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qbasic_forever

10,505 karma · joined February 3, 2021

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qbasic_forever··on Building a digital music collection in 2023
git-annex is something to consider too. It's kind of like git LFS in that it doesn't directly store files in the git repo (so the files can be enormous or change frequently without all the overhead of commits in git), but it's more flexible and allows you to direct the files to be stored and retrieved from many different types of file stores (network drives, piles of discs/burned CDs/USB drives, S3 storage, etc.). Basically throw all your music files wherever you want, tell git-annex where they live, and then ask it what music you want on what machines and it will do the rest to go figure out what needs to happen to materialize those files in the right locations.

I'd be leery of storing the music files in a git repo directly as MP3 tags and metadata are a wild west and some music players do wacky things like update ID3 tags with play counts, etc. on every listen (which would require committing and pushing music on every listen!).

qbasic_forever··on Why bumblebees love cats and other beautiful relationships (2021)
Mine has learned exactly what corners to yell into such that their cry/meow echoes and reverberates everywhere so it can't be ignored. It's kind of impressive how smart and adaptable cats are, lol.
qbasic_forever··on Data centres account for between 1.5% and 2% of global electricity consumption
Hang a freaking painting or photo.
qbasic_forever··on Two men die in Ironman Cork competition in Ireland
Is there some kind of bug or issue with HN comments? Maybe a bug in a client people are using? I've noticed over the last couple days what appear to be comments like this one above that are completely unrelated to the post. It almost seems like they were made in error or associated with the wrong post.
qbasic_forever··on VidCutter: A program for lossless video cutting
I was trying to play it on Android devices and can't mount it unfortunately.
qbasic_forever··on VidCutter: A program for lossless video cutting
I've also noticed playback of DVDs is terrible these days too. Long ago I ripped my DVD collection to iso files so I could preserve the full experience of the menus, etc. But almost nothing these days supports DVD iso playback and menus, not even VLC! The only software I can get to work to play them is Kodi. It's wild how much DVD software has disappeared, I don't remember it being this bad 20 years ago.
qbasic_forever··on Jazz² Resurrection: Open-source Jazz Jackrabbit 2 reimplementation
There's mention of it in the DMCA if I remember correctly. It says DRM can be cracked if something isn't available to be sold anymore or something similar: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/dmca-game-preservation-exemp...
qbasic_forever··on Data centres account for between 1.5% and 2% of global electricity consumption
You definitely should, I know some folks that keep their huge TV on 24/7 because they like the pretty screensaver and photos it shows when idle. These same folks take a lot of other steps in their life to try to help the environment (recycle, drive electric cars, etc) but simple stuff like turning things off completely confounds them.
qbasic_forever··on Welcome to Datasette Cloud
Totally agree, so many things people get strong feelings about customizing workflows--note taking, todo lists, personal document management, inventory of goods, etc.--are really just a sqlite database with some nice custom views and interfaces. I could definitely see a future where datasette or similar tools can replace some of that stuff.

Access is probably caught in a weird spot internally at MS. If they put effort into it then it just removes some of the need to sell proper SQL server or azure cloud database tech. Better to just limp it along then start internal wars with bigger organizations/products.

qbasic_forever··on Welcome to Datasette Cloud
I think of it more like MS Access but a sane backend of sqlite and python. There are thousands and thousands of critical business processes cludged together in Excel and Access--datasette could be a much better choice for those use cases. Something both devs and business people can use.
qbasic_forever··on Cellebrite asks cops to keep its technology secret
WTF is with your account? Are you trying to impersonate dang, the official moderator?
qbasic_forever··on From Mechs to Mopar
Yeah I wish more modern retro games would embrace the mostly flat shaded polygon aesthetic of mech 2 and similar games. There's a certain 80's future cool to early polygon graphics before it all became texture-mapped hyper realism.
qbasic_forever··on Twitter/X has removed all media posted before 2014
I didn't say anything either way. I think everyone can agree that losing a huge record of how it happened is a big loss.
qbasic_forever··on Twitter/X has removed all media posted before 2014
Wow I wonder how much record of the arab spring protests and uprising are now lost forever. Those protests were all around 2010 to 2012 or so and was in my mind what really pushed Twitter into the public consciousness. I hope the Library of Congress managed to archive all that stuff like they said they would years ago, it would be a big loss to historians for it to disappear overnight.
qbasic_forever··on Analysis: Health care CEOs hauled in $4B last year as inflation pinched workers
Nope, I'm saying pharmaceutical companies don't need to be capitalist and profit driven.
qbasic_forever··on Analysis: Health care CEOs hauled in $4B last year as inflation pinched workers
I agree, and to solve this problem I say we nationalize and socialize healthcare to provide it to all citizens free of cost just as they do in many African and other countries. This will remove the need to have any healthcare CEOs entirely.
qbasic_forever··on Boycott Systemd (2014)
Distributed RPC, i.e. dbus over the network, is an incredibly complex and still basically unsolved problem. To really do it right and guarantee correctness across systems (which may be in different states of working or failed!) you need a perfect message queue with exactly once delivery... but in practice implementing that is incredibly storage intensive (you'd have to store every message forever). You're basically asking for something as complex and difficult to run as kafka--it's not as simple as just send dbus messages over a network socket.
qbasic_forever··on Boycott Systemd (2014)
Systemd doesn't remove any control, and in fact gives a lot of extra control over things like process dependencies, environment, etc. The big complaint people had/have really just boils down to someone moved the cheese--your bespoke and brittle startup scripts are now declarative config files. Some people had to learn something new and that _really_ angered them.
qbasic_forever··on Boycott Systemd (2014)
Unix domain sockets or FIFOs could be an alternative, but you'd have to do all kinds of complexity to support pub/sub style many to many communication over them (which is what dbus effectively does for you).
qbasic_forever··on Boycott Systemd (2014)
Yes systemd can use dbus, but plenty of non-systemd systems use and used dbus.
qbasic_forever··on Boycott Systemd (2014)
Dbus doesn't have anything to do with systemd FYI. It's a communication bus for processes to talk to each other through structured RPC messages.
qbasic_forever··on Textual: Rapid Application Development framework for Python
Just run a web terminal like ttyd: https://tsl0922.github.io/ttyd
qbasic_forever··on SUSE to go private
I dunno, looking at dell.com now all I see are bad CGI mockups of products and "AI" boldly slapped everywhere. It looks like trash and nothing like the Dell I used to use and own 20 years ago. I almost think the company is entirely fake and produces nothing based on their site today.
qbasic_forever··on DIY Espresso (2020)
Moka pots don't make espresso, they don't get up to the pressure required for espresso-level extraction. They're still quite good and I prefer them over drip brew for most coffees.
qbasic_forever··on DIY Espresso (2020)
It can extract more flavor. The most fruity and sweet brews I've ever had were good espresso shots. The same beans in a pour over are still fantastic, but it's all amplified and more pronounced when made as an espresso shot. There's also a syrupy texture that you really can't get with any other brewing method.

All that said, every day I drink pour overs and aeropress brews--I don't want to drop the $1k+ on a proper home espresso setup.

qbasic_forever··on The tech job recession is over
Yeah hiring in January is the real tell of what's going on. The layoffs winding down now were all planned and executed early at the start of the year. If next year rolls around and companies are still doing rounds of layoffs then everything is very far from being over.
qbasic_forever··on Owner of hydrogen-powered Hyundai quoted $175,000 to replace fuel cell
IIRC hydrogen fuel cells are loaded with expensive precious metals like platinum.
qbasic_forever··on Htmx is part of the GitHub Accelerator
Congrats. I will be very curious to see how this (and other companies that are built around an open source frontend/web library) work on monetizing themselves. Are there any successful businesses in that space?

I worry it will be truly challenging without a big compromise to morals/openness/etc. I kind of wonder if stuff like htmx should just be funded with a big grant so it never needs to worry about selling out users for profits and operating income. Or at the very least that it learns to run extremely lean, to not chase expensive fads, and to build itself into something that can survive off a modest "please donate/buy some stickers/tshirts or my book" income stream. I hope we don't see the day that suddenly there's no download link on their site and it's replaced with a, "please contact our sales team for a demo!".

qbasic_forever··on Cruise vehicle gets stuck in wet concrete while driving in San Francisco
One of the articles about this past weekend's Cruise traffic jams mentioned the company blamed a flakey cell phone signal as the root cause. Now why would having perfect access to cell networks be required to keep the car driving... I suspect because Cruise is relying much more heavily on remote human drivers. It would not surprise me to find out Cruise is just a big scam and the self driving algorithm fails so often the cars are basically just remote piloted taxis.
qbasic_forever··on Hip hop historians who are racing to preserve its story
Absolute garbage comment. Go listen to some 60s rock and it's nothing but the same themes. Jim Morrison and the Doors wrote songs about explicitly killing your father, doing drugs, etc.
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