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Joined 4 years ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2020

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  • They will both agree to broad idea that “rich bad” and “middle class is struggling”. Their relative suffering is what they both agree on even though they’re different.

    If the 40k person saw how the 400k person lives in real life, they would be rolling out the guillotine for the 400k dude. But without proper context online that 40k person will go to bat for the 400k person if anyone brings up the topic of lifestyle.

    The further up the scale the more luxury there is. However people work with more binary thinking. So it’s easier to point at the dudes making 1000k or more. The territory of more unfathomable weath. Really there’s a lot of excess going on way before we reach the multi-millionaire to billionaire strata.


  • I’ve thought about this from time to time. Have we been kind of a neurotic generation? I could never tell if it was just me that was seeing things or what. The under 30s seems more indifferent. Might be because they are mostly the children of Gen-X? Are over 30s a bit uptight? How did we end up this way?

    From personal experience growing up so many kids were obsessed with the rat race from way too young. That whole mindset that you must to university to get all your credentials to fit yourself into a cookie cutter. The defacto life track until the illusion started to crack.

    All in all I think the over 30 generation has a really hard time with self reflection. In particular talking about the faults of our own generation. Which is paradoxical against the whole mental health awareness stuff.



  • Bluetooth is low bitrate. The audio codecs need to use a lot of compression. Old audio equipment are analog which is better because it doesn’t have so much digital conversions to completely wreck sound.

    Bluetooth is still reliant on its original SBC codec from the early 2000s or something. 20 year old tech. Due to this nobody really took BT audio adoption seriously until the past several years when the zeitgeist finally tipped. Suddenly wireless headphones were every where.

    I think maybe it was when Apple got rid of headphone jack. So the rest of the industry caved. And we all just handwave away how bluetooth audio has always sucked.

    For compatibility every device maker sticks to that 20 year old common denominator. There are proprietary codecs that are supposed be better quality but then you get all the joys of cross compatibility hell. If your devices aren’t inter-compatible they’ll fall back to the common denominator. The basic SBC codec. Even with better quality codec they can only do so much with limited wireless bitrate.

    Fun fact. There is higher quality configuration for the SBC codec but nobody configures it in software when making their device. People say it’s indistinguishable from the highest quality proprietary codecs. But audio can subjective so eh…

    Even if you were to enable the better configuration for SBC. All the devices out there in the world are built with the default configuration. No two devices sender/receiver will ever both use the better config. So it’s impossible to fix this.

    It doesn’t matter anymore since all this in the process of being superseded by Bluethooth 5 audio. Which throws away all that and tries to do it all over again. It’s still reliant on low bitrate wireless protocol though. So they can use whatever algorithmic trickery so they can claim produce perceptually indistinguishable from CD quality or lossless quality or whatever.

    I’m sure there will always be people that say they can tell the difference. I don’t doubt people can because it’s simply not the same audio but a disassembly into bits for wireless transmission. Then reconstituted on the other-side as near as possible to the original.





  • It was nothing more than an off the shelf ARM SBC inside. Some third party designed and made the board. Nobody had the bootloader keys to unlock the units. It was easily bricked. No keys to recover it. They had sold it as a device for “hackers” but nobody could really hack it. The whole concept was dead on arrival.

    Several years later people discovered weaknesses in Nvidias bootloader code. The Ouya is vulnerable. So they’re finally wide open hackable. But nobody cares anymore.






  • It’s a rich peoples game. Those with mere pittance to invest will not end up with much even if they live a very long natural life and do not touch a penny of whatever they could invest until their death bed. Even then they’ve have to wait until the very end for that pittance. The whole thing is based on having a enough wealth such that small percentage returns equate to a lot in absolute value. A small or even larger than average percentage return from relatively little wealth is still very little.

    To change any of this would be to change the underlying issues of unequal distribution of wealth. The stock markets are derivative. If more had wealth then obviously they’d be investing more. It’s not the other way around.

    Some believe they can cheat code their way to the other side by gambling which is not investing. Seems to have become popular again in recent times after certain cultural phenomenons. That again does not change underlying issues. A few lottery winners and many more silent losers only serves to amplify inequality.