Linux nerd. Music lover. Specialty coffee obsessed. The list goes on; stop using so many gosh darn periods!

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: February 19th, 2024

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  • Thank you!

    I suspect you haven’t missed anything and the audio tracks provided have been either inadvertently or deliberately manipulated by some other factor unrelated to the RCA cables.

    This is very, very possible, especially given that the measurements were hardly taken scientifically or with video evidence. And that suspicious pre-amp…

    Apart from something extraordinarily badly designed, broken or dirty, there is no plausible reason why a cable carrying a signal with no significant current and no high frequency components can have any effect on that signal - high frequency audio is approximately DC in the wider scope of Electronics Engineering.

    This has been and still is my understanding, but the video just freaked me out a little, as it makes very tall claims about it’s magical measurements. But it’s good to get the reality confirmed by an expert, thank you!

    That answer doesn’t suite people trying to get rich selling ridiculous cables though.

    Yeah, I’m still a little in shock that the weird cable costs $200… how can people take that seriously when cables for $5 sound identifical in blind testing??





  • Gesaffelstein is hardly a pop culture figure, though; I don’t think many gen-z kids know him. But he’s an absolute icon of the 2010s dark techno scene.

    The Conspiracy singles were legendary. My Conspiracy Pt. 1 record has a More Cowbell joke on it, which I love. Weird record though, it’s 33 1/3 on one side and 45 on the other. And it doesn’t say that anywhere on the record, so it took me years before realizing I was listening to a slowed down Hatred. I kinda love the slowed down version, funny how that happens :P



  • I am a small indie artist. I earn nearly no money from streaming services, but I do from Bandcamp, SoundCloud (though fuck Soundcloud, they also suck), actual LPs and CDs sold, etc.

    If someone decides to listen to my music over Spotify, or really any streaming service, they are also “stealing” my music. Because I get no money from that, and listening to my music over those platforms strengthens their monopoly (this mostly applies to Spotify).

    I need to publish my music on Spotify et al (fuck you discogs) for discoverability, because they have an evil fucking global monopoly, but the moment anyone finds my music there, I would ask them to listen to it elsewhere.

    It will literally benefit me, and indie artist, more, if you bootleg my music instead of listening via streaming services, as this weakens their monopoly. Seriously.

    I have a different job, I don’t need to live from my music right now, so the stakes are fairly low for me. But it still sucks to see streaming services ruin independent music like this. I would ask everyone to bootleg music, and then support artists like me through Bandcamp (especially CDs and LPs) and donations (or merch, though I don’t have any), if you appreciate the art.

    I don’t expect anyone to immediately buy niche music they don’t know, so bootlegging until you become a fan seems reasonable to me. I’ve discovered many of my favorite albums like that, eventually buying LPs online and donating to the artist; that is far more beneficial to those artists than listening over any streaming service (including the slightly better tidal and Amazon music).

    /rant over



  • I don’t think this is accurate. The majority of IRL gamers I know are casual people with crappy Minecraft-level pre-builts (hugely overpriced usually; I know someone who spent 1.1k on a 3060 Ti pre-built) or 10 year-old computers built by their neighbors. A lot of casual gamers exist and the steam machine will be very appealing to them as an easy upgrade.

    In a way, you’re right. A lot of people will be upgrading potatoes. Or replacing thin air next to their TV’s.

    Even I, with a custom built with a 7900 XT running openSUSE TW, am considering this for doing stuff in the living room (or similar, I live in a tiny apartment lol) with friends or just casual-TV gaming and media. I don’t have that right now, and even 900€ sounds appealing for doing that with a Linux-based computer (and gamescope!!!, which I can’t get working on my device) I have full control over, but know will work.

    I don’t know of something equivalently priced, but it there is something, please tell me. I think they have a market here. I personally, at least, have been waiting years for something like this to recommend to friends and to an extent to myself.


  • Research and development is probably very high when you consider Proton, SteamOS, and the semi-custom CPU and GPU. Something between $50 to $100 million would be typical. Silicone is famously expensive in R&D, Proton has continuous costs (and has for quite a while now) that rack up, and SteamOS is literally an operating system. That’s a lot of salaries to pay.

    I reckon they’re taking advantage of being private and playing the long game. Very, very long game. They’re not really in danger as long as Steam is successful, but I can’t blame them for wanting a decent gross margin so they can at least cover hardware costs. Especially with memory prices right now, I wouldn’t be surprised at 1000€ here in Germany, though I wouldn’t be happy about it. I would happily buy at 900€ (≈$1040), and be ecstatic at 800€ (≈$920).



  • The question is rather What is “reality”: the dream (et al.) or the physical world (what you describe as reality). See Descartes first two meditations (and note that he relies fully on the existence of God to prove the existence of reality later). In this case, us experiencing a “dream” just serves to outline the point; Descartes, for example, also suggests that we are being fooled by an evil daemon. If it’s a dream or an evil daemon — doesn’t matter; it would likely be something entirely beyond our comprehension anyway. But genuinely proving the physical world as being reality is very difficult.




  • I have a friend who was born and raised in China, and move to Europe when they were 16 yo. They’re first language was basically Chinese, despite having an American and German parent respectively.

    I was always super curious about what their time in China was like, and asked extensively about it. Of course they were quite biased in favor of China, so things like the crazy surveillance that goes on there never really seemed dubios to them, but one thing they mentioned very frequently: discrimination.

    I should say, this individual did not look Chinese (and couldn’t get a Chinese passport, despite being born there). This — according to them, and I am inclined to believe this, due to the aforementioned bias — caused them to be intensely discriminated against, as a lot of Chinese people apparently don’t like Westerners (well, a lot of Westerners also discriminate against Chinese).

    Your mileage may vary, but that did always surprise me. If you look non-asian, China might not be the best place to move to 🤷.