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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Spotify and other such services almost certainly sound worse because they are compressed. But it’s not really a like for like comparison with vinyl. Spotify is streaming audio for people who want to play music casually in cars, earbuds etc. It offers convenience, not perfect sound fidelity. FLAC / CD on the other hand could be compared to vinyl and would win hands down for better frequency and range. The only reason they wouldn’t is if the CD master sucked and the vinyl master didn’t.

    And vinyl is very lossy in its own way. The (digital) master of each side undergoes dynamic range & frequency compression to fit the limitations of the format (e.g. to reduce sibilance, track width). Then the master is cut into a lacquer disc from which a “father” is made, from which “mothers” are made, from which stampers are made and from which the vinyl record is made. So the vinyl in someone’s hand is a copy, of a copy, of a copy, of an altered digital master. The stamper too wears out so if someone is unlucky they get a pressing right the end of its life. And playing the disk can cause wow, flutter, distortion and general wear & tear can cause hiss, pop, dullness and scratches.

    So vinyl will never sound better unless it received a better master than other formats.



  • I had the misfortune to have some PLA snap just before and after the direct drive in my Bambu P1S and it took ages to get it out. I think age and moisture can affect filament, especially it blended with wood dust, sparkles or something which undermines it even further. I’ve resorted to packing my AMS with silica beads to hopefully mitigate for the issue and I threw out the filament that caused the issue. Ironically this is one of the few places a bowden extruder is any benefit - if the filament snaps just push it from behind through a heated nozzle until the blockage clears.


  • If a server were an obvious conduit for disinfo then other servers could defederate from it. But if it was different accounts on different servers mixed in with authentic users then it’s almost impossible to remove. What tools does mastodon / lemmy even provide to spot inauthentic behaviour? And because we’re talking different servers run in different ways there is no clear picture from above that can be formed in the same way that a centralized social media platform might have - identifying suspicious clusters of nodes or traffic.

    As for federation’s future we’ll wait and see. Both bluesky and threads are talking of providing federation protocols - threads using activitypub and bluesky it’s own API. As for Mastodon & Lemmy I see a lot of positive interest in these things. The fact we’re commenting on Lemmy instead of Reddit says a lot.



  • All large news orgs and NGOs need to do the same - federate their server which becomes the source of truth, and then mirror the content over other social media which is not federated. This may or may not include Twitter. I imagine that over time having news and reporting across social media will diminish any advantage Twitter possesses and then news orgs / NGOs might decide if they want their content on a platform like Twitter that cannot be bothered with things like stamping out bots, trolls, inauthentic actors, or supporting a free and fair press.


  • If you look at any modern desktop application, e.g. those built over GTK or QT, then they’re basically rendering stuff into a pixmap and pushing it over the wire. All of the drawing primitives made X11 efficient once upon a time are useless, obsolete junk, completely inadequate for a modern experience. Instead, X11 is pushing big fat pixmaps around and it is not efficient at all.

    So I doubt it makes any difference to bandwidth except in a positive sense. I bet if you ran a Wayland desktop over RDP it would be more efficient than X11 forwarding. Not familiar with waypipe but it seems more like a proxy between a server and a client so it’s probably more dependent on the client’s use/abuse of calls to the server than RDP is when implemented by a server.




  • tar was originally was for tape archiving so it’s just a stream of headers and files which end up directed to a file or a device. It’s not well ordered, just whatever file happens to be found next is the next in the stream. When you compress the tar this stream it’s just piped through gzip or bzip2 on its way.

    The tradeoff for compressing this way is if you want to list the contents of the tar then you essentially have to decompress and stream through the whole thing to see what’s in it unlike a .zip or .7z where there would be a separate index at the end which can be read far more easily.


  • arc@lemm.eetoLinux@lemmy.mlHow to write a 'tar' command
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    10 months ago

    I know the basics off by heart. Not the hardest command syntax to learn all things considered.

    The most annoying would be the growing collection of “uber commands” which are much more of a pain in the ass - aws, systemctl, docker, kubectl, npm, cargo, etc. - the executable has potentially dozens of subcommands, each of which has dozens of parameters.