WHERE ARE MY PRECISION SCREWDRIVERS
azertyfun @ azertyfun @sh.itjust.works Posts 2Comments 865Joined 2 yr. ago
azertyfun @ azertyfun @sh.itjust.works
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865
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2 yr. ago
Downmixing is a pretty straightforward affair. You have 6 channels, you need to go to 2, so you just average 4 signals per channel using some weights.
Good media players (Kodi) allow you to change those weights, especially for the center channel, and to reduce dynamic range (with a compressor). Problem solved, the movie will be understandable even on shitty built-in TV speakers if you want to do that for some insane reason.
The problem is that there are "default" weights for 2.0 downmixing that were made in the 90s for professional audio monitoring headphones, and these are the weights used by shitty software from shitty movie distributors or TV sets that don't care to find out why default downmixing is done the way it is. Netflix could detect that you're using shitty speakers and automatically reduce dynamic range and boost dialogue for you, they just DGAF. But none of that is the movie's problem.
Right?! A track like Spanish Sahara by Foals that uses the full dynamic range is such a pleasure to listen to. Then there's In the Air Tonight which IIRC has a digital release with super compressed dynamic range. The whole point of that song is that it slowly builds up to a genre-defining drop, so it had better stand out!
But people want to listen to movies on their built-in TV speakers with children crying in the background, and they don't want to understand how or why things are the way they are, they just want to complain that the world doesn't revolve around them.
I had a 5.0 setup before I even bought my first TV. I was just using my PC monitor until then.
It's counter-intuitive but decent sound comes first. I'd much rather watch Interstellar in 360p with 5.1 audio than in 4K OLED HDR with built-in speakers.
But when you say that people get mad because they spent a grand on a TV that sounds like shit and they feel they have to defend their choices.
I see that, but that is not what I am saying.
This is just not how things work on a technical level. The default is how cinemas work because that's the experience movies are made for; literally every other way to consume movie audio is "general usage audio programs fine tuning" and that's what needs fixing. That's my entire thesis. By calling me elitist you're just inventing things I'm not saying to get mad over.
Yes 500 € is a lot of money. But I will say I bought a good audio setup years before I even had a TV (some parts second hand so it did not actually cost me that much, and a 3.0 setup gets you 80 % of the way there). It's a markedly better experience to watch a movie on a shitty PC monitor with good audio than on a 55" OLED with built-in speakers, and I will die on that hill. And anecdotally I've heard actual filmmakers say as much.
people watch stuff on TV and cannot hear any dialogue
did you read anything I said or do you just want to complain?
have a doctorate on audio / put in thousands of dollars into a hobby
Good news then, a more-than-decent 5.1 setup can be had for ~500 €. A decent soundbar for a few hundred.
and let people like you mess around with the settings for your home cinema
I can't if the audio source is fucked up because directors have been forced by studios to release with low dynamic range.
My whole point is that your audio goes Master -> 5.1 channels -> downmixer -> your shitty 2.0 channels speakers and my audio goes Master -> 5.1 channels -> receiver -> my 5.1 setup.
You're asking the master to change to fit your needs. I'm asking the media players to fix their fucking downmixers because that's where the problem lies. Leave the studio mastering alone god damn it.
Where do you draw the line? If you use a soundbar, someone else is complaining because they use their built-in speakers. But if you optimize for that, someone else is using their laptop speaker on the train.
What really pisses me off with this "argument" is that the audio information is all right there, which you would know if you bothered to read the second half of my comment before getting all pissy.
5.1 audio (and the standards that superseded it in cinemas) all have multiple audio channels with one dedicated to voice. If you have a shit sound system, the sound system should be downmixing in a way that preserves dialogue better. Again, the information is all right there as there is no stereo track in most movies, your player is building it on-the-fly based on the 5.1 track. It's not the director's fault that Netflix or Hulu is doing an awful job at accounting for the fact that most of their users are listening on a sound setup that can barely reproduce intelligible speech.
Nah, I have a good sound setup and I don't want to be watching movies with less dynamic range because some people are using their shrilly built-in TV speakers with their children screaming in the background or $5 earbuds.
If you don't want to have a proper 5.1 audio setup, it's not the director's problem, it's the media player. Audio compression, center channel boosting, and subtitling are things that media centers have been able to do for decades (e.g. Kodi), it's just that streaming platforms and TVs don't always support it because they DGAF. Do look for a "night mode" in your TV settings though, that's an audio compressor and I have one on my receiver. If you are using headphones, use a media player like Kodi that allows you to boost the center channel (which is dedicated to dialogue).
OpenID-Connect, the standardized form of oAuth for the sole purpose of authenticating users to third-party services (i.e. google says "yes I certify it is john.smith@gmail.com logging in to your service").
99 % of websites even with "2FA" enabled allow to reset all login credentials with an email reset. Or worse, an SMS reset.
aka it's all just 1FA with the password+TOTP just being there for "convenience", and they trust gmail's actual 2FA not to get breached because if it does then the account is donzo.
Not that emailing passwords is good, because users won't change them and are likely to leak them. However login systems that are just an email with temporary credentials are superior to the standard system with the possibility to reset password by email, since they're basically that with less attack surface. The service provider never even has to process the user's password. Literally the only downside is usability, which can be a worthwhile tradeoff.
Alternatively one could do OIDC, but the downside is it only works with whichever authentication providers are setup whereas email registrations work without an intermediary such as google or Microsoft which is a big plus in my book, and might even be a hard requirement in B2B scenarios.
Finished severance s02 this weekend. Very disappointing ending to me (that I will not spoil), even though it seems like it's all anyone could talk about a couple months back.
Maybe it's because I just played Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and we were spoiled with incredible writing that does foreshadowing excellently with deep and nuanced themes, but while Severance's execution is great in the details the overarching plot left me severely disappointed. As if they got great directors, actors, set designers, dialogue, but just wrote the s01e01 hook and then kind of just made up the plot as an afterthought. Keeping up mystery for its own sake because once the curtain is pulled back, we realize the stage pieces are not that impressive.
It's still good TV but it ain't that deep and IDK why everybody's raving on about it. Anyway thanks for coming to my ted talk.
Nowadays "buggy" is not how I'd describe it, though there were certainly teething issues at the beginning. By now other DEs have learned to deal with it.
However it's still true that the GTK4 design is ill-fitting, and very opinionated. Quite exemplary of this are the applications that hardcode the GTK file picker (like Firefox and chrome) even though it's inferior in every way to the Qt file picker and forces the infuriating GTK "design" choice of doing fuzzy search when you type in the file list instead of jumping to the relevant file. Very annoying when dealing with organized directories especially when no other file browser on my system works that way!
Not books, but the Misfits and Magic TTRPG show from Dimension 20 is everything that HP isn't. It's fun and whimsical and the characters are lovable and the writing is great and the world building is astounding and it never misses a chance to take the piss at the many problematic aspects of HP it's satirically lampooning. I think the first episode is free on YouTube.
As a European software developer I would love to see that.
Unfortunately I'm afraid those most likely to cry foul aren't Americans, but the majority of European tech businesses who are either reselling MSFT bullshit or completely locked in AWS/Azure/GCP. Open-source/sovereign software services are the exception, not the rule.
You know, maybe my grandparents had it right.
It is weird that computers give so little sensory feedback for what they're doing. Flashlights go click. Cassette decks go clack-vrrrr. Whiteboards go squeek-squeek. Screen sharing goes... nothing, just a small mostly white rectangle on top of my much bigger rectangle until a disembodied, 4 kHz-wide simulacrum of someone's voice from halfway around the world says "yeah we see your screen". Unnatural is what it is.
The damn dean could have invited Kanye to do a standup routine that is just roman salutes and this would still have been an extremely gross violation of every democratic principle that would have gotten any other president impeached.
However in Trump's America it's just a Thursday and the so-called opposition is just nodding along and dutifully complying with every unconstitutional order. At this point Trump could sign an executive order for every registered democrat to literally dig their own grave and I think a majority would actually do it.
High-five the group of Belgian, Chadian, and Romanian vexillologists who were also sweating profusely throughout.
"Econ 101" is just that and if you think it's representative of "economists" you're dunning-krugering.
There are a lot of very competent interdisciplinary socio-economic scientists. The problem is that no-one listens to them because everyone still has the hots for the ghost of fucking Milton Friedman and trickle-down raeganomics.
Populist ideologues will always promote simple economic models, that's not the economists' fault. Sociologists can tell you why bad economic policy is self-sustaining under democratic capitalism but they can't really do anything about it because no one asks for their opinion.
Hell, right now the US is ruled by a moron whose understanding of economics is so bad that even the most hard-line libertarian economists are saying "you wot m8".
I've wrapped plenty of sensitive electronics that I'd be comfortable throwing at a wall. Get a larger box than you think you need, some foam wrapping/bubble wrap from another package and use that to form a protective core. Fill the rest of the box with lightly crumpled scrap paper, or packing peanuts if you have them. It ain't rocket science.
You just have to assume in the first truck the package will sit underneath seven other heavy packages, while the second truck will be completely empty as your package rattles around and bangs against the walls. Anything else is foolishness, you know damn well those trucks aren't individually fastening every box for a couple euros of gross revenue per delivery.
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Jump
Those are special cases, but the majority of Trump voters voted out of fear, not hate.
citation needed
Here's one: As of April 30th 14 % of Americans think Trump hasn't gone far enough with the unconstitutional deportation and rendition of immigrants to El Salvador's concentration camps. Another 33 % of Americans think it's "been about right". 52 % oppose it.
I do not see how it is possible to interpret that any other way than Americans are voting and supporting this administration out of hate. This isn't about the price of eggs. This isn't about voting "out of habit". When asked, specifically, about the horrific and hateful practices that are most emblematic of Trump's discourse of wanton hatred, half of American people actively support it.
Think whatever the hell you want about how to deal with that, but I draw the line at giving these people the benefit of the doubt. They don't deserve it, and they would not do the same for you.
Ironic, IKEA is married to PZ2. Which to be fair is a fine standard (aside from the fact that unaware people tend to confuse it with PH2 then wonder why their screws are stripped), it's just annoying that I have to switch my drill from T20 to PZ2 to build IKEA furniture.