pixelscript

@pixelscript@lemm.ee

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon walks home in the city at 2 AM⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I can’t think of a time before this I’ve seen the word ‘meanacing’ used as a verb and not an adjective.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Linux hits exactly 2% user share on the October 2024 Steam Survey⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I’d be more than happy to sacrifice a distro I don’t care about like Ubuntu to the mainstream if it means Microsoft’s market cap gets a sizeable chunk taken out of it.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Read-onlys are cancer. Post stuff you want to see.⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Nah. The real cancer is the quiet plurality of users who just scroll through the post feed and only voting, not even reading comments. The ones who are responsible for the occasional thread that has entirely negative comments but gets upvoted to the stratosphere anyways.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I just need to keep it steady⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  There’s actually no digital audio involved anywhere in this process. It’s all analog.

  A magnetic tape cassette holds raw wave data of the sounds it records. Just like a vinyl record, except the groove is in the magnetic field instead of physically etched into the surface of the tape, and the needle is an electromagnet instead of, well, a needle.

  An audio cable using a standard 3.5mm jack also transmits raw wave data. It has to, because the electromagnetic pulses in the cable are what directly drive the electromagnets in whatever speakers they’re hooked up to. If it’s coming out of a digital player, the player has to convert the signal on its own using an onboard digital-to-analog converter (a DAC).

  The neat part is that since a tape deck read head is looking for an analog wave signal, and an analog wave signal is what an aux cable carries, the two are directly compatible with one another. If you actually crack one of these tape deck hacks open, you’ll find the whole thing is completely empty, save for the audio cable wires going directly to the write head that mimics the tape. Beyond that, there’s no conversion equipment, no circuit board, nothing. It’s a direct pass-through.

  The body of the thing is nothing more than an elaborate way to trip all the mechanisms in the tape deck to trick it into thinking it’s holding a valid cassette, while simply holding the write head fixed in the proper spot.

  I’m sure you already know all of this. I just think it’s really cool and I enjoy talking about it. Analog tech is amazing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨A real puzzler⁩ ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Votes on Lemmy are public, fyi.

  You have to host your own Lemmy instance to see them for yourself, but you can check if you were so inclined.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why did it take so damn long for humanity to "learn" how to draw/paint realistic images?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Art supplies were historically not cheap. If you wanted to do this for a living, you were probably needing to aim for selling your art to the rich upper class. That implicitly meant catering to their fickle tastes and working on commission. You didn’t make art for you and find your audience later, you made art for the customers you had or you starved.

  And to put it bluntly, realism wasn’t the fashionable hotness for most of human history. The more “crude” styles you may think of as objectively inferior to and less technically impressive as realism were in fact the styles in demand at their respective times. Fashion existed in ancient and medeival times just like it does today, and those styles were the fashion.

  The idea of the independent eccentric artist who lives secluded in their ideas cave producing masterpieces for no one in particular leaving the world in awe at their genius every time they come out with something to show is a very modern concept. If any artist wanted to make a realism painting in an era where it was not popular, they’d be doing it purely for themselves at their own expense. So virtually no one did. Or if they did, their works largely didn’t survive.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why are peole hating on .world?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t think the existence of large instances is in itself strictly antithetical to decentralization. The network effect makes them inevitable.

  The power in the fediverse is everyone has a standard toolset to interact with the entire fediverse. Most people won’t, and that’s okay. The important thing is that, should larger communities become too oppresive as they gentrify, replacing them is a cheap decision, as you and everyone like-minded with you can squad up and leave at any time and lose nothing as the standard tooling of the platform facilitates that migration. You have mobility in the fediverse, and that permits choice to those who seek it.

  This will stop being true once the larger instances start augmenting their experiences with proprietary nonsense. Features that only work there, that you can invest into and become dependant on, that you’d have to give up if you leave.

  The day that happens will be the day that chunk of the Fediverse dies. Or, well, it won’t die, it will probably flourish and do very well. But it won’t be the Fediverse anymore. It will just be another knee-high-fence-gated community, that happens to run on Fediverse tech.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Invincible 💪⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  In the microwave of evil?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I hate how anything without "world" in its name is just about the US⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  The more egalitarian principle would be to not assume. I won’t deny that. People from more minority locales have every right to be upset at being marginalized.

  But at the same time, whenever I read passive aggressive comments on socials from crown countries or from EAASL people around the world bitching about US defaultism as if people are doing it just to be ignorant dicks, I can only think to myself, “Uhh, hello? What do you think the demographics of this space were? What did you expect?”

  Americans are hardly the majority of the world’s English apeakers, but for all the reasons you listed, they tend to remain a massive plurality, if not an outright overwhelming majority, of any mainstream online English language platform. No, that’s not a license to perpetuate US defaultism. But like… read the room, people. Your good fight is far more uphill than you seem to think it is.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨I have the weirdest aesthetic preferences⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve seen at least one company press kit in rules on how to display their logo refer to it as “respect distance”.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Which are the lesser-known movies that are well worth seeing?⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago⁩:

  Detective Heart of America: The Final Freedom is a comedy film that will either be the funniest thing ever or an absolute cringefest, depending on your opinion of Jason Steele’s brand of humor. There is no in-between. It’s available to watch for free on YouTube, or whatever alternative frontend you use.

  Jason Steele, AKA FilmCow, you may recognize from YouTube series such as Charlie the Unicorn or Llamas with Hats. Yeah. That guy. Imagine 70 minutes of that.

  The film is a sequel to a pair of 4 minute long shorts (here and here). The film contains characters from these shorts and references events from them. So watching the film without watching the shorts first leads to some characters showing up out of nowhere with unexplained details. But that’s how every other character in the movie is, so… whatever, lmao.

  I still recommend watching the shorts first. If nothing else they can serve as an appetizer for you, to decide whether or not it’s your cup of tea. The film is the same vibe as the shorts, just longer. If you hate the shorts you will despise the film.

  It’s unironically my favorite film, so, I hope you get some amusement out of it. But if you bounce right off, I won’t be surprised. If you like it, enjoy quoting every line of it for the next month. If you hate it, sorry for wasting your time.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Burning Up⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The difference is that humans emit their own heat. Combined with our funny tendency to wear insulative clothing that can asymptotically approach zero net heat exchange with the atmosphere, acceptable temperatures skew wildly towards and beyond freezing.

  Meanwhile, without some kind of acting cooling mechanism, any temp even slightly above fever temp is inevitably fatal. You can only take off so many layers. What are you going to do, take off your skin? Sweating helps us humans a lot, but evaporative cooling can only do so much to reverse the heat gradient.

  50 F is excellent… with a light jacket or a blanket. Not so much if you’re naked.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Burning Up⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The correct rebuttal is that 69 degrees is ideal ambient temperature.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Anon comes out to his religious parents⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  What do you call a cis male who is sexually attracted to the conventionally attractive female phisique, but once it actually gets to act of sex or porn that depicts it, all interest is completely lost?

  Asking for a friend…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why 🤷‍♂️ do users 👨‍💻 dislike 👎 the use ✅ of emojis 😀 on Lemmy 🐭?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Emojis to me are like a strongly flavored seasoning. It’s only appropriate in specific contexts, and even in those contexts, just a pinch goes a long way. Too much and it can detract from the experience.

  Emojipasta is grossly overseasoned food. But that’s the point, obviously. It’s the emoji version of those white women on Tiktok who throw three pounds of ground beef wrapped around an entire block of cheese in a baking sheet full of milk and bake it in the oven for rage clicks.

  Me, personally, I usually don’t need emoji seasoning. I’m fine with it plain. Besides, most emojis to me have all the class of drowning your entire meal in ranch dressing. There are a very small handful of exceptions. But that’s just my lame opinion.

  And of the ones I do find theoretically useful, I’m always hesitant to use them, because emoji rendering is platform specific. They’re not quite like text, where the glyphs are entirely utilitarian and typeface it’s written in conveys little to no information. But with emojis, the subleties pile up. A thinking emoji rendered on a Windows PC isn’t quite the same as a thinking emoji on an iPhone, or various kinds of Android phones. Unless I’m on a platform like Twitter or Discord that forces all clients to use a single emoji set, I can never confidently send a precise emotion with an emoji.

  Platforms like Discord that let you create your own emojis instead of using the comparatively sterile, corporate-approved, general purpose set provided in standard Unicode is another story. I like those and use them extensively. If Lemmy natively supported a Discord-esque system where instances or communities could define custom emojis that didn’t rely on custom clients, plugins, or instance-specific rendering hacks, I’d use them all the time. Though this would, I presume, be to the extreme chagrin of many.