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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • I’m not depressed, at least I don’t think I am. I don’t really feel sad.

    Society equating depression with sadness is a great disservice to the condition. It’s quite common for it to present as just … nothing. An emotional void where you might expect emotions to be. Things that would be expected to make you happy just don’t. Things that would make you sad, the same. Your feelings are depressed in the sense that their impact is just muted across the board.

    A lack of motivation is also a very common indicator. You’re just missing the drive to do something because the emotional rewards that you expect to happen when you accomplish your goals just aren’t there.





  • As Edge comes pre-installed by default on Windows machines, users must navigate the Microsoft offering in order to download their browser of choice.

    What’s the actual alternative they want here? That users look up download URLs on other devices and download their browser of choice via command line using cURL Invoke-WebRequest? That ISPs provide browser installers on USB sticks?

    Also, it’s not like MS is cornering the market on browser share here. Even with this “unfair advantage” they’ve only scraped together a 5% slice of browser usage.




  • The dndmemes protests were a pretty incredible thing while they lasted. The mods changed the subreddit to “nsfw” because that disabled most of the monetization. Then Reddit admins told them the subreddit obviously wasn’t really nsfw and to change it to accurately reflect the subreddit content.

    …so the mods changed the subreddit rules to allow actual nsfw content and people went nuts. In multiple senses of the term.

    Of course “accurately reflecting the subreddit” wasn’t what Reddit really cared about. They wanted to preserve the advertising stream for a popular subreddit, and this did the opposite of that. Reddit admins soon after basically said “remove nsfw content, restore the subreddit to what it used to be, do what we say or we’ll replace you with a mod team of our own choosing”.







  • I think you are conflating a few different concepts here.

    Can you comment on the specific makeup of a “rendered” audio file in plaintext, how is the computer representing every little noise bit of sound at any given point, the polyphony etc?
    What are the conventions of such representation? How can a spectrogram tell pitches are where they are, how is the computer representing that?

    This is a completely separate concern from how data can be represented as text, and will vary by audio format. The “simplest”, PCM encoded audio like in a .wav file, doesn’t really concern itself at all with polyphony and is just a quantised representation of the audio wave amplitude at any given instant in time. It samples that tens of thousands of times per second. Whether it’s a single pure tone or a full symphony the density of what’s stored is the same. Just an air-pressure-over-time graph, essentially.

    Is it the same to view plaintext as analysing it with a hex-viewer?

    “Plaintext” doesn’t really have a fixed definition in this context. It can be the same as looking at it in a hex viewer, if your “plaintext” representation is hexadecimal encoding. Binary data, like in audio files, isn’t plaintext, and opening it directly in a text editor is not expected to give you a useful result, or even a consistent result. Different editors might show you different “text” depending on what encoding they fall back on, or how they represent unprintable characters.

    There are several methods of representing binary data as text, such as hexadecimal, base64, or uuencode, but none of these representations if saved as-is are the original file, strictly speaking.