atoav

Yes? But if you want to solve that issue locking down the tech is not the solution. The solution is to have an inspector show up unannounced and give you a hefty fine if that screw is set incorrect.

So if that is really an issue, apply the correct fix and don't push the blame on environmentalists.

"I did not plan to relocate, but the opening at $your company made me reconsider. I then delved into $location history and culture, and found it really fascinating. Since I am [young|experienced in $oldcareer], I decided it would be worth trying out something new."

> I don't think it's a matter of "resisting or not", they literally have no choice and can typically also not tell anyone because of gag orders.

I would not rule out there are organizations/companies in the US who would rather give up their business than fold to the pressure, which is why I let this open. I know there are some US entities who have public carnary style notices ("We have not been visited by a government agency, ..."), with the idea being that while they can compell you to not say a thing, they can't force you to say a thing. How well that would work in practise, I dunno, but it shows that some in the US anticipate the issue and at least signal to care about it.

But in the end I agree with you, the safer route for people in the EU is to not deal with this risk to begin with.

I get the difference between business and academic note taking, but I still think it is benefitial to do it yourself in a business meeting, because as you write down the notes you may realize a point hasn't been made as clearly as you wish it was made, which allows you to intervene.

Actually I think one of the main values of note taking isn't that you get notes, it is that engaging your brain to summarize points makes you understand and remember the points better, even if you throw your notes away right after.

It is like writing: One of the main purposes of writing (for me and many others) is that it forces you to structure your thoughts. You could give that task to AI, get the resulting text, but your loss is the lack of clarity you could have gained from doing it yourself.

Well in this case it is a documented trail of defering needed maintenance with the argument of needing to safe money.

I did not argue that this is a outcome that can only happen to conservative governments. In fact I am convinced it is a fundamental problem of how politics work: you elect politicians to government for a limited period, so they often try to push off costs for which the ultimate prize will be paid to the next period, in which they may not be in government anymore.

But of course conservative governments tend to be more often part of that dynamic since austerity politics and conservatism often (although, not always) go hand in hand. Often the austerity has a smidgen of corruption as well, where government contracts that then need to be made (urgently! since maintenance was deferred!) often go to the politicians private friends. Free market for thee and not for me.

Another classic is to starve some working government/public institutions budget, only to then point at the mess and explain why this needs to privatized (coincidentally you know exactly the right guy to step in, what a surprise).

I am not saying that it is only conservative polticians that do that, but it tends to be a bit harder to do while e.g. demanding democratic socialist policy and strong public institutions.

The issues you see now in Germany are the direct consequence of the Merkel era conservative government and its austerity policy. They really wanted to get the deficit down at all cost. And all cost included any sort of needed maintenance on public infrastructure.

I always bring the receipts, so if I say it is them, then the chances are it is them. Pointing fingers before investigation the cause is a waste of precious time.

Yes, but if any US three-letter agency knocks at a US companies door and says: "Nice business you have there", will they resist just to not sell out their EU customers? I don't think so.

And the patriot act exists, so this is not just a theoretical worry. Meaning as an EU citizen I would like to ban US vendors completely till you guys get your house in order again. Not that we don't have our own wanna be autocrats and surveillance-lovers, but I think having authocratic laws should have consequences for the businesses in any country.

I know that capacitance multipliers are commonly used in audio circuits like specific Equalizer circuits, mainly to allow to use smaller capacitors.

XML is ok, the problem IMO is that the way some people use(d) it is utterly unhinged.

So a return value that could have easily been two lined of text is now a nested demon of XML. The complexity isn't what that application does, the complexity is in how it returns the values.

Another good one is to use XML when something else would have made things simpler, e.g. for a config file where you could easily have used a .ini or a .toml file.

Or you have an application that tries to so generic that the definition for a simple use case is a whopping 5MB XML file. Cool. When I feel writing a config for your application is harder than programming the whole thing yourself you have really made it. /s

Then it shouldn't be allowed to call it "buy" they should be forced to call it "rent".

"We investigated ourselves and found we did nothing wrong"

Button ≠ Button. People like to believe they should all be the same, but they really should not be.

On physical keyboards we already have three different kinds: normal buttons, modifier keys (shift, etc) and toggle keys (caps lock).

High stakes rare actions can require special button designs. E.g. on a black magic cinema camera the button that formats the memory card needs to be held for three second while it visually counts down. This gives a small delay during which the user can decide: "Fuck this is the wrong memory card!" and cancle.

The downside is that some imaginary power user that uses the camera only to format a stack of SSDs will get burdened. You have to decide which is more common and make a decision.

Bad programming. People who have experience with embedded programming knows that reading out a button usually means denouncing. At the speed a microcontroller can read out a button it will change it's state multiple times per press because of contact bounce. Meaning when a user presses a button the program sees off, on, off, off, on, on, off, on, on, on, on, on, on, etc.

Now if you just naively read out the current state of the button and do something with it elsewhere in the program looping may be off or on randomly.

It is not hard to imagine if there is some other logic (or e.g. a rate limit) on the 30 seconds and on the beep that these would see different slices in time of the button. Congrats you built a button-debounce based RNG.

Physical buttons can be surprisingly complex if you don't rely on someone else's driver. The correct solution is to debounce the button, that can be done either in hardware (too expensive, so rarely done) or in softeare, by e.g. averaging the last 50 reads and wait till the majority is either off or on.

This should be common knowledge for embedded programmers, but every noe and then you will see someone who has never heard of it.

It is not that complicated. You need to introduce CO₂ threshold levels that make sense from a medical standpoint. Then you need to enforce them in the same way other basic environmental regulations or worker rights are enforced in regions of the world where these work.

The main question is: If your workplace, city, whatever forces you to work or live in an harmful/unhealthy environment, do you have any realistic course of action to improve the situation? In the US you would call this (gasp) regulation, I would call it a basic human right.

If we talk about stairways, nobody complains about building regulations that mandate handrails. CO₂ levels are not totally different.

What does wonders for me is to go out into nature, a beach, a lake or a park, or even a longer train ride, with nothing but a pen and notebook, while keeping the phone in my bag. When I return usually I have a few pages of ideas.

Sometimes distraction is the main issue when it comes to having ideas.

Tutorials are fine, especially if you know nothing doing the motion is often better than fooling around. Just like with languages there are passive skilla (your capability to understand a certain thing) and active skills (you capability to use a thing practically when the situation demands it). It is natural to understand more than you can apply.

Once you're a little more confident (you know a bit, but not much) I suggest to modify the tutorial as you follow along, that makes the tutorial harder and gives you small challenges to overcome while still giving you general guard rails.

Then as soon as you're dangerous enough to be let loose you should pick your own projects that are slightly above your skill level. Maybe try different approaches if you're unhappy with the first result.

When I wanted to improve my comic drawing skills ca. 2009 I started drawing and publishing a daily webcomic strip for a year. That really helped.

But tutorials remain useful even if you're advanced or a pro. E.g. if you use blender a lot and a new feature comes around watching a tutorial on it is a very efficient way of getting up to speed. Of course you will watch tutorials differently from a beginner, you will pick up on different things etc.

The best way to learn is a serious project with a deadline, but if you have that deadline it will make you wish you had watched some tutorials when you had the time. Source: I teach this kind of stuff at the university level for 6 years now.

Nothing is as sad as seeing some young motivated student losing patience if the task doesn't turn out to be a quick, easy win. The saddest however are students so eager for the quick, easy win that throughout their academic career they repeat the pattern and never really dive deep into any topic.

I had a student come to me with essentially the same problem over two years and each time I helped her she was in refusal to listen as she stressed herself to just make it work now. Her problem was that she never took the time to do the basics and rejected any learning opportunity as it stared her in the face.

You get results over time if you dedicate yourself to just doing the thing. For many subjects there is no shortcut, no way to walk the path without actually walking it. Every time you encounter an issue there is a learning opportunity. Use it.

According to wikipedia Linus Torvalds has dual (finnish/american) citizenship. Odd to leave out the country where he was born tho.

Just be wary that you might not like the middle ground between a serial killer and someone wbo insists all human life is sacred.

Yeah nah. For all relevant level metering you use a A-weighting curve (weighting the frequencies by human ear sensitivity) so that is not how any of that works.

I feel the question what the best approach is entirely depends on the people or organization. E.g. when you tackle a new problem, my answer would be to first solve it quick and dirty and then do it properly without over-engineering.

If the problem is one you faced a billion times, then either use the existing trusted solution and modify it, or if there is no such thing do the proper thing from the start.

If you have a problem where later adjustments are an issue for you (e.g. time wise), solutions that take that into account are superior to ones that are not.

I work with art students and program probably three new projects a week. It is okay to anticipate the needs of the people you work with and not have them spell out everything, it is okay to make a good solution even if no one asked for it, especially if you work with hardware.

E.g. knowing my "customers" I knoe they will return 2 hours before their exam is something is wrong. Guess when that debug mode comes in handy? Exactly then.

There are however ways that needlessly overcomplicate solutions or add more moving parts than needed or simply waste valuable time in the wrong moment. These need to be avoided.

What is the best way to write a program? Depends.

The statement refers to human perception of reality.

It is not cursed. It is actively trying to cement its own power like the authoritarian fascists they are. And some of you still pretend if they just cheer enough for dear leader the tide will turn for them as well. As if this all was just a sports game where you have to cheer for your team even if they actively break the rules.

Now let's do trains.

This is good advice. I run the mediatec workshop at a art university, meaning my daily job involves many student requests. A good request is one where the student thought about what I need to know and which question they need answered. A bad request is a wall of prose that leaves you wondering about what, precisely it is they now want from you, potentially also leaving out key information like duration, place, etc.

My number one tip therefore is to try to put yourself into the perspective of the other side. Did you give them all the information they need to know? Of course you will know a lot of things about your project that are really obvious to you, but that you would need to mention to others so they understand what you are talking about. On the other hand if you want to hire a plumber, you don't need to tell them a long story about the roof of the house. Conceptually the plumbing and the roof may both be house-related issues in your mind, but you're wasting the plumbers time. So that means the time/patience of the person on the other side is a valuable resource.

When I worked as a camera guy on film sets, this was a typical occurrence. You level out the camera trypod with the magic eye on the tripod. The magic eye being a small amount of liquid with a single bubble inside, pointing always upward.

Soon you realize that an surprising amount of walls are just not straight or level.

> But for the end result 48kHz is more than necessary. I can’t even hear any frequency above 17kHz

And even if you could, would the frequencies that all humans lose with age really be all that essential for the enjoyment of music? We are talking about frequencies most instruments won't even produce unless severely abused.

For some reasons in audiophile-land the magic is always in some elusive outer realms and never right there where the important stuff happens. They spend a fortune on speaker cables, while often not giving a second thought on room acoustics beyond the cosmetic. The magic sparkle is all the way in the ultrasonic, while their listening spaces have deep nulls in the mid-range due to comb filtering from reflective surfaces caused by a lack of acoustic treatment.

I love music (enough to have mixed it for a living) and to me it is very clear how the priorities are ordered when it comes to audio fidelity:

1. Room Acoustics

2. Speakers

3. Electronics & Digital

Going from the back: Assuming you don't get the cheapest of the cheapest and don't abuse the gear by making it do things it wasn't build for electronics and digital audio nowadays is transparent. That means, it essentially sounds the same if operated within spec. Even a 0,50 € IC will have distortion figures so staggeringly low it is below human perception and equipment is getting better still. A decent opamp can have distortion figures like 0.005 % THD with a linear frequency response all the way up to radio frequencies. There can be challenges with driving very weird speakers or headphones, but if you hsve the right combination of gear it doesn't have to be expensive to be indistinguishably good in it's audio performance.

This means speakers are way more important thsn the electronics before it. Their distortion numbers are multiple magnitudes higher (in the ball park of 3% THD), their frequency response is inherently problematic (often many dBs up and down even in expensive speakers), they will hsve different beaming characteristics st different frequencies, small speakers lack bass, placement is essential, etc. So getting good speakers is important.

But all of this is dwarfed by the impacts acoustics. The position of the speakers alone makes a huge difference. The impact of an acoustically untreated space is severe: you can get a completely smeared time response with deep nulls of 20dB and more while other frequencies are highly resonant. Even a budget speaker won't have problems of that magnitude.

So get some ok electronics, even more ok speakers, but invest the bulk of the money/time into the setup of the room itself.

Many adiophiles have that priority list reversed. Room acoustics suck. You need to measure a lot, add ugly absorbers in inconvenient places, can't place speakers where they look nice and conserve space, but need to place them where they work well acoustically, there is no ideal solution and everything is a compromise. So buying a gold plated HDMI cable and imagining the improvement appears to be better. Only that you might be doing it in a room where a positional difference of a few centimeters changes the frequency response of the listening position massively.

No it is about ambient temperature. Of course climate change would factor into ambient temperature since it is a change of the bell curve that represents the usual day-by-day weather.

It raises the average temperature and makes hot extremes more frequent and intense, while cold extremes generally become less frequent, but they may also move to different places, since ocean currents change. Additionally it also changes precipitation and other weather extremes: a warmer atmosphere can contain more water vapour, contributing to more intense heavy rainfalls or snow for example. However, this does not necessarily mean that day-to-day temperature variability increases everywhere; changes in temperature variability depend on the region and season.

Put simply, extreme weather can mean humidity, perception and wind mix. How these three mix will decide whether the weather is survivable or not. I grew up in the alps and the number of people who have died on mountains because they are unaware of how wind mixed into their cold weather survivability even with decent gear is way too high. See also: https://www.noaa.gov/jetstream/synoptic/wind-chill

That means this isn't nearly as simple as saying: (1) climate change means it is getting hotter on average, (2) that study says more people die of cold exposure, ergo (3) this means less people will die.

The main problem woth this chain of thought is that point 1 isn't adequately describing what happens. If you have read any IPCC report know that the number of extreme weather events is increasing. I live in Europe and this year I experienced both the coldest winter and the hottest summer in my lifetime.