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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • I think you are conflating a few different concepts here.

    Can you comment on the specific makeup of a “rendered” audio file in plaintext, how is the computer representing every little noise bit of sound at any given point, the polyphony etc?
    What are the conventions of such representation? How can a spectrogram tell pitches are where they are, how is the computer representing that?

    This is a completely separate concern from how data can be represented as text, and will vary by audio format. The “simplest”, PCM encoded audio like in a .wav file, doesn’t really concern itself at all with polyphony and is just a quantised representation of the audio wave amplitude at any given instant in time. It samples that tens of thousands of times per second. Whether it’s a single pure tone or a full symphony the density of what’s stored is the same. Just an air-pressure-over-time graph, essentially.

    Is it the same to view plaintext as analysing it with a hex-viewer?

    “Plaintext” doesn’t really have a fixed definition in this context. It can be the same as looking at it in a hex viewer, if your “plaintext” representation is hexadecimal encoding. Binary data, like in audio files, isn’t plaintext, and opening it directly in a text editor is not expected to give you a useful result, or even a consistent result. Different editors might show you different “text” depending on what encoding they fall back on, or how they represent unprintable characters.

    There are several methods of representing binary data as text, such as hexadecimal, base64, or uuencode, but none of these representations if saved as-is are the original file, strictly speaking.



  • How are “this person” and “a BMW driver” likely male coded while “person” and “driver” are fine? It sounds to me like you’re just assuming negative intent in others, while your own use of the same words is fine because you know what you mean.


  • vithigar@lemmy.catoScience Memes@mander.xyzOxygen
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    3 days ago

    The short version is that life needs something that’s at least a little unstable in order to extract chemical energy from things.

    The post is correct when viewed in a particular light, on a technicality, if you squint. By that same technicality iron rusting is also burning very slowly. They’re ignoring the rapidity which is implied by “burning”. But yes, oxygen is unstable, oxygen helps burn things, and oxygen is toxic if you get too much at once. Though you’d need to be breathing pure oxygen pressurized to about 1.4 atmospheres, or regular air pressurized to about 7 atmospheres, for that last one to happen. It’s a legitimate concern for deep SCUBA divers.

    But why does life need instability? Chemical instability is, in basic terms, just stored chemical energy, and that energy wants to be released. The more reactive something is the easier it is to get energy from reactions involving it. There’s a balancing act here where more reactive means easier energy, but also more dangerous. Oxygen is in a kind of sweet spot where it’s stable enough that it’s not generally going to explode or catch fire on its own, but can be coaxed into doing those things in controlled ways with other chemicals to extract energy when needed.





  • Millennial with the opposite experience here. Once upon a time I’d use the phone all the time, could spend hours wandering the house and talking with friends, and calling anyone for any purpose was never a problem.

    Then I got a job answering phones for Comcast, was there less than a year before I quit. It’s been about two decades since then but it installed a hatred of phones in me that has lasted to this day.









  • I have a hobby development project with a modest community and maintain a Discord server basically because it’s necessary in order to avoid reducing my potential community reach by at least 50%.

    I’m active on GitHub and respond to comments and issues there. I maintain an official thread for my project on the official forum for the game it’s related to. I also keep all documentation, downloads, and guides off Discord and on the clearnet. Discord is still easily 80% or more of where people look for information about the project.