Linux gamer, retired aviator, profanity enthusiast

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • Another is fstab. You’ll often be told to go edit that by hand, often in the terminal. Adding a drive to an existing system and mounting it as part of the file system is a task an ordinary computer user would want to do.

    I’m thinking about a gamer switching to Linux, and then saying something like “I wanna hook up my 5.1 speakers” or “I’m gonna buy a new SSD and add it to my existing system so I have room for more games.”

    I’m not a proponent of making EVERYTHING a GUI setting because not even Microsoft does that but there are still some splintery edges in places people will actually touch that could use some sanding.



  • CDs can, by a very narrow margin, reproduce sounds beyond which the human ear can detect. There’s a theorem that states you can perfectly reproduce a waveform by sampling if the bitrate is double the maximum frequency or something like that, and CDs use a bitrate such that it can produce just above the human hearing range. You can’t record an ultrasonic dog whistle on a CD, it won’t work.

    It’s functionally impossible to improve on “red book” CD Digital Audio quality because it can perfectly replicate any waveform that has been band-passed filtered to 20,000 Hz or thereabouts. Maybe you can talk about dynamic range or multi-channel (CDs are exactly stereo. No mono, no 5.1 surround…Stereo.) It’s why there really hasn’t been a new disc format; no one needs one. It was as good as the human ear can do in the early 80’s and still is.



  • Not quite as many leading experts in their field.

    The braintrust is starting to build, we can now have a whatisthisthing community, but you still don’t get to say “exoornithological engineers of Lemmy, in your opinion…”

    If you’re used to the weird wackos being the gay hating bible thumping gun fucking Republicans, they’re basically not present here. They’re replaced with the “Mao did nothing wrong” crowd.

    There is less bandwagon posting here. “this” chains and so forth.

    Cross-posting or doing !example@whatever.lol doesn’t happen as often as it did on Reddit.

    Oh here’s a big cultural difference: Lemmy mods tend not to be as anal about their community formats as Reddit mods are. I got a 14 day ban from r/whatisthisthing for telling an anecdote related to the thing in question, because it wasn’t STRICTLY about identifying what the thing was. “Which community is this, what are the norms, what is the expected format etc” is not as much of a concern here. Lemmy communities aren’t art projects.

    No one here is important or official. There are no video game community managers or anything like that here. Lemmy is not used for interacting with anyone other than fellow idle nerds.











  • At some point I’m not averse to advertising. I’m fine with Burger King having signs on their buildings.

    My water bill comes with a one page flyer from the town every month which announces things like planned road construction, the obligatory “as we enter [whatever] season, remember that it probably presents a fire hazard somehow” from the fire department (seriously I’m surprised they didn’t warn against knocking candles over during Valentine’s Day fucking) and a list of events that the town library, community college and other such organizations are putting on open to the public.

    I see a place or even a need for a similar platform that operates at a national or global scale.

    I’m reminded of the Bloody Board, which if I understand the story correctly was a Buffy The Vampire Slayer fan site whose owner was kind of misusing a forum engine as an announcement board, so if you didn’t know that bit of context it looked like someone going completely insane. A writer for Cracked.com didn’t know that bit of context, and wrote an article about how someone was apparently going completely insane, and Cracked’s audience took that at face value and basically broke it. Having a Twitter account, or a Mastodon account, that does the same thing, posting about a TV show (quotes, memorable scenes, interviews with cast and crew, appearances at conventions and stuff, fan meet and greets etc) would seem perfectly normal.

    The thing I’m envisioning might be closer to an RSS feed except it’s a platform.






  • Yes. People get scammed for millions this way.

    A newer scam does an end-around the normal sniff tests. They don’t ask you to give htem money, they strike up a pretty genuine friendship, they have details that check out, so it feels like you’ve just made an actual friend. They’ll talk to you for months. And then they’ll mention that they’ve been making a lot of money on this cool new investment. Well you want to make a lot of money on an investment too, so you ask how, and they tell you how to download an app from the app store, which is supposed to be a safe place, and walk you through “investing” money in some crypto or whatever. Which of course is the payout.