any of the consumables. The consumables are just a way to make already achievable portions of the game easier, which is just sloppy game design IMO. Bethesda games for instance are very guilty of that.


  • People not understanding that we understand bookmarks exist is weird to me.

    For me it’s a suspected ADHD thing. If I make a bookmark:

    • I have to context-switch into “cleaning up” mode. Leaving a tab open is not distracting, having to name it and categorize it is.
    • Bookmarks are virtual drawers. Anything I put in a drawer might as well be in a cave in Alaska guarded by a troll as far as my brain is concerned. If I intend to look at this in the next 2-3 weeks, I keep the tab open because it’s a virtual reminder I’ve not yet done the thing.
    • Yes, I’ve got tabs open from over a year ago. Those ones don’t serve a purpose, I’ll get around to cleaning up… eventually.

    Honestly if I was forced to close my browser sessions at the end of the work day, not joke, not an exaggeration, I’d switch jobs. I’m working on too many different complex things to have to rebuild my mental model of where everything was at from scratch every morning. I would not get anything done.


  • Opposite statements. Either they follow orders or they are loyal to the constitution. Can’t do both right now.

    I can’t fathom the industrial amounts of pure propagandium that Americans must have been huffing to think the military will ever be on their side. Blind and unconditional obedience is literally the only way militaries can function properly and everything about them is organized to promote that.

    US military apologists (even before Trump) will say “but soldiers are legally obligated to follow the constitution first and must refuse unlawful orders” like Abu Ghraib didn’t happen in my lifetime. We all know that 90 % of soldiers will wipe themselves with the original copy of the declaration of independence if Trump orders them to. And those that refuse will be dishonorably discharged, or worse.


  • Downmixing is a pretty straightforward affair. You have 6 channels, you need to go to 2, so you just average 4 signals per channel using some weights.

    Good media players (Kodi) allow you to change those weights, especially for the center channel, and to reduce dynamic range (with a compressor). Problem solved, the movie will be understandable even on shitty built-in TV speakers if you want to do that for some insane reason.

    The problem is that there are “default” weights for 2.0 downmixing that were made in the 90s for professional audio monitoring headphones, and these are the weights used by shitty software from shitty movie distributors or TV sets that don’t care to find out why default downmixing is done the way it is. Netflix could detect that you’re using shitty speakers and automatically reduce dynamic range and boost dialogue for you, they just DGAF. But none of that is the movie’s problem.


  • I had a 5.0 setup before I even bought my first TV. I was just using my PC monitor until then.

    It’s counter-intuitive but decent sound comes first. I’d much rather watch Interstellar in 360p with 5.1 audio than in 4K OLED HDR with built-in speakers.

    But when you say that people get mad because they spent a grand on a TV that sounds like shit and they feel they have to defend their choices.


  • people watch stuff on TV and cannot hear any dialogue

    did you read anything I said or do you just want to complain?

    have a doctorate on audio / put in thousands of dollars into a hobby

    Good news then, a more-than-decent 5.1 setup can be had for ~500 €. A decent soundbar for a few hundred.

    and let people like you mess around with the settings for your home cinema

    I can’t if the audio source is fucked up because directors have been forced by studios to release with low dynamic range.

    My whole point is that your audio goes Master -> 5.1 channels -> downmixer -> your shitty 2.0 channels speakers and my audio goes Master -> 5.1 channels -> receiver -> my 5.1 setup.

    You’re asking the master to change to fit your needs. I’m asking the media players to fix their fucking downmixers because that’s where the problem lies. Leave the studio mastering alone god damn it.


  • Where do you draw the line? If you use a soundbar, someone else is complaining because they use their built-in speakers. But if you optimize for that, someone else is using their laptop speaker on the train.

    What really pisses me off with this “argument” is that the audio information is all right there, which you would know if you bothered to read the second half of my comment before getting all pissy.

    5.1 audio (and the standards that superseded it in cinemas) all have multiple audio channels with one dedicated to voice. If you have a shit sound system, the sound system should be downmixing in a way that preserves dialogue better. Again, the information is all right there as there is no stereo track in most movies, your player is building it on-the-fly based on the 5.1 track. It’s not the director’s fault that Netflix or Hulu is doing an awful job at accounting for the fact that most of their users are listening on a sound setup that can barely reproduce intelligible speech.


  • Nah, I have a good sound setup and I don’t want to be watching movies with less dynamic range because some people are using their shrilly built-in TV speakers with their children screaming in the background or $5 earbuds.

    If you don’t want to have a proper 5.1 audio setup, it’s not the director’s problem, it’s the media player. Audio compression, center channel boosting, and subtitling are things that media centers have been able to do for decades (e.g. Kodi), it’s just that streaming platforms and TVs don’t always support it because they DGAF. Do look for a “night mode” in your TV settings though, that’s an audio compressor and I have one on my receiver. If you are using headphones, use a media player like Kodi that allows you to boost the center channel (which is dedicated to dialogue).