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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • People stopped ripping CDs and instead started downloading them (legally) via iTunes or (illegally) via napster or similar software more than a decade before disc drives became obsolete. Even the launch of Spotify predates the removal of disc drives from mainstream PCs/laptops.

    Also, teenagers still know about CDs. They just don’t see a reason to use them and to some degree, I agree. While not having to worry about monthly payments and availability of your own library, music discovery has never been easier. I don’t want to buy a whole album from an artist that has maybe one good song. I also want to be able to listen to whatever song comes to mind, whenever it does. I don’t want to be limited by the CDs I have in my collection or whatever my friends might be able to send me.

    With my shared family subscription to a streaming service, I can listen to whatever song I like, whenever I like for the price of 4 CDs a year. And I’m definitely adding more than 4 albums to my library every year.





  • I usually turn on a light motion blur in games that I f don’t get above 40-ish fps, because the motion blur masks the stuttering. I prefer no motion blur and stuttering to too much or bad motion blur though. I couldn’t play Horizon Zero Dawn on the PS4 Pro, because the motion blur was really intense, even in performance mode and there was no way to turn it off.

    I really like it when games give you an intensity slider instead of just on or off. Spiderman on the PS4, for example runs at 30fps. It looks like a stuttery mess with motion blur off. With motion blur at the highest setting (which is the default I think), you cannot see a thing when moving. But putting it at ~20% or so masks the stuttering very well without being a complete eyesore.

    I also like object based motion blur a lot, like the Jedi games have. Instead of blurring the camera movement, it only blurs the movement of objects that are actually moving (quickly), which has a nice effect, in my opinion.

    In general though, I prefer having better performance and a clear image, but motion blur is a useable band-aid solution if performance is a limiting factor.

    I have similar opinions to the likes of DLSS, FSR & Co. I vastly prefer running games at native resolution but when my GPU can’t keep up, FSR it is. I‘m not yet convinced of frame generation as an alternative to motion blur to get 30fps feeling a little closer to 60 but I haven’t gotten around to testing that yet either. Im not categorically against it in Games, unlike in movies. Motion smoothing in TVs is a pest.



  • From what I’ve read (although my numbers are a few years old), Qobuz and Napster pay artists even more than Tidal. The former even significantly so (about 3x, from what I’ve read), although it is slightly more expensive. Both also support lossless audio.

    And, for completion: Among the big-tech streaming services, the one that seems to pay the best is Apple Music, with a little more than half of what Tidal pays. The worst ones are amazon and Spotify which both pay about a third of Tidal.



  • On the one hand, I agree. Apple has positioned their power buttons with the assumption that the devices wouldn’t be turned off very often for quite a while now. It was on the backside of the previous mac mini design and also on the backside of the 2013 trashcan mac pro, for example.

    That still doesn’t make it less annoying though. We use a lot of macs for work, including aforementioned mac minis and mac pros and we do turn them off regularly because there’s no need for them to use power 24/7. Having to turn them around to find the power button is just stupid. That’s form over function in its finest. But if you’re the type of person who never turns off their computer, obviously it doesn’t really matter.

    That’s not to say, that the new mac minis aren’t remarkable machines. The redesign was necessary and is very good in general. It’s a tiny powerhouse. They could’ve just chosen less of afterthought of a power button location.


  • I really love our German equivalents: Harald Lesch and the show TerraX. Had the privilege of seeing him live in a guest lecture in my uni about the anthropocene. He feels so much more genuine and less arrogant than Neil DeGrasse Tyson. If you know German and don’t know him, check him out. Both on TerraX and his YouTube presence. There are even some full lectures on there, similar to the one I saw life.