@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

thomasjwebb

@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social

Ⓐ🏴 software engineer and occasional street food vendor. Sincereposter in a shitposter's world.

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ryanhoulihan, to random
@ryanhoulihan@mastodon.social avatar

This AI cash grab from Duolingo is the last straw. Fuck French and fuck this app

thomasjwebb,
@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

@ryanhoulihan oh no I don't know if I can take Duolingo enshittifying

skinnylatte, to random
@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io avatar

The used camera market is ridiculous if you’re interested in hyped up cameras. Someone is selling a X100V with 18 000 - 20 000 shots for more than a Leica M3.

Not even the new X100VI.

Well, I’m glad people like that camera (it’s very good but at this price I’ll probably never get one)

thomasjwebb,
@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

@mattblaze @skinnylatte I got an original X100 before they suddenly became a hot commodity (so as often with my used purchases, I made money off it). The IQ you get with newer phones is good enough that it's hard to justify a digital camera with a small sensor area for me personally. I loved the feel and aesthetics of it though.

atomicpoet, to random
@atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org avatar

Nowadays, nobody blinks an eye at vinyl making a comeback. Vinyl actually outsells CDs. It now accounts for 8% of the music industry’s revenue.

But is that a good thing?

Well, it’s good for record stores. So long as vinyl keeps local record stores open, that’s definitely a good thing. And I appreciate that vinyl, in its roundabout way, keeps interest in all other physical media alive.

The only video rental store in my town, Video Cat, now sells vinyl. If vinyl helps keep them open, I’m happy. Case closed.

But… I still think vinyl’s supposed superiority over everything else is tantamount to snake oil.

Once you hear an open reel tape running at 7½ IPS and above, you become well aware of vinyl’s limitations. To me, as far as analog media is concerned, that’s the high watermark. And who else agrees with me here?

The music industry. If they’re going analog, it will be on open reel tape. And this has been the case since for more than 75 years.

But it gets better. Digital enthusiasts will talk about the virtues of CD audio, and they’re right. In terms of audio, CDs are damn good.

We can get better, though.

The best musical format I’ve ever heard are Super Audio CDs. Unlike CDs, they don’t use pulse-code modulation to convert analog into digital. Instead, they use pulse-density modulation encoding with 1-bit values sampling at 2.8224 MHz.

This doesn’t make much of a difference when you’re hearing from a basic stereo set-up. However, if you happen to have a 5.1 channel surround sound home theatre, then Super Audio CDs are phenomenal.

Now you’re not just hearing music in front of you. You’re immersed in sound. I’ve heard classical music on Super Audio CD where it literally feels like you’re present in the orchestra pit. That’s how good it is.

Of course, you can get even better sound if you got to your local movie theatre. But let’s be honest. Most of us will never own a personal IMAX system.

thomasjwebb,
@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

@atomicpoet I've made similar points before except I think we can do even better and invent new analog formats that don't wear out like CDs and tape do. Laser discs are actually an analog format with the durability of optical media and even had an analog track early on before they switched to using CD audio for the audio track. And we can use newer laser technology to get that fidelity out to outer space.

https://mastodon.social/@thomasjwebb/112219397349854428

thomasjwebb,
@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

@atomicpoet yeah I never got into them except when I was in kindergarten the class used a laserdisc player for something and I was amazed by that. I just thought they somehow fit a movie on a regular record. I was also surprised when I first found out that it's an analog format. Apparently CDs were also almost going to be analog before they made improvements to DACs in time to make 16-bit feasible.

thomasjwebb,
@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

@atomicpoet yeah having lived through the CD era, it's easy for me to shit on them because they had ample opportunity to give me grief (as did tapes). But just like we squeezed more out of tape with Dolby S, they also squeezed more out of CD-quality audio with noise shaping. Really, in most cases it's the overall audio setup that's the bottleneck, not the limitations of CDs or CD-quality audio itself. There's a reason it's still popular in Japan.

atomicpoet, to random
@atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org avatar

Vinyl is fine. My kid really loves it.

But I love tape even more. By that, I mean both open reel tape and cassette.

I have a Panasonic open reel deck, and it’s incredible. It’s blows vinyl out of the water, and is actually better than CDs. Even people who aren’t into HiFi agree with me on this.

But on my bucket list is a cassette deck with Dolby S. That, right there, is the height of analog audio tech as far as I’m concerned.

thomasjwebb,
@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

@atomicpoet one thing that's surprisingly good is the audio tracks on HD-VHS. Not that that ever took off as a media for distributing music. One advantage tape has over vinyl is in most cases the master was tape in the first place. Dolby S on metal is as good as cassette gets.

skinnylatte, to random
@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io avatar

As with all things soy in the west, I’m perplexed by the soy milk vs milk conversation.

Most of us in East / SE Asia drink soy AND dairy milk! (Same with tofu, which is often prepared with non-vegan products)

Soy is totally just its own beautiful

Also, homemade soy milks are very different from the weird stuff you get in western supermarket that are trying to imitate dairy. Look for a Chinese tofu shop that might also have fresh soy milk.

In SF try the ones at Hai Ky or Thai Nghiep

thomasjwebb,
@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

@skinnylatte almond milk was popular in medieval European cuisine and was often mixed with dairy milk. Somehow it fell out of favor at some point but horchata comes from that tradition. And often has dairy milk in it.

thomasjwebb, to random
@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

In some ways, the point of my web presence is to make myself unemployable to a certain kind of client. So in keeping with that, I think I'll keep my LinkedIn acct for now and just auto-crosspost from my tech account (@tjw) to there. One advantage is I don't have the psychological barrier of "I'm posting this on LI" stopping me from posting the thing I "shouldn't" on LI.

rechelon, to random
@rechelon@mastodon.social avatar

Oh my god he had a literal brain worm.

thomasjwebb,
@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

@rechelon what a time to be alive

dansup, to fediverse
@dansup@mastodon.social avatar

Anyone building a federated Stack Overflow?

#activityPub #stackOverflow

thomasjwebb,
@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

@dansup it seems like lemmy can be that with the right skin. We also really need a federated alternative to github. Gitea is partway there but thinking also about how github is sort of a linkedin for programmers.

thomasjwebb,
@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

@grishka @dansup what else is there other than gitea and codeberg?

juliaserano, to trans
@juliaserano@mastodon.social avatar

NEW ESSAY (building upon the last one): “Gender Ideology” Is a Conspiracy Theory – it displays all the hallmarks & I believe we should explicitly call it that. no paywall, please give it lots of "claps"!
https://juliaserano.medium.com/gender-ideology-is-a-conspiracy-theory-3cd8b837bb2b?sk=6ddb483e5b424b0ffacc1fae95be318a

thomasjwebb,
@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

@juliaserano I've been saying variants of this to friends for awhile. "Gender ideology" is such a sloppy-sounding, vague phrase. I didn't know where it came from but I could tell it was an exonym thrust upon an amorphous made-up enemy. And you put this in a much more articulate way than I ever have.

rodhilton, to random
@rodhilton@mastodon.social avatar

Dunno if some dipshit will call me posting this FUD again, a mere week after the last time I said it. But once again: if you build your business on top of anything offered by Google in virtually any way, you are in "fool me seventeen times" territory here. No company has indicated its disdain for the developer ecosystem to the degree Google systematically does.

Everything that doesn't pull the revenue of Ads is eventually killed, and nothing pulls the revenue of Ads.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/05/google-fit-apis-get-shut-down-in-2025-might-break-fitness-devices/

thomasjwebb,
@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

@rodhilton I hate it so much when perfectly good technology becomes trash because a service was turned off.

lanodan, to random
@lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me avatar

Camping.
screenshot_mpv:[SubsPlease] Yuru Camp S3 - 05 (720p) [6165F585]@00:10:18.660.jpg

thomasjwebb,
@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

@lanodan many of the fancy rice cookers are capable of some pressure cooking because that apparently makes for really good brown rice but I haven’t noticed many large standalone pressure cookers (caveat I don’t live in Japan but I spend about a month there every year and maybe the rural part of Japan I’m usually in doesn’t have as good of an appliance selection).

ZachWeinersmith, to random
@ZachWeinersmith@mastodon.social avatar

So there's a lot of kvetching, from myself included, about how the modern internet has gotten worse, usually due to a combination of SEO, social media gone evil, and the prevalence of money as more and more of a guiding factor in tech.

But of course the old internet had the problem of being fairly boring. The interesting question is how to get a third way. I've heard a few proposals:

thomasjwebb,
@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

@ZachWeinersmith there were a lot of things about the old internet I definitely hated at the time. The old forum admins were even less fair than social media managers. Trolls everywhere. And so many websites were IE-only or didn't properly support non-Latin languages. Open standards were often disregarded and important software was often Windows-only.

But this is all beside your point. One technological solution that would help a bit is AI to filter out repetitive and stolen content.

skinnylatte, to BelieveInFilm
@skinnylatte@hachyderm.io avatar

Gotta collect them all

(Freestyle photo in SoCal now carries Bellini’s ECN-2 chemicals. So now I have a mini lab at home where I can process, well, almost everything. All of these, and black and white in different chemicals as well)

Hard to believe that a year ago I didn’t know how to do any of this and now I have strong opinions and brand and product preferences on all of it

thomasjwebb,
@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

@skinnylatte I’ve been afraid of getting into processing my own color but everyone tells me it’s not that much harder than mono.

Aknorals, to random
@Aknorals@mastodon.social avatar

My Hobby: Finding out the oldest age "input your age" is for various sites.

A few won't let you be born before 1920, but Steam/Valve lets you be born in 1900! So old~

thomasjwebb,
@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

@Aknorals this makes me wonder if future life extension tech will break legacy software that remains in use (if it bounds by age rather than earliest date born). Or who knows, maybe there are already subtle bugs for 3-digit lifespans but it happens rarely enough to not be noticeable or something.

lzg, to random
@lzg@mastodon.social avatar

deleted_by_author

    •
    thomasjwebb,
    @thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

    @lzg I think about posts like "normalize..." that should read "I, personally, need to get in the habit of" or "I'm personally peeved by this interaction I had." Or anything that tries to turn I into the royal we.

    thomasjwebb,
    @thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

    @lzg it's a weird sort of timidity on the part of overly bold people. Like they don't want to be seen as talking about themselves too much but it's way worse to talk about yourself and try to make it look like you're talking about everything. As though the whole universe is contained in you, some limousine liberal who gets paid for your half-baked opinions.

    sundogplanets, (edited ) to random
    @sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

    Quick poll: off the top of your head, without searching online, do you know what "Kessler Syndrome" is?

    thomasjwebb,
    @thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

    @sundogplanets nothing makes me think that I absorbed a nonsense idea more than seeing that the actual experts aren't even aware of it, lol.

    thomasjwebb, to random
    @thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

    One argument I really hate seeing against blocklists is that it disproportionately targets marginalized people. Not because I don't think it could be true, but because it fundamentally misunderstands what harassment is.

    Having people swarm your mentions with abusive comments is a million times worse than being ignored. No one has a right to interaction. If bigots stuck with blocking the people they hate, that would be a massive improvement over what they actually do.

    ryanhoulihan, to random
    @ryanhoulihan@mastodon.social avatar

    It’s not that I don’t feel the social pressure to join Spotify. I just get Apple Music for free! 😭

    thomasjwebb,
    @thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

    @ryanhoulihan Apple Music has better audio quality anyway

    danilo, (edited ) to random
    @danilo@hachyderm.io avatar

    best no name drugstore candy

    thomasjwebb,
    @thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

    @danilo the problem is your selection forced it to compete with lemon drops. Both are sweet and sour whereas in this list the peppermint puffs have their own niche.

    thomasjwebb, to random
    @thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

    I remember when it was common wisdom that of course vinyl is better than CD but a big part of why we thought that was CD hadn't yet reached its potential - the mastering was shit. Lately it seems to have inverted, for similar reasons - people are listening to vinyls of new music that wasn't mastered right for the format and playing with bad equipment.

    Anyway, analog can do better than vinyl and digital can do better than CD. A new optical analog format would be awesome.

    skinnylatte, to coffee
    @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io avatar

    Although I love ‘good coffee’ I also love bad and in between and mediocre coffee. I actually love all coffee

    https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/02/magazine/instant-coffee-benefits.html

    thomasjwebb,
    @thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

    @skinnylatte Does Trung Nguyen pale in comparison to what can be had in SE Asia? I can even find them in Asian markets nearby. They used to grow a naturally half-caff coffee that I'd mail order from them.

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