• 5 Posts
  • 49 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • If you’re thinking amplifier, just grab your favourite Japanese '70s hi-fi range and go from there. Can hardly go wrong.

    A half-scale Harman/Kardon 330c but with an OLED info display in the panel that held a tuning scale might kill it.

    The key is to use the right materials. They sold a modern CD-based stereo a few years ago that apes the look of a small Marantz 22xx, but being plastic garbage, sort of fails the mission. Conversely, Yamaha did some new silver-face amps that don’t look like dollar-store tat.


  • Y’know what? I don’t care. Maybe it’s happening, even in the dramatic worst-case way it’s portrayed here, but is that the biggest/only story in China? It feels sort of credibility-stretching that a country of 1.4 billion people and a top-two global economy is entirely cantilevered around the idea of oppressing a tiny minority in the rural corner of the country. I’m fairly certain there are at least nine people in China who can go an entire workday without contemplating how to wipe the Uighyurs off the map. Maybe as many as twelve!

    The US is no longer in any sort of moral leadership position to point fingers on human rights, if not for the last few decades, then certainly in its El Salvador phase. The only reason Western media remotely give a damn here is because they’re desperate to slap an asterisk next to the growth and real economic advancement of a country that promises to outpace them imminently.



  • There’s a huge shift in male role models over the past few decades, and it always felt to me like the people who could never fit into the old militaristic, athletic “conqueror”-style mould saying “we’ll invent our own definition of masculinity” than a direct, fully-bought-in progression.

    This will leave people behind-- the ones who can’t find new “appropriate” idols or aren’t impressed by their achievements. The Linus Torvalds version of conquering the world is hardly the Genghis Khan version.

    Maybe we need to find a way to broaden the modern pantheon to figures that can resonate with a traditional audience.






  • I expect the hype people to do hype, but I’m frustrated that the consumers are also being hypemen. So much of this stuff, especially at the corporate level, is FOMO rather than actually delivered value.

    If it was any other expensive and likely vendor-lockin-inducing adventure, it would be behind years of careful study and down-to-the-dime estimates of cost and yield. But the same people who historically took 5 years to decide to replace an IBM Wheelwriter with a PC and a laser printer are rushing to throw AI at every problem up to and including the men’s toilet on the third floor being clogged.