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ubercow13

4,014 karma · joined May 31, 2011

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ubercow13··on So you think you could be an electrician?
You don't have to do the exercise _at work_
ubercow13··on So you think you could be an electrician?
You weren't prevented from doing exercise as part of your desk job. I think the analogy is pretty apt.
ubercow13··on 24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense (2012)
Would 192khz audio result in less sizzle and distortion? Or more audible band IMD from the sound >22khz
ubercow13··on The AirPods Effect
What types of social interaction should be permitted in society?
ubercow13··on There's still no point in gigabit broadband
Not really because the latency of, say, clicking a web link and the website showing on screen depends on throughput, not just ping latency.
ubercow13··on Stop Ruining It
Tabs and breadcrumbs are both useful features though, that almost every other OS/DE file manager has supported since forever
ubercow13··on Zed Editor Theme-Builder
You could use Mos, which also has the advantage that smooth scrolling works the same in every app (speed, acceleration etc)

https://mos.caldis.me/

ubercow13··on What async promised and what it delivered
It is mentioned
ubercow13··on Aspartame is not that bad? (2022)
What artificial sweetener is in regular Coke?
ubercow13··on Cocoa-Way – Native macOS Wayland compositor for running Linux apps seamlessly
Apart from just running Linux apps, you can use this to run graphical applications remotely on a Linux server, like X11 forwarding.
ubercow13··on Cocoa-Way – Native macOS Wayland compositor for running Linux apps seamlessly
Maybe try this: https://ke-complex-modifications.pqrs.org/#pc_shortcuts
ubercow13··on Professional video editing, right in the browser with WebGPU and WASM
See also https://github.com/Sportinger/MasterSelects
ubercow13··on Making Firefox's right-click not suck with about:config
The "Email Image..." one is infuriating. Who right clicks an image to email it to someone in 2026? And if it's you, could you help me understand why??
ubercow13··on Ghostty – Terminal Emulator
Or the manual, which describes the features for automatically handling it.
ubercow13··on My AI Adoption Journey
>Sure, if you think calculators or bicycles are "superhuman technology".

Uh, yes they are? That's why they were revolutionary technologies!

It's hard to see why a bike that isn't superhuman would even make sense? Being superhuman in at least some aspect really seems like the bare minimum for a technology to be worth adopting.

ubercow13··on If you put Apple icons in reverse it looks like someone getting good at design
Those icons were incredibly visually distinct, despite being meaningless. I still know exactly what they are for instantly, in my peripheral vision, years after using many of them.

Modern icons are not only not comprehensible but not visually distinct (Tahoe making everything the same shape, many apps removing all colour from toolbar icons, various distinct if anachronistic symbolic icons like Save being replaced with slighly different orientations and arrangements of arrows and rounded rectangles...).

This severely impacts the efficiency of user interaction, especially after the first time you use something, at least for me. It's not a knee jerk reaction, it's a reaction to actually feeling it becoming harder to use my computer.

ubercow13··on Let's be honest, Generative AI isn't going all that well
It seems like just such a weird and rigid way to evaluate it? I am a somewhat reasonable human coder, but I can't copy and paste a bunch of code without alterations from memory either. Can someone still find a use for me?
ubercow13··on Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
>feature that was essentially text manipulation

That seems like the kind of feature where the LLM would already have the domain knowledge needed to write reasonable tests, though. Similar to how it can vibe code a surprisingly complicated website or video game without much help, but probably not create a single component of a complex distributed system that will fit into an existing architecture, with exactly the correct behaviour based on some obscure domain knowledge that pretty much exists only in your company.

ubercow13··on Don't fall into the anti-AI hype
Sure if you just leave all the code there. But if it's churning out iterations, incrementally improving stuff, it seems ok? That's pretty much what we do as humans, at least IME.
ubercow13··on The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe
Also the resize cursor is completely unreliable, the cursor often doesn't change to the resize one when the mouse is over the correct resize areg. So it's even harder to tell if your cursor is in the right place before clicking. If you click in the wrong place it can have frustrating consequences, like activating another window or even clicking something inside it.
ubercow13··on From silicon to Darude – Sandstorm: breaking famous synthesizer DSPs [video]
This talk is by The Usual Suspects, and it's about one of those 'others' that they targeted.
ubercow13··on Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings
True but there was specific criticism about how the framerate made it far too easy to see the parts of the effects, sets and costumes that made it clear things were props and spoiled the illusion. Maybe we just require a new level of quality in set design to enable higher frame rates but it clearly has some tradeoff.
ubercow13··on Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings
>It was always just a compromise between film cost and smoothness.

I think the criticisms of The Hobbit when it came out in 48fps showed that it's not just that.

ubercow13··on Stranger Things creator says turn off “garbage” settings
It's not just the framerate mismatch, OLED's un-pulsed presentation with almost instant response time greatly reduces the perceived motion smoothness of lower framerate content compared to eg, CRTs or plasma displays
ubercow13··on Linux DAW: Help Linux musicians to quickly and easily find the tools they need
I don't really see how that would be precise enough, the mouse wheel has a DPI of like 10 vs 400-800 for a mouse. A mouse wheel has like 25 notches in a full rotation and even MIDI CC values go from 0-127, that's 5 full rotations, that doesn't sound practical as it would be far too slow. And many parameters require much more precise control than 127 steps.

I don't play flight sims but I imagine most flight surfaces require small adjustments and the effect of those adjustments on the aircraft is naturally smoothed out by the dynamics of the plane (you're adjusting an acceleration).

I imagine the scroll wheel is not suitable for dogfighting.

ubercow13··on Linux DAW: Help Linux musicians to quickly and easily find the tools they need
Some audio software lets you do this but mouse wheels are incredibly imprecise compared to the mouse sensor itself so this isn't really useful for many types of control which require precise adjustment.
ubercow13··on Linux DAW: Help Linux musicians to quickly and easily find the tools they need
It works great though, what's the alternative? It's visually small, so you can fit a lot of controls in a small space. You can glance at it and know the current setting and where it falls within the range of possible values. By making the mouse control modal when you click on a knob (so you start dragging and can drag over a much larger area than you could for say a slider, which isn't modal) you have immensely precise control over the value in realtime, while still being able to quickly make big changes. This is essential for performance. Combining this with some gentle mouse acceleration for the rate of change of the control when dragging gives you even more precise control. This isn't possible with a slider either.

I would say the opposite, it's basically the perfect interface for a very specific scenario with requirements that don't really occur in much other computer software.

ubercow13··on Linux DAW: Help Linux musicians to quickly and easily find the tools they need
It doesn't provide enough precision for many synth/music effect knobs.
ubercow13··on Show HN: Ez FFmpeg – Video editing in plain English
Totally disagree, I have a wrapper I wrote myself for converting things, often for sharing the odd little clip online or such. It produces a complex command that is not easy to just type out, that does multiple things to maximise compatibility like

- making sure pixel are square while resizing if the video resolution is too large

    ("scale=w=if(gt(iw*sar\\,ih)\\,min(ceil(iw*sar/2)*2\\,{})\\,ceil(iw*sar*min(ih\\,{})/ih/2)*2):h=if(gt(ih\\,iw*sar)\\,min(ceil(ih/2)*2\\,{})\\,ceil(ih*min(iw*sar\\,{})/iw/sar/2)\*2):out_range=limited,zscale,setsar=1")
- dealing with some HDR or high gamut thing I can't really remember that can result from screen recording on macos using some method I was using at some point

- setting this one tag on hevc files that macos needs for them to be recognised as hevc but isn't set by default

- calculating the target bitrate if I need a specific filesize and verifying the encode actually hit that size and retrying if not (doesn't always work first time with certain hardware encoders even if they have a target or max bitrate parameter)

- dealing with 2-pass encoding which is fiddly and requires two separate commands and the parameters are codec specific

- correctly activating hardware encoding for various codecs

- etc

And this is just for the basic task of "make this into a simple mp4"

ubercow13··on Has the cost of building software dropped 90%?
Then why wasn't someone else employed at -10% compensation instead of you before LLMs?
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