For IEMs, the price difference typically goes towards comfort rather than sound quality. As a professional audio technician, a custom-molded IEM will be infinitely more comfortable than a cheap set. But not everyone can justify spending $2000 for custom molds, because they don’t use them for work every day.

It really depends on how low the bitrate is. A change from 320kbps (the highest “near-CD” bitrate that .mp3 supports) to 128kbps (standard .mp3) won’t make a huge difference, but a change from 160 to 75 will likely make a big difference… Bitrate tends to be a game of diminishing returns, where a difference between 96kbps and 128kbps is typically noticeable, even by laypeople… But a difference between 320kbps and 640kbps is harder to hear, (or makes no difference at all), even though it’s a much bigger jump between numbers. As the bitrate continues to increase, you get fewer and fewer benefits while your file size begins to balloon.

To be clear, there is a lot of snake oil in the audiophile world. I’m not denying that. I work in audio, (peep my username), and spend a lot of time dispelling snake oil myths as part of my job. My current audio rig is easily a quarter million dollars, and is located in an acoustically treated room, because it’s built for an entire audience. I’ve also worked in recording and system design. So I’m probably fairly qualified to speak about this specific topic…

Like lots of snake oil, the bitrate conversation is built upon grains of truth; Just enough to be convincing to someone who only has a surface level understanding of the underlying principles. And audiophiles tend to focus a lot on hardware and manufacturer’s claims, instead of studying what makes that hardware work… Which makes them particularly susceptible to snake oil myths, oftentimes perpetuated by the manufacturers to sell more expensive products to unsuspecting customers. An extreme “low vs lower” bitrate difference is one of the few things that laypeople will be able to identify when presented with an A/B test. In fact, low bitrate comparisons are often used by scummy audiophile companies as a bad-faith “here’s what our competitors sound like, vs what we sound like” example. And to be clear, reducing from ~160kbps to ~75kbps is an extreme difference.

I want you to think of the most crunchy and heavily compressed “downloaded from limewire on the family computer for your iPod” .mp3 file you’ve ever heard. Full of artifacts, absolutely no high end, sounds like it was recorded with a landline phone, and it crackles when the kick drum peaks. That was probably at least 96kbps, because that’s the lowest bitrate that .mp3 compression supports by default. And that’s after the mp3 compression algorithm has done its lossy “eh, people probably don’t care about this particular frequency” thing. 75kbps is crazy low, and you’ll undoubtedly hear the compression as a result. But again, increasing bitrates will have diminishing returns as the number continues to climb. Going from 75kbps to 160kbps will be a marked improvement, but going from 160kbps to 320kbps will be a much smaller change.

The reason audiophiles tend to have difficulty with (or even completely fail at) identifying different bitrates is because audiophiles live in a magical land where going from 1200kbps (high-end FLAC quality) to 1411kbps (uncompressed CD quality) makes a noticeable difference. In 99.9% of cases it doesn’t make any difference at all, (because again, diminishing returns) but audiophiles will swear that the 1411kbps sounds better simply because the number is bigger. Again, the snake oil is built upon grains of truth, (differences in low bitrates are immediately noticeable) but only enough to be convincing to people who don’t understand the underlying principles, (at a certain point, bitrate stops impacting audio quality and only makes your file size bigger).

All of this is to say that yes, the posted bitrate of 75kbps is laughably low. And even laypeople will absolutely be able to hear a difference between the two in an A/B comparison. Because as the bitrate approaches 0, the differences get more and more apparent. And (at least when compared to things like FLAC and CD quality) 75kbps is remarkably close to 0.

I don’t think they do, and this will probably be what changes that. I’m fully expecting the site to lose their remaining TLDs as a result of this.

He always looks like someone is slowly but steadily sliding hardboiled eggs into his ass, and he’s trying not to react until he can decide how he feels about it.

If they think there’s even a small chance, they will make the move, because they know if they don’t, even if that woman likes them, she will never ever make the first move.

Or in my case, I find out after the fact that she wanted me to make a move, and I was continuously dismissing her hints because I didn’t want to be creepy and/or ruin a good friendship if I was misreading the situation. My best friend of like 4 years ended up pissed when I started dating someone new, because she had been hoping I would ask her out. Like bitch, why didn’t you say that when I was single?

I think we’re essentially saying the same thing in different ways. Yes, I 100% agree that forums should be separate from whatever the new Discord replacement ends up being.

I was more arguing that we can’t only use forums to replace Discord, because the realtime communication aspect would be a different use case. I’ve seen lots of “lol just use forums” types of posts, which completely ignore the realtime side of things. There would still need to be some service to replace the realtime aspects that Discord does serve.

Yeah, self-hosting it can be a bear, especially since you need to deal with the whole “bots trying to kill it will regularly post CSAM in random channels, and if any of your users are in that channel it will federate to your own server and now you have CSAM saved on your server’s cache” stuff. It’s the same problem that Lemmy was dealing with during Reddit’s APIcolypse. You can always choose not to federate, but that largely defeats the point of the protocol existing in the first place.

You also need to set up TURN servers to get functional voice/video calls. WebRTC (like voice/video calling) tends to throw a fit without some sort of TURN functionality. That’s something the average Joe won’t know how to do, and is typically going to require a paid tier from some external host like Cloudflare.

Edit: I looked it up. Cloudflare offers TURN servers, with the first 1000GB for free each month, but then it charges for use after that. But that does mean a server that gets used for video calls more than a few hours per month could end up incurring costs. Because that TURN server would be handling all of the video streaming data, so it will quickly eat that 1000GB limit. It also means true self-hosting is prohibitively difficult, as you’d be tying yourself to an external provider unless you go out of your way to host your own TURN server.

Sure, but that’s not an argument for replacing Discord with forums. The two serve entirely different use cases, and should be treated like two entirely separate products.

I’m currently researching Matrix Synapse, to see if it would be worth the hassle to self-host a server.

And this is why generic EULAs should be heavily regulated, and allowed to be negotiated like any other contract. Allow me to pencil in a “you’ll allow me to uniquely watermark the scan of my ID so it can be traced back to this specific request, and agree to pay me $500M if that scan is ever included in a data breach or sold to additional third-party vendors” clause.

Oh, Discord doesn’t want to agree to that? Gee, if the company is deleting everything immediately and there’s no risk of a leak/intentional sale, what’s the harm in including it? How’s the saying go? Something about “if you have nothing to hide”?

Never bought a Windows license… But happily paid the Apple Tax.

They’re the same picture.

Home Assistant is entirely self-hosted. No third-party required. It can run in a container or on a raspberry pi, but it’s typically easiest (and most functional) when you use a dedicated Home Assistant Green. It connects to Zigbee, Matter, etc via USB adapters. Or if your devices are networked (instead of using a hub), it can often find them directly on your network via local device discovery. It integrates with Alexa really well, so you wouldn’t need to immediately ditch your existing smart speakers.

If you really want to get fancy, you can even set up a local machine to do local LLM processing for self-hosted smart speakers.

I personally started using it after my smart light provider (Sengled) had a few extended outages. There was no communication from the company, and lots of people were speculating that they had gone kaput. It was literally cheaper to just get the HA Green and a Zigbee dongle, and set that up (instead of replacing all of my lights with a different brand). And since it’s entirely self-hosted, it even keeps working when my internet goes out during storms.

The funny part is that blue LEDs were historically the hardest to make. Engineers tried for years, but the shorter blue wavelength was elusive. But one Japanese dude managed to figure it out, and they exploded in popularity because they were the new futuristic thing. And now they’re actually one of the cheapest colors available, because every single manufacturer was rushing to jump on the bandwagon and has the equipment to make them. Sort of like the flatscreen TV crash in the early 2010’s, when TV prices suddenly crashed because every manufacturer was getting better and better at making the (historically very expensive) screen panels cheaply.

And to answer the question on why they’re so fucking bright, it’s because blue is a very short wavelength. It takes less power to produce shorter wavelengths. When you compare the relative brightness of two different colored LEDs, shorter wavelengths will be brighter. Like if you send 1 watt of power into two different LEDs, a blue LED will always be brighter than a red one (if everything else about them is the same). That’s why so many of the cheap RGB LED lights tend to be sort of blueish when they’re set to “white”. The “white” is just all of the individual diodes at 100% brightness, which means the blue tends to beat out the other colors.

But the engineers who design those things don’t stop to consider that a blue LED needs less power. They’re just checking the “has a power light” item off of their design punch list. They could undervolt the diode to make it dimmer, but that requires extra circuitry. Just get a diode that works on the same voltage as what you’re already using (probably 5v or 12v for a wall charger) and hook it up to the same voltage that you already have. And use a blue one because they’re the cheapest option. Congrats, you’ve just designed a charger that has a fucking blinding blue LED. The whole “people will want to use this in their bedroom in the dark” thing was never even a consideration.

This is also why red (and infrared) light is better at heating things up. Longer wavelengths carry more energy, which means they heat things up more when they come into contact. The wave takes more power to make, which means it is able to carry more energy to whatever you’re trying to make. Trying to design a blue heat lamp would be an exercise in frustration, because you’d be fighting physics. It’s also why the sky is blue during the day but sunsets are red. The blue light tends to get scattered by air molecules, (which is why the sky looks blue) but red light is able to punch through and reach the surface when the sun is at a steep angle (like during a sunset).

It only applies to steam keys though. Like if you want to sell on other storefronts (like Epic) for cheaper, it’s perfectly fine. You simply can’t sell steam keys on other storefronts for cheaper. It’s not really “price fixing” as much as it is “Steam ensuring their servers aren’t used to download the game unless the dev has properly paid them for the key”…

Like imagine a company wants to sell more copies of their game. So they set up their own site to sell directly to consumers, and it’s cheaper than buying on Steam. This is totally fine. Consumers can still choose to add the standalone version as a non-Steam game to be able to launch it via Steam.

It’s only a breach of contract if they start offering steam keys for that same (cheaper) price, which allows the game to be downloaded via Steam, includes achievement integrations, includes Steam’s friend list “join game” multiplayer, includes Steam Deck/Steam Machine optimizations, etc… If they want all of those nice Steam integrations, they need an official Steam key. And that Steam key can’t be sold cheaper than on Steam’s official store.

Yeah, I bought my own domain specifically so I could set up a catch-all email service. Everything sent to my domain hits the same inbox, but I can easily see who has sold my info. If I start getting spam addressed to “[email protected]” then I know Walmart sold my info. And I can easily set a rule to automatically mark anything addressed to that burned account as spam.

Lots of websites quickly caught onto the “just add a + after your regular email” trick, and set up an internal rule to remove any of the + tags. So that old trick is largely useless.

Yup. Privatize profits, socialize losses. It’s the way the capitalist machine is able to keep grinding up orphans for the 1%.

More Epstein stuff. A document mentioned he was going to get his wife to start taking antibiotics because of an STI he picked up. The joke is that he wouldn’t want to tell her it was an STI, so he’d have to find some other way to justify the antibiotics.

My big concern right now is actually the fact that the “no censorship” part is already being weaponized by Nazis. I suspect it will quickly fall prey to the Nazi Bar Problem. I gave the app a fair shot. Opened it up, and the very first post was a “the Jews are secretly running the world” post from an account named something like @ItsAlwaysTheJews. It had a caricature of a Jew (big nose, long sideburns, and yarmulka) reaching out of a TV to steal a watcher’s brain.

Okay, not a great first impression, but that’s inevitable on a free speech app. Let’s keep scrolling. Three or four more posts down, and I was met with a “Hitler was right about the jews” post. Yikes. The fact that those were up front and center (on the default “Ranked” sort) for my brand new account was… Not a great sign.

Time will tell. I do hope it succeeds, because TikTok is clearly an awful choice. But it needs to succeed for the right reasons, and not just become a Nazi cesspit.

Edit: I just opened the app again after posting this comment, and the second post on my feed was a white pride “they’re trying to replace us/white genocide” (common white power talking point to recruit new members) post:

Edit 2: Looking at the account’s follower list, it looks like users are largely using the Palestinian genocide to justify Nazi imagery. Equating Israel’s actions with Jews in general. There are a few straight up Hitler glorification accounts on the follower list, which have “the Jews are genociding Palestine” types of posts right alongside 1488 posts, swastikas, and Nazi salutes. Here is a quick screenshot of some of the followers:

And here is a screenshot of how those followers are using the Palestinian genocide to justify the holocaust:

The upper post is a bunch of dead Palestinian kids and babies lined up in a row. The lower post is obvious. Both (re)posted by the same @HitlerTheHero account.

I mean, it’s charted #1 on social media on the app stores. It’s an explosive rise in popularity, but that’s not unheard of. If anything, I suspect that the popularity is manufactured. It’s likely some company running an astroturf campaign to capitalize on the fact that people are tired of TikTok’s censorship BS.

Yeah, I gave it a shot. I opened the app, and immediately scrolled past a “Jews are secretly ruling the world” conspiracy theory post from a user named something like @ItsAlwaysTheJews… Okay, maybe a fluke. Not a great first impression, but let’s see what else the app has to offer. Then a few posts later there was a “Hitler was right about the Jews” post.

So yeah, it has definitely fallen prey to the Nazi Bar problem.