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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • Why do you think the encryption capabilities on your PC are there for your sake? They might have sold them to you on that, but they are really there to protect copyright data because TPM allows encryption/decryption that is completely hidden from the rest of your system. Like an encrypted handshake that then transfers an encrypted key to decrypt the video stream. But it doesn’t save the decrypted data, it immediately re-encrypts it using your display’s private key (or whatever device is next in the chain, maybe your GPU). They can make it so that the unencrypted stream never touches your RAM or travels on any wire, which means you can’t pirate shows as you watch them unless you point a camera at your screen.

    Obviously if they just said that was one of the main points, no one would want it and media companies couldn’t benefit from it because they’d have to compromise to sell content.

    The other point was so that they could build a system where they hold the encryption keys and get to choose whose data is actually private. Obviously that’s an even harder sell.

    So they did what marketers always do and lied by omission about what it was for and just outright lied if they ever said they’d never give the keys to law enforcement (did they ever even say that?).

    Let go of the idea that someone selling something to you implies any kind of loyalty, especially when either party is a large corporation.





  • I haven’t gotten my hands dirty with this stuff specifically, but maybe you need to adjust buffer sizes to properly handle the different bit rates. Do you mainly see issues with higher combinations? The sample rate * bit depth is the important number, here. If you consider the problematic ones from that perspective, is there a threshold where anything under works fine but anything above has issues that get worse depending on how far above the threshold it is?

    I’m not certain, but I believe the audio buffer is handled via a callback function that gets called when the audio buffer is some % close to empty, and then the program refills the buffer, plus some other overhead. That data left in the buffer sets the deadline for refilling the buffer; miss that deadline and the audio cuts out. Meet the deadline and audio is seemless.

    A too small buffer will require the callback be called more often, and then the overhead can add up to missing deadlines. Alternatively, the % when it does the callback might need to be adjusted.

    Another consideration is if your DAC doesn’t support the chosen sample rate and bits per sample, then there is probably another buffer of the supported size and a conversion from one to the other (and its own callback when that buffer gets low). That said, I don’t know if it’ll even list unsupported combinations because I’m having trouble thinking of a valid use case. But it’s technically possible, so maybe it is like that.

    Anyways, those are what I’d be checking to debug this. If it is a setup problem, it won’t likely ever go away on its own, unless better defaults get set for those bitrates, but the ideal values depend on your system’s performance, so if yours is on the weaker side, it might never change.



  • For some soups, a great way to serve them is to toast a thick slice of one of the uncut loaves (so you can cut it thick), then place it in the middle of a wide bowl and serve the soup on top of that. Sometimes, you put another sauce that harmonizes well with the souo on the bread, first.

    Then you eat it as the soup absorbs into the bread, experiencing a combination of soggy and dry bread textures along with the flavour of the broth (and sauce, if present).

    It wouldn’t work with a standard loaf of bread, as both the slices and the bread itself aren’t thick enough to keep it from quickly going fully soggy. Breaking crackers or dipping toast into soup are pale imitations (ok, dipping toast isn’t that far off, but I still prefer a good thick piece of toast).

    Also, if you take a baguette and cut it into thinner slices then toast/bake those slices, you end up with a much cheaper version of those artisan crackers that are just dried pieces of baguette.

    Also, look up beef wellington for one of the more extreme uses of non-standard bread.


  • Though, on the other hand, having the video saved offsite is useful because then anyone with physical access to your home can’t get rid of the video showing they’re there.

    This is not an argument in favour of using cloud services, because that gives access to your video to anyone the company deems should have access (or sometimes individual workers who either have access as part of their job or gain access because businesses suck at security). It’s in response to you saying isolate the cameras from the internet entirely; there is a good reason to have them connected (though you could have a PC handle that with a connection to two networks and no physical or software bridge between the two, just take video from one, upload (encrypted) to server on other).


  • Funny story, though I do question the study they referred to, because there’s different flavours of counter-culture that look pretty different from each other. Hipster is one, but there’s also goth, emo, trench coat aesthetic, people who chase outdated trends, punk, metal, those who don’t dress up any differently if they are going out or staying in, otaku (like the ones that wear clothes with hentai on them, I wouldn’t call cosplaying a counter culture so much as a costume hobby unless cosplay wear is their default)…

    All of those looks are very different from each other while not wanting to follow the main culture’s trends and flaunting its definition of beauty.

    And tbh, I’m not sure I’d even call hipsters a counter-culture. There was a desire to rebel, but looking at the aesthetic, I can’t tell what they were really trying to rebel against. Looking sloppy? Business casual? Maybe it’s because the aesthetic has been absorbed into the culture itself or maybe it was an advertiser-led “rebellion” in the first place? Or trying to be ahead of the curve means eventually the mainstream “catches up” and the look just looks normal now?

    Also, thinking about it more, I wonder if the hilariously apt story was genuine or if someone there realized how they could really push their story by inventing an angry reader to prove their point.


  • I think the windows connection help wizard might have actually fixed a connection issue I had once. Out of more chances than I probably should have given it, considering how often it did dick all, despite my phone’s connection being fine.

    I think there’s a rare race condition or something in the windows network stack because I’ve had four different machines suddenly lose the ability to connect to working networks, where sometimes toggling airplane mode would fix it, sometimes even that wouldn’t do anything and it needed a restart. It happened more often with wireless connections, but I’ve seen it affect wired ones, too.


  • It feels like a bunch of moderation decisions are made by people just trying to satisfy some arbitrary OCD-like requirements. Like “you can’t reply to an old conversation” or “you can’t talk about a problem someone has already talked about”. That stuff is worse than the people who reply useless shit like RTFM (aka “I go to helo forums not to provide help but to gloat about the things I know that you don’t and act like every single comment is addressed to me personally and needs my input”) because at least those useless comments don’t kill the rest of the conversation.


  • My experience when I switched about a year ago was to wonder why I had put it off for so long because from day 1, it was more comfortable to use.

    Ans this is despite me using a DE I’d never used before (cinnamon) and ended up not really liking and getting “pushed” to another one (KDE) like windows pushed me to another OS (and even that was another “why didn’t I do this sooner?”).

    So a DE that was bad enough that I was happy to find a better alternative was still such a better experience than windows that I didn’t miss any of the comfort of familiarity at all from the start.

    And the longest part of the process was a) fighting windows to write the install iso properly (iirc it wanted to add the stupid windows meta folder files or something like that, causing the iso to fail the hash check, and I have a feeling that that side effect might be a reason they do it that way), and b) reading up on the various options in case I wanted something other than the default or common options (I didn’t but it was good to learn).






  • Funny thing about “AI skills” that I’ve noticed so far is that they are actually just skills in the thing you’re trying to get AI to help with. If you’re good at that, you can often (though not always) get an effective result. Mostly because you can talk about it at a deeper level and catch mistakes the AI makes.

    If you have no idea about the thing, it might look competent to you, but you just won’t be catching the mistakes.

    In that context, I would call them thought amplifiers and pretty effective at the whole “talking about something can help debug the problem, even if the other person doesn’t contribute anything of value because you have to look at the problem differently to explain it and that different perspective might make the solution more visible”, while also being able to contribute some valueable pieces.



  • Yeah, the Linux community has done a shitload of work to bring Linux up to as good as windows (in the technical sense) and better than windows (regarding the often hostile user experience).

    Microsoft is now helping with the marketing by making the windows experience even worse, driving more people to “take the plunge” only for them to realize there isn’t a place where the floor suddenly drops away and you’re left helpless, and that that actually is a better description for using windows outside of the rails MS wants.

    If you use an AMD gpu, there’s actually fewer steps to go from empty disk to playing a game, assuming that game isn’t trying to do things with the kernel or is one of the rare games that aren’t compatible for reasons other than anti-cheat (I’ve seen one game like that so far, forget the name of it but a logistics game that needed some dotnet library or something and I ended up giving up and refunding it rather than troubleshooting it until it worked, though others on protondb did say they got it working).

    The days where windows gives an easier or better experience are gone, even ignoring all the next level enshitification of win 11. I’ve been on Linux for about a year now but wish I had switched sooner.