MentalEdge

MentalEdge , vor 15 Tagen

Nah I think most of us just don't think this one makes sense.

Like I get in what way it's supposed to be funny. It just isn't.

MentalEdge , vor 17 Tagen

Doing that, or operating such a service, will become a crime.

MentalEdge , vor 17 Tagen

Well they'll go for the service providers, of course.

Signal would effectively have to leave the EU market and block any EU users to stay out of hot water.

The list of privacy-respecting chat apps would become real short real fast, and good luck getting everyone in your life to use one.

Yeah, I have my own matrix instance, but unless I want to cut off 90% of the people I want to have in my life, I can't not bridge it to at least telegram and whatsapp.

It doesn't matter that this is unenforceable, or that alternatives exists. That simply means that those of us who care will still be able to keep some of our communications secure. But this legal change will still make it impossible to keep all of our communications private. That's already the case, and this will make it orders of magnitude worse.

Unenforceable? On an individual level, yes. On a societal level? No. This absolutely can and will enable the monitoring of 99.99% of actual chat activity.

MentalEdge , vor einem Monat

And e2ee would also get fucked, whether you consent or not.

The problem is that by merely enabling the surveillance, security is already compromised, whether it's used to spy or not.

MentalEdge , vor einem Monat

I mean, I just set my system to only check for updates once a week.

There's no real reason to install every update, the second it's available. If there's a big security fix you should get asap, you'll hear about it.

MentalEdge , vor einem Monat

Which is why you reduce the frequency at which the system checks for updates.

Once I get notified it's irresistible.

MentalEdge , vor einem Monat

By an Index and get into VR gaming on Linux. We livin on the edge ovar her. Shit breaks every day and there's a wonky python script you have to use if you wanna be able to put the base stations into sleep mode 👍

MentalEdge , vor 2 Monaten

Huh. TIL.

To me popcorn goes in the same category as potato chips, salty. Always salty. But apparently it lands with candy for a part of the world? I had no idea.

Do you sweet popcorn people get some other salty snack? Or are all your movie snacks sugary?

To me the ultimate combo is salty popcorn (maybe even buttery) and a sweet drink.

MentalEdge , vor 2 Monaten

Followed by MPV doing the same

MentalEdge , vor 2 Monaten

All jobs, if you get really technical.

MentalEdge , vor 2 Monaten

https://sopuli.xyz/pictrs/image/c43b4b02-b359-48aa-ae4d-cdccde1bcfc3.webp

MentalEdge , vor 2 Monaten

That post will only exist on your instance. Federation out to other instances would have to happen via the instance that community is on.

MentalEdge , vor 3 Monaten

And also on the posts about Linux. And the posts linking any tech-related news. And posts asking for any kind of tech support. And on...

MentalEdge , vor 3 Monaten

I manage a machine that runs both media transcodes and some video game servers.

The video game servers have to run in real-time, or very close to it. Otherwise players using them suffer noticeable lag.

Achieving this at the same time that an ffmpeg process was running was completely impossible. No matter what I did to limit ffmpegs use of CPU time. Even when running it at lowest priority it impacted the game server processes running at top priority. Even if I limited it to one thread, it was affecting things.

I couldn't understand the problem. There was enough CPU time to go around to do both things, and the transcode wasn't even time sensitive, while the game server was, so why couldn't the Linux kernel just figure it out and schedule things in a way that made sense?

So, for the first time I read up on how computers actually handle processes, multi-tasking and CPU scheduling.

As FFMPEG is an application that uses ALL available CPU time until a task is done, I came to the conclusion that due to how context switching works (CPU cores can only do one thing, they just switch out what they do really fast, but this too takes time) it was causing the system to fall behind on the video game processes when the system was operating with zero processing headroom. The scheduler wasn't smart enough to maintain a real-time process in the face of FFMPEG, which would occupy ALL available cycles.

I learned the solution was core pinning. Manually setting processes to run on certain cores of the CPU. I set FFMPEG to use only one core, since it doesn't matter how fast it completes. And I set the game processes to use all but that one core, so they don't accidentally end up queueing for CPU time on a core that doesn't have the headroom to allow the task to run within a reasonable time range.

This has completely solved the problem, as the game processes and FFMPEG no longer wait for CPU cycles in the same queue.

MentalEdge , vor 4 Monaten

Are you saying anti-theists are in favor of eradicating religion from human memory?

If so, no. Wrong.

Simply not making decisions based on fictional fairy tales, doesn't require deleting those fairy tales from historical record or cultural memory.

Only religions obliterate other religions, atheists simply don't believe the stories to be true, and anti-theists simply want humanity to stop being controlled by things that aren't real.

MentalEdge , vor 6 Monaten

It's called "tracker music". A "tracker" is a type of music composing software that dates back to the very dawn of digital music.

Ahoy has a fantastic video about how they work and their history.

MentalEdge , vor 6 Monaten

No. Tracker music is 16-bit, within tracker music the term chiptune refers to a specific sub-genre which emulates 8-bit music.

Only much later did "chiptune" become a catch-all for all old computer music, and in that context it can refer to music not made with a tracker.

MentalEdge , vor 6 Monaten

And?

This whole discussion is within the context of trackers specifically, not the mainstream definition of "chiptune" which can refer to any music, made using whatever, that have some bleeps and bloops mixed in.

The mainstream definition also includes music that isn't tracker music, which isn't what we're talking about, and hence, it's not the right term to be using.

Bringing up the word in its general meaning within a discussion about tracker music, is even more confusing and unhelpful, because in the context of trackers, the word chiptune refers to a specific type of tracker music.

MentalEdge , vor 6 Monaten

That "lmao" is really doing some heavy lifting for your credibility there...

Which definition are you even using when saying that a tracker is necessary? In the age of trackers "chiptune" referred to a music style from before trackers. If chiptunes existed before trackers, then someone obviously made that music without one.

To consider same sound produced with newer tools "cheating" or "fake" is an stupid distinction. Would not using trackers to create chiptunes then be cheating, too, since chiptune referred to tracker music that was emulating the even older style of 8-bit computer music? (Since again, trackers are a 16-bit era thing)

I'm starting to think you don't even know what a tracker is, because while trackers could be used to make other styles of music from their time, plenty of retro games used other ways to produce music, such as MIDI sound cards or direct instruction of synth voice chips. All of which would be called "chiptunes" by most people today, not just trackers.

MentalEdge , vor 6 Monaten

Trackers were created to take advantage of the new and unique audio hardware available in the Amiga.

Trackers use sample-banks, while both the NES and SNES heavily relied on voice chips.

The NES only had 5 voice channels, and they were each stuck with their initial synth-type, and while SNES could reproduce samples, they were used sparingly due to the space audio samples would take up on the cartridge.

Trackers could create music using actual audio samples. While the samples couldn't be long or high quality due to RAM and CPU constraints, the way they functioned from the audio systems of the NES and SNES is fundamentally different, and more capable.

While it is possible to re-create the style of music produced by the NES and SNES with a tracker, that's hardly what they were developed for. Trackers had far fewer technical limitations and could do so much more.

MentalEdge , vor 6 Monaten

You're telling me shit I already know and trying to twist the facts

I'm sorry, but if you already know all this, why can't you make sense? You're again coming in with a new claim that falls apart the second I add context:

MIDI is a digital standard for musical notation, one which trackers DID NOT USE. Lots of trackers use their own formats which can't even be opened by other trackers, let alone any MIDI compliant software. Not to mention that MIDI files don't come with samples, while tracker modules had to in order to reproduce a track correctly.

Trackers are as related to MIDI as they are to dots scribbled onto five lines on a piece of paper. All music can be represented using MIDI, because MIDI is just notes. That doesn't mean all digital music uses MIDI. Especially when MIDI doesn't store actual sound data.

Trackers, and I apparently have to say this again, USED SAMPLES. As in, NOT SYNTHS (like the NES). They played back recorded audio data from actual sound files according to a pattern input by the composer. Which yes, you could argue is equivalent to MIDI. But the samples are not, and they are a fundamental part of how trackers work. In order to even get started with using a tracker to create NES/SNES style music, you'd have to configure it with a sample-bank that contains the noises they would make.

Perhaps you are confused because MIDI sound cards did something similar. They used MIDI data to play music using the preset sample-banks that different MIDI cards came with, meaning the track would sound different depending on what sound card was used.

Tracker modules meanwhile came with their own samples, meaning they always played the same. Composers could also use whatever audio files they wanted to create their sample-banks.

"Those old games" also most certainly did not use MIDI, they either had their music produced using direct hardware instruction or whatever tools the game developers created for themselves.

But we're getting off track. You've kept making new claims about trackers, what they are related to, the terminology around them, and what they are for, each of which has been subtly off.

To recap:

Tracker music is tracker music. The word "chiptune" can either refer to a sub-genre within tracker music, or "retro" music in general, which includes lots of other music aside from tracker music. However, it cannot be used to refer to tracker music and only tracker music. Those two terms are not interchangeable. That doesn't change because "it's much later now m8".

Trackers were also not created to "replicate" or "reproduce" anything, they can, but they can also do more. They were developed specifically to take advantage of the new 16-bit sound card introduced in the Amiga, and worked by playing back recorded audio samples, while older computer music was produced by instructing synthesizers to bleep and bloop.

MentalEdge , vor 6 Monaten

If you had a MIDI sound-card, sure.

Of course you can use samples to play the notes in a MIDI, MIDI is just a digital standard for storing a sequence of notes. You can do whatever you want with those.

But now you're grasping at straws, trackers didn't use MIDI, and unlike MIDI, shipped the samples with the tracks, so they'd sound the same wherever they were played.

That there's a superficial similarity is inconsequential, and that you'd bring it up at all, just further crushes your previous claims that trackers were related to earlier 8-bit synth-based music.