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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Quality of the system is such a massive dependency here, I can well believe that someone watching old reruns from a shitty streaming service that is upscaled to 1080p or 4k by their TV they purchased from the supermarket with coupons collected from their breakfast cereal is going to struggle to tell the difference.

    Likewise if you fed the TVs with a high end 4k blu ray player and any blu ray considered reference such as Interstellar, you are still going to struggle to tell the difference, even with a more midrange TV unless the TVs get comically large for the viewing distance so that the 1080p screen starts to look pixelated.

    I think very few people would expect their old wired apple earphones they got free with their iphone 4 would expect amazing sound from them, yet people seem to be ignoring the same for cheap TVs. I am not advocating for ultra high end audio/videophile nonsense with systems costing 10s of thousands, just that quite large and noticeable gains are available much lower down the scale.

    Depending what you watch and how you watch it, good quality HDR for the right content is an absolute home run for difference between standard 1080p and 4k HDR if your TV can do true black. Shit TVs do HDR shitterly, its just not comparable to a decent TV and source. Its like playing high rez loss less audio on those old apple wired earphones vs. playing low bitrate MP3s.




  • I would stay near (ish) to Kyoto and just go one day, the National Museum in Kyoto is really good and you can see the rest of what you want to see quite quickly. It is about as commercialized as you can get for a town in Japan, its approaching Disney levels of parody.

    Staying further away lowers the cost and as long as its on one of the direct train lines into Kyoto it doesnt take long to get there. There is a lot to do in daily travelable distance in the region that is a better use of your time.


  • Much like Regan and Bush Junior, Trump is the front man to smarter (but not really smart) people who orchestrate everything. He just happens to be broadly aligned with what they want, and every now and again they throw him a bone with his personal vendettas while allowing his family to make obscene amounts of money via various scams and bribes.

    What is truly astounding is how many people voted for the orange buffoon a second time, and still support him now. He has always been very clear as to what he is, what he will do, yet they still vote for him? Racism and hate has to be a powerful perfume that covers up the rancid stench of Trump and his goons.


  • I would buy a feature phone today, preferably something eink, if it was painless to switch my SIM between it and my smart phone. Having to take the SIM out of one, put it in the other, then turn on the phone is not painless and they do not design the little draws to support thousands of open/closes against the contacts to read the SIM.

    There are times I want the smart phone to have the SIM because I will want or need the extra functionality and if you just make the feature phone do everything then its just morphed into a smart phone with extra steps. I want the feature phone to be basic as I can get away with.

    That said, I really want google wallet or similar that I can share between the two phones for my passes and tickets, audio streaming support, and maps. Something like a Hisense A9 would fit the bill but the temptation to add more apps than the basics would be too great, plus I still need a way to switch SIMs between the phones.

    I cannot replace my smart phone, rather than supplement, with any feature phone because I use it for such a wide range of things. I can ssh from it to my home devices, I can manage my bank accounts, it tracks my health, it provides video and audio streaming on and offline, I can read and write documents/spreadsheets, plus anything you can do via a web browser.


  • What this chart is missing is the impact of the quality of the screen and the source material being played on it.

    A shit screen is a shit screen, just like a badly filmed TV show from the 80s will look like crap on anything other than an old CRT.

    People buying a 4k screen from Wallmart for $200 then wondering why they cant tell its any better than their old 1080p screen.

    The problem with pushing up resolution is the cost to get a good set right now is so much its a niche within a niche of people who actually want it. Even a good 4k set with proper HDR support and big enough to make a different is expensive. Even when 8k moves away from early adopter markups its still going to be expensive, especially when compared to the tat you can by at the supermarket.





  • Yeah it pushed me to finally put in an order, got to wait till December now as I’m in the third batch.

    I wanted to wait till we had proof thst the graphics card would be updatable and a better one would be available as their AMD card is a bit too lightweight for me.

    I would rather it had been a better AMD card, I have a 7900 xtx in my desktop, but i will take what I can get at this point, especially as I know I can upgrade later.


  • With CDs they were negatively impacted by the loudness war as it became much more widespread. Having to hunt around for the right recording, often the earlier ones, can be expensive. Normalisation of the recordings by streaming companies is just an awful idea as it doesn’t fix the bad parts of the mix just turns everything down.

    I prefer SACDs to CDs, mostly because they tended to be mastered and mixed better than the CDs of the past two decades. The surround audio mixes are mostly just gimmicky, although they are a good fit for some records, but they almost always had a two channel mix that you could pick instead. The higher frequency range is mostly pointless.


  • But how do you pay the overseers to enforce it when money is no longer valid? And the overseers are bigger and tougher than your average billionaire?

    Slavery only works when there is money to pay the overseers and a legal system to protect the owner class from being extorted by the overseers.

    ICE is in a similar boat and they have to pay significant amounts to attract people to carry out ICE fascism.