stewie3128

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stewie3128,

First we ban DDT, then Pizza Hut releases Stuffed Crust, then bed bugs make a resurgence. It all fits.

stewie3128,

Hope springs eternal. Most people without an adblocker don’t even notice that their web experience has become an ad-ridden hellscape.

Next smartphone I buy, which one do you recommend?

Things that make me angry about my current smartphone Samsung Galaxy S21Ultra on a Verizon plan is the mandatory software updates in which they install WITHOUT MY PERMISSION stupid apps like Netflix and addictive gambling games and stacking block games and Candy crush. God knows what else they install without my permission. I...

stewie3128,

Warning about bringing an unlocked phone to Verizon (even if it’s a current flagship Apple/Samsung/Google device): 50/50 they’ll lock you out of WiFi calling/HD voice, etc. Because they’re dicks.

stewie3128,

And if your bootloader is unlocked, VZ is likely to lock you out of VoLTE/HD Voice/WiFi calling/etc.

I mean, you could go to T-Mobile who don’t currently play these specific games with devices, but then you’re trading coverage for features/freedom.

All carriers, wired and wireless, need to be regulated as DUMB PIPES. Title 2 for everyone. That’s what we’re paying for: Not “the Verizon experience” or “the pride and accomplishment of being an AT&T customer.” Let me buy a phone, and do with it whatever it is technologically capable of doing on your network. The network provider doesn’t need to provide any Android/iOS tech support if they keep it simple and stay out of the customer-fuckery business.

stewie3128,

Republicans actively laugh at protesters. If people are protesting, they think, “I’ve gotta be doing something right to be triggering the libs like this.”

/Grew up in a Republican household with all Republican extended family

In fact, the largest protests in history (to that date) were in opposition to starting the Iraq war. Fat load of good that did.

Democrats protest. Republicans vote. Guess who’s running the show.

stewie3128,

I get the sense that everyone responding to this is completely missing the joke.

They mean laser printers, people.

stewie3128,

HP can do whatever they want, never going back to them. Currently use Brother, and have been happy with their lasers for - I think - 15 years now.

stewie3128,

Nope. Pee on Confederate graves… The few that they’ve managed to bury properly. They died doing a shitty thing for a shitty reason, and we’ve had to deal with the aftermath since the election of 1876 was brokered to end Reconstruction.

They fucked everything up. So, yeah, no respect. Pee on them.

stewie3128,

Let them burn themselves out, then piss on them.

stewie3128,

I use Mac for work (post audio) and Gentoo for fun on an Intel machine.

MacOS does not do well if you dig in to it like it’s a Linux box.

stewie3128,

Would be great if he said that about funding the American government.

stewie3128,

I fear, though, that Trump v2 will have everything at his disposal that Bush had, and more. Heritage Foundation is already rigging the scaffolding for reintroducing Schedule F with the next GOP president, and have personnel lists.

stewie3128,

Hillary’s plan was being developed and debated in '93-94, Romneycare in Massachusetts happened in 2006.

stewie3128,

I live in SoCal and love it, and do not intend to have kids, but it really seems like you’d be struggling to raise 3 kids around here on less than $150k (2 cars, rent/mortgage, etc).

Obviously many people manage it somehow, but it must be incredibly stressful. I have no idea how most of them do it.

stewie3128,

Most of them, but I’m just tired.

stewie3128,
stewie3128,

In a vacuum, sure, hydrogen for personal vehicles is great. In reality, though, you’re down at about 30% efficiency between the H2 geting extracted from wherever, and you gassing up your car.

Additionally, if more than 5% of that H2 escapes into the atmosphere at any time, it actually does more damage to the planet than fossil fuels, by preoccupying the hydroxyl radicals in the sky that would otherwise be breaking down greenhouse gases.

Add on to that, that if I actually had to pay for hydrogen fuel, it would cost me 6x as much per mile to run my Hyundai Nexo than a Prius. H2 in SoCal is currently $36/kg at the pump, having doubled or nearly tripled in price in the last 18 months. (Somehow, in Korea it’s only $2/kg.)

H2 fuel cell tech has its place as a fuel (but not in combustion engines like BMW is trying to do though… that’s just a farce). Trucks/long-haul vehicles, planes, ships all would be better off running H2. It fuels up fast, is way lighter than any battery, and is pretty darn energy dense. But for around-town driving, BEVs right now are just a much better option. Their problem is heavy batteries and comparatively longer fueling time than gasoline/hydrogen.

Fossil fuels are just amazingly energy dense, and we’re not going to replace them 1:1 any time soon. Every alternative involves massive tradeoffs.

Source: I own a 2022 Hyundai Nexo hydrogen SUV. Love it as a car, but most of the H2 fueling stations are broken down half the time (you need to check an app to see which one, if any, are currently working), and the price of the fuel in the US is no longer viable. When my free fuel card expires in 2025, I’ll be getting either a BEV or PHEV. Lucid or Polaris are looking nice.

stewie3128,

The 12 years of mandatory schooling that they already get is wasted on most of them anyway. Mention President McKinley, and most Americans will respond with “who?”

Education in the US sucks in a lot of ways for a lot of people for a lot of reasons, and most “students” don’t end up retaining much of anything as a result of those forces. We’re trained to get grades based on attendance and participation, from material that is taught to the test. Very little of your grade has anything to do with whether you actually learned, digested, and retained anything…

We were all taught about the Whiskey Rebellion in high school. But bring it up in any conversation about taxes, and 99% of the time you’ll get a blank stare, or “the what?”

So we can pile “financial literacy” on top of all the other things that are jammed into American curricula, and it won’t make a damn bit of difference in the end. Because it doesn’t matter what is taught - it’s not going to be learned anyway. Payday lenders will still make bank, buy-here-pay-here dealerships will keep recycling the same cars at a huge profit, the poor will still play the lottery, and Santander will keep making car loans to under-qualified applicants at extortionate interest rates. People will still buy $70k pickup trucks on a $50k salary, and roll their negative equity into the next overpriced consumer wealth/masculinity signaling device.

stewie3128,

Then for you it doesn’t matter. But it may matter to people you share your music with, and I think higher-quality should proliferate instead of lower-quality.

Also I listened to that A/B test - glitchy mess on my android phone for some reason, but still got 23/25 with my $10 Panasonic earbuds.

stewie3128,

This is what I’ve done. Not all it’s cracked up to be. 24/96 is still my sweet spot for casual listening (as long as the recording/mastering chain was all at least 96khz… Otherwise, whatever the weakest link in the chain was).

For having a career, though, 3 decades of piano ain’t a bad way to go.

stewie3128,

This was more true when the labels were running everything. Now you can get a lot of the material more-or-less directly from the artists on various platforms. Instead of artists getting 5% of the $$$, they can get 70%+.

Just saying that not everything you listen to is necessarily by a band signed to a label. A lot of newer talents have gotten wise to the scam the labels have been running (for the same reasons you articulated - who would knowingly sign up for that?) and are putting things out themselves instead.

stewie3128,

I normally just listen to podcasts on those earbuds, but it’s what I had at the moment, so it’s what I used.

Has HP printers always been this bad? (sh.itjust.works)

So my mother recently bought an ET-2800, By HP we had an HP printer before and we got a new one because the old one would not work with my sister’s Windows 11 Laptop. So I had to set it up for my mother, the manual said you can use it without the app. But there was no way to physically do that. Anyway, I downloaded the app on...

stewie3128,

I’ve only bought Brother laser printers for 15 years now, and have no intention of doing anything else. Never again, HP.

stewie3128,

I pay for streaming services where I don’t want to see the ads - which is to say, every streaming service I use at any given moment. I hate ads.

If I can’t get media ad-free, to the high seas it is.

Website ads, though, can go to hell in my opinion. There’s no good way to let a tasteful amount through with negligible impact on pageload speed. I subscribe to a few newspapers, but for everything else there’s uBO.

I consider myself lucky to be able to pay my way out of the problem right now. Until I was in my early 30s, I never paid for a single piece of software or media, simply because I couldn’t afford it. I did FOSS where I could, but, still…

Now that I can afford to pay for the things I use (and frequently write the expense off to my business), I haven’t ventured into international waters for years. Hopefully, “voting with my wallet” and financially supporting the software and media I use can go some distance to preventing more draconian DRM from being imposed.

Although everyone needs to get paid for their work, I’ll never begrudge anyone pirating something because they can’t afford it. I’ve been there, and wouldn’t have been able to advance in my field without doing so.

stewie3128,

Largest protests in history (at least at the time) were against invading Iraq in the lead-up to the war. Democrats protest, but Republicans VOTE. That’s why they run everything from a minority position.

stewie3128,

Your parliament just gave a nazi a standing ovation.

stewie3128,

So we’re going to protest our way around gerrymandering now?

It’s gerrymandered because people voted in 6he reps who gerrymandered everything. Things didn’t get gerrymandered by the GOP protesting for more gerrymandering.

stewie3128,

Depends. Does it have any oil we could invade?

stewie3128,

Putting Zimmer anywhere near the same league as Williams is grotesque.

Zimmer writes a medley, then has an army of underpaid and under-credited orchestrators write 95% of the film. He couldn’t orchestrate his way out of a paper bag.

His primary skill is pushing the “every instrument on every note” button on his Project Sam VI and then adding an additional 6 french horns, 6 trombones, and probably a pipe organ.

Can you recall a single melody from Oppenheimer? It’s all just environmental boom and brass shit, with strings that might as well be synth. Can you recall a melody from Inception? Nope, just BWAAAAH.

There’s a reason all of his legitimately musical scores in the last 25 years are co-written with another composer. Batman films, The Rock, Gladiator, etc. He musically peaked as a solo composer with Backdraft, imo.

Williams, on the other hand, employees orchestrators solely because he is required by union rules to have an orchestrator. His short-scores (the blueprints that orchestrators work from) are UNBELIEVABLY detailed.

Williams went to Juilliard. Zimmer took two weeks of piano lessons and was in a band.

And no one, NO ONE, has written the number of iconic melodies and scores that Williams has. Star Wars wouldn’t be Star Wars without that score… Mark Hammil has said that John Williams is more responsible for the success of Start Wars than anyone other than George Lucas.

Jurassic Park wouldn’t be JP without his score.

ET. Superman. Indiana Jones. Harry Potter. You can hear the music to these films in your head right now.

Or, you can listen to Hans Zimmer in your head now too: BWAAAAH.

I’ll leave you with one thought: A few months ago, my Uber driver was a former orchestrator for Zimmer at RC. He hated it and quit. Re-read those two sentences.

stewie3128,

Point taken on mistaking Oppenheimer’s patently generic score for a Zimmer work. I actually enjoy Nolan films, otherwise I wouldn’t go to see them.

Klaus Badelt (who wrote the completely - IMO - non-piratical theme to PotC… seriously, could have been in the Rock and it would have made no difference) and Steve Jablonsky both came out of RC, and both write music that is indiscernible from the atmospheric, non-specific stuff that Zimmer has been making for 25 years. Everyone Zimmer has influenced sounds like they compose by smearing a varnish of LOUD around the film.

I grew up listening to HZ, he has reached incredible heights at times. But right now he owns a music factory that is 99% operated by other people, and puts his name in as composer of primarily others’ work. Yeah, it’s the contract they signed, but I don’t think it makes him a great composer.

stewie3128,

I used TikTok once. Three hours later I didn’t realize that it was already midnight. Uninstalled immediately. Never again.

What are some FOSS programs that you think are a far better user experience than their counterparts? (sh.itjust.works)

I used Plex for my home media for almost a year, then it stopped playing nice for reasons I gave up on diagnosing. While looking at alternatives, I found Jellyfin which is much more responsive, IMO, and the UI is much nicer as well....

stewie3128,

Can it export EDLs or FCP-compatible XMLs for your audio team?

stewie3128,

Google still benefits from having Firefox around, so that they can maintain less of an appearance of a monopoly in the browser space. Whatever way they fund Firefox, it’s still to their benefit to do so.

stewie3128,

It uses Chromium as its base, so is essentially Chrome with fancy things attached to it. It uses Blink, Chrome/Chromium’s rendering engine.

We need fewer Chromium-based browsers out there. The greater marketshare they have, the easier it will be for Google to push W3C and everyone else around to conform to their desired business model.

For example, when Google inevitably pushes WEI into Chrome, WebKit and Gecko (Safari-based and Firefox-based browsers) won’t be affected at all.

If, however, 90% of all users end up on Blink (whether it’s Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, Edge, Brave, or whatever) then Google can do whatever they want to the web.

stewie3128,

Reaper can go toe-to-toe with any DAW, including Pro Tools.

I work in audio for film and television, and we would all drop Pro Tools and switch to Logic/Nuendo/Studio One/Reaper if Avid didn’t have a legacy stranglehold on the Audio Post industry.

stewie3128,

Simply being “not as bad” does not make it “good.”

This is just providing masculine jobs for guys who won’t do anything else, while enriching the terrible people who employ them. There’s no use to whaling.

stewie3128,

I think the only cure for gear acquisition syndrome is experience. After a few years of buying everything in sight, I noticed that I really only used my FabFilter and Universal Audio plugins, with occasional instances of Soothe2 and MH Thump. When I changed computers, I didn’t reinstall 70% of my plugins.

After a few years of composing, I noticed I only really used my samples from East-West, ProjectSAM, and Cinesamples.

But it took me a while to get to that point.

stewie3128,

Every part of me wants Mitch McConnell to publicly suffer.

stewie3128,

Sure I do. Here’s one:

All Republicans are either selfish, stupid, or evil.

stewie3128,

You always are, and people are always allowed to call you an asshole if they feel compelled to do so.

Looking for suggestions for a place to move in the US as a remote employee

So the work I do is 100% remote now. I moved to Southern California because of an industry that has in part moved to remote work. My only requirements are a temperate climate, nature access and hopefully a blue-ish state. Is there a place out there that makes sense financially? I’m hoping to buy a house less then 500k. I...

stewie3128,

Ashland, OR.

stewie3128,

If you’ve never experienced upper Midwest winters, you’ll be in for an interesting experience.

Also, not much in the way of topology, contrasting with SoCal.

I grew up in Chicago and got out of the entire area as soon as possible, due to (in no particular order) allergies, weather, and seasonal affective disorder.

I live in SoCal now and love it here, but climate change will probably force us elsewhere within 20 years. We already spend most of the summer somewhere else to escape the heat.

stewie3128,

West Virginians.

stewie3128,

Eureka is quite nice.

CA north of SAC is definitely not “blue-ish” in the slightest. Towns like Yreka are basically de-industrialized, the locals blame “environmentalists” for that, and now Siskiyou County goes like 70% Trump.

Also, Redding is an absolute shithole.

stewie3128,

That requires owning land yourself, which strictly speaking isn’t a thing in communism.

Search engine without SEO garbage?

Been looking for a search engine that isn’t plauged with SEO garbage every time I look for anything. Been using DDG for quite a long time now, and I’m starting to get dissatisfied with results. It seems like more and more results are just companies trying to make their way to the top of the search results instead of anything...

stewie3128,

Just remember that when something is free, you’re the product.

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