@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

thomasjwebb

@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social

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

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

mekkaokereke, to random
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io avatar

Rest in Power Shafiqah Hudson.
https://www.netrootsnation.org/profile/shafiqah-hudson/

Shafiqah, known online as SassyCrass, was a brilliant teacher, writer, and Black feminist that we owe so much to.

We talk a lot about how online disinfo campaigns from Gamergate to the Alt-right to Moscow's Internet Research Agency, target the Black community. But the Black community doesn't fall for it. "Famous security researchers" often pretend that they first found these disinfo networks, but they didn't.

https://slate.com/technology/2019/04/black-feminists-alt-right-twitter-gamergate.html

thomasjwebb,
@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

@mekkaokereke my wife was very confused by the "be like" meme format. She's not a native English speaker. I think to many of us nonblack native English speakers, we get confused and think that AAVE is doing cartoon pirate speak (collapsing all copulas to "be" which actual West Country wouldn't do either) so it didn't occur to me that ESL people would interpret the "be" as a command, which makes the memes even more confusing. So I actually brought up the cookie monster example to explain it.

dansup, to fediverse
@dansup@mastodon.social avatar

Anyone building a federated Stack Overflow?

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, to random
@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

Elon Musk and Taylor Swift can kick and scream all they want, but flight info is public information and it is your right to access it. The electromagnetic waves are beaming through your skulls as we speak! These are all public flights but I've seen private ones as well by listening in using my $20 RTL-SDR.

BlackAzizAnansi, to random
@BlackAzizAnansi@mas.to avatar

Drop one of your family secrets.

thomasjwebb,
@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

@BlackAzizAnansi oh shit I got a better one. One aunt of mine got pregnant as a teenager (unfortunately common that side of the family) and abandoned her newborn baby in a shopping cart. It was in the news when this happened. That person is still alive. Not the same side of the family as the mafiosi.

thomasjwebb,
@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

@BlackAzizAnansi I’m related to the biggest mob snitch in history (Tumac).

thomasjwebb, to random
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"...Myanmar’s military had murdered thousands of Rohingya people, including babies and children, and beaten, raped, tortured, starved, and imprisoned thousands more. About three-quarters of a million Rohingya had fled Myanmar to live in huge, disease-infested refugee camps in Bangladesh.

And Meta?

By that point, Meta had been receiving detailed and increasingly desperate warnings about Facebook’s role as an accelerant of genocidal propaganda in Myanmar for six years."

https://erinkissane.com/meta-in-myanmar-part-i-the-setup

thomasjwebb, to BelieveInFilm Japanese
@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

Damn Harman is getting into making color film.

https://kosmofoto.com/2023/12/harman-new-film-announcement/

thomasjwebb, to fediverse
@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

One thing cool about the progress of the plugin for is for haxians, that will mean that not only can one of the main communities (https://community.haxe.org/) interact with the broader Fediverse, but it could after some improvements to the plugin, hook up with any other Discourse-based forums, like https://community.openfl.org/.

thomasjwebb, to random
@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

Innocence is a red herring. Most people kind of suck and they also deserve to live. What applies with police brutality also applies with terrorism and war crimes.

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.

thomasjwebb, to random
@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

In this house, the REAL Christmas movie is Tokyo Godfathers

thomasjwebb, to random
@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

Ohio shows that the overt trans-obsessed right doesn't sell well to the public, but this murky space of same shit under a different name might. Singal, et al. created this incoherent messaging out of thin air and it's important to ensure the public understands it's the same pro-conversion therapy nonsense that they recoil from when it's spewed by religious right windbags.

thomasjwebb, to random
@thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

He was a womanizer. Turning things into women. His cat, his vacuum cleaner, his male best friend, himself. All women now. She needs to be stopped before she womanizes every last novelty hot sauce bottle in this truck stop.

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.

flockofnazguls, to random
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    thomasjwebb,
    @thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

    @flockofnazguls I used that for one of my websites and might use it for another. I kinda hybridized it with jekyll to get more features.

    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.

    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

    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.

    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

    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 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 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 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.

    foone, to random
    @foone@digipres.club avatar

    excited to announce a 20 billion dollar investment from the state of california into research into room-temperature semiconductors

    thomasjwebb,
    @thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

    @foone @spacehobo "That's when I came up with that joke. When I saw it on xkcd"
    -Grandpa Simpson

    flockofnazguls, to random
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    thomasjwebb,
    @thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

    @flockofnazguls does any part of that movie actually take place in the IE?

    flockofnazguls, to random
    @flockofnazguls@mastodon.flockofnazguls.com avatar

    deleted_by_author

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    thomasjwebb,
    @thomasjwebb@mastodon.social avatar

    @flockofnazguls sinsy and utau come to mind for oss. You might need to transcribe non-Japanese to katakana in some cases. Festival also has a singing mode and you might need to e-mail someone (maybe Alan Black?) to get that code. I can help you with that if you want since I had to do a project using that ages ago.

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