maybewhenthesun

If you struggle imagining that, try playing this classic: https://space-cadet.nl/#play

While Space Cadet Pinball proudly calls itself '3D pinball' , the only 3D thing about it is that the table background bitmap is drawn in perspective and the ball gets smaller if farther away ;-)

Agreed 100%

If you pick other units, you can make the constants 1. You don't really need to 'recalculate' something for that.

And while this can sometimes be useful to reframe your thoughts and even lead to new insights it doesn't really have an inherent meaning.

I used to feel very 'old man yells at sky' when I told people they were being naive using Google Drive (Or any other 'cloud storage' for that matter).

I have a strong 'told you so' feeling right now.

I don't think the difference is in the writers so much, as in the publishers. If you look at manuscripts by famous writers they're often full of typos. And if you look at old correspondence between writers and their publishers there are often discussions of continuity errors and the like.

These days lots of books are self published. And even the big publishers spend less money + time on this kind of thing.

I've been a subscriber of a dutch online-only publication called 'de correspondent' . It's ok (quit good sometimes). But you can sense they have a sliver of the budget the big newspapers in my youth had.

The advent of internet and the notion that news should / could be 'free' has caused a steep decline in quality journalism worldwide, I think.

I have some journalists (for a local newspaper) in my circle of friends and they all complain there's no 'newsroom' anymore for most (dutch) newspapers. All journalists now are supposed to 'self-redact' and their copy is just pasted into the newspaper without anybody else looking at it.

Lots of 'journalists' are freelancers who just send in their piece. Even those often get published with minimal oversight. There just isn't enough money to have a redaction.

Fact-checking is(or should be) done by the one writing the piece. So personal biases are hardly ever caught.

Admitted, all these stories are for a small local newspaper with very tight budgets. But according to my friends it's the same everywhere when they speak to their friends, and even the big national newspapers here have very minimal supporting personnel.

It's no wonder the world polarizes.

There used to be tons of videos from around 2008-2010 of a french folk festival I always went to. I remember watching all videos of those events and see if I spotted anyone I knew.

Those were definitely not copyright claimed by anybody. But 3/4 of them are gone by now when I tried some nostalgia - youtbe -spelunking recently . I assume youtube silently deletes videos if they are never watched? Or maybe they are still there, but not easily findable anymore.

But it perfectly captures what the site is about. ;-)

> bieng

I'm quite used to native english speakers putting e and i in random order. I understand because 'weird' is more or less pronounced like you would pronounce 'wierd' and english spelling is rather haphazard anyway. But 'bieng' is a a first . Please note, I'm not blaming you! I make plenty of mistakes myself and english spelling is weird. I'm just curious if you are a native english speaker or not?

I have a theory that for (esl) people that have different sounding ei and ie in their native language, this particular part of english spelling is actually easier than for native english speakers.

My guess is that you have english as a second language, because being (be-ing) is pronounced differently than other ei words and a native speaker would probably not write bi-eng ... was I correct?

Which is also what birds do I think. They also only have only one orifice

Look up diagrams of bird lungs.

Yes, the in/out is through the mouth+nose. But internally is' more like a one-way circle.

Interesting about that OSHA curve. I also read some (dutch) research once where they had a slightly different conclusion (though I now can't find it anywhere): People tended to underestimate the volume/sound pressure of bass , and coupled with the fact that bass is much harder to block with earplugs the loud bass at concerts was a major contributing factor to hearing damage for concert goers.

Now this does not contradict what you say, of course. It's very well possible that the human ear is less sensitive to bass and that people are underestimating the volume of bass.

Amen to that! The difference between overproduced generic 'producer music' and AI music (which is basically a remix of that I guess) is often minimal.

Both are excruciatingly boring.

90% of the music I listen these days is recordings by musicians that I saw live, and bought the CD at their gig. And even then about a quarter of the CD's I buy are misguidedly auto-tuned making the CD very bland compared to their live performance. I much prefer live recordings, where it's much harder to fix a mistake by one of the musicians because everything is audible on all microphones.

On the one hand it's great for (indy) music that you can have the equivalent of e 70s EMI studio in your living room. On the other hand the editing possibilities make people too perfectionist, wringing all personality out of their music.

It probably could. Point he's trying to make is that it very often isn't. Lots of pop music is just snapped to grid. Makes it easier to repeat and swap sections.

I'm not sure his demonstration is 'fair', as in someone really quantizing that track would probably do a slightly better job. But it does highlight the effect of over-quantization. Which happens a lot , together with the 'autotune-the-hell-out-of-it' fashion.

Lots of boring music being produced. But , while it wasn't really recorded because recording was expensive, musicians 'phoning it in' have probably always been the majority of popular music.

100% agreed.

This fashion of cranking the base and the high end and removing the middle (simulating a subwoofer with some tiny speakers, basically) can't die fast enough.

I mean, fair play for the writer. If he wants it to sound that way he's of course free to do so. But this style is used a lot in concerts and open air amplification and I hate it.

My theory is that this style is popular with people playing their music too loud. If your ear feels 'blocked' after a while, your music is too loud.

One thing with this style is that, because it leaves the middle (speech) frequencies relatively empty, it feels less blocking. And the high base makes that it doesn't really sound tinny or harsh. But they high base cane easily damage your hearing still.

Yeah for sure, you don't take it by the end of the handle for a light tap.

Still, if you want to have some guideline for that angle I would at least go for the end of the handle ;-)

I was slightly annoyed by the whole rigmarole about the angle as well. Silly of course because everybody should use the angle that suits them best. It's just that when I was taught 'hammering' as a kid, it was drilled into my head that I should always have the pivot point of the arc level with the thing I was hammering. So if you hammer from your wrist your wrist should be level with the impact point, and if swinging from the elbow the elbow should be there.

I couldn't stand angled mallets, because if you want to strike something on a flat surface you'll have to put your wrist awkwardly close to the surface.

Also, in the webpage he holds the mallet more than halfway up the handle, wasting the bottom half. I was similarly drilled to always hold it at the end of the handle to maximize the length.

And then I'm slightly annoyed because he confuses flaired and flared.

All in all a very nice website, where I can be comfortably annoyed by nice niche nerdy topics. A blast from the past in between the onslaught of AI related content ;-P

I read it as 'it's easier to dump the execs in Iceland than in space` :-D

Which might be true, though the second thing sounds promising as well...

They do the same with youtube accounts. My parents lost a ton a family movies that way. No warning either, just poof -> gone.

My uncle, who worked for oil companies all his life, always had the opinion that the Indians use english better than the English. :-)

'prepone' is an example of why I sometimes agree. Most indian guys I know also up the baudrate of english so much that they get twice the information flow compared to british english. With the disadvantage that both sides of the conversation need to speak indian english or you'll get protocol errors :-D

Yea no shit sherlock!

My stance used to be that the invention of the filter bubble combined with targeted advertising is the most dangerous invention for human society of the last 100 years.

AI turns that up to 11

Delivering the bits might not be hard. Storing the bits is hard. Or at least expensive.

st iGNUtius called it, amen. :-P

I used to think that. But I now realize there will always be people having a job in said datacenter who will try to prevent that. As long as the AI pays it's minions well , people, will do their job.

But AIs need such ridiculously complicated infrastructure with all the datacenters and GPUs and memory fabs etc etc an AI that actually destabilizes the economy will wipe itself out.

It will be a death by a 1000 papercuts. It started with the 'filter bubble' (imho the most dangerous invention/discovery for humanity ever ), then it leveled up to 'propaganda leveraging the filter bubble' and now with AI in the loop ...

And then there's a slight possibility of 'terminator skynet' style trouble, Where the AI starts to make the decisions to benefit itself. But I guess the chances of an AI screwing up their own supply chain would be near 100% so I'm not too afraid of that.

govts should be forbidden from using X. Or any other commercial for-profit message service.

It's not like one-way communication is a hard problem. Just post that stuff on a website ffs!

Google has always been like this. I used to have a Youtube account with timelapse movies from my holidays. Nothing special, just stuff to show the family, but it was a lot of work to edit and upload them all.

One day I got a message that my account was closed because of a violation of the TOS. No explanation what it was that I violated. No chance for appeal. No chance to communicate with a human about it. It was explicitly stated that it was impossible to reinstate the account. To this day I have no clue what it was in the 20 or so timelapse movies taken from a small sailing boat that offended Google.

It was a good lesson to never trust Google.

That's what I meant when stating 'the exact frequencies are culturally defined'.

There are lots of tuning systems. Equal temperament is just 12 (logarithmic) equal steps. But other tuning systems use different priorities.

The basis is physical, though. It's always about trying to get the frequency ratios as simple as possible (or as close as possible to a simple ratio). Based on the fact that natural overtones are always (more or less) integer multiples of the base frequency so that's what sounds pleasing to us. Using only integer ratios is impossible though, so we have to deviate from those. And on top of that we want to deviate because people get bored ;-)

I agree that this is often the situation in practice. I feel it's kind of bleak to just accept that status quo. Democracy lost? Back to the medieval system of nobles and serfs? Where having money means having rights?

We don't live (hopefully) in a complete lawless anarchy where it's just 'might makes right'. And we should certainly not strive to end up that way.

> waiting for judge 2 or 3 years is a thing in places but for people it is just useless.

Which is a bit of an exaggeration. When someone breaks the law it doesn't take 2-3 years to get fined/punished. At least not in a functioning society.

I'd like my e-reader to show up as a printer, and when I print something on it it actually gets saved as a pdf on the reader. Like in the article, but multi-page pdf.

I often do 'print to A5 pdf => copy pdf to e-reader'. Would be nice to do that in one step from any program that can print.