Edgeworth's recent activity

  1. Comment on Menthol inhalation may boost cognitive ability in Alzheimer’s in ~science

    Edgeworth
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    i had the exact same experience of a teacher giving peppermints during standardized testing days, saying that the smell of peppermint helps you think. I wonder what the source of that story is

    i had the exact same experience of a teacher giving peppermints during standardized testing days, saying that the smell of peppermint helps you think. I wonder what the source of that story is

    4 votes

  2. Comment on MRI research shows live music makes us more emotional than recordings in ~music

    Edgeworth
    Link Parent
    I have a different view on this. I would never trade my favorite albums in exchange for memories of my favorite live moments. Live music is a fleeting feeling. Whereas I have relationships with my...

    I have a different view on this. I would never trade my favorite albums in exchange for memories of my favorite live moments. Live music is a fleeting feeling. Whereas I have relationships with my favorite recordings. They have meant different things at different times in my life, and they represent an ongoing possibility of new experiences and ways of thinking of them. The same as good novels. This is a personal thing too, I know, but I have had the experiences you described but just didn't enjoy it as much as I expected. I also think I have trouble really allowing myself to have a transcendental experience in a crowd (no matter how small); it's a quite uncomfortable setting for me.

    In a way, familiar recordings automatically create this "optimized"(ugh) type of experience, because the more you know an album, the more your brain molds to it, and expects what it knows is coming. The musicians don't need to read a brain scan or anything.

    The article is paywalled, so I can't check if the recordings were new to the listeners or not, but personally I value recordings that I'm already very familiar with much higher. So I find myself disagreeing with the headline. I know it's not true for me at least.

    5 votes

  3. Comment on <deleted topic> in ~tildes

    Edgeworth
    Link Parent
    It’s mine too. I’m always a little self conscious telling people that because I think they’ll think I’m boring. To me it’s the color of a sleepy overcast sky heavy with rain or the perfect color...

    It’s mine too. I’m always a little self conscious telling people that because I think they’ll think I’m boring.

    To me it’s the color of a sleepy overcast sky heavy with rain or the perfect color for a cozy sweater. (I live in a climate where those things are the exception so they stay special instead of becoming miserable). It’s the color of comfort to me too.

    5 votes

  4. Comment on Redditors of Tildes, which subreddits are you missing the most during the blackout? in ~tech

    Edgeworth
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    I've been scanning the /r/Games frontpage every single day for I don't even know how long now. Well over a decade at this point. It was so convenient to get a mix of news and the better opinion...

    I've been scanning the /r/Games frontpage every single day for I don't even know how long now. Well over a decade at this point. It was so convenient to get a mix of news and the better opinion articles that come out. The comment sections are usually pretty bad as a whole but had useful information often enough that I'd read the top voted comments every once in a while.

    But it hasn't felt right for a while, at least a few years. I don't think I pay close enough attention to that side of it all to give specific criticism about their moderation, but it seems like all is not well on that front. (Does it really bother anyone else that they have a mod on the modlist named Whiteness88? What's going on there?) A lot of reddit feels like this. The vibes are bad. It's made me hate having this vague attachment to it.

    It's way past time for me to leave and the blackout is as good an excuse as any. It's just hard. There's an emotional fondness for it simply out of familiarity and regularity, despite that it just wasn't a great place. I don't think I can get a balance of RSS feeds that will have most of what I care about and not leave important stuff out without it being a mess.

    The whole situation makes me feel a weird emptiness.

    11 votes

  5. Comment on What programming/technical projects have you been working on? in ~comp

    Edgeworth
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    I'm making a site that is a mix of Twitch, Rabbit, and Netflix, made for small group media parties. You have the option to queue up movies stored on the server. Or you can screenshare via WebRTC,...

    I'm making a site that is a mix of Twitch, Rabbit, and Netflix, made for small group media parties. You have the option to queue up movies stored on the server. Or you can screenshare via WebRTC, or RMTP like twitch, or paste a youtube link (or anything that can be gotten from youtube-dl) and it will be queued up. There's a twitch chat on the side, a row of webcams on the bottom, and even video reactions that will show a reaction gif to everyone when you click a button. There's a voting system for what goes next on the queue. Since it's RMTP, anyone who has OBS can get their own room and stream through that after I give them a stream key. The whole thing works great with a 30-person discord family that I do it with, there is a 5-10 person party most nights. But not quite ready to show the world.

    A node.js server with socket.io powers a lot of it, the chat, the reactions, most other network stuff. When someone starts some content, it starts an instance of ffmpeg which streams the media file via rtmp. Then an nginx server serves the actual page and accepts the rtmp and makes an hls stream. The HLS stream is then used as the video.js source. A big challenge that I just tried and failed at was to display embedded subtitles from an mkv movie as webvtt subtitles and have them show up on video.js, so that every individual could decide whether to have subtitles on or off. Ultimately everything that appears on screen is through the ffmpeg rtmp stream, so dynamic stuff like that is difficult. Sooo now I'm considering doing a sync'd subtitle renderer from scratch.

    I doubt if I'll ever release it beyond my private discord but for our purposes it is basically a far superior successor to rabbit. The whole thing came about because discord Go Live was just really bad and you can't stream through OBS. With this I can tweak every tiny parameter if I wish.

    6 votes

  6. Comment on Are there any experimental/electronic producers on here? in ~music

    Edgeworth
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    I am, on and off for the past 12 years or so. The artists that really got me going down this path were Animal Collective and Oneohtrix Point Never and it went downhill from there. I also...

    I am, on and off for the past 12 years or so. The artists that really got me going down this path were Animal Collective and Oneohtrix Point Never and it went downhill from there. I also discovered this guy Stephan Moore who calls himself a "sound artist" and I really look up to him, since he's a programmer too. He makes sound installations.

    https://oddnoise.com/gallery.html

    Anyway, so now I like calling myself a sound artist. Just opening up the DAW and just playing with sound can be so wonderful.

    2 votes

  7. Comment on What are your thoughts on more nuanced sexuality labels and their relationship with lgbt? in ~lgbt

    Edgeworth
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    I think the prolific nature of the labels is a stopgap toward having a fully developed language for describing sexuality with nuance. I don't describe other parts of my life with one of a bunch of...

    I think the prolific nature of the labels is a stopgap toward having a fully developed language for describing sexuality with nuance. I don't describe other parts of my life with one of a bunch of existing labels. When I tell people about myself, it tends to be in a story-like way. It's natural for people to talk this way. Seeing how their story connects to one of these labels is not intuitive, and people will of course resist this.

    Take the "snowflake" insult. Nobody gets called this when they are telling their own story, even though that story makes them unique. "My favorite color is gray and my favorite food is french toast" probably narrows me down to way more specificity than any of the sexuality labels would, yet nobody would complain about me describing myself like that. Maybe if I called myself polichromophilic (greek roots for gray-color-loving, I doubt it's actually correct), it would bother someone.

    Personally, it took me a long, long time to realize which of these labels applies to me. There was no way for me to know unless I specifically learned the definition at some point. Even so, plenty of people have a natural aversion to being labeled.

    I'm definitely not calling for abandoning the labels. They have helped a lot of people discover themselves. "Oh hey, this applies to me." But I don't see them as the thing that will get nuanced sexuality into mass acceptance. And considering how universal sex is, it is to our advantage to have this nuance.

    10 votes

  8. Comment on Misteramazing doesn't understand music theory in ~music

    Edgeworth
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    I have to agree here. Really classless to "take down" an amateur like this. There's a strong tone of aggression in the response video that felt misplaced to me, as if it were pulling the mask off...

    I have to agree here. Really classless to "take down" an amateur like this. There's a strong tone of aggression in the response video that felt misplaced to me, as if it were pulling the mask off of a grand con, when it may have been just a well-intentioned musician incorrectly transcribing some chords. However, considering the original video's audience of 1.8 million views, the tone may be justified to some, since the volume of misinformation is pretty severe. I can't totally agree with that because well, the video being criticized is two years old, and probably wasn't getting any more views. Considering it's totally possible to develop serious musical skill in that time, "Misteramazing Doesn't Understand Music Theory" is a somewhat presumptive title.

    So I'm in two minds really. Things like calling "rate" an effect instead of a parameter of an effect1, among many other errors, betrays a serious lack of theoretical experience and knowledge, to the point that I don't think someone making such a basic mistake should speak so authoritatively. It's worrying that this level of inexpertise can be spread so much. I assume with that many views, there was a perception by unfamiliar users that clicked from reddit or wherever, that he was reliable. The slick production value also lends it ostensible authority, making it all the more dangerous.

    On the other hand, if I had it my way, the rhetoric and tone of the response video could be done away with, and the response would prioritize the principle of charity and neutrality of tone. Like another thread discussed, music theory is an academic discipline, so if you're so eager to flaunt your knowledge, the more effective way for the response to establish authority is by addressing points in that academic framework. I do have a specific aversion to the way humans love this chest-beating "PWNED" thing, especially in topics that are serious or academic. I found it an interesting coincidence that misteramazing has a video criticizing clickbait criticism videos.

    1. While seemingly a small and inconsequential error, it is the type nevertheless reveals a lot, it's not something an otherwise knowledgeable music producer might just slip up on.

    3 votes

  9. Comment on What's one thing you HAVEN'T been able to find online, no matter how hard you tried? in ~talk

    Edgeworth
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    There was this youtube video that was an amateur 3D animation of Calvin and Hobbes where they broke Dad's binoculars or something. The voice acting was suuuper funny. Seems like it got deleted....

    There was this youtube video that was an amateur 3D animation of Calvin and Hobbes where they broke Dad's binoculars or something. The voice acting was suuuper funny. Seems like it got deleted. Not very important or anything but just a weird thing I remember that's gone now. This was about 10 years ago when I used to watch it I think.

    5 votes

  10. Comment on Do you ever feel like you want to learn everything? in ~talk

    Edgeworth
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    Yeah, a lot of times it will come in a burst of motivation where I try to suck up a thousand topics at once and it just becomes a steaming mess. I have to make a lot of effort to do things in...

    Yeah, a lot of times it will come in a burst of motivation where I try to suck up a thousand topics at once and it just becomes a steaming mess. I have to make a lot of effort to do things in little bits per day rather than going full out when I have extra motivation and then burning out.

    The existence of Library Genesis can make me a little woozy. That's a lotta top-grade material. I can't help but use a lot of my spare time reading textbooks on everything I wish I could have taken in college.

    1 vote