HN user
What on earth are you on about? The article is referring to Variety, which refers to Puck as having broken the story. Are Variety, the renowned trade publication, and Puck, an independent and journalist-owned publication also "tabloid rags"?
https://variety.com/2026/film/global/luca-guadagnino-sam-alt...
A lot of present-day mastering can technically remain loud while sounding a lot less harsh. That's thanks to aesthetic mixing choices and at least in part due to audio processing and tools like plugins from Oeksound (Soothe) and others, which are used on nearly all top-selling music now https://oeksound.com
I find that the likes of Ariana Grande have a lot more air in their music those 00s acts you describe, while still being quite loud. So do my absolute favorite artists Tame Impala, Caroline Polachek and Dua Lipa.
Commercially this probably works out with better headphones and earbuds as a default listening mode, as opposed to things like the 00s earbuds delivered with digital music players and early smartphones.
That first Billy Eilish record would probably not have been a hit if the target audience was getting their first impression of new music in cars driving at highway speeds.
You are very unlikely to hear a difference like this on laptop speakers. Present-day Apple laptop speakers are great feats of engineering for what they are, but they use a bunch of trickery to create the illusion of bass and such. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_fundamental
Even with decent headphones, the difference between these samples isn't trivial to spot, unless you have moderately trained ears.
I'm not an audio professional but I have a great interest in this space. My first impression is that the the bass in the second sample stands out a bit more in the mix, perhaps thanks to higher dynamic range. The high range is muted and the mid range in the percussion and such may be more pronounced.
That's not to say you're wrong about audiophiles. A lot of claims made by this subculture are nonsense and especially not applicable to situations where an everyday person seeks some improvement to their audio reproduction.
For example, lossy audio codecs have a bad reputation among certain people, due to old technology. Mp3 is undoubtedly garbage, 90s tech. If I waste a bunch of time on blind tests, I can spot even a 320 kbps mp3 sample with my regular listening headphones. Lower bitrates are a lot more obvious to spot.
However, this problem is gone for almost all people in most listening environments, mine included. This is thanks to the more modern lossy delivery codecs at decent bitrates, as employed by the the premium tiers of the big streaming services, which are Vorbis (Spotify) and AAC (Apple and most others) and Opus (Youtube Music in some circumstances).
Archival and editing copies of audio should obviously be lossless. Generational loss over lossy media are as real with digital re-encodes as with analog tape.
A regular person who wants to improve their listening experience can easily get decent headphones now. However, anyone who wants to invest in a better shared listening experience than a decent portable mono Bluetooth speaker can offer, should probably start by thinking through the the acoustics of the room they want to listen in.
This doesn't have to be fancy, just having shelves with actual books on the walls in the direction looking towards a speaker system does a lot.
Spending more than 200 USD on speakers in a room with blank walls is ridiculous, unless it's a log cabin. Those actually sound great.
Due to how my head is wired, I've discovered that I enjoy gaming a lot more after I switched to console two years ago: all settings are curated (for better and worse). I'm not even sure why I didn't switch earlier.
The only reasons I can think of are fear of the controller and slow load times due to mechanical HDD on last-gen systems.
I don't spend time away from gameplay trying to get optimal setting. I'm just the type of neurotic that I will do that stuff even though I absolutely don't enjoy it.
I can jump directly into gaming without anxiety over how my hardware is falling behind. With my PS5 being in my living room, gaming is also time away from my desk, which I, much like doing anything on a Windows PC, associate with my IT jobby job.
A console is an appliance. It's like a toaster or dishwasher, except it lets me play games without any work.
With PS5, I also don't have to worry about weird glitches with audio through HDMI in my living room setup, since that's how I prefer to play. And PS5 now also renders Dolby Atmos, without any glitches.
These are of course all me-problems, but I thought I'd mention it here, since gaming is too much fun to be confined to the tuning-happy garage mindset of PC.
There's a lot of great picks here, such as Gattaca, Man from Earth, Contact, The Matrix, Wall-E, Children of Men, The Fifth Element, 12 Monkeys. I would add Truman Show.
Depending on the individual and their patience, Primer (2004) might also be a great fit. The pace is a bid subdued but thematically, it's mind bending. I don't think it includes anything particularly awkward as an early scifi movie to watch together with your own child. I would probably start with one of the spectacles from the above picks, though.
I admittedly don't have kids, but media is so saturated and oversexualized that I personally feel that thought-provoking fiction that dissects and critiques urges is possible and good to explore at some point, in safe company, ammended with brief discussion. I'm certainly thankful I got offered these conversations.
That said, Ex Machina might be a little intense in that regard, even though I seem to remember that the explicity is mostly some nudity. It's a great movie, but probably not the first or fifth I would show a 12-year-old with the above discursive parameters included. The themes of corruption and "fucking around and finding out" are so heavy that you don't want to just leave a child with it.
It could be your tenth pick, though, or perhaps something for 6-18 months on of successfully watching and discussing movies and their depiction of life in an open way.
I watched Terminator (1984) around that age, perhaps a year younger. It's not great science fiction, but I still like it quite a bit for the drab, claustrophobic atmosphere, with brief "light horror" sequences, which were a perfect age-appropriate fit for me at the time. At that point I also quite enjoyed action sequences with heavy 70s-80s American body-on-frame sedans getting wrecked.
The basic premise is based on James Cameron having a fever dream after all, and it shows in all the best ways when the concept isn't overdeveloped into a family comedy drama like T2. T2 is great, massive cinema in its own right but I feel the entire Terminator concept, time travel and all, falls apart the more you think about it. A dusky, gritty, fast-paced thriller is a better avenue for the concept.
T1's run time is also admirably brief, at just over 90 minutes.
This is my impression as well, about NYT's business.
The "internet person" knee jerk response about paywalls, does have a certain degree of truth about relevance of journalism though, but that's a longer term loss of a commons rather than a business model issue, at least right now.
Soft paywalls often allow you to read a few articles when you click through to google, but then you share an article with someone who's wrong on the internet. And you end up looking like a ding-a-ling because a paywall is presented when the user opens the article url directly with no google referrer, and no normal person is going to google an article to be allow to read an opposing view.
Essentially, it's a shame that the open web business model didn't work for 'real' journalism, because there's plenty of dogshit-tier content to happily take its place.
Here in Finland, public service broadcaster Yle has been a good source for good information in text form, but the media industry has fought tooth and nail to try and impose limits like Yle only being allowed to publish certain types of longer-form journalistic text, like investigations when enough rich media is included.
I can appreciate the argument about public service distorting the market in this case, but I'm really worried about the local information that's going to be available sans paywall on search engines in the long run with these restrictions.
It's unclear how big the impact of the above is going to be, but remember, this is a small market, too. Especially if Yle's budgets are slashed to allow less longer-form journalism that qualifies for web publishing with the rules, it might get hairy.
I don't think they do. I've been using DuckDNS against my own domain CNAMEs for years.
They do not. Wouldn't be paying them via Patreon if they did.
Intriguing. Doesn't seem to work on macOS tho.
Was looking for a good place to post this in the thread but I'll just drop it here. Microsoft Teams still lacks multi-account support on desktop.
As in, you can't sign on to several business organizations like you can in Slack. It's so dumb and disqualifying. Utter nightmare if you work with several organizations.
https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/c9995dc8-...
I've bookmarked that page and I check in on it regularly, as Microsoft claims multi-account support is due for late 2022.
I understand why this sounds like a bad answer, but it's not half-bad in context.
Microsoft 365 absolutely is something of a buffet for companies/orgs with IT budget constraints and compliance-heavy objectives.
Just more stuff that sort of works and ticks boxes, starting with hosting almost everything in the EU for European customers. Compare that to Google, who flat-out refuses to guarantee EU-only hosting for Workspace customer.
All the bundled extra tools outside e-mail and the absolute core M365 Office apps just sit there, ready to use, easy to package and deploy to clients. All generated user data is stored in the MS environment every stakeholder has signed on to. From OneNote, MS Todo to Teams, everything's integrated without as much as configuring SSO externally.
A lot of what's included, Teams specifically, is shockingly bad. But these elements tick very important boxes. And very few people seem to care about the rest. UX isn't a compliance-mandated requirement.
I sort of know this, as I work at a company that has to punch above its weight in compliance, due to industry specific requirements.
If you need good single-sign-on for Slack, you end up paying the now Salesforce-owned company over USD 10/month, just for Slack. If you want decent data retention controls for Slack, you need their Enterprise Grid plan, the price of which is unlisted, but I've heard it's like USD 25/month/user(!). Just for Slack.
Same with Atlassian. The decent handful of dollars you pay per user only applies if you're ok with shockingly limited controls.
With Microsoft, you get a lot for just buying M365. You can get started building a soundly logged and controlled environment if you put everyone on M365 Business Premium (including desktop apps) and/or F3 licenses (web/mobile apps only) for about 20 and 10 dollars respectively.
Sure, you do pay through the nose for the really good logging capabilities with M365 E5 licensing, something close to USD50 per user/month, which is a lot, but it also includes everything from Defender antivirus, InTune device management, Teams telephony call-in support to a Windows Enterprise client license.
There's so much included with M365 in terms of compliance and bundle value that Microsoft absolutely can leave it absolutely terrible UX condition, so they do.
That plugin is probably based on BlogVault's Migrate Guru, which is available for free and works with a number or hosts. It's a game changer, really.
Cloudways is good at providing a control panel with a user experience resembling expensive Wordpress hosts, including developer workflows and such, while also giving a little more control over the server stack. You pay per server and its resources rather than per site.
The default Cloudways Wordpress stack performs very well. Their caching solution is built on Varnish, controlled by a competent plugin. However, I do find that some themes and site builder themes simply don't play well with at least Cloudways' Varnish conf, so one might end up using the included memcached or redis for page caching, with the help of some plugin like W3 Total Cache.
Customer support can be hit-or-miss.
I wouldn't necessarily recommend using Cloudways' lower tier plans, and Cloudways doesn't recommend them for production use either. I pay about USD 100 per month for a server on Digital Ocean that hosts sites I maintain with a web agency. We rely on Cloudways' development tools. For the number of sites we host, it's a very appealing price compared to certain big-name Wordpress hosting companies.
For someone just wanting to host one or more small websites for a sustainable, low cost, I would recommend looking into well regarded cPanel hosts that runs CloudLinux and LiteSpeed on NVMe hardware. These companies also have some very decent, standardized Wordpress management features these days, even though the cPanel GUI us far from pretty. I describe this in more detail here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32255962
I used to host small projects on DH.
If you need a place where you can out several websites that don't make money for a sustainable, reasonable small cost, you'll be surprised by the price/quality/performance offered by good, independent cPanel based hosting providers these days.
By independent, I mean not owned by GoDaddy or Newfold Digital (formerly Endurance International Group, EIG). Just as an example, Bluehost, Hostgator etc are owned by Newfold Digital, with big brand recognition and subpar service.
cPanel isn't aesthetically pleasing, but it keeps the market outside the big names extremely competitive. You can ask another cPanel based host to migrate your accounts at any time in a process that's standardized and quick.
With NVMe disks and software built especially for the hosting industry, such as CloudLinux and LiteSpeed, these hosting options can be very performant. On CloudLinux, all hosting accounts run in their own containers with RAM and CPU limits so the system as a whole stays responsive. These environments can easily feel as snappy or better then self-configured virtual machines.
I tried out A2Hosting's Turbo hosting early this year. The performance was very good, but their EU datacenter had connectivity issues.
I now use a British company called Stablepoint, run by people who used to operate TSOHost before selling out to GoDaddy. Stablepoint uses public cloud infrastructure, so the reliability is very good for very reasonable prices around numerous data center regions globally.
I do use Stablepoint's highest-end reseller account, so I can't speak for the performance of their regular servers. A2 is probably very solid network wise in the States, and their non-reseller Turbo plans are affordable and very well regarded. Both companies have generous 2-4 GB RAM limits per cPanel account on their mid-tier accounts.
yeah my entire hosting account is up and my uptime robot monitoring reports no recent outages.
In my experience, Dreamhost's e-mail has been the part of the service that always worked.
I'm under the impression that the architecture of their e-mail service has been some sort of HA clustered setup for ages, and I think one of their unusually outspoken blog post in the 00s said outright that their customers are less sensitive to web than e-mail outages.
I've had an account with Dreamhost since June 2007. Their web uptime wasn't great back in the day. I seem to remember that they made a bad investment in some sort of very expensive NAS or SAN architecture from NetApp that caused a lot of downtime because the filers just regularly dropped clients.
However, with the dawn of cheap SSD, I think they moved back to local, per-server disks in the early 2010s.
I still have my Dreamhost account. They don't use cPanel, which was appealing to a younger me, for aesthetic reasons, and they also gave away sub account privileges you had to pay extra for as reseller hosting at other places.
My DH account has been a Swiss army knife of sorts for doing small web and hosting related things. This was especially useful back in the days before you could just use free Cloudflare DNS for random things.
These days, I use my own M365 business tenant for e-mail, and all my web customers are on servers in Europe, largely on hosting accounts based on cPanel, which I hated before. Now I like the ease with which I can ask a new provider to migrate all my cPanel accounts. It keeps the web hosting business extremely competitive.
Dreamhost also uses absurdly old hardware, my account is on an 8-core AMD Opteron 4122 CPU. Performance isn't particularly good. They also use Debian, so they don't rely on new features that CloudLinux and LiteSpeed bring to the table for shared hosting, to limit resource congestion/noisy neighbors.
My plan is actually to get off Dreamhost during my upcoming summer vacation.
Okay, and the Tatars?
I'm curious as to how you dismiss the first pattern, specifically, Russia's treatment of indigenous Crimean Tatars as well as the laughable 2014 "referendum"
The current product page still states that "a big four accounting firm" audits the service's privacy policy on a yearly retainer https://one.one.one.one/dns/
Cloudflare's public DNS's privacy promises are audited by KPMG https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/cloudflares-1...
Do you work in an international setting where everyone speaks English as a second language, with or without a strong accent? Or, do you find yourself surrounded by native speakers? Is good English a matter of status in this work context?
For some reason, I find it easier to speak good English around native speakers. I seem to have instant access to more idioms in my vocabulary and my pronunciation is better.
Personally, I sometimes get the feeling that non-native speakers of English try to impress each other. Whereas the native speaker tech biz expat crowd, or the pleasant persons among them, mostly seem pleased to be around people they can communicate with and are happy to accommodate.
I'm a native Swedish speaker in Finland[1], blessed with the rights that come with a second official national language.
Growing up, I was something of a bookish basement dweller and didn't speak the majority Finnish language outside lessons in school. I did, thank goodness, read Finnish literature, comics, computer magazines.
So, when it was time to move away from home and I got my first real job that involved speaking a lot of Finnish, I had a couple of very awkward and terrible weeks at a corporate service desk call center. After that, I was fine, and grew more confident with Finnish as I developed a social life.
At the end of the day, it's all about speaking. Languages are meant to be utilized for communicating with other people, so you just have to find some way of doing that, I think.
I'm used to being clever and quick in my native language - and English - so I had to fight a lot of frustration with Finnish. I learned English and was comfortable speaking it in less than a school year, but English is also an easy language for a bookish and pop culture drenched Swedish speaker to pick up. Finnish has no relation to Germanic, or Indo-European languages, so it's a bit of an adventure.[2]
What I can say is that being the kind of person who can sit around and listen to conversations for a while and chime in with a joke or question always helped me fit in in situations where I don't feel like taking charge.
So, try and find your own social strengths and play to that.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish-speaking_population_of...
The tradeoff seems to be that
* Bluetooth offers limited range and uses more battery, and is usually interrupted if someone calls, but supports any application that can play sound.
* Spotify Connect is its own Spotify client and downloads the audio stream from Spotify which allows freedom to roam. But the implementation is indeed limited to Spotify and doesn't support niceties like volume normalization or nerdy details like crossfade (and perhaps not gapless playback)
Any paid Google service with an SLA is perfectly fine.
The choice between Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace should mostly be a matter of taste.
Google Workspace is very straightforward and largely offers better finish and UX. I personally dislike Google's material design and find myself confused by it, but most people seem fine with it.
M365 Business Standard on the other hand is arguably a better deal if you value the macOS and Windows versions of Microsoft's office apps. The UI isn't always good and the web versions suck, but everything is also very flexible and intended to scale to almost everything the IT dept of a Fortune 500 companies with tricky compliancy requirements might require to control a fleet of Windows machines.
Do you know if anyone actually uses or used their software stack and hardware for end-user productivity?
Social networks and communications platforms have value because there are people using them. I'm sure you know this, it's called the network effect.
Facebook's services are places where people in my demographic have accumulated social networks that sometimes forms connections in actual socializing.
When we throw parties with my best friends for a wider social circles, friends and acquaintances included, we still use Facebook events, to coordinate them, as an example.
Similarly, although I use Signal to talk to my closest friends, Facebook Messenger is still a functional way to get hold of people when you don't have their phone number or e-mail. Where I'm from, people my age didn't really collect phone numbers, since Facebook's convenient for that.
Transferring the connection between myself and these acquaintances may be cumbersome or awkward, and mind you, I'm the kind of person who insists on moving conversations to Signal after a certain point.
As a case in point, it took years to make Signal something that I actually use for real social connections outside my closest circle of people who humor my nerdy demands. And only succeeded thanks to 1) me having moved some group chats to Whatsapp for encryption the minute Whatsapp released a desktop app in May 2016. This moved the social graph to my phone book, which made it easy to switch to Signal over time. The initial move to Whatsapp worked because people already used it. 2) the larger network effect of Signal taking off, largely over the last year.
So, with all of this hassle in mind, I'm not going to tell people who, bluntly put, are at risk of being lonely, to drop useful social tools.
Yeah. Especially seeing the effects the pandemic has had on peoples' social lives, and as such quality of life, I'm not going approach grownups who are unlikely to form new strong friendships, and tell them to cut off a major source of casual semi-social interaction with old buddies.
For context, I'm a man in my thirties, and I notice that a lot of my peers are super busy balancing work/life, or just bury themselves in work.
I'm from a Nordic culture where we don't have Southern European social customs and strong multi-generational families. I'm really worried about how our norms basically push us into loneliness outside our attempts to run nuclear families, which often fail and leave people divorced with limited additional social bonds.
No, I find them to be a lot more ambitious than that. Worth browsing around the site, and you'll see it's not spammy at all.
If you run a serious web project, ownership of domain names is critical asset management, especially if you care for privacy. If the current domain was to get hijacked by someone's commercial ambitions, the site would probably be reworked towards the kind of BS VPN blabbering you described.
I don't agree with all of PrivacyTools' angles and priorities, making a lot of their advice pretty impractical for most people. But the purist approach is also interesting to follow, even if one doesn't jump on the bandwagon.