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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2020

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  • People still gloat about piracy being a hydra where you cut off one head and more pop up. Except it isn’t any where close to that. Probably hasn’t been in at least 10-15 years. Piracy has been gradually chipped away at. People don’t seem to want to admit that. As if that would be siding with anti-piracy or something.

    In its heyday the catalogues of content was immense in breadth and depth. Just about any obscure thing could be found. These days even popular TV shows become more difficult to come by even a short while after the episode has been released. Unless you have access to more private parts of the web then you’re left trying to source some low quality trash tier download.

    Which brings me to the next point. Piracy used to be about providing the best possible quality. With popularity the quality got watered down. Opportunists came in trying to monetize it which drew the attention of authorities. Which drew the attention more opportunists which drew the attention of authorities. It snowballed.

    What piracy used to be was the spirit of the original internet. It was the library not just a library but the library of humanity. People catalogued and shared because that’s what librarians do.

    If I had the power I’d take away its popularity. Make it obscure again. It was better when it was ruled by snobs and autistic perfectionists.




  • The intelligence level on reddit has hit rock bottom. That’s not to say lemmy instances are the opposite. It’s just that reddit has reached what must be some kind of end stage. Someone else posted already about being met with blank stares about technical topics. It applies to pretty much any topic.

    Not being very informed about a certain topic is not a problem in itself. Reddit seems to have internalized some sort of personality. One where the social milieu is about petty squabbles. They don’t care about the topic itself but coming away from the replies feeling like they’re the bigger dog who barked louder. More often than not I find myself just letting them have their victory. There’s no real discussion happening anyways.

    In the first half of reddits existence it was ridiculed for being the site full of neckbeards who think too highly of themselves on account of nerds being smart-aleck nerds. What I’ve seen the past several years goes to show that it isn’t a nerd thing. As reddit has become more a sample of any given part of the population, this trait of reddit has not changed. People go to reddit thinking they’re engaged in some kind of high intellectual discourse simply because reddit is supposed to be that.

    I can’t tell if these things are a trait of reddit which bled over from the other social media like Facebook and Twitter. I never used those. Just about any other platform is better compared to reddit. Whether that be lemmy instances or small forums. Could be some kind of social media mind rot or something. I don’t know but that’s what I attribute it to.



  • From the very beginning

    When is that exactly do you have in mind? I’m talking about automation which roughly around 2010 the discourse was primarily centered around blue collar jobs. The discussion was about these careers becoming obsolete if AI ever advanced to the point where it involved little to no humans to perform the tasks.

    Back then AI with regards to white collar jobs was no where near the primary focus of discourse much less programming.

    Tech nerds back then were all gung ho about it making entire careers obsolete in the near future. Truck drivers were supposed to be a dead career by now. They absolutely do not hold the same enthusiasm right now when it’s being said about their own careers.

    Are you seriously trying to imply

    You’re way off the mark. Save your outrage.










  • They will both agree to broad idea that “rich bad” and “middle class is struggling”. Their relative suffering is what they both agree on even though they’re different.

    If the 40k person saw how the 400k person lives in real life, they would be rolling out the guillotine for the 400k dude. But without proper context online that 40k person will go to bat for the 400k person if anyone brings up the topic of lifestyle.

    The further up the scale the more luxury there is. However people work with more binary thinking. So it’s easier to point at the dudes making 1000k or more. The territory of more unfathomable weath. Really there’s a lot of excess going on way before we reach the multi-millionaire to billionaire strata.


  • I’ve thought about this from time to time. Have we been kind of a neurotic generation? I could never tell if it was just me that was seeing things or what. The under 30s seems more indifferent. Might be because they are mostly the children of Gen-X? Are over 30s a bit uptight? How did we end up this way?

    From personal experience growing up so many kids were obsessed with the rat race from way too young. That whole mindset that you must to university to get all your credentials to fit yourself into a cookie cutter. The defacto life track until the illusion started to crack.

    All in all I think the over 30 generation has a really hard time with self reflection. In particular talking about the faults of our own generation. Which is paradoxical against the whole mental health awareness stuff.



  • VR has the same problem smartphones and tablets did until the Apple revolution. Consumers don’t care about technical details which nerds get stuck on. The technology simply isn’t there at the moment.

    Right now VR is and will remain for bespoke applications. It will remain so for many iterations of technological advancement until miniaturization beyond anything anyone can ever dream of right now. The technologically inclined can reason about relatively insignificant details like transistor count or whatever. Consumers don’t care. Just like they didn’t care about tablets or even touch screen devices in general even though commercial products existed long before the iPad and iPhone. Nobody gives a shit about technical details. The final product from a layman user perspective is all that matters. Jobs knew this was the ultimate goal. The rest of the tech industry continues to struggle with internalizing it.

    Even if they scrimp and save to produce a pleb model. It’s still just a bespoke device. A glorified screen that might have a few neat uses. People will then put it aside and forget about it.


  • Bluetooth is low bitrate. The audio codecs need to use a lot of compression. Old audio equipment are analog which is better because it doesn’t have so much digital conversions to completely wreck sound.

    Bluetooth is still reliant on its original SBC codec from the early 2000s or something. 20 year old tech. Due to this nobody really took BT audio adoption seriously until the past several years when the zeitgeist finally tipped. Suddenly wireless headphones were every where.

    I think maybe it was when Apple got rid of headphone jack. So the rest of the industry caved. And we all just handwave away how bluetooth audio has always sucked.

    For compatibility every device maker sticks to that 20 year old common denominator. There are proprietary codecs that are supposed be better quality but then you get all the joys of cross compatibility hell. If your devices aren’t inter-compatible they’ll fall back to the common denominator. The basic SBC codec. Even with better quality codec they can only do so much with limited wireless bitrate.

    Fun fact. There is higher quality configuration for the SBC codec but nobody configures it in software when making their device. People say it’s indistinguishable from the highest quality proprietary codecs. But audio can subjective so eh…

    Even if you were to enable the better configuration for SBC. All the devices out there in the world are built with the default configuration. No two devices sender/receiver will ever both use the better config. So it’s impossible to fix this.

    It doesn’t matter anymore since all this in the process of being superseded by Bluethooth 5 audio. Which throws away all that and tries to do it all over again. It’s still reliant on low bitrate wireless protocol though. So they can use whatever algorithmic trickery so they can claim produce perceptually indistinguishable from CD quality or lossless quality or whatever.

    I’m sure there will always be people that say they can tell the difference. I don’t doubt people can because it’s simply not the same audio but a disassembly into bits for wireless transmission. Then reconstituted on the other-side as near as possible to the original.