Does “ужасшоу” sound kind of like “asshole”?

Upvoted. It is literally impossible for 99.99% of the population to tell the difference between a good LAME mp3 encode and the original. If someone is working with the audio, making their own remixes and such, they can benefit from lossless/higher bit depth/higher sample rate though.

There were shitty mp3 encoders like Blade in the past (planted by the music industry?) that are easy to hear a difference, and if dealing with files from an unknown source one can only make an educated guess with a spectrogram as to the files’ lineage. Example: Was it a Blade mp3 from Napster burned to audio CD that some moron ripped and posted as flac?

Source: old Hydrogenaudio forums and personally been Exact Audio Copying to flac for over 20 years. Had (modded? custom? can’t recall) Envy24 drivers on WinXP for bit-perfect S/PDIF output of “bit-perfect” CD rips. It was overkill but fairly easy to get the digital part perfect, then the analog part can be subjective… never used special stones, or coat hangers as speaker wire. 🤣

I almost wish I hadn’t looked; knew my area had paper mills and wood processing, they’ve been dredging the waterways for PCBs (chlorinated organics) for decades.

I work with electronics and have heard from multiple older gentleman that when they were young, they saw old high-voltage transformers from power poles being replaced which would be leaking off the backs of the trucks until empty or even purposely tipped into the storm drains. Why is healthcare so expensive? 🤔

No apologies for being politics-adjacent in the Gaming community, billionaires aren’t keeping their hands out of anything either. Keep rewarding Valve and the good companies and shitting on the bad ones!

Nah. News… Uh, in an adjacent saga, billionaire Kanye West is selling swastika t-shirts. So that’s where we’re at with these people…

Hear, hear. It fucking sucks that we created these monsters. At least I did, for simply wanting to use eBay.

Now you got me started on X… 😂 While true, Musk is no fool and bought such a simple and recognizable domain back from PayPal in 2017 for an undisclosed amount.

He’s a successful businessman, no doubt. Problem is that billionaires are pulling up the ladders behind them as wealth inequality is increasing (power is concentrating).

Twitter was well-known to be infested with bots when Musk purchased it. Turns out, that made it more valuable to someone rich who wants to sway elections…

Shop local, use smaller local services (credit unions), drop services owned by or purchased by billionaires (Too busy ranting and I haven’t actually read this article yet 🤣)

Decentralization, power to the people and not just the few, as the founding fathers intended. To our European viewers… He’s coming. (You know who. Not talking about Jesus who the churches have replaced with culture war nonsense.)

It’s an early specimen of “unregulated bank”, founded in part by Trump buddy Peter Thiel and merged with Elon Musk’s X.com in 2000.

They have a history of locking accounts under false pretenses and seizing the money. It’s screwed over many a Kickstarter and Indiegogo. Early in Minecraft history, Notch lost access to over half a million dollars. They’ve failed to pay rewards in their software bug bounty program.

Edit: The usual antics for Musk and friends for 20 years.

Also, I checked my records. I’m biased (a word that the current US administration is erasing from all government documents) because of an early Amazon third-party seller plus PayPal experience; the item I was sent was wrong and 5% of the value of what I ordered. Returned sealed cheap item, seller wouldn’t refund. PayPal ruled in the seller’s favor and Amazon did not care because of third-party seller terms and conditions. A young person out a few hundred bucks doesn’t forget that.

Braintree, Honey, Paydiant, Tradera, Xoom, and Zettle all owned by PayPal.

Valve applying a bit of regulation (the right way) and still making piles of money, weird how that works.

I’ve been saying for years that if we want healthy economies, compare to human health. When the factors keeping growth at a controlled rate are disrupted, you end up with cancer.

Rant is related although covering hardware manufacturing rather than software:

Commodore manufactured in the USA and Europe some of the best-selling personal computers ever under lack of regulation. When the market became dominated by IBM-compatibles and Macintoshes, Commodore folded and left Superfund sites all over. (Superfund is basically EPA disaster declaration allowing for taxpayer funds release for large-scale cleanup operations.) Privatize the profits and socialize the losses. (lack of regulation led to the wrong way)

Yet, somehow Google Glass was reason to beat up its nosy users.

We’re at the point that trans people get arrested for being in either bathroom.

The US right-wing was constantly bitching about “cancel culture” and now that they are in power they are cancelling everything they can.

pouet.net is the demoscene Smithsonian. Feels good running the good stuff on real hardware that I’ve accumulated from thrift stores, rummage sales, and Craigslist (remember that?) over the years.

The longer that friends stay over, the more hardware I pull out, and they get subjected to the likes of Eon by The Black Lotus on Amiga 500 and Area 5150 by CRTC & Hornet on IBM 5160. I think they got 1,000 composite video colors out of the original IBM CGA Graphics Card and sampled music playing through the PC speaker on a 4.77MHz i8088. 😂

I should start a computer museum but I have no money and I don’t think there’s any money in it. I’ve considered doing an event at my local downtown old-timey theater that reopened several years back… They will rent it out for stuff like that.

I love showing people scene demos running on my PAL C64, then seeing their reaction when I tell them that the CPU clock is 985 kiloHertz.

There’s too many good ones but the most famous may be Edge of Disgrace by Booze Design in 2008.