Shurimal

IEM is easier to type than “in-ear headphones” and has become the defacto generic term for them, just like “monitor” has become to mean any stand mount/bookshelf speaker.

Anyway, over the past few years the market has flooded with cheap and very good “IEM-s” by manufacturers like Moondrop, Truthear and others. 30€ can get you a pair that follows Harman curve quite closely and has low enough distortion to allow EQ. Generally they use 10mm dynamic drivers instead of balanced armatures, but they also have more expensive multi-way BA and DD/BA options.

In short, high quality IEM style headphones have become a commodity and you don’t need to be an audiophile or muso who’s willing to pay hundreds for Shure SE535-s.

A pair of 40€ Denons is not really an “investment piece”, even though they have lasted me for 10 years.

If they were wired I bet you’d have to untangle them

I never have to untangle my IEM cables. A civilized person keeps their IEM-s in the carry case when not in use.

Comes in handy at work all the time when I need to test a piece of equipment.

And the best-bang-for-buck IEM-s still are wired only. Have my sights set on Moondrop Lans for xmas.

Back the fuck up! If you only have one copy, you have none.

For a publicly traded company the people who buy their products are not the customers for whom to create value.

Shareholders are the real customers.

People who buy the products become a resource to extract value from.

The very day Hamas attack happened I suspected that there’s no way Israel’s intelligence orgs, some of the best in the world, did not know about the plan for the attack way before it happened. This whole affair stinks to the high heavens.

Obviously somewhere along there were some hubs that weren’t obvious to the naked eye.

Probably the port on your laptop was on a hub built onto the mobo. If my understanding is right that’s how USB ports usually are connected: controller->hub->ports. If you open up device manager and go to USB controllers you’ll see several root hubs and hubs even when you have no external hubs or docks connected.

You’re right, of course, but my point is that it’s not only metal, punk and other “angry” music, or more precisely, music that is aesthetically an acquired taste. There’s a lot of mellow, danceable and catchy music that has themes other than “Ooh, baby, baby, yeah, aha”. That this sort of music is not played on radio is a completely different problem.

Take a listen to eg VNV Nation’s Tomorrow Never Comes and tell me it couldn’t be a nr. 1 hit on radio and in clubs. It has all the making of a good catchy pop song, yet has some very thoughtful and contemplative lyrics.

But that nobody outside “angry” genres seems to be doing it is what saddens me.

There’s a lot of “non-angry” (ie no thick distorted guitars and screamed vocals) music that has strong political themes and social commentary going on. A lot of folk, blues, EBM, EDM, reagge, dub is about the struggles of the working class, people of color etc, has anti-capitalist, anti-war and anti-globalisation message.

Leslie fish
Asian Dub Foundation
Later VNV Nation (early works are stylistically more “angry”, but thematically similar)
Covenant
Chip Taylor
Shamen
And many more

Vivaldi with uBlock Origin works just as well as it’s always been, I don’t even need to do regular manual filter upgrades. Only two tweaks I did was disabling Vivaldi’s built-in adblocker for YT (triggered the player blocking while logged in) and installing the pop-up blocker script for TamperMonkey.

So, business as usual. Google can go’an’fuck 'emselves.

start using alternatives like lbry and/or peertube

Sure. But actively using YT without paying for Premium and blocking all the ads will affect them more, and if enough people do it, might actually catalyze it to go Twixxer levels of enshittification, which would be just as beneficial for growing the userbase of those alternatives with the side benefit of getting rid of one of the gatekeepers. Fediverse saw a huge growth in popularity following the recent enshittification of Reddit, after all. “Build it and they will come” has a corollary that goes “Destroy it and they’ll go elsewhere” :)

Dude just watch the ads so people get paid…

I don’t care. Hypothetical incomes of other people are not my problem or obligation. Next you’ll be saying I must eat at restaurants at least three days a week and attend all concerts and drama plays in my town because otherwise people don’t get paid.

You’re not automatically entitled to free content

Correct. First I need to manually set up my tools, and then these tools get me free content automatically. But I don’t care about entitlement; it’s a spook. It’s all down to risk-benefit. The risk of blocking youtube ads is basically nil, but I benefit by wasting less time and not having loud, imbecile and completely irrelevant audio-visual crap annoying me. I also pirate all my music, movies and shows. Because I don’t care. I like free stuff. Copyright is a spook, anyway.

Vivaldi with uBlock Origin here. A simple refresh of the page makes the popup go away, often for the rest of the session. For me, it’s YT without ads as usual. I might need to clear uBlock cache and refresh filter lists to make it work even better. There’s also a Tampermonkey script for blocking the popup, but I haven’t tried it yet.

As a side note, I’ve seen a lot of talk about boycotting Youtube. There are 3 things to consider with this:

1. Boycotting YT will give Google exactly what they want, getting rid of the “freeloaders” who don’t pay for Premium and block ads.
2. Boycotting YT will hurt small creators who don’t see much ad revenue (if any) anyway. Views and likes are what make small creators visible to the algorithm, if these drop off, their reach will diminish.
3. Boycotting YT won’t affect big creators with sponsorships, healthy Patreon community, millions of subscribers and views.
   Best way of defiance here is not stopping to use YT, but on the contrary, generating as much traffick to YT as possible while blocking the ads.

Removed by mod

If I can’t afford something, I watch ads

I can’t afford to pay 20€ per month–that’s more than my whole monthly phone bill with something like 50 or 100 GB of data. Cost of living is high enough as it is.

I also lack the most valuable currency there is in one’s life, one that you simply can’t get more of. Time. So I block ads, which cost a lot of time, with extreme prejudice.

Ads are also bad for my mental health, they just irritate me, rack up stress and easily swing me into bad mood.

Lastly, I don’t give a fuck about costing money to some multi-billion corporation. I don’t care about them as much as they don’t care about me; the corpos see me just as a resource to exploit as much as possible then move on to another one when there’s nothing more to exploit, and I see the corpos exactly the same way. Call it mutual parasitism. Yes, I’m a parasite. And parasites are the most successful lifeforms on Earth.

The problem with Google’s passcodes:

1. I don’t use Google account on my phone. In a rare occasion I need to access gmail outside of my home, I just log in via a browser, either on my phone or work computer or wherever.
2. My home PC has no authentication whatsoever. The three physical locks on my apartment’s door is the access control. Couldn’t lug it around for authentication, anyway.
3. I have no other devices that could be used for this passcode thing, and my phone is usually laying around somewhere, probably shut off with empty battery.

In fact, I have not bothered even with 2FA for google accounts. At this point these are just “garbage collection accounts” for spam and youtube subscriptions/playlists, anyway.

->relativistic kill vehicle.

You see it coming, omae wa mou shindeiru.

Only thing more scary would be triggering a vacuum decay event. But these tend to backfire quite spectacularly.

These are machines, though, not human beings.

What’s the difference? On the most fundamental level it’s all the same.

just reinforcement learning models

…like the naturally occuring neural networks are.