Übercomplicated

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

Em dashes are considered informal, I have had several professors scold me for using them in academic writing. Like contractions.

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).

I did the tidal ABX test, which I prefer since it’s comparing FLAC, and the difference is almost negligible. I do hear a slight difference >15k, and I can only year up to 18.5k, but on most tracks it’s not noticeable. Also slightly worse transients, but again, only noticable on a few tracks. I also can only hear any of this on HD600s with very, very high volume, which is not how I usually listen to music. I really like this test :)

Lossless is still nice to have though, mostly because I can then rip FLAC files to do good remasters, which is why I happily use tidal (also for a number of other reasons).

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.

The 7900XTX has 24 gigabytes of video memory vs. the 3080 Ti’s 12. That’s a big difference…

Here’s a couple Linux benchmarks by phoronix (don’t take this as literal game performance, rather as relative performance between different cards): https://www.phoronix.com/review/rx7900xt-rx7900xtx-linux/6.

As you can see, the 7900XTX performs much better.

This is kinda genius

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 🤷.

You wouldn’t mind elaborating on “of course things are so simple”? It feels like an awfully vague answer…

I’m pretty sure clap is completely cross platform, which is pretty cool. But the infamous VST is unfortunately not; you need to create separate Linux and Windows VSTs :(

Lol, there’s even a warning. The first one I saw was fucking hilarious, thanks for the recommendation!

Scared to click, someone pls provide context

Dyslexia strikes again…

You’re right, I wasn’t really being sarcastic. Configuring neovim (or really anything) for exceedingly long times is fun!

Whaaaaaaaat!?! Nonsense! Sacrilege! I love spending 8 hours at a time reconfiguring neovim from scratch to get full LSP support and 20 millisecond start-up times! Who wouldn’t love doing that!?!!!??!!?! (/hj)

Edit: half-joking (/hj), not sarcastic (/s).

For the record, installing Windows in a VM and getting it to work can be a real pain in the ass. Just a little warning: don’t expect VM-Windows to be easy!

Bitlocker many meanings: in this case, it just refers to your disk encryption, and not the pro feature. Duel Dual boot can be a pain. I wish you good luck!

He’s likely referring to Ubuntu (OS), and not Linux (Kernel) in general.

Boot times. I am the kind of person who shuts my computer (may it be a laptop or desktop) down, whenever I’m not using it. With systemD, boot times are generally kind of annoying; runit, however, completely changes this. It really feels amazing to turn a Void Linux system on, and have it boot in seconds, with just one screen of logs. On top of that, if you’re doing a arch-style install (like the Void Linux minimal install), runit is just much nicer and more ergonomic. The main point is really boot time though, which I think is improved due to adhering to the Unix philosophy and having much less bloat. Using a runit system reminds you of how bloated and slow (and kinda convoluted) systemD is.

I’m also the kinda guy who spends hours optimizing my neovim config (~80 plugins, including LSP) for 20 millisecond start-up times. In the end, I still use Tumbleweed though.