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goblin89

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Independent consultant — software design & development.

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Comments1,233
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www.coindesk.com 4mo ago

Institutional cryptocurrency platform Blockfills is for sale after Bitcoin drops

goblin89
1pts0
multiuser-blocks.cyberspace.app 5mo ago

Multiuser Blocks

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staffbase.com 5mo ago

Integration patterns: How we connect software

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www.youtube.com 8mo ago

Near mid-air collision at LAX between American Airlines and ITA [video]

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127pts100
cybernews.com 2y ago

Musk's Conundrum with SpaceX military contract and Starshield in Taiwan

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www.bloomberg.com 2y ago

Everything You Need to Know About China's Child Pneumonia Outbreak

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www.bbc.com 3y ago

5 years of Chinese spy balloons worldwide plotted from Planet Labs imagery

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en.wikipedia.org 3y ago

Pillar of Shame in Hong Kong

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www.taiwannews.com.tw 3y ago

Berkshire Hathaway sells off TSMC

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2pts0
www.reuters.com 3y ago

China’s military active near Taiwan despite combat drills finished

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twitter.com 3y ago

“The foreign forces you are talking about are Marx and Engels”

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hongkongfp.com 4y ago

Anonymous HK students hide Pillar of Shame miniatures around campus

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time.com 4y ago

Dismantling the Pillar of Shame (2021)

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en.wiktionary.org 4y ago

May 35th

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www.youtube.com 4y ago

Two Russian gas executives and their families found dead within 24 hours

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www.realclearpolitics.com 4y ago

We’re Urging Ukrainians to Die

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6pts3
www.quantamagazine.org 4y ago

Symmetries Reveal Clues About the Holographic Universe

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3pts0
www.cnn.com 4y ago

Saudi Arabia is now building its own ballistic missiles with help of China

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twitter.com 5y ago

PII leak in Lemonade has been discovered “accidentally”

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twitter.com 5y ago

COVID origin: if we walk away from this, it will pave the way for future covids

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neonstreaming.com 5y ago

Neon Live Streaming mobile broadcasting app

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1pts0
samharris.org 5y ago

The Worst Epidemic [audio]

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2pts1
en.wikipedia.org 5y ago

Decline in Insect Populations

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3pts0
www.nature.com 6y ago

Transgenic Aedes aegypti Mosquitoes Transfer Genes into a Natural Population

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1pts0
github.com 6y ago

OpenChronograph: Programmable board for Fossil/Skagen hybrid smartwatches

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2pts0
github.com 6y ago

pywebview: Like Electron, but instead of Chromium using OS’s own native renderer

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4pts1
github.com 6y ago

jsondiffpatch: Diff & patch JavaScript objects

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2pts0
youtu.be 6y ago

NIH rep to PBS: COVID fatality rates likely lower, more asymptomatic cases

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video.twimg.com 6y ago

Vandalized Xiaomi Store in Hong Kong

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observablehq.com 6y ago

CIELUV is coming to d3-color

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1pts0
Organic Maps 18 days ago

Organic Maps finally made Hong Kong a region this year. Previously they required you to download the entire “China South” region, which was an extremely weird and wasteful choice.

Next it should standardize region naming.

For example, the new region is called “China Hong Kong” (every online ordering form out there does simply “Hong Kong”). Simultaneously, Taiwan is just “Taiwan”, so it’s clearly not about following a party line. Simultaneously, places like Falklands (not without its own disputes), South Georgia, Saint Helena have no mention of UK in their respective region titles, while Hawaii and Puerto Rico both lead with USA.

I think they should stick with toponyms, instead of trying to be some sort of political arbiter.

I have a smart playlist that gets automatically populated with songs in my library that are not available (evidently pulled) on Apple Music anymore, and it is growing with tunes that I like and that are sometimes impossible to find elsewhere. If I had the foresight to get actual copies, I could still listen to them. I don’t think there’s any way to download them, but I didn’t “buy” them via iTunes Store, just streamed them.

DaVinci Resolve 21 2 months ago

This is about app specific data, not text. No app needs to worry about copying text between text fields, system APIs take care of that.

DaVinci Resolve 21 2 months ago

This starts to look like a waste of time and not a useful discussion. There are frameworks and libraries that handle 100% of clipboard OS specifics, and the app in question has no use for system clipboard in the first place. In my experience the app is buggy and a pain to use relative to other software, that’s the entirety of my point.

DaVinci Resolve 21 2 months ago

There’s no use case for system clipboard, given it’s a monolithic piece of software that doesn’t allow multiple projects to be simultaneously open in different instances. There’s nowhere else to paste except the same window.

Meanwhile, open-source, non-Electron, multi-platform software that handles copy-paste via system clipboard exists just fine (VCV Rack comes to mind).

DaVinci Resolve 21 2 months ago

Grouping close-together changes of the same control for undo sounds probably intentional to me

I explained how it happens. Intentional or not, it just takes us between buggy software and poorly designed software and even then losing changes (not all of what is undone is redone and you are left in an inconsistent state) remains a bug.

Ctrl+Z in a textbox doesn't go one character at a time

Retyping text is not comparable to readjusting different fine color controls on different pages of the UI across different nodes.

By comparison, the aforementioned RawTherapee (despite being powered by Qt and looking pretty barren) in fact works more reliably with no such issues, and it’s also cross-platform software that is free to boot.

DaVinci Resolve 21 2 months ago

What I do now can be done using a mix of free software (ffmpeg, etc.) and if I were to go pro and have less time for tinkering then it’d be FCP for me.

DaVinci Resolve 21 2 months ago

Again never had this issue

Again, if Fusion implementation on Windows is different that this is not an issue, that is an even bigger red flag.

Have you reported these issues to Black Magic?

No, there’s too many, and I can’t be bothered. Pretty old threads about it can be found online. Nothing changes.

DaVinci Resolve 21 2 months ago

I know people who never use undo. If you haven’t run into these issues, that does not tell me much, unless you use this software the same way I do.

DaVinci Resolve 21 2 months ago

If behaviors I listed in the previous comment are all different on Windows, that’s an even bigger red flag.

DaVinci Resolve 21 2 months ago

I mean, I just used it last month whatever the latest version was. It didn’t freeze at startup but all the other issues were still there.

I can’t see myself paying for that. What I do now can be done using a mix of free software (ffmpeg, etc.) and if I were to go pro and have less time for tinkering then it’d be FCP for me…

DaVinci Resolve 21 2 months ago

Unlikely. This has been the case on 3 different laptops and multiple macOS versions and Resolve versions.

I use it pretty infrequently nowadays and I admit I didn’t see the startup freeze in a couple months (either I am lucky or they finally fixed it in a recent update), the undo glitch is alive as ever though.

Some other things off the top of my head:

• UI freezes for a second or two when you switch to Fusion tab.

• If you adjust speed in a Fusion node, timeline clip remains the same length, so if you slow it down 2x you can only see the first half. To say Fusion in general is half-baked is to be very, very generous.

• Export location gets reset every launch.

• Can’t copy-paste a node or its settings, in case you want to test between two different configurations.

Even the aforementioned RawTherapee (which is made using Qt I think and which is far from a shining example of usability) is more pleasant to use for me.

DaVinci Resolve 21 2 months ago

I tolerate Resolve, essentially it’s just inertia. It is hard to imagine software could be commercial and so poorly made.

My favorite glitch that has persisted for many versions is how if you background it while it is launching, the GUI becomes frozen and the only way to use it is to kill the process and then launch it again making sure to not switch to any other apps while it loads. The worst one that comes to mind, because it happens all the time when I am using it, is when you hit undo once it could undo multiple recent changes (never know how many exactly, just have to guess), and if you then redo in panic it would only redo one of them, so you have to manually do it (fun when it involves fine color adjustments). For my own sanity will not try remembering all the other ones. In addition, a lot of counter-intuitive design choices, messy color management, etc.

Proprietary cross-platform software for multimedia production tends to be polished but Resolve genuinely feels worse than an Electron app, with subtle delays and micro-freezes in many interactions.

To be fair now with all those “AI” features they could probably say it is optimized for “agents” or something…

Some people feel like we are being turned into content producers for large corporations to monetize and they’re not entirely wrong. I don’t mind when people take a stance, even if their methods aren’t perfect and it may inconvenience myself personally.

If you’re in rush to airport or hospital and you are delayed by protesters for a cause you don’t understand, it’s one thing, I could understand a bit of cursing. However, this is someone’s web resource, they are free to do with it whatever they want, and they owe you and me nothing.

I can guarantee my identity by e.g. scanning my ID card on a system with absolutely no secure boot chain.

Your ID card is on your phone. Go ahead, guarantee you’re not using a duplicate of someone else’s ID card, that no one could duplicate your card, with a mainstream widely available consumer phone.

I can also guarantee a secure boot chain with my patched bootloader.

Go ahead, show how your grandma automatically guarantees to interested parties that I or whoever else didn’t patch her bootloader to run a backdoored OS, while using a mainstream widely available consumer phone.

Neither of these things require apps to verify the environment they run in.

Demonstrate a mainstream, widely available consumer phone that does these things without requiring apps to verify the environment they run it.

We can continue this infinitely, but if you keep making sweeping contrarian statements without contributing the proof required then it’s just not worth it.

somehow we don't go and ban kitchen knives

False analogy. You can’t have your kitchen knife exploited by a hacker team in North Korea, who shotgun attacks half of the public Internet infrastructure and uses the proceeds to fund the national nuclear program, can you? (I somewhat exaggerate, but you get the idea.)

Systems can be secure and trusted by the user without having to cede control

In an ideal world where users have infinite information and infinite capability to process and internalize it to become an infosec expert, sure. I don’t know about you, but most of us don’t live in that world.

I agree it’s not perfect. Having to use liquid glass and being unable to install custom watch faces is ridiculous. There’s probably an opportunity for a hardened OS which can be trusted by interested parties to not be maliciously altered, and also not force so many constraints onto users like current walled gardens do. But a fully open OS, plus an ordinary user who has no time or willingness to casually become a tptacek on the side, in addition to completely unrelated full-time job that’s getting more competitive due to LLMs and whatnot, seems more like a disaster than utopia.

In context of eIDAS, your phone starts to be used for much more sensitive matters than typing comments or even logging in to your bank. The repercussions from having a secretly patched bootloader can involve another person assuming your identity, including for large B2B transactions.

Requiring citizens to have (buy) some device to simply prove they are who they are seems hostile and dystopian to me. Some say it’s the future; I’m not convinced.

However, if you were to allow me to use my pocket computer (and nothing else) to prove I am who I say I am, you would want to trust that I am not pretending to be somebody else after extracting private keys from their phone or whatnot. I.e., you would want to require some sort of trusted computing.

Currently, that seems to only be provided by closed ecosystem phones.

Even still, I think it’s a mistake to be rolling out eIDAS as a mobile app first. The specification allows for this to be a dedicated hardware key (maybe even something YubiKey-like, and the EU already requires all phone manufacturers to have USB-C), so why not start with that.

AirPods Max 2 4 months ago

Not sure where you're looking

Both products in US on the site of respective manufacturer. Maybe you bought the older model (which by the way has higher impedance, so dedicated amplifier is a must, take it into account when you calculate the price).

no one is sitting with AirPods Max in their studios for work

People absolutely use them for serious work. They are much more of a personal product though, and there are other factors that would make an average studio disinclined to invest in them, like fragility and cost of repair and a whole bunch of unnecessary for a studio features.

Of course, when the studio already has all the rest of the hardware, soundproofed room, etc., it could actually be cheaper to buy cans that do not in fact include ANC, DAC, Dolby, amplifier, etc., and maybe even enjoy a bump in audio quality while at that. For someone who does not have that, it is often simply not a practical choice.

AirPods Max 2 4 months ago

Typical studio grade cans need studio grade equipment to drive them. No surprise if decently sounding headphones that already ship with tailored DAC, amplifier, ANC cost more than decent headphones for which you need to buy all that (and lug around if you travel).

Yet, with that taken into account, today the latest DT 1770 Pro still cost over 20% more than the latest AirPods Max.

Considering Apple markets Max for audio work, they compete on the same turf. This makes Apple’s offer unusually cost effective, not the other way around. I think this can be attributed to their fragility and inferior sound quality relative to DT 1770 Pro (at the end of a decent signal chain).

AirPods Max 2 4 months ago

I see, I remember checking that they didn’t support high definition wireless codec but missed the part where they could do lossless over the wire last year.

Why can’t they squeeze in that codec, considering Pros have it for years and are a lot smaller?

Edit: apparently I was confusing AirPods Pros with Sony WH models, which have LDAC. I guess there is no chance Apple adopts LDAC, even in their large heavy cans.

AirPods Max 2 4 months ago

My number two complaint about AirPods Pro is that decreasing the volume of system sounds doesn’t seem to do much. Every time the low battery message makes me jolt and is a bit deafening. It is nice that it’s has no vocal component, but it’s still quite annoying. Curious if anyone compared them to Max in this regard.

AirPods Max 2 4 months ago

New AirPods Max finally have lossless wired audio, which is pretty nice and makes them finally catch up with the Pros.

Does anyone have experience with obtaining a flatter frequency response from any AirPods, though? While maintaining the full power of noise cancellation.

My experience with Pros has always been that they exaggerate the bass. EQ settings available in Music are coarse, and I don’t know of any other way to control frequency response independently of the app that plays the sound.

I know they are not really best for critical audio work, but they are damn convenient.

With an ordinary fretted guitar, you can sort of perfectly tune it to what you play but not perfectly tune it in a global sense.

That’s an issue with tuning instruments in general, and why pianos are generally slightly out of tune as a compromise.

As you get used to a particular guitar and strings, as you train your ear, you can also learn to work around the imperfections by adjusting how you hold down the strings (even with a fretted guitar, you can slightly repitch a string by holding it differently).