People generally remember storms this big for the rest of their lives.

I truly think this will be a status quo shattering storm. Ever since “covid ended” the US has been in this state of extreme suffocating denial dialed up to 11 about the future and consquences. We all returned to office (if we were lucky enough not to be deemed an essential worker and were able to quarantine at all) and just accepted society was too dysfunctional to treat our safety as valuable even at a basic and fundamental level. Liberals and centrists dont even try to convince me they arent full of shit anymore, they checked out (all my leftist and science friends on the otherhand are still fighting but they and people in general for that matter are real close to collapse).

Honestly I feel exactly like I am living in a nightmare and if there is any silver lining to this storm it might be from punching centrists in the face to get them to wake up from their shitty dreams that are quickly foreclosing our future. Not that I want this to happen or that people sufferring is good…

. . but oh my I cant take much more of this, this is the most suffocating and disonant period of US culture I have lived through it makes the Iraq war era US look grounded and sane in comparison, which makes me want to throw up just saying that.

Dear Lemmy and the fediverse as a whole.

Unless you have specifically read up about the labor rights of Luddites you really dont know what you are talking about when you throw the word Luddite around (I know I didn’t)

“[T]he Luddites did indeed understand the advantages which mechanization would bring,” Raymond Boudon, a sociologist at Paris-Sorbonne University, wrote in his Analysis of Ideology, citing the work of influential historian Lewis Coser. But “their machine-wrecking was an attempt to show the owners of the new textile mills that they were a force to be reckoned with, that they had a ‘nuisance value’. By acting in this way, their main objective was to gain concessions from the employers.”

The Luddites weren’t technophobes, then. They were labor strategists.

“This strategic interpretation of the Luddite movement is confirmed by the fact that the workers often destroyed only those machines which were turning out faulty goods,” Boudon wrote. “It was still true, of course, that a worker who went on strike could easily be replaced by somebody from the army of unemployed people willing to be strike-breakers, at a time when nascent trade-unionism was harshly suppressed. Since machine-breaking brought the factory to a halt, it was not only a functional substitute for striking, it was also much more effective.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/luddites-definition-wrong-labor-technophobe/

Except the Luddites didn’t hate machines either—they were gifted artisans resisting a capitalist takeover of the production process that would irreparably harm their communities, weaken their collective bargaining power, and reduce skilled workers to replaceable drones as mechanized as the machines themselves. Their struggle has been tragically warped into a caricature when it is more relevant than ever.

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2021/06/the-luddites-were-right

yeah definitely give it a go again and make sure to take the time to pick a decent reviewed one.

A bad bluetooth fm transmitter is a headache and a fiddly waste of time, a good one on the other hand works essentially just as good as an aux cord.

Great description, the thing most people get wrong about defending science and history is that they dont convey how fucking weird it really is.

Even if Mozilla/Firefox was at some point a healthy organization, the shear incredible disparity of power between Google and Mozilla/Firefox means that the probability that Mozilla/Firefox would remain a healthy, functional organization approaches zero over a long enough period of time.

This is a problem that needs legislative action to destroy Google’s incredible power and pseudo-monopoly control of search.

I am not saying Mozilla/Firefox isn’t toxic, but there a million ways that Mozilla/Firefox could end up a toxic entity and billions of dollars that are directly interested in that being the case so shrugs.

…but yeah I agree with you, Mozilla/Firefox definitely didnt turn into a shithole overnight, but until recently criticizing them has been very difficuly to do in a lot of circles.

Agreed, did you know the NYC subway system moves about the same order of magnitude per day as the entire continental US air travel networks does. All those planes flying back and forth between countless different airports… the subway beneath NYC moves more people.

I think this statistic both puts into context the incredible order of magnitude power of subways for mass transit, and also helps put in perspective how dangerous they really are based on scary content uploading that is happening within a single subway car… you gotta zoom your brain out to see the sea of perfectly boring subway cars transporting people to work and back every single day.

Ahh… I see you have met my dad, who decided only after I called him after having failed my suicide attempt to offer to take me back in after having kicked me out promptly at 18 and then only housed me for 2 months before driving me out to a random street corner and dropping me off saying he had lifted me back up enough for me to handle my own live because I was ruining his “vibe” while having a 3 bedroom house and a job that makes more than half a million a year.

A man who wouldn’t let me get a drivers license because I wasn’t allowed to touch one of his cars and needed to buy one on my own and figure out how to do it by 16 despite his first 3 cars being bought for him by his parents after he wrecked each previous one.

Seriously, when people say it is a distraction to blame generations and focus hatred on boomers I think it is a good reminder to keep the eye on the ball of extreme wealth inequality, but I think there is a really weird nut of truth in that generational hate in that wealthy, successful US boomers of a certain type really did completely abandon the “social contract” so to speak of passing the world on to their kids. Which wouldn’t be that weird if society was always like it, and I am sure the “upper middle class kids” of every generation has felt this way to a certain extent, but it really feels like wealthy boomers just foreclosed the future of… literally everybody and when you meet boomers like your dad or one of my parents or countless other wealthy boomers I have met it really becomes far more “comic book” evil than it is reasonable to assume with some of these sad losers. There is no reason for the cruelty, and for the severance of resources and support other than a bunch of cynical political ideologies that amounted to barely anything more than lobotimizing a father’s capacity to actually empathize with their child about basic life needs. It is like the condescending judgement of some wealthy boomer parents cancerously grew into a deep seated belief that their kids don’t belong to be in the same economic class as they do, whether those wealthy boomers will consciously acknowledge it or not. I mean… not the worst problem to have, I am just pointing out how pathetic and sad US culture really is among superficially “successful” families.

Americans are the worst culture. Truly fucking despicable what they think is sane. You only get to buy how you want to be treated and the threshold for the floor of basic human dignity is more than most of us can afford.

As someone from the US I wholeheartedly agree but I also want to qualify this a bit.

US culture is the worst culture given how rich it is. You might go to another culture with a HELL of a lot less money in the society/less GDP (…because it has been extracted by countries like the US but different conversation) and be able to find aspects of that culture that are way worse… but more than any other country on earth the US has been able to choose the world it wants to exist in instead of being existentially forced to accept the terms set out by more powerful countries, and holy shit what the US has done with that is not only dumb it is catastrophic.

The US is the richest country on earth, we could be treating each other like royalty, we could be saying “it is unamerican to let homeless americans starve!!” and just start giving people housing and food for free, we could do whatever the fuck we want with all of our incredible amount of power and just ignore the consequences for the rest of the world… but instead not only do we ignore the consequences of our life style on the rest of the world (again, utterly catastrophic in terms of carbon footprint, ecological impact and just plain wastefulness) we ignore the consequences of our life style on our own damn selves, our family, our kids, our parents, our neighbors and our friends.

Like yeah I know I am not saying anything original but damn I just feel like it needs to be said over and over again, the US is a very shameful place in the sense that the amount of unnecessary suffering here is quite extreme (again, not making claims about absolute suffering… not that it is ever helpful too beyond pointing out big disparities of privilege).

Most americans believe the entire point of transit is to sort people who can afford it from people who cant.

If mass transit is affordable for all it is literally considered a threat to these pathetic people who would means test their own kids before they gave them food and shelter if it was socially acceptable.

I was in NYC recently and the amount of wealthier people who just ubered everywhere (or actually just demanded to own a car and drive themselves in the least car friendly place IN THE US) with no consideration for ever using the subway underneath their feet was pretty disgusting and appalling especially coming from somewhere without magic train tunnels underneath my feet that run 24/7…

Notice all of these narratives run essentially in parallel with a nebulous fear of the subway being stoked by Eric Adams and centrists, they provide a convenient impulse to rationalize taking the easy way out and clogging the streets with another useless car. Kind of like convincing yourself as a kid not to do a chore in the basement because the basement is scaryyyy, I mean look at this video from somebody in another basement experiencing a freak scary incident that would likely never ever happen to me!!!

I live somewhere with free bus transit in the US, and it is shocking how different it feels and yet also how many successful people around me with working cars just categorically ignore the use or possibility of using busses. The US is really really deeply fucked on this point and it makes me feel awful for the rest of the planet having to deal with our horrendous carbon footprints.

New York City has so much potential, but it is utterly ruined by rich conservative money suffocating the city in a chokehold.

I hate the US so much sigh

LogSeq notes: https://github.com/logseq/logseq A different approach to note taking & journal. Very nice looking, rich plugin ecosystem, could use some performance boost but I think they are working on it

My true love is Org Mode and Emacs, but honestly LogSeq feels similar in a weird way with its extreme simplicity but also confusingly powerful and open ended design.

I am EXTREMELY impressed with LogSeq, I showed it to someone recently and they straight up told me “this is the best software I have ever tried in my life!”… admittedly they didn’t know about PKMs, external brains, obscure powerful note taking, thinking and tasktracking software but also that is kind of the point… they could immediately see the power of these type of tools even though they didn’t know anything about them because Logseq is so straightforward and powerful.

Logseq + Syncthing (my favorite software period) is an INCREDIBLY powerful combination and honestly shits on 99.99% of office/task tracking/productivity/filesharing software from boutique productivity companies and multi-billion dollar tech companies alike. Like yeah… Syncthing isn’t a file backup utility, and Logseq has no built in simultaneous editing capacity in its current version but when you are talking about syncing edits of tiny markdown plain text files you can just basically forget all of that crap and just pretend you and the person you are sharing Logseq notes with are magically the same user making edits on a single device… and so long as you are reasonable with your editing pace you can forget the nightmare of the cloud/corporate silos/subscription/surveillance-capitalism… COMPLETELY in the realm of notes and note sharing.

Crank the simple file versioning up to like 40 on your Syncthing share folder for Logseq, deal with the extremely rare file sync whenever it pops up through Syncthing’s GUI, preferably have one of the devices in the share network be a phone or raspberry pi that is online most of the time and never look back!

That is great to hear, definitely seemed like FreeCAD was REALLY basic in the past, but there is such a big gap for a really fully featured FOSS Cad software!

Well we can’t live without a modern game that acknowledges how awesome Total Annihilation is as an idea so effectively that means we can’t live without Beyond All Reason/The Spring Engine right?

I mean Forged Alliance Forever is amazing and I am zero percent bashing it… and ok I guess we would still have Planetary Annihilation, and that game looks pretty awesome too…so I suppose technically we could live without Beyond All Reason but I doubt even the Planetary Annihilation devs would be happy about that world, I know the FAF community wouldnt be happy lol.

I don’t care how it gets done, really.

We know, that is why you are being called out?

Get nice headphones, I dont know good in ear headphone models to recommend off the top of my head but for over the ear headphones a used/refurbished sony XM3 or XM4 is a FANTASTIC way to spend $80-$160 on your love of music listening and nice comfy all day wear bluetooth headphones like these will pay for themselves after only a couple miserable airplane flights or travel trips involving loud public spaces you have to take.

As much as I just shit on “boutique” DACs for being all the same basically, there definitely very real differences in headphones between the bottom of the headphone market, branded “cool” headphones like beats and ACTUAL music enthusiast headphones like headphones from Audiotechnica or nicer Sonys or gestures at overwhelming number of options.

Just make sure the headphones you get are “efficient”, as in the decibels in volume they put out vs how much energy is put into them by the DAC/amplifier is a big ratio, that means your run of the mill DAC will be able to amplify your headphones to as loud as you want with audiophile quality :) .

If you want just that little bit more of audio quality in your bluetooth headphones (with not quite as good noise cancelling as Sonys) go for the Shure Aonic 50s. Damn they reallly really sound wonderful are very comfortable to wear for hours and hours.

Both models of headphones I mentioned have 1/8th inch headphone jacks and can be used without bluetooth, which in my opinion is a baselevel requirement for nice bluetooth headphones if JUST for the fact that it demonstrates more than anything else that the headphone manufacturer actually gives a shit about audio quality. I also dont trust bluetooth not to randomly shit the bed too lol (also like come on, how much does it cost to put a freakin headphone jack in a device these days, they are a literal commodity, it is always worth the couple extra cents in my opinion).

Look I am not trying to rain on your parade but I really really reallyyyyy dont want other people to get lost or confused by this misinformation. I really am not trying to be antagonistic here I just feel very strongly about how science is being misrepresented in the realm of audio engineering.

DACs are a solved problem in terms of amplifying music to normal listening levels for a normal pair of headphones.

let me repeat that in a different way

DACs are a commodity, they are like bic pens, pens used to be this difficult thing to produce quality versions of for cheap at a mass scale… and then someone invented the bic pen and now it is trivial… we are at that point with DACs and a lot of people are weirdly uncomfortable with that and want there to be different flavors of DACs and shit… but it is a lie people tell themselves because the reality in 2024 is boring with DACs… but also inspiring because hey basically any DAC you get your hands on is going to be of arbitrary quality.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/high-end-pc-audio,3733-19.html

Yes if you get a fancy pair of headphones with really high impedance that needs to be driven by an extra powerful DAC ok… but that is NOT the overwhelming majority of headphones. Crucially it isn’t that nicer DACs have “more warmth” or other nonsense, it is a question of HOW MUCH amplification a DAC can do before distortion begins, which means a less powerful DAC driving normal headphones at a normal level is never going to encounter conditions where it would differ in performance from a $3000 DAC hooked up to the same headphones.

To put as many nails into this coffin as possible let me also be clear, there are plenty of audiophile level headphones with very reasonable impedance values that can be driven by any random DAC in any random computer or phone in a fashion that is indistinguishable in blind A/B listening tests even with experts from the way an expensive DAC would drive those headphones.

Please stop pushing pseudosicence that is effectively trying to make listening to music into this exclusive thing where you are only getting the “real” listening experience if you have a signal chain full of psuedo scientific gear that costs hundreds if not thousands of extra dollars and yet doesnt make a difference that can actually be sensed by the human ear because the difference is imperceptible or not even perceivable by the human ear at a basic level in the first place.

People are broke as shit right now, they are struggling hard, please don’t encourage people to spend the precious little spending money they actually have on DACs that are marketed on effectively psuedosciencific differences (again in terms of what YOU can actually perceive as a human).

Spend money on nice headphones, on a nice neck pillow for your head while you listen, whatever just spend your money on anything else about the music listening experience other than an expensive DAC, PLEASE as an audio engineer I beg you.

If you really feel the need to buy a DAC, hell just buy the base level audio interface from Native Instruments or another trusted brand, those are DESIGNED for musicians and yes you are getting a bunch of hardware you dont need in that box too (like audio recording hardware and inputs) but even still it is going to run you far less than some of these “boutique audiophile DACs”.

When Jupiter or Saturn finally wins some competitions are they going to get their medals in the form of precious metals aersolized into a vapor and stuffed into a mason jar?

I like how people are assuming if Anne Frank were alive she would be doing anything other than shouting to the world about ending the genocide in Gaza because genocides are the most terrible crime humanity can enact upon itself.

A statue is just some rock you paid somebody to carve.

Also Fortune is ignoring the serious damage done to the health of many industries by arbitarily hurtig workers and forcing them off of career paths for no fucking reason.

Fuck MBA rich asshats, people need to stop putting them in charge of things they dont know shit.

Sure, I definitely overreacted and I honestly was pretty stressed out the day I replied so yeah, fair. I think I have a point, this just wasn’t the salient place for it and I was too tired to realize that in the moment.

shrugs you know people have been confidently making these kinds of statements… since written language was invented? I bet the first person who developed written language did it to complain about how this generation of kids don’t know how to write a proper sentence.

What is in freefall is the economy for the middle and working class and basic idea that artists and writers should be compensated, period. What has released us into freefall is that making art and crafting words are shit on by society as not a respectable job worth being paid a living wage for.

There are a terrifying amount of good writers out there, more than there have ever been, both in total number AND per capita.