No homework in detention sounds absolutely fucked.
There were a couple times in high school I actually asked to go to detention after class, just to do homework. Because I knew it was a quiet, distraction-free space where I could concentrate on a time-sensitive task. Baffled the detention supervisor, she probably wondered if I was having a bad situation at home I was trying to avoid, but no, just wanted to protect myself from myself. And it was very effective every time.
Choice is an irritating speed bump to people who don’t care to choose, which unfortunately is most of them.
Python is the only programming language that has forced me to question what the difference is between an egg and a wheel.
I’d be more than happy to sacrifice a distro I don’t care about like Ubuntu to the mainstream if it means Microsoft’s market cap gets a sizeable chunk taken out of it.
There’s actually no digital audio involved anywhere in this process. It’s all analog.
A magnetic tape cassette holds raw wave data of the sounds it records. Just like a vinyl record, except the groove is in the magnetic field instead of physically etched into the surface of the tape, and the needle is an electromagnet instead of, well, a needle.
An audio cable using a standard 3.5mm jack also transmits raw wave data. It has to, because the electromagnetic pulses in the cable are what directly drive the electromagnets in whatever speakers they’re hooked up to. If it’s coming out of a digital player, the player has to convert the signal on its own using an onboard digital-to-analog converter (a DAC).
The neat part is that since a tape deck read head is looking for an analog wave signal, and an analog wave signal is what an aux cable carries, the two are directly compatible with one another. If you actually crack one of these tape deck hacks open, you’ll find the whole thing is completely empty, save for the audio cable wires going directly to the write head that mimics the tape. Beyond that, there’s no conversion equipment, no circuit board, nothing. It’s a direct pass-through.
The body of the thing is nothing more than an elaborate way to trip all the mechanisms in the tape deck to trick it into thinking it’s holding a valid cassette, while simply holding the write head fixed in the proper spot.
I’m sure you already know all of this. I just think it’s really cool and I enjoy talking about it. Analog tech is amazing.
My true hell would be instances only federating explicitly through whitelist. If what the other reply I received about Mastodon is correct, and if Lemmy behaves similary, then they operate on an implicit auto-federation with every other instance. Actual transaction of data needs to be triggered by some user on that instance reaching out to the other instance, but there’s no need for the instances involved to whitelist one another first. They just do it. To stop the transfer, they have to explicitly defed, which effectively makes it an opt-out system.
The root comment I initially replied to made it sound, to me, like Mastodon instances choose not to federate with one another. Obviously they aren’t preemptively banning one another, so, I interpreted that to mean Mastodon instances must whitelist one another to connect. But apparently what they actually meant was, “users of Mastodon instances rarely explore outward”? The instances would auto-federate, but in practice, the “crawlers” (the users) aren’t leaving their bubbles often enough to create a critical mass of interconnectedness across the Fediverse?
The fact we have to have this discussion at all is more proof to my original point regardless. Federation is pure faffery to people who just want a platform that has everything in one place.
That sounds worse than I thought it was. I just assumed Mastodon was like Lemmy, where every instance federates with every other instance basically by default and there’s only some high-profile defed exceptions.
A Fediverse where federations are opt-in instead of opt-out sounds like actual hell. Yeah, more control to instances, hooray, but far less seamless usability for people. The only people you will attract with that model are the ones who think having upwards of seven alts for being in seven different communities isn’t remotely strange or cumbersome. That, and/or self-hosting your own individual instances. Neither of these describe the behavior of the vast majority of Internet users who want to sign up on a platform that just works with one account that can see and interact with everything.
Season’s the reason!
This is basically asking why anyone would live in or near a city like Los Angeles or New York City when Minot exists and has everything you could possibly need.
If you had to look up where Minot even is, you’ve proven my point.
Say what you will about whether living near the proverbial big city is worth it or not. But it cannot be denied, there is a world of experiences on offer at larger platforms that a smaller platform simply cannot provide. Network effect can be a cruel mistress.
I’m pretty sure they’re referring to the concept of defederation and how that can splinter the platform.
Bluesky is ““federated”” in largely the same ways as Mastodon, but there’s basically one and only one instance anyone cares about. The federation capability is just lip service to the minority of dorks like us who care.
To the vast majority of Twitter refugees, federation as a concept is not a feature, it’s an irritation.
Surprised how, of all the people who took the bait, not a single one of them complained about systemd.
My beard isn’t long enough to have an opinion about systemd. All I know is all my homies hate systemd for some reason.
I mean, yeah, kind of. In the same way pilots fly planes out of a stubborn sense of pride for knowing what all the flight deck controls do.
It’s basically a power strip:
but specifically for cables that carry Internet traffic instead of electrical power.
A more direct analogy would be a telephone switchboard (which is why it is called a “switch”), basically a computerized version of those old-timey operator ladies who used to sit in a room waiting for you to make a phone call, and they’d physically move a plug connected to your phone and plug it directly into the phone line of whoever you were trying to call. That, but for computers trying to talk to one another over network cables instead of making telephone calls.