I once met a person that never drank water, only soft drinks. It’s not the unhealthiness of this that disturbed me, but the fact they did it without the requisite paperwork.

Unlike those disorganised people I have a formal waiver. I primarily drink steam and crushed glaciers.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I think it will take insane amounts of effort to wrangle the model into not doing its own thing. Possibly more than the amount of effort it takes to animate manually.

    “Yes this is brilliant, now generate just a few more se… why have you added a clone of my character? What? And why have the emotions on the faces of the other two swapped again? Arghh it’s confusing the subjects again! Now the room has started strobing too, goddammit this is a bathtub not a disco!”



  • There have been constant news articles coming out over the past few years claiming the next big thing in supercapacitor and battery technologies. Very few actually turn out to work practically.

    The most exciting things to happen in the last few years (from an average citizen’s perspective) are the wider availability of sodium ion batteries (I believe some power tools ship with them now?), the continued testing of liquid flow batteries (endless trials starting with the claim that they might be more economic) and the reduction in costs of lithium-ion solid state batteries (probably due to the economics of electric car demand).

    FWIW the distinction between capacitors and batteries gets blurred in the supercapacitor realm. Many of the items sold or researched are blends of chemical (“battery”) and electrostatic (“capacitor”) energy storage. The headline of this particular pushes the misconception that these concepts can’t mix.

    My university login no longer works so I can’t get a copy of the paper itself :( But from the abstract it looks first stage, far from getting excited about:

    This precise control over relaxation time holds promise for a wide array of applications and has the potential to accelerate the development of highly efficient energy storage systems.

    “holds promise” and “has the potential” are not miscible with “May Be the Beginning of the End for Batteries”.




  • Meanwhile the fan PC port is absolutely amazing. I couldn’t play my copy of PD on my actual N64 because the low framerate made me motionsick, the fan-made PC port runs smooth.

    This makes me remember what happened with the re3 and revc (GTA III and GTA Vice City) projects. Fans fixed so much in those games, in their spare time, and published it as a patch (so you still had to own the games). Take Two DMCA’d and sued them just before releasing their the maligned “GTA Trilogy”. I wonder if Microsoft would have done the same before releasing new Perfect Dark content?



  • Oh. Back to resistance: Doesn’t really matter audio quality doesn’t care it’s still the same AC signal just with less amplitude

    Only for ideal resistors.

    Resistors are noise sources. Intentional resistors tend not to be too bad (and probably won’t be heard in this situation unless you have super-high-impedance headphones, perhaps 10’s of K), but unintentional resistors (eg corroded unstable metal contacts inside a plastic part) can be atrocious.

    A few things to add to this:

    (1) If your resistor acts even slightly like a diode then you will encounter partially rectified RF signals (more noise yay). Metal oxides between metals can do this, eg if the connector has crimped two badly-plated bits of metal together.

    (2) Plasticisers in some plastics can leak out, causing corrosion on unseen internal metal parts.

    (Of course linking all of this together is just conjecture, the causes of Moss’ bad adaptors might be something completely different)



  • This could end up competitive.

    Invite people to your house, give them a tour and briefly mention the shelf before scurrying them on. Watch their faces contort but don’t give them the opportunity to ask any questions.

    EDIT: I have a vague guess at what could have gone wrong with your adaptor. It might have had OK L and R contacts but a broken G contact. You would then hear the difference between the L and R channels, which most often sounds like garbage. Music would be weird (entire instruments/vocals disappear) and mono audio would be silent or near-silent (so you’ll have to turn it up a lot and will hear noise).


  • Balanced will reduce noise (in terms of RF noise, of course) significantly better than unbalanced,

    In this situation I don’t think it will at all.

    I don’t think that balanced vs unbalanced is actually electromagnetically that different in this particular configuration (see my edit at the end of above). Things like where the wire is sitting on your body and what pose you are in will probably affect RF noise pickup levels on the headphone wires much more than changing between bal & unbal signalling.

    but the source of noise does need to be far enough away from the capturing device to not affect it directly and, therefore, be able to be negated by the balanced cable.

    I didn’t get into near-field and far-field effects. I’m not sure that it really matters here, but I might be wrong.