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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • For tracks I’m familiar with and play often, I can usually tell the difference between 128kbps and 192kbps on an MP3. In very rare cases, with the right song and the right earphones, I can discern 192kpbs MP3 from 256kbps. But I definitely can’t tell a 256kbps MP3 from FLAC. The Wikipedia article on audio transparency says that MP3 becomes transparent on average around 240kbps.

    I’ve recently started using the Opus codec. It is higher quality at lower bitrates than MP3. Opus is considered transparent on average at around 160-192kbps.

    Personally, I’ve been re-encoding all my FLACs to 192kbps OPUS for storing on my smartphone where space is limited.





  • No. This makes no sense. Are you seriously saying if you saw an order for 18,000 waters pop up on your monitor you’d just say “that’s fine” then spend the next three days straight filling cups?

    If I were the manager of the store, I’d hope my employees would have the bare minimum critical thinking skill to ask someone first.

    At the store I worked in, everyone would be given at least 12 hours notice of a catering order. We’d have everything prepped ready to go, and expect the order when it arrives. If one popped up without notice it’s definitely a bug, and we’re definitely not making it.




  • Yeah, I grew up in the 90s where schools and offices had physical filing cabinets full of folders and files. And in the late 90s when learning computers at school those same concepts were reinforced in the computer file system. So files and folders within the context of using a computer is ingrained and seems obvious to me.

    But kids these days are born with iPads in their hand, they use Chromebooks in primary school, and all their files are automatically saved to the cloud and immediately available on all their devices. How would they ever learn the concepts of filesystems? It’s not taught at school. It’s not relevant to anything they do.

    It used to make me so frustrated (it’s a simple concept!) but now I get it. Maybe it’s not as obvious a paradigm as we thought. Maybe there are better ways of organising files (eg, tagging, keywords, filtering) that are more human. Or using namespacing (ns prefixes, curies). Or even using non-local universal identifiers (ipfs locators). It makes me wonder if we might eventually even move away from hierarchical-directory based filesystems at the system level too.


  • Came here to say this. My workplace used to offer a Linux workstation option (which I opted in for 9 years), but they had to remove that option to fulfill new security and management, compliance standards. They need to be able to manage exactly which applications are installed on a system, which binaries are allowed to run and when, the exact settings for every application, the exact version of the OS and the specific updates, and precisely when updates are installed. All of this needs to be applied based on the user, their organisational division, their security groups, clearance level, specific model of device, etc.

    I know that using a combination of Selinux, Kerberos, and something like Puppet can get you close in the Linux world, but Microsoft group policy has been around for 30 years and is well understood and just works.



  • Man, you’re basically saying “I want to move to a new country, but I don’t want to lose any of my friends, I can’t change my job, I don’t want to learn a new language, I want to bring all my furniture and appliances with me, and we just had a new baby a month ago so I’m sleep deprived and don’t have any spare time. How do I do it?”





  • I generally prefer native local applications wherever possible, and for a long time I was against the movement to web based tools. That is until one thing changed. I moved to a different department at work. In this different department, I am issued with a Windows 11 laptop that is extremely locked down. It cannot run any executables aside from those whitelisted. I cannot run anything as administrator. If I need anything new whitelisted, I need to write a full page justification, get an endorsement from my manager, and then it can take over a year to get approved (but most likely will be immediately denied).

    Obviously one thing it can run is MS Edge. All of the company tools and systems are webapps on the intranet, accessed via Edge. Now I’m grateful there are so many high quality browser based webapps around.


  • Same. People age quite differently. I didn’t start puberty until I was 16. I didn’t get attracted to girls until I was 17. Much later than my friends.

    I got a job at a pizza shop when I was 20, and I made friends with the 15+16yo employees there, I got along much better with them than people my own age. I can see how that’s was potentially creepy, looking back on it, but it seemed normal enough at the time, those people were my good friends.

    I matured very slowly. I didn’t graduate uni until I was 29. I’m now 39, physically I look like I’m 30, mentally and psychologically I feel like I’m 30.