tomc1985

Spectrograms are used in speech therapy to help with pronunciation. I remember using one such program to correct my own speech, at elementary school in the 90s. It was even a game: I moved a cursor through a maze and it would only move in the correct direction when my sound I made was correct. The game had a spectrogram for additional visual feedback -- my speech therapist could point to an area on it and tell me that I was placing my tongue incorrectly or whatever. Its a really cool example of the power of biofeedback.

No, I am not saying this is a fact-free zone. What I am saying is that it is a zone for opinions, which may or may not be true (counterfactual may not be the best word choice here, but it is close enough), and is not to be held to the same standard as wikipedia, whose copy you are using in what I read as a flippant remark.

I don't have data for you, just my perceptions and opinions. There are too many structural problems with the way political data is collected in this country (starting with the wording on questions in political surveys, and ending far beyond redistricting shenanigans). Given how deceptive and manipulative most election campaigns are, and how third parties are disproportionately disadvantaged financially, I don't think that looking at the proportion of left/right seats in congress is a good proxy for political polarization.

What I do see as a proxy is the behavior of those around me, and then trying to extrapolate that to reflect a larger population. I live in one of many pockets of conservativism in a very liberal state, and I am judging on the tone and tenor of political conversations and how freely friendly, amicable political debate flows among social groups in a fairly politically diverse area. Again, this is highly subjective for many different reasons, and I can say that I used to travel around a lot and have rubbed shoulders with many different social groups and castes in this society, and so I feel that I am at least somewhat qualified to extrapolate here.

And that observation is that political discussion is getting narrower, more pointed, and more focused on nationally-popular memes/issues. 12 years ago I sat in a meeting of one of the local tea-party chapters, and it was mostly older folks rabblerousing over local stuff. There wasn't much in the way of conspiracy theories, there wasn't a whole bunch of liberal shit-talking, just a bunch of people bitching about this-or-that with the local schooldistrict. When they happened to pick on my own high school, I knew that much of what they were saying was factually false, and I was able to state to the crowd why, and that was that. (There was some grumbling but the conversation turned elsewhere.) There were both left- and right-leaning folks in my friend group, and there was a quiet understanding to not get into political debates, and people weren't on-edge about it so if something was said, it didn't blow up.

We didn't have too many local crazies flying massive American flags on their trucks, with their cheap shots at trolling regular folks -- but now we do; there are places I can go where I can see them on a regular and predictable basis.

Nowadays I stay out of political shit, people are way too toxic, obsessive, and focusing on the same dozen or so things that everyone else is talking about. What would this tea party meeting have looked like today?

I have a different social group now; one that I like far more but we are very left-leaning, and increasingly (and troublingly) so. There is a much higher proportion of "polsplaining" (like mansplaining, but politicos talking down to people that offend them), many more suggestions that people self-evaluate (and insinuations that they are bad for towing a particular line), and hot political buzzwords are on people's tongues (and used as scapegoats) far more often than I can recall. I find myself hesitating to argue some points as I don't really want to die on any of these hills.

When the Roe v Wade decision dropped I broke my rule and attended a local rally, as I was pissed (much like everyone else). But at that rally someone got up on the podium and actively denounced people that not only just opposed abortion or womens health issues, but also anyone that opposed Black Lives Matter, anyone that opposed reparations, anyone that opposed ACAB; they kept calling for a unified front to address all of these issues as one.

I don't recall overhearing anyone complaining about feeling unable to speak up, but in the last year or two it has occurred multiple times at my usual haunts.

But once again this is all subjective experience of one person, albeit someone who tries to be at least somewhat perceptive and thoughtful about it. I have an axe to grind, so I am very quick to denounce certain cohorts -- hence my original comment here -- but again this is all subjective and nowhere have I explicitly asserted anything as fact. If you take the omission of certain wording as an attempt at factuality, you should consider that certain kinds of language training encourage writing in a way that minimizes some phrasing as a matter of style, and that it is very common in many places where people write professionally.

Growing up I do not remember political associations to be so strong in folks. Twenty years ago, when 9/11 hit, we put aside our differences in a remarkable display of national unity. (Granted, not all good came out of this; a number of racial groups saw a ton of negative attention at the time. But even with that, the climate felt like one of unity, at least for me.) Comedians like Trey Parker/Matt Stone, Dave Chapelle, even Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert would regularly poke the bear on a wide range of social issues without constantly sparking nationwide outrages.

Now, we have... this: an endless cacophony of unqualified and undeserving voices spouting off whatever they want, for every purpose other than advancing productive debate. Where all get to be heard regardless of merit, yet original ideas suppressed because of pedantry (like "citation needed") and not having the backing of the melange of different social issues and media idols that we suffer under today. I don't think the political climate has been so stifling since at least McCarthyism, and for this I blame Twitter and social media.

I don't understand how you think such flowery, subjective language constitutes an objective statement of reality; all of my input into this matter is pretty clearly stated as opinion and observations outlined serve to reinforce it.

Besides, sitting there banging out "Citation Needed" like this was fucking Wikipedia is a crass, petulant move, and wholly inappropriate for something as counterfactual as a comment board. You can save the nitpicking for r/AskHistorians, where the rules clearly require it.

The past as you see it here doesn't exist, by my own perception. There were a lot more extremeist groups in the shadows, but that contained them and isolated those that sought to join them. With so much of this extremeism out in the open, people are now seeing social reinforcement where before they would have seen chastisement, and I think this is a bad thing. We were much better as a country as the great melting pot, than we are now as the salad bowl.

I think its wonderful that so many oppressed groups are given opportunities at the podium, but the problem is that many of these oppressed groups are oppressed for good reason (like white supremacists), and there needs to be some sort of filter that keeps them sidelined. Unfortunately I don't see how to achieve that without some sort of orthodoxy, and right now the people that are trying to write that are fucking crazy.

Yeah, online communities reflexively "other" anyone who does not agree with their increasingly robust (aka fascist) political dogma, given that that sort of thing seems to be inescapably creeping into everything

How many times have I walked by a table in a cafe to overhear someone complaining that it's impossible to be taken seriously unless you adopt extremeist left or right schools of thought?

How many times have I witnessed adherents dismissing moderates or centrists? Accusing them of helping the "enemy"? What about people who think for themselves and have concluded something out of the mainstream? Throwing in some other unrelated political cause and accusing anyone who doesn't agree to be wrong?

It's disgusting, and those communities should be ashamed of themselves

I'm assuming, of course, that GP is a decent person and independent thinker, as those types tend to get railroaded in this glorious new dawn of political groupthink

They don't start fresh every three months.

Usually they have multiple leagues cooking up in the oven at any given time, so that if the league they want to release isn't ready in time, another, simpler idea will likely be within reach of completion.

The timeline is as such because their business model requires engagement spikes every three months. Remember that Path of Exile is free-to-play.

I also want to add that PoE has grown into one of, if not THE most complex games ever made; there are so many overlapping systems and mechanics that there were memes about what would happen if they added any more special destination buttons to the worldmap. And I'm not even talking about the initial release; it was a complicated game then, but now it has the mechanics of at least a dozen leagues baked into the core game play; many of those leagues are an entire game unto themselves (like Delve)

I love it for this, but it makes me sad that most gamers don't try and reason about this complex thing, and instead follow build guides and copy streamers, instead of experiment. Also, because of the nature of the game's deisgn, you need to play for a stupendous amount of hours to reach the end- endgame, and for most folks you also need to trade items with people IRL as the designers intentionally do not add a decent trade system. There are a lot of other quirks that reflect the designers' intent to not make life easy, either, and players both love and hate that.

Humorists all over the western world are finding that the newest members of their audience don't even speak their language any more.

Kind of reminds me of the Funnybot episode of South Park.

I for one think the prank that GOG pulled is HILARIOUS

I've gotten good enough at Linux to where I don't need to constantly look stuff up after long periods of use, but not FreeBSD.

Which is why I love FreeBSD so much. It's consistent, clearly explained, thoroughly documented, powerful, and flexible. I have a home server (just upgraded to 13.1) that I go months at a time without logging in. And while I do tend to forget a lot of important details, looking them up is incredibly easy.

I don't really care about what software FreeBSD uses, just that it is consistent and well-documented.

Plus, the whole architecture of it fits comfortably in my head. It is so nice to reason about.

Haven't tried Mono, Node, or anything NoSQL, but Java, Ruby, and Postgres all run pretty well. It is runtime-compatibile with Linux executables and you can even install a linux distro in a jail

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/setting-up-a-debian-linux...

And supporting them is supporting a faceless corporation run by young, ageist technocrats, where all your rights are squashed under DRM

On a high quality record with a high quality setup, you can have both. It's because the distortion is really subtle, and hits all the right harmonics. On bass-heavy music it makes the bass sound really nice. The other parts of "warmth" aren't really in my wheelhouse, but it makes the bass in bass music better

Yes, but it really isn't that far. As soon as you leave the edge of suburba-mega-town you're in wilderness again. Where I live it's much less than a half-hour of driving, from the most interior parts of the city, in most conditions.

Maybe on the popular coasts, but most of inner USA is little pockets of development spread out among large wilderness

Hell even the California countryside is like this, once you get far enough away from the big cities

I wonder if it made the association from being shown images with various kinds of fights, a large portion of which may have been bloody.

Stop anthropomorphisizing computers! They hate that!

Maybe it's the prevailing trend among non-HN people that sucks.

Would a confidant or ally obscure the reasons for problems behind a friendly face? Would they use subtlety and emotional manipulation to push you to use the things that they want you to use?

Is my computer my ally/confidant, or is it trying to control me from the shadows?

An ally does not behave in the way that Windows has been programmed to behave. It should be straight and narrow with me when something is wrong. Not friendly and fake-diplomatic.

Once again, we are shown an example of how business greed and the desires of average, illiterate users ruin computing for the people that understand them and are capable of making the most with them -- the power users. Of course, rather than spending the extra effort needed to elevate ordinary users to a more literate status, we happily stoop to their level as it makes obscuring the various telemetry and profit machinery embedded in Windows far easier.

touche

The tonality of all the new copy in Windows 10 is just bad. It's like a bunch of nontechnicals got together and tried to cuteify the OS.

I had totally forgotten about how obnoxious Cortana was (I always turned that shit off first thing), or the condescending text that accompanies large updates requiring you to re-certify that no, you don't want to use Microsoft Edge, thank you

Don't even want to imagine what Windows 11 is like, none of my PCs can run it (thank god)

I miss the bluescreens that didn't have emoticons

Computers don't have feelings, they process data. I don't want servants, I have computers for that. So how I talk to them shouldn't matter.

In fact, if you have a servant at all, YOU are an enormous asshole. Nobody should live in the shadow of someone far more privileged than they.

They're trying to come off as friendly and inviting, but I read it as half-assed.

Perception is a bitch.

If I had my way we'd dispense with all these stupid pleasantries. My computer is not my friend, Windows is not my friend, and Microsoft and their awful marketing droids (who almost certainly guided their choice of words here) are most definitely not my friend. Who decided that Windows needs to talk to me like a middle-aged soccer mom (or an argonian shopkeeper)?

Nothing wrong with "Welcome", "Error 404: File Not Found", "Bad command or file name", etc etc etc. (Ok, maybe the last one is a bit cryptic, but it is telling me exactly what went wrong without any fluff, which is how all software should be.)

Computers are our servants, not our friends. They should act like it, and we should stop trying to humanize them.

Kind of like how Windows' first-time boot-up greets you with a flat (and totally inappropriate) "Hi"

Like fucking seriously, not even "Hello"? "Hi" is how I greet the coworker I don't really even like that much. Whenever I see this I think of the Argonian NPCs from Oblivion, who would also greet you with a very flat "Hi"

"Greetings," "Salutations," even "Welcome!" would be a better choice here.

I don't know what's so demonstrably false about it; there is credible evidence (cited in another comment) suggesting mineral/electrolyte loss from drinking demineralized water and GGP admits to purposefully consuming nutrients from other sources to compensate. That only helps to prove my point?

If you have to compensate from other sources than I don't understand how something is necessarily harmless, without the qualifier that it should only be used in the context of a proper diet (which many/most don't have, particularly the types that might be susceptible to quack wellness claims)

Besides, one anecdote does not a disproven theory make

I'm thinking demineralized water, of which distillation is several ways to produce it. The rub seems to be that it leeches minerals from both the body and distribution mechanisms (like metal piping)

If you take a multivitamin and eat a varied diet, there is no "magic" nutritional value lost.

So you're substituting in the lost minerals from other sources. I don't see how that detracts from my (rather weak) argument

Why do you seem to feel so strongly about distilled water?

Why not google this yourself? Here are a few papers I was able to dig up:

http://ecoewp.com/images/nutrientschap12.pdf

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4223198/

And FFS people, lighten up. The preferred way to correct someone wrong on the internet is gently.

I don't know, but 'distilled' water is typically sold as the most chemically pure form of water. I do know it needs to be remineralized or something, as pure distilled water is bad for you.

But plenty to do with distillation, which is the mechanism this solar device uses

One that shows a very plausible reality where FAANG comes out with a rating system, and how that might potentially go down.