5k up or down is nothing in Bitcoin?
Yup. This isn't news. This site has a hateful obsession with all things crypto. I think it's driven by a mixture of frustration at the irrationality of markets and bitterness about missing the boat.
Readit Newseggsbenedict commented on Bitcoin tumbles $5000 in 24 hours as interest rates jump cnbc.com/2024/04/02/crypt... · Posted by u/paulpauper
eggsbenedict commented on Ask HN: I don't read fiction, how much am I missing out on? · Posted by u/samh748
Honestly, not much.
Over time, I've found more and more fiction to be formulaic and not enticing. Mostly to make a quick buck.
Not to mention, internet induced ADD makes works of the old masters inaccessible.
I remember one time, the internet told me to read this book - The KingKiller chronicles. An amazing rating almost everywhere. The reality? It's laughably bad. Like middle school bad. And this is a top fantasy book?
Self improvement is possible without fiction. Nothing to see here.
Yeah, and McDonald's is one of the most popular restaurants. Doesn't say much about the quality of restaurants in general. There's a lot of a wildly good, life-changing fiction out there.
A couple hints:
Almost all fantasy is terrible.
Almost everything the internet likes is terrible.
Almost everything in a series format is terrible.
>We base our objections to the Armenians
Objection to an ethnicity. Key indicator of genocide for any action taken based on such an objection.
>on three distinct grounds. In the first place, they have enriched themselves at the expense of the Turks. In the second place, they are determined to domineer over us and to establish a separate state. In the third place, they have openly encouraged our enemies. They have assisted the Russians in the Caucasus, and our failure there is largely explained by their actions.
Reads almost verbatim just like Nazi Germany on Jews back then or Nazi Russia on Ukrainians today.
> We have therefore come to the irrevocable decision that we shall make them powerless before this war is ended.”
Again very similar to the perception of themselves as the master race (Nazi Germany) or the master nation (Nazi Russia) and thus perceiving themselves as having the right to act in such a way.
Nazi Russia? Not once, but twice?
eggsbenedict commented on Anti-Cryptography Provisions in Internet Anti-Trust Bills schneier.com/blog/archive... · Posted by u/pueblito
And the war on privacy continues.
Legislators have a bad habit of creating intentionally vague laws that have almost unlimited discretionary scope.
“Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”
eggsbenedict commented on A religious sect landed Google in a lawsuit nytimes.com/2022/06/16/te... · Posted by u/semiquaver
Interesting story.
From the headline, I thought this was going to be a culture-war type of article. I wasn't expecting evidence of a real cult.
It's a commendable piece in a practical sense because data you haven't collected is data you cannot harm someone with in general, not just on this front, but make no mistake: A government that does not respect the bodily autonomy of women isn't going to respect privacy for too long if it enables the former.
When communications security gets into the way of authority it's the next thing on the chopping block, which has already been the case over the last two decades.
>A government that does not respect the bodily autonomy of women isn't going to respect privacy for too long if it enables the former.
For the record, I don't have a problem with abortion. Obviously I think it should be a last resort, but the impression I get is that most people who get abortions view it that way too.
That said, framing the debate around abortion purely as a question of bodily autonomy always seemed to be a very dishonest way of engaging with the debate. The issue at stake for most people(again, I don't care!) who oppose abortion is not that women are getting a medical procedure done to themselves, but that, in their view, a 2nd and entirely different person is killed as the result of this procedure.
But, many people who bring up the slogans of bodily autonomy already know this. By ignoring the core debate and taking this alternate tack, they get to:
1.) Smear their opponents' position as purely misogynist and obfuscate the core of the debate, and
2.) Signal their own loyalty to their political tribe, by demonstrating their unwillingness to even engage with the "other side."
The inverse of this question is actually very interesting:
"What is it that makes a fetus NOT a person?" Maybe it's the lack of consciousnessness/low brain activity? Then, should we be allowed to kill braindead and comatose people arbitrarily? And anyway, we don't even know what consciousness is to begin with.
Or maybe, they just don't look like people, so we don't have to treat them that way? Well, that opens up a pretty ugly can of worms.
Or maybe it's the fact that the fetus is completely physically dependent on the mother's body? That's an interesting proposition, but then again, so is every baby until just days before it leaves the womb, and almost nobody is arguing the morality of ultra-late-stage abortions.
So you immediately end up with all these (admittedly) edge-cases that demonstrate some of the moral and legislative complexity of this issue, not to mention its entanglement with the federal-state-local American legal system, which is what Roe v. Wade really addresses to begin with. I'm not doing this as some kind of "gotcha!" or takedown of the whole concept of abortion. Just asking that on this forum we don't trick ourselves into believing the sound-bite version of things.
Yet again, I don't really care either way whether people get abortions or not. In general it seems like something that's impossible to legislate out of existence anyway. But I always fail to see how this is a simple question of women's bodies and evil government overreach.
eggsbenedict commented on ‘Tucker Carlson Tonight’ Fuels Extremism and Fear nytimes.com/interactive/2... · Posted by u/syspec
That's terrible! Can this be allowed to continue?
> NYC and Chicago are about as far as you can get from “socially conservative”, so it’s not clear what your narrative actually is here.
They aren't "socially conservative" in the "I hate gay people" way, but they certainly have the dog-eat-dog look-out-for-number-one fuck-you-got-mine American culture down pat. They're just more blatant about it than the "bless your heart" public-face-goes-to-church-and-is-friendly/private-face-exploits-their-employers rural American folks.
So, to get this straight, the working definition here for "socially conservative" is anyone who steals things or exploits others, regardless of whether they support gay rights or vote democrat.
Yeah, in that light, these social conservatives do seem pretty bad.
I'm not sure I prefer Albini's mix, I'm still missing the released (commercial) mix. Somehow I find albini's version too toyed with (some instruments pops out at times). And the demo you linked is closer to the final version in that regard, sounds more like Nirvana to me. Thanks for the link, I had no idea these were online.
In a totally other genre, Michael Jackson Thriller vocal studo outtakes are breathtaking.
>Somehow I find albini's version too toyed with (some instruments pops out at times)
I'm a professional record producer and songwriter. Here are my thoughts:
Very likely it's the other way around. Albini is notoriously hard-headed about refusing to use compression on tracks and mixes. He's gone on record about how compressors ruin the tone, expressivity, and micro-dynamics of recorded sounds.
Regardless of whether you agree with that, and he does have a point, compression performs one job admirably: it prevents dynamic sounds from unexpectedly popping out of a determined dynamic range.
This is a disagreement lots of people have had with Albini's method, and he's also a little prickly about these things. He has an artistic vision of "properly" recording bands and mixing them in a way that doesn't adulterate or modify their live sound. In other words, he tries to get the final sound just through exacting microphone placement while recording, and applies the absolute minimum of post-processing.
However, the consensus in commercial record production at this point is that signal processing such as compression, distortion, and equalization, even in dramatic quantity, can create a more compelling audio result. Albini certainly views this as leading to a decline in fidelity (in the etymological sense of truth), and possibly as leading to a decline in artistic integrity (heavily debated).
A couple final ideas:
- In a recorded-music world, what constitutes an "authentic" or "true" sound?
- Should a studio operator (recording/mixing) aim to respect the real-world sound of the artist, or the intentions of the artist? How do you identify the intentions of an artist?
eggsbenedict commented on Biden Should Punish Saudi Arabia for Backing Russia foreignpolicy.com/2022/03... · Posted by u/Ice_cream_suit
Why is the terminology always that the US gets to "punish" everyone else? It reeks of American exceptionalism and misguided paternalism, not to mention dubiously claimed moral high ground.
Russia has clearly made a tragic error by violently and unjustly invading Ukraine. They've escalated the world into a new cold war and perhaps dealt a death blow to globalization in the process. But...
If the US wants to de-escalate towards peace and prosperity, maybe it's best to reframe foreign policy in terms of cooperation and negotiation rather than discipline. Or maybe Americans are just that much better and more right that it's their job to keep the kids in line.
Do people really think this "big stick" attitude doesn't breed widespread resentment?