I'm not sure social media was ever sane. I distinctly remember thinking it wasn't back in my highschool days, so around 2007-2009, which was pretty much when Facebook completely took over the market in Sweden where I lived.
Before then I used to use lunarstorm. Was that the sane period of social media? Maybe, my memory is fuzzy: it's been a while.
At least with early Facebook one was mostly interacting with one's pretty close peers. Back when I joined, you still needed a .edu email address to signup, and there was no real discovery mechanism, so you mostly only friended people who you had met IRL.
Yeah it wasn't ever sane. It was just harder to onboard and you were still interacting mostly with people you knew. Now it's worse because you'll hardly ever interact with people you know.
This trick unfortunately falls down above a certain size, especially if you want to game at a good fps, and stay in the consumer space (price) rather than the commercial display space. That gigabyte 45 inch is too small to use above your fireplace and view across the living room.
In my case I compromised on needing 4k, and got an lg 65 inch with only HDMI.
I have been doing A/V systems professionally for many years and the best system I have found recently is a Sony TV with an Apple TV. No sign-in needed for the TV for basic setup, can be easily set to come on to a particular input, works well with the Apple remote, and functions well with no internet with just a little corner pop-up saying "no internet" when you first turn it on.
You should update the TV when you first unbox it (ideally via ethernet) and then disconnect it. If you don't like Apple TV then your streaming box of choice.
> You should update the TV when you first unbox it (ideally via ethernet) and then disconnect it. If you don't like Apple TV then your streaming box of choice.
Can you update via USB? I know my (couple years old now) Samsung TVs have firmware downloads available so you don't even need to connect the TV to anything.
Yes. I've owned a couple Android-based Sony TVs in the past decade and they both support updating firmware via USB thumb. They also support installing/removing packages with ADB, just like one would with an Android phone, in the case that there's some offline app you want to use on it. The newer models also do a neat thing where if you have external speakers hooked up, its internal speakers can be repurposed for center channel audio which is super cool.
I'll echo the Apple TV + Sony TV combo. It's very solid.
Apple + Sony sounds like a pretty nice combo, although unsurprisingly, right? It is a combination of premium brands. (Of course often premium brands are actually garbage in a nice shell, so maybe it is surprisingly not surprisingly bad, haha).
Projectors can be an option but the price point to get anything comparably good in terms of picture quality puts you squarely back in commercial TV pricing.
Russia seems poised to invade Europe in the near future. If they do, and succeed, Rome could become part of the new Soviet Union(which Putin has explicitly said he wants to bring back)
Once that happens, it's likely to lead to poverty. At least that's what happened in the last USSR
Russia is neither poor nor failing, and saying that is underestimating the real actual danger they present.
Russia has vast natural resources and enough buyers for those resources even if the EU manages to completely stop (at significant cost). Their industry turned to wartime mode, resulting in the fact that they now have more armored vehicles than in February 2022.
Will they actually physically reach Italy? Probably not. Will they try to buy it out and bring a (even more) fascist autocratic regime there? Probably yes.
It's both poor, failing and with a population affected by chronic depression. But for that reason (desperation) they should not be underestimated and should have been handled in a way less gentle way.
> Russia has vast natural resources and enough buyers
Not saying that it's not what has kept them standing until now, but the buyers make the price in this case. So who knows what the price could become in the future.
> Will they try to buy it out and bring a (even more) fascist autocratic regime there? Probably yes.
Are you still talking about Russia with their monopoly currency? "Try" as in one probability over one billion to succeed and be disposed of a few days later. This ability to influence foreign countries effectively and not in clownish ways is a nice story for kids.
Let's entertain that idea. Suppose they did invade most of Europe.
How would they keep everyone under control? You won't find that many people eager to participate in satellite regimes or new social experiments, like you had in post-WWII.
I don't think Russia will even consider invading western Ukraine. They'll keep the Russian speaking part which they can easily govern.
> How would they keep everyone under control? You won't find that many people eager to participate in satellite regimes or new social experiments, like you had in post-WWII.
Through cynicism and propaganda, just like they've been doing at home, and the same way it works in the US now. Everyone can see the corruption and depravity of the current regime, it might as well be a Russian satellite (many people would claim it already is), and yet we all collectively do nothing about it.
>Russia seems poised to invade Europe in the near future
only if the near future includes the year 2150 because as of right now the Russian defense ministry is celebrating the liberation of individual bakery plants on their state media
Russia’s kleptocracy has impoverished the country so much that it now needs attrition in its male population to keep people from rising up against the current leadership. War is how you keep poor citizens from rebelling against you. When the war is over, historically the returning soldiers (especially in Russia) overturn the leadership. So there is never an incentive to stop a war. Especially a losing one.
The fact that it's a fragile kleptocracy basically reduce to 0 any possibility of a normal future. Puppet state at best, if someone is willing to take them. I expect they already planned what to do with the returning soldiers, not that they will like it or accept gracefully what's in store for them.
Those cover Russia's motivation, which is indeed strong. You can add that Putin wants the glorious Soviet Empire days back, and that without additional buffer zones Russia is very vulnerable to land invasion (in Summer). Russia has plenty of reasons to conquer much of Europe
But I don't see Russia's capability to do so. Their kleptocracy has impoverished the country and has repeatedly lead leadership (including Putin) to overestimate their own capabilities. Male population faces attrition from war and alcoholism. Leadership has a habit of dying in mysterious accidents or falling out of windows, reducing the amount of experienced leaders available and discouraging anyone with a brain from rising up too far. And they are barely able to advance in Ukraine.
There are legitimate concerns that Russia might attack other countries once the Ukraine war concludes. They might even make some initial territorial gains because they are in full war economy while Europe has only scaled up enough to support Ukraine, and has depleted ammunition stockpiles. But I don't see them getting very far
Yes, this was in fact an explanation of a joke. "In Soviet Russia, Rome is a poor city" requires both a currently-existing Soviet Russia, and Rome to be a part of it. Both of those are far-fetched. "Russia seems poised to invade Europe in the near future" is a bad explanation, since they are currently invading a country geographically in Europe.
Why wouldn't it happen? America's new direction is that Europe is the enemy, and massive resources will be poured into propelling the already popular right wing parties, which are Russian puppets, into power. They don't need boots on the ground to conquer the continent, they just need a cynical population that doesn't see the difference between good and bad, just like in the US.
They had working infra and a great case for keeping fairly "close to the metal". Complicated files-heavy workload that needs tons of clever caching to perform well, lots of writes, lots of non-HTTP TCP traffic.
Retrofitting that into "cloud" bullshit is such a bad idea.
Using bare-metal requires competent Unix admins, and Actions team is full of javascript clowns (see: decision to use dashes in environment variable; lack of any sort of shell quoting support in templates; keeping logs next to binaries in self-hosted runners). Perhaps they would be better off using infra someone else maintains.
I dunno man, if you see response code 404 and start looking into network errors, you need to read up on http response codes. there is no way a network error results in a 404
I've decided math isn't my thing. The first part of the article I couldn't stop thinking "how the hell would you construct a banana filter?" And the entire smoothie metaphor seemed to describe nothing at all.
Then there was something about circles and why do some people call them some other silly thing?
So far, so utterly meaningless, as far as I could tell. just seemed like meaningless babble to make even a kindergartner feel comfortable with the article, but it didn't seem to have communicated much of anything, really.
Then there were circles. Some of them were moving, one of them had a sinus wave next to it and some balls were tracing both in sync, indicating which part of the sinus wave equalled which part of the circle I guess?
I understood none of it.
I asked chat gpt to explain to me, i think it has read this article cause it used the smoothie analogy as well. I still don't understand what that analogy is meant to mean.
Then finally I found this:
If someone plays a piano chord, you hear one sound.
But that sound is actually made of multiple notes (multiple frequencies).
The Fourier Transform is the tool that figures out:
which notes (frequencies) are present, and how loud each one is
The piano analogy is incomplete. First, of all, a piano constructs sounds by combining multiple string sounds in a unique manner. But the idea behind transforms (Fourier being a particular case) is that you can take a function (“sound”) that isn’t necessarily produced by combining components and you can still decompose it into a sum of components. This decomposition is not unique in the general case as there are many different transforms yielding different results. However, from the mathematical (and i believe, quantum mechanical) standpoint, there is full equivalence between the original function and its transforms.
The other important point is that Fourier doesn’t really give you frequency and loudness. It gives you complex numbers that can be used to estimate the loudness of different frequencies. But the complex nature of the transform is somewhat more complex than that (accidental pun).
A fun fact. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle can be viewed as the direct consequence of the nature of the Fourier transform. In other words, it is not an unexplained natural wonder but rather a mathematical inevitability. I only wish we could say the same about the rest of quantum theory!
All analogies are incomplete. It's kinda inherent in the definition of the word.
But it is a lovely, real-world and commonly understood example of how harmonics can work, and thus a nice baby-step into the idea of spectral analysis.
Yes, I could understand almost all of this actually! Thanks for explaining Fourier so well!
I really don't have any mathematics in my background, so you lost me towards the very end when the actual math came in, but I can't fault your Fourier explanation for not also explaining imaginary numbers: even I can see they're out of scope for this post!
Imaginary numbers are strange, basically i * i = -1. So it's a square root of negative one. It's imaginary because well, you need some imagination to come to terms with this. But they are useful to show things on a 2d plane, one axis is the real numbers -1 to 1, and the other -i to i. And then multiplying by number i will rotate in circles: i × i = -1, -1 × i = -i, -i × i = 1, 1 × i = i. And then there is this wonderful property that e ^ iπ = -1, which somehow combines the euler constant, number pi and the imaginary number, and it somehow works. And then also the related formula e^ix=cosx+i sinx, and so to rotate by x you just multiply with e^ix, where x = 2π × frequency. It somehow all fits in neatly, even though none of it is essential for the mechanism described. At least that's my uneducated understanding (my math background is also not that great, that's why I tried to explain this to myself with a more intuition based approach).
Hmm.. Imaginary numbers are indeed a bit confusing.
I'm trying to imagine a 2d surface where the X-axis coordinates are all the real numbers, and the y axis are all the imaginary numbers. That makes them orthogonal, and that seemed to add up with your explanation, up until ixi=-1.
The only way I can get that to add up is if I instead imagine a arbitrary coordinate system, where x and y are not necessarily perpendicular, and i describes the angle between x and y.
I've only just finished my first cup of coffee for the day, so I haven't quite decided yet if that makes any sense whatsoever, but it's the only way I can intuit about it that includes a circular motion like the one you describe..
In this case you could almost describe i as the square root of 180°, which... Yeah it's kinda weird...
I think so, it's called the complex plane. A complex number has a real and an imaginary component a+bi, so like a vector. The amount of each gives you the coordinates on the plane (a or b can be zero as well on the axes).
I had a chat with gpt to try and clear out some details. It seems that one is supposed to think of real and imaginary as a vector. The rotation part comes in when the imaginary numbers is used as an exponent to the real, in which case you're no longer saying "3 left, two right" but "4 units from origin, at an angle of (imaginary number)"
of course, the math here doesn't work out as using degrees or any other unit of rotation a normal person is used to, but instead, some other unit of rotation I haven't quite wrapped my head around yet (what the hell does atan2(b,a) mean? Is atan(a,b) deprecated or what? ) I didn't know namespace collisions were a thing mathematicians worried about, they should just release maths 2.0 and be rid of the legacy atan at this point!
I think it's because the normal atan receives one argument, eg atan(y/x) and then sometimes you can't divide by zero, and it can’t distinguish quadrants (because we loose info on the sign of Y-coordinate and the X-coordinate). atan2 takes 2 params and knows the signs so it can understand the quadrants and also handle divide by zero. I now realize that the name atan2 probably refers to 2 parameters.
Before then I used to use lunarstorm. Was that the sane period of social media? Maybe, my memory is fuzzy: it's been a while.
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