Luc

Do you mean like a bass sound? Any idea what frequency?

As someone who can’t hear high pitches at all, I do recognise this funky bouncing of frequencies at the edge of my hearing range (probably around 15 kHz, I haven’t precisely measured it). It’s surprisingly hard to locate sound sources when you only hear them when you’re facing a certain angle in a certain spot in the room! These are always too quiet for my phone to pick up, so that’s no help sadly

I wonder if there’d be a market for a variant of a phone model that is just all-round decent, but has a better microphone and other sensor upgrades. I run into the sensor limits a lot (probably weekly) but also don’t want to permanently run around with a bulky sensor board in my pocket :<

Probably related: apparently (some?) people can learn to use echolocation. Particularly useful for blind people of course, but I’ve read it’s too much effort and too limited compared to the alternative solutions so that it’s generally not considered worth pursuing. Naturally I had to try it myself: distinguishing the distance to one wall isn’t hard at all, at least coarsely; the difficulty seems to be in rapidly (while walking) finding smaller objects (especially ones that dampen sound), figuring out angles if you’re not facing or precisely perpendicular to a wall, and dealing with background noise

With your superhuman hearing, maybe you’d enjoy casually learning to do this at some level and getting some use out of the hearing sensitivity :)

All lights? Also battery-fed DC lights somehow?! I’m no expert but that seems strange

I’ve caught a lot of lights and light-emitting displays flickering with the 980fps camera that’s built into my phone (best thing since sliced bread for a nerd like me), but also quite many lights appear solid. I’d imagine few have such high-frequency electronics that it pulses well beyond 1 kHz. Otherwise the sensor should sometimes capture a frame during a low or a peak

As an example, I was recently looking at car lights in Germany, expecting to see duty cycling in most modern ones, but the majority (2/3rds or so) were actually solid so far as I could tell. A few cars had a mixture of flickering and solid lights in seemingly the same fixture. All flickering ones were high frequency though, not like 50 Hz as grid-fed lights do but much more. I didn’t bother with ffmpeg and counting frames but I estimated on the order of 250 Hz for one of them

You’re saying I can learn to see with my buttocks if one puts the right kind of lens in front of it and the light is sufficiently intense?

I definitely can’t hear high frequencies (I’m assuming due to ear infections as a child, feels mildly unfair that other people my age get to hear and understand conversations better but oh well) but coil whine is a thing for me as well.

Had a router once that would whine depending on the network packet rate. My computer screen makes a noise when displaying large grids like a screen full of terminal text or a mostly blank spreadsheet. The led lights in my bathroom make a noise and I often turn them off while transacting my business. My Bluetooth headphones make similar noises depending on the connection state but that one is probably interference and not coil whine

It happens at all frequencies. Although you don’t need to be able to hear special frequencies for it, of course you’ll hear it in more places if you have superlucg hearing ^^

Do you have an example of something you can make out that an average person probably can’t?

Missing the latest addition to the OSI model: AI!

Layer 8 (sender): turning a few keywords into a well-formed text

Layer 8 (receiver): summarising text back into its short form

That’s the idea anyway. In practice, half the apps ask for it on first setup so (tech-illiterate) people are expecting the prompt and know to click yes next finish

It’s still the developer’s choice when the prompt is shown, just that it moved from AndroidManifest.xml to executable code so now they have the option to not ask until it’s actually needed

I also seem to remember it’s a policy of Google’s that permission mustn’t be asked until required, but if I remember this right, I’m either not using enough of their store-vetted adware or they’re not checking this properly

Scripting isn’t the issue, but for tab completion: the boundary is often at a space or parenthesis so that you need to type the backslash + char to continue tabbing to completion

In dutch I’ve heard them be called flying commas unapologetically (vliegende comma’s — ironically has one in it because many plurals need it, it doesn’t mark possession)

Now I’m imagining a shell that looks iteratively through arguments to find where quotes would make total sense

$ ls
my victims.ods
$ wipe -f my victims.ods --thorough

So the shell would go like

1. wipe → command name found, ok
2. -f → no file in the current directory starts with that, skip
3. my → matches a file, keep in memory…
4. my victims.ods → full match, but missing quotes!
5. Prompt user:

Filename "my victims.ods" found without quotes. Choose:
[a]dd quotes this time
[A]lways add quotes (dangerous)
[n]o quotes today please
[N]ever offer adding quotes again
[t]ell me what could possibly go wrong when I choose to always add quotes
[P]unch the person who proposed this feature

almost always a strawman

Tell me what party should I vote for then :(

“… or through inaction, allow a human to come to harm.” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Laws_of_Robotics)

You can stand by and do nothing if that’s the lesser evil choice

Not to mention the improved team quality now that you can easily and effectively verify that the person can do the job in real-world conditions

But, to be fair, there does probably need to be some pre-selection. Anyone could show up for a free day’s wage. Might still be worth it though, who knows

the problem solves itself (unless you are very desperate)

Have you seen dating sites? When the market is such that one side can clearly pick whoever they want, not everyone has the luxury (good looks for dating / relevant experience for jobs) to not play ball

And here I thought it was referring to the small print on the inside. Then it hit me.

There it is… now I’ve got Tetris tune stuck in my head! Thank you good sir for this great gift! x)

I don’t know

(https://barrypopik.com/blog/three_logicians_walk_into_a_bar)

If you have a lot of intrinsic motivation, Anki will probably make you learn the languages the fastest (or maybe you pick one of the two, idk how Norwegian Bokmål and Nynosk interact)

If not, some gamified thing like Duolingo keeps a lot of people engaged for ages apparently. Keep in mind that even their scientific papers are using engagement as the metric by which they score different spaced repetition parameters, not lesson retention. My grandma has been doing English for a year and I have yet to hear her speak two words, but she loves the characters and enjoys it a lot and that’s the important thing for her ^^. If you’ve already got the book for the in-depth part, this could be a way to supplement by building a habit of daily learning

I’d guess that most other software is somewhere in between, at least on learning efficiency (like listening to audio books as someone else suggested: ok that’s great and engaging, once you have a solid foundation at least, but it’s only listening comprehension and you already need to know a lot so the further learning is somewhat limited)