V17's recent activity

  1. Comment on Why cassette tapes are coming back in ~music

    V17
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    IIRC this is not the case with the vinyl that we've used for decades. It's probably still going to make some sound, just like when you put a sewing needle into the bottom of a paper/plastic cup...

    If you have the right hardware, you can hear the music from vinyl without using electricity.

    IIRC this is not the case with the vinyl that we've used for decades. It's probably still going to make some sound, just like when you put a sewing needle into the bottom of a paper/plastic cup and run it along the groove, but I believe these gramphones were only used for old shellac records in which the grooves were cut differently.

    3 votes

  2. Comment on Indecision: Get a camera despite having a phone in ~tech

    V17
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    Just today I discovered RapidRAW. I haven't tested it yet, but supposedly it's great and inspired by Lightroom.

    Just today I discovered RapidRAW. I haven't tested it yet, but supposedly it's great and inspired by Lightroom.

    1 vote

  3. Comment on The Oatmeal: A cartoonist's review of AI art in ~comics

    V17
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    I don't agree with all of your points because firstly I'm a fan of gatekeeping, surely the problem of "now the internet is going to be flooded with an order of magnitude more shitty content" is...

    I don't agree with all of your points because firstly I'm a fan of gatekeeping, surely the problem of "now the internet is going to be flooded with an order of magnitude more shitty content" is real and already happening, and secondly "it's capitalism's fault" usually just means "it's the fault of human nature" and even if it doesn't it might as well because it describes something that's very unlikely to change.

    But the main point is spot on. You don't even need to spend the effort to train models on your art, even just using less mainstream models than the ChatGPT tool with default settings in a smart way can create an endless supply of inspiration that you can use in your own work. One thing that LLMs and image generation models seem to have in common is that they work well as hypothesis machines basically, creating really interesting fragments of things when used well. I used to make strange liminal style (but not stereotypical backrooms etc.), weird architecture 3D renders for fun and I have used AI this way. One thing that I struggled with was to add some organic looking dust, grime and other things that would make the scene look worn and abandoned. Turns out you can use directed AI inpainting for that and selectively blend it with the original render.

    And AI can be wielded by artists to create actual novel art like this music video that wouldn't be realistically (even if the limitation might only be budget) possible otherwise. I certainly did not feel any disappointment when watching it.

    That said, I think the issue of not differentiating between "art" and just "imagery" or "content", where the origin really doesn't matter much, as mentioned in the current top comment here, is a bigger flaw with his take.

    9 votes

  4. Comment on Indecision: Get a camera despite having a phone in ~tech

    V17
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    Other people already replied, but whatever, you asked me so I'm going to give you my opinion as well. I completely disagree with the "Don't shoot RAW" article, on the contrary as an amateur...

    Other people already replied, but whatever, you asked me so I'm going to give you my opinion as well. I completely disagree with the "Don't shoot RAW" article, on the contrary as an amateur shooting RAWs and learning the depth of what I can create using it is what made photography fun for me. But I mainly shoot landscapes which rely more on postprocessing, for your purpose it's less necessary.

    Basically with digital cameras RAW is the default, and jpeg mode tries to "develop" the raws automatically. Modern cameras do that really well. "Developing" a RAW is necessary because by default, in the data you get straight from the image sensor, there's no reference of what neutral white is, the difference between the darkest tones and the lightest tones is higher than what a display (or a printed photo) can show, so it needs to be squashed using various algorithms, some mathemagic is being done with colors etc. So an actual viewable image must be created using software, either automatically using a processing chip in the camera, or semi automatically using a computer program that you can influence.

    All cameras can save both jpegs and RAWs at the same time, so you can decide to only do some post work on one or a few select photos and the rest leave as jpegs that are likely going to be good enough.

    The most popular program for that is Adobe Lightroom, and as much as I dislike Adobe I think it's rather good. Other options exist, I like DxO, and Affinity Photo is not bad these days either (it's a full fledged Photoshop alternative that can also develop RAWs, though not to the very maximum of their potential like say DxO).

    Usually when you just load the RAW photo into an application like Lightroom you get something that looks similar to what you would get as a jpeg straight out of camera, but you can decide to tweak it and significantly change it, with much more freedom than you get from a jpeg. The downside is that until you get skilled at it, it can take a lot of time to do this even for just a few pictures.

    Personally I wouldn't recommend the open source variants, Darktable and Rawtherapee, to a layman unless you enjoy learning complicated technical things - they're powerful but needlessly complicated with bad interfaces imo. I like Filmulator, which is also free and it simulates film-style photography, but I'm not sure how well supported it is, it hasn't received an update in several years. It's different from other apps in how it works, so reading the manual is required, but it's relatively short and the overall concept is quite simple.

  5. Comment on Indecision: Get a camera despite having a phone in ~tech

    V17
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    I know not everybody is like that, but personally I find it difficult to switch my mind to "photo mode" with a phone camera. I just snap things that usually end up not being that great. With an...

    I know not everybody is like that, but personally I find it difficult to switch my mind to "photo mode" with a phone camera. I just snap things that usually end up not being that great. With an actual camera I take pretty decent pictures and find it easy to think about what pictures I take.

    Generally the worse the lighting conditions are, the bigger the difference between a real camera and a phone camera... But sometimes to get the most out of a real camera you need to shoot raws and develop the pictures yourself. I don't have comprehensive experiences with current models, but I think that a good phone still has more robust automatic processing than the average mirrorless, but the average mirrorless has miles better input data, so usually the result looks better as well even with shooting jpegs and not doing any manual processing.

    But honestly the ergonomics and the mindset switch of using a real camera are the biggest differences for just snapping photos of family etc. Hard to say if that's worth it.

    1 vote

  6. Comment on Bluesky melts down over Jesse Singal in ~tech

    V17
    Link Parent
    It's doubly not true in the ex-communist part of Europe. I see leftist americans saying it all the time on the dumber platforms like instagram or reddit and it's a bit frustrating. Though it's...

    It's doubly not true in the ex-communist part of Europe. I see leftist americans saying it all the time on the dumber platforms like instagram or reddit and it's a bit frustrating.

    Though it's partially an artifact of not separating leftist economic policies and socially progressive policies. The saying is probably still true when talking only about economy and only about mainstream US politicians.

    7 votes

  7. Comment on Outrage over American Eagle's 'great jeans' ad was a conservative media creation in ~society

    V17
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    I agree, and I don't have an answer either. I wish I did. I am not convinced about the usefulness of the linked analysis though.

    I agree, and I don't have an answer either. I wish I did. I am not convinced about the usefulness of the linked analysis though.

    1 vote

  8. Comment on Outrage over American Eagle's 'great jeans' ad was a conservative media creation in ~society

    V17
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    So will political opponents who try to exploit any fuckups that the other side does. By this reasoning the outrage cycle is inevitable and nobody is to blame. As per my middle paragraph above I am...

    Hyperprogressives, as you call them, will always exist.

    So will political opponents who try to exploit any fuckups that the other side does. By this reasoning the outrage cycle is inevitable and nobody is to blame.

    The article was about the facts of this one specific instance, which had very clear political lines.

    As per my middle paragraph above I am not entirely convinced by their analysis.

    3 votes

  9. Comment on How we're designing Audacity for the future in ~tech

    V17
    Link Parent
    I believe you can do those things in Photopea, which is ad-supported freeware and runs only in browser - something I hate, but I have to admit it's an incredibly cool piece of software - and I...

    I believe you can do those things in Photopea, which is ad-supported freeware and runs only in browser - something I hate, but I have to admit it's an incredibly cool piece of software - and I believe you can also do most of it within Darktable these days, possibly even in RawTherapee (both free software) or some forks, if you shoot in raw.

    2 votes

  10. Comment on Outrage over American Eagle's 'great jeans' ad was a conservative media creation in ~society

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    I am skeptical. I don't really follow any conservative online media (except one very conservative gaming forum, lol), yet for a while I did see posts about the ad regularly, mostly on Instagram...

    I am skeptical.

    I don't really follow any conservative online media (except one very conservative gaming forum, lol), yet for a while I did see posts about the ad regularly, mostly on Instagram and Reddit, and they were all western style liberals criticizing the ad and arguing about dogwhistles. That's how I learned about it. This is anecdotal, but still.

    What is not anecdotal is the article showing that with the exception of one day the social network that posted about the ad the most is Bluesky, a platform known to be predominantly liberal. Apparently those posts did not trigger their "words associated with racism or bigotry" filter, but obviously they were still amplifying the signal.

    Since this is an article about the cycle of outrage, it seems like it should call out everybody feeding the outrage. Conservatives made complaining about liberals who get, in their eyes, inadequately outraged about "normal" things one of the foundations of their platform. This is bad and hypocritical and it's good to call it out. It also only works because a group of hyperprogressives just keeps getting outraged. This is also bad and should be called out.

    4 votes

  11. Comment on How we're designing Audacity for the future in ~tech

    V17
    Link Parent
    It's a bigger problem to find contributors for GIMP than for say Krita and other similar (or smaller) projects. I wouldn't want to be writing a graphics processing GUI application in C either, so...

    It's a bigger problem to find contributors for GIMP than for say Krita and other similar (or smaller) projects. I wouldn't want to be writing a graphics processing GUI application in C either, so I don't blame anyone. GEGL, the core of GIMP, is also arguably more ambitious than it might seem from the outside.

    1 vote

  12. Comment on How we're designing Audacity for the future in ~tech

    V17
    Link Parent
    This has been fixed in either 3.0 or the current 3.1.4 development build. It may still be missing some other common idioms, not sure, but work has been done on both the GUI and functionality of...

    (no shift-click multi select and such)

    This has been fixed in either 3.0 or the current 3.1.4 development build. It may still be missing some other common idioms, not sure, but work has been done on both the GUI and functionality of the layers panel (the development build now has filter layers, better functioning groups, vector layers and external link layers iirc).

    Many of those clearly missing things have been frozen for years because there was a lot of work on the underlying image processing engine to be done, which had priority and needed to be finished before GIMP 3.0 came out. The development team is small, apparently most people don't really want to work on a somewhat outdated image processing application in C, which is understandable.

    3 votes

  13. Comment on How we're designing Audacity for the future in ~tech

    V17
    Link Parent
    I understand. The reason why I bought the Affinity Suite is that some workflows are simply impossible or a huge pain in GIMP. For photo editing I use smart selection, non-destructive filters...

    I just get lost trying to figure out stuff I could do in 2-5 minutes in GIMP.

    I understand. The reason why I bought the Affinity Suite is that some workflows are simply impossible or a huge pain in GIMP. For photo editing I use smart selection, non-destructive filters (filter layers/adjustment layers) and inpainting as the very basis of what I do, this is a very common workflow in some types of photography. And it's impossible in current versions of GIMP, whereas in Photoshop it has been available for I think about 20 years now. It's likely finally going to be present in the upcoming 3.x versions, so that's cool.

    1 vote

  14. Comment on How we're designing Audacity for the future in ~tech

    V17
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    Apart from feeling bland corporate I think it's also just not that good. But the old one feels too "oldschool open source", so I understand why they wanted to change it.

    Apart from feeling bland corporate I think it's also just not that good. But the old one feels too "oldschool open source", so I understand why they wanted to change it.

    13 votes

  15. Comment on How we're designing Audacity for the future in ~tech

    V17
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    I honestly think that GIMP is okay these days. It used to be quite bad on Windows specifically because there it used to use an old version of GTK (its GUI library) for the longest time, which was...

    (I use GIMP and don't get the fuss?)

    I honestly think that GIMP is okay these days. It used to be quite bad on Windows specifically because there it used to use an old version of GTK (its GUI library) for the longest time, which was buggy, produced incosistent behavior in various widgets etc. But that has been fixed for years now. I kind of prefer its GUI to parts of Audacity, lol.

    I normally use Affinity Suite, which is definitely better, but GIMP is fine.

    Recently I had to use various Adobe apps for work and I was appaled by some of their GUI design choices, likely present for historical reasons. I think a big part of GIMP GUI hate is just being used to somethind different.

    Now if only it wasn't 20 years behind state of the art feature-wise, but that's a different issue. Still a cool application.

    8 votes

  16. Comment on It's impossible to evaluate your sleep with only one number in ~health

    V17
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    This is actually the easiest way. I have no formal education in medicine, but I believe one of the reasons why antivirals are so difficult to do is that we're mostly interested in ones that are...

    I didn't know anti-virals had gotten to that point that they could be used almost preemptively.

    This is actually the easiest way. I have no formal education in medicine, but I believe one of the reasons why antivirals are so difficult to do is that we're mostly interested in ones that are useful for severe illness, but at that late stage several things are happening at once and just killing the virus (which is quite difficult on its own with oral medication) does not help that much.

    Killing viruses locally is much easier, but it only works as prevention or before the illness develops fully. Azelastine was tested specifically as a prevention (that people continued to use if they did get sick, it shortened the illness). And the zinc lozenges, when used after you start feeling sick, do not remove the symptoms, but they basically freeze them. Instead of a fully developed cold (which for me is normally sore throat -> runny nose + sinus pain -> coughing -> end) I got 3 days of the symptoms I already had before I started taking it.

    One "side effect" that happened to me with zinc and VirX, so it may be common to all of them, is that when I used them to successfully stop an illness, I had to still stay calm and relax as if I was sick for about 3-4 days, otherwise I felt really tired (as if partially sick) for more than a week. No full illness though.

    1 vote

  17. Comment on It's impossible to evaluate your sleep with only one number in ~health

    V17
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    Azelastine spray that I'm using has a year long shelf life before it's opened and since it costs about 8€ here, that seems fine. Zinc lozenges iirc last longer, but those are not ideal (they don't...

    Azelastine spray that I'm using has a year long shelf life before it's opened and since it costs about 8€ here, that seems fine. Zinc lozenges iirc last longer, but those are not ideal (they don't work for covid and they're just less pleasant to use). I think the spray made of seaweed may work better than azelastine, but I have no further information on that (specific efficacy or shelf life), you'd have to look it up yourself.

    1 vote

  18. Comment on It's impossible to evaluate your sleep with only one number in ~health

    V17
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    There are OTC antiviral medications that work against respiratory viruses, but their one downside is that you have to take them asap, in an ideal world before you get any symptoms, because with...

    It does occasionally tell me I'm sick about a day before I'm aware of it, and while that's interesting, it's not particularly useful or actionable.

    There are OTC antiviral medications that work against respiratory viruses, but their one downside is that you have to take them asap, in an ideal world before you get any symptoms, because with viral illnesses at the moment when you get first symptoms the virus is already widely multiplied, it's just the immune response that's delayed. Taking them a day early would likely significantly increase the chance of avoiding the illness completely.

    The ones I know off:

    • Life Extension Enhanced Zinc Lozenges: specific forms of zinc lozenges block replication of various rhinoviruses and coronaviruses that cause common cold. Not effective against covid I don't think. Only works as a lozenge (which creates a high concentration locally), standard zinc pills have zero effect of this type.
    • VirX nasal spray: currently not available in most places, but it works against the flu and covid as well.
    • Antihistamine nasal sprays based on Azelastine: recently confirmed to have broad antiviral effects, widely available, known to be safe and well tolerated since it's an off-label use of a popular medication
    • I don't have the name right now, but nasal sprays based on a compound isolated from a specific type of seaweed, which kills viruses and also creates a protective layer in your nasal passage that reduces the chance of getting ill. That one is relatively cheap and available as well.
    2 votes

  19. Comment on It's impossible to evaluate your sleep with only one number in ~health

    V17
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    I think it really depends on the person. Two of my friends told me about their Garmin watch, one was going through quite bad covid (needed hospitalisation and oxygen in the end, pre vaccination)...

    my wife's is and she's constantly going on about how it says her body battery is low but I ask her how she feels and usually she feels just fine

    I think it really depends on the person. Two of my friends told me about their Garmin watch, one was going through quite bad covid (needed hospitalisation and oxygen in the end, pre vaccination) and told me how the body battery was accurately tracking the gradual worsening of his symptoms. That's easy though, because it was a severe situation. Other friend told me her watch tells her "you might be coming down with an illness" based on I guess slightly higher resting heart rate, slight changes in temperature and possibly other things, and it's usually accurate. This sounds like a killer feature because any accessible interventions against viral illnesses only work well when used as soon as possible, in an ideal situation before any symptoms even start.

  20. Comment on It's impossible to evaluate your sleep with only one number in ~health

    V17
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    Perhaps if it's like that long term, but when my resting heart rate changed from 60 to 90 due to a chronic illness it was one of the first things I noticed. It didn't feel terrible overall, but I...

    We just don't have a good sense of our resting heartrate. If it's 50 or 90, is going to feel the same to people.

    Perhaps if it's like that long term, but when my resting heart rate changed from 60 to 90 due to a chronic illness it was one of the first things I noticed. It didn't feel terrible overall, but I did almost immediately think "huh, my heart rate shouldn't be this high when I'm sitting down."

    2 votes