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Cake day: March 20th, 2025

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  • I mean, you’re almost there, but then you lost the plot. I’m a professional lighting technician, and also happen to have a little bit of experience with paint.

    Light is additive color, and RGB is commonly used because your eyes have three different cones that detect colors. You have a red cone, a green cone, and a blue cone. So lights will tend to use the RGB color space because it allows the light to directly stimulate those three cones. If I shine RGB light at a white object, it will combine to reflect as white (meaning the object appears to be white) because the full spectrum is being reflected off of the object.

    But the actual colors used don’t really matter, as long as they add up to the full spectrum of light. I could use CMY light instead, and achieve the same basic effect. Again, if the full spectrum is hitting the object, the full spectrum has the potential to be reflected. And that potential is additive color… We add color to the system to achieve the color we want.

    Pigment (or really anything that absorbs/blocks light) is subtractive color. CMY(K) is commonly used in printing, but you could just as easily use RGB pigments instead. All that matters is that they’re selectively absorbing light, instead of reflecting it. If a pigment selectively reflects cyan light, (and absorbs all other wavelengths), it will appear as cyan when you hit it with white light. That absorption/blocking is subtractive color. We start with the full spectrum, and remove wavelengths to achieve the desired color.

    But the absorption isn’t actually what matters. What matters is that the light is selectively being reflected off of the object. Let’s say I have a pane of glass, which is coated with a special reflective material. This material will allow cyan light to pass through, while all other light gets reflected off.

    Now two things will happen if I shine white light at this glass: First, the glass itself will appear to shine red. That’s because when you selectively remove cyan light from the spectrum, it tints red. Since the cyan light is passing through the glass (instead of being reflected) we are effectively subtracting it from the glass’ reflection. So the glass appears red due to the subtractive color.

    Second, the light on the other side of the glass will appear to be cyan. Because the cyan light is selectively allowed to pass through that filter. This cyan light could be used for additive color mixing, and could be combined with beams of other spectrums (like magenta and yellow) to form white light.

    Now with this above system, we have the potential for both additive and subtractive color mixing, purely due to the properties of how the light interacts with the reflective material. Again, the specific color space isn’t what determines additive or subtractive, it is how the light is interacting in the system. And nearly every natural system will be using both. You’ll have additive color illuminating the room you’re in, then subtractive color selectively absorbing wavelengths to make different objects appear different colors.




  • For some of us, that’s not a bad thing. I tend to burn my account and make a new one every year or two, just to minimize the accumulation of potential doxxing material.

    I also tend to swap things like my specific location when I talk about where I live. Pretty sure on just this one account I have comments saying I live in Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. I’ll even change how I talk about my job. I work in live entertainment, but that’s a very broad category. I change details like how many seats my venue has, what my specific job is, (for instance, on this account I’m an audio technician), what my work history is like, what kinds of shows I tend to work, etc… All of them have grains of truth, (for instance, I have worked as an audio technician in the past, so I know what the job entails), but none are truly correct and all are red herrings in some way.






  • mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.comtolinuxmemes@lemmy.worldBeware
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    3 days ago

    I mean yeah, but that’s a little like saying “computers all have WiFi capabilities these days, as long as you only buy motherboards with built in WiFi.” It’s a pretty large limitation to place on the user’s choice. Especially when Linux users like to meme about certain distros being better or worse.




  • The grand jury is an extension of the district attorney’s office. When a crime is suspected of being committed, the district attorney brings the evidence to a grand jury. The prosecutor has a lot of discretion in what evidence the grand jury sees. They can do things like include evidence that they know won’t stand up in court, or intentionally exclude exculpatory evidence (that would prove the suspect’s innocence).

    Additionally, there is no defense attorney at the grand jury. Nobody has been charged with a crime yet, so the suspect can’t even defend themselves.

    The point of the grand jury is for the prosecutor to go “do I have enough evidence to go to trial?” On paper, it is meant to prevent frivolous charges and protect clearly innocent suspects. If the grand jury decides there is enough evidence to go to trial, then the suspect is officially charged with a crime and the entire arrest+trial part of the prosecution kicks off. But in reality, it is often just used as a scapegoat by the district attorney. The grand jury is anonymous, which makes them very convenient as a scapegoat. As far as the public is concerned, the grand jury is just a sort of massless, faceless blob. The DA is typically an elected position, which means they need to keep the public’s wants in mind. And this can come into conflict with the job, when they have a politically inconvenient case.

    For example, let’s say a cop kills someone. The public is out for blood. But the police union has privately told the DA that if charges get pressed, the cops will collectively stop cooperating as witnesses and won’t collect evidence at crime scenes. Functionally making the DA’s job impossible.

    So the DA uses the grand jury as a scapegoat. They refuse to bring any evidence (because again, they can choose to exclude evidence), and then the grand jury refuses to indict because they were given no evidence. Then the DA jumps in front of the news cameras and goes “I tried my best, and I brought the case to the grand jury! But the big mean grand jury refused to indict! Remember that I’m fighting for you. Vote for me!” And the grand jury (as a faceless blob) can’t defend themselves and go “hey uhh, we would have indicted that cop if the DA brought any evidence…”






  • It really depends on how low the bitrate is. A change from 320kbps (the highest “near-CD” bitrate that .mp3 supports) to 128kbps (standard .mp3) won’t make a huge difference, but a change from 160 to 75 will likely make a big difference… Bitrate tends to be a game of diminishing returns, where a difference between 96kbps and 128kbps is typically noticeable, even by laypeople… But a difference between 320kbps and 640kbps is harder to hear, (or makes no difference at all), even though it’s a much bigger jump between numbers. As the bitrate continues to increase, you get fewer and fewer benefits while your file size begins to balloon.

    To be clear, there is a lot of snake oil in the audiophile world. I’m not denying that. I work in audio, (peep my username), and spend a lot of time dispelling snake oil myths as part of my job. My current audio rig is easily a quarter million dollars, and is located in an acoustically treated room, because it’s built for an entire audience. I’ve also worked in recording and system design. So I’m probably fairly qualified to speak about this specific topic…

    Like lots of snake oil, the bitrate conversation is built upon grains of truth; Just enough to be convincing to someone who only has a surface level understanding of the underlying principles. And audiophiles tend to focus a lot on hardware and manufacturer’s claims, instead of studying what makes that hardware work… Which makes them particularly susceptible to snake oil myths, oftentimes perpetuated by the manufacturers to sell more expensive products to unsuspecting customers. An extreme “low vs lower” bitrate difference is one of the few things that laypeople will be able to identify when presented with an A/B test. In fact, low bitrate comparisons are often used by scummy audiophile companies as a bad-faith “here’s what our competitors sound like, vs what we sound like” example. And to be clear, reducing from ~160kbps to ~75kbps is an extreme difference.

    I want you to think of the most crunchy and heavily compressed “downloaded from limewire on the family computer for your iPod” .mp3 file you’ve ever heard. Full of artifacts, absolutely no high end, sounds like it was recorded with a landline phone, and it crackles when the kick drum peaks. That was probably at least 96kbps, because that’s the lowest bitrate that .mp3 compression supports by default. And that’s after the mp3 compression algorithm has done its lossy “eh, people probably don’t care about this particular frequency” thing. 75kbps is crazy low, and you’ll undoubtedly hear the compression as a result. But again, increasing bitrates will have diminishing returns as the number continues to climb. Going from 75kbps to 160kbps will be a marked improvement, but going from 160kbps to 320kbps will be a much smaller change.

    The reason audiophiles tend to have difficulty with (or even completely fail at) identifying different bitrates is because audiophiles live in a magical land where going from 1200kbps (high-end FLAC quality) to 1411kbps (uncompressed CD quality) makes a noticeable difference. In 99.9% of cases it doesn’t make any difference at all, (because again, diminishing returns) but audiophiles will swear that the 1411kbps sounds better simply because the number is bigger. Again, the snake oil is built upon grains of truth, (differences in low bitrates are immediately noticeable) but only enough to be convincing to people who don’t understand the underlying principles, (at a certain point, bitrate stops impacting audio quality and only makes your file size bigger).

    All of this is to say that yes, the posted bitrate of 75kbps is laughably low. And even laypeople will absolutely be able to hear a difference between the two in an A/B comparison. Because as the bitrate approaches 0, the differences get more and more apparent. And (at least when compared to things like FLAC and CD quality) 75kbps is remarkably close to 0.



  • You caught a downvote for that comment, but that’s literally what my late father-in-law told me on his deathbed. He had been battling cancer for about a year by that point, and was partially paralyzed around the six month mark after his vertebrae collapsed from it spreading to his bones. My wife was his constant in-home caregiver after that, while I took on a ton of overtime and freelance work to financially support both of us.

    One day, I was over at his house taking care of him, because my wife needed a girl’s night for herself to just get away from things for a few moments. While I was feeding him, he broke down in tears and said he wished he had been hit by a bus instead, because at least then he would have had his dignity intact and would have been able to leave my wife some sort of inheritance. He died two days later.

    I’ll never tell my wife about that conversation. She was already dealing with enough mental, emotional, and physical stress from the caregiving (and her own health issues, which the stress compounded), and at this point it’s better to just let sleeping dogs lie.

    Fuck cancer.