I don't need the ICJ's permission to talk about what I see with my own eyes.

Ah yes, expressing schadenfreude against the Dems as a possibly overzealous condemnation of a genocide == sending in the tanks against an uprising

IMO I think people are gonna have to start swearing more online since it's kinda hard to get commercial LLMs to swear.

Good question! Because of:

Last month, maggots and other insects were reportedly released at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, DC, during a visit by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Chicago has seen nightly protests during the convention by organizations seeking an end to the Gaza war and an end to U.S. military support for Israel.

And because Palestine is the main focus of DNC protests right now, i.e. the big thing that the DNC is choosing to ignore.

Frankly, if it ends up being a Republican or non-political attack, I'm still cool with seeing the ruling class squirm even if it's done by assholes for the wrong reasons.

But also, even if it has absolutely nothing to do with Palestine, that is far from the only reason to be irritated with the Democrats. For example:

• Their continued funding and support of police
• Their continued material support of capitalism and neoliberalism
• Their support for putting down radical movements,
• Their tendency to soften radical movements (for example, abolish the police -> defund the police)
• Their quiet support for racism at home and abroad
• Their use of jails and prisons
• Their imperialist foreign policy (other than on Palestine)
• Their enforcement of borders (which has been strengthened under the Biden administration)
• Their rejection of refugees that their foreign and climate policies created
• Their tolerance of LGBTQI oppression
• Their attempts to destroy what little privacy we have left and destroy our precious free internet
• Their antagonism towards homeless people in a country with more empty homes than homeless people, a system of property ownership that they fundamentally support
• Their refusal to fix the Supreme Court, which they absolutely have the power to do

And so much more! All while pretending to be the party of progress, they are in fact the party whose sole goal is to prevent more radical change being imposed on the ruling class from below!

Yeah I'm not really stoked about the food safety implications and food waste for the rest of us if "bugs in food" protests become normal, but I still think that inconveniencing and antagonizing powerful people complicit in genocide is in general an acceptable form of protest. It accomplishes perpetual and fractal ("at all levels") discomfort for their actions as long as they continue them.

Willing to let lgbt, people of color, students, poor people and the working class be oppressed and possibly murdered.

Sounds like what's happening right fucking now under a Democrat presidency!

How many times do you have to try to kick Lucy's football before you realize that she's punking you?!?

Voting for President merely ratifies decisions already made by capital. I'm not voting for your candidate, and I refuse to be guilted for decisions already made by capital.

Because trump WILL make sure of that.

Trump winning would be an indicator of the trajectory you have no control over as far as the ballot box is concerned.

But you are willing to let everyone around you burn for this.

No I am not. I want people to organize themselves against the system, not within it. The system itself is the problem. Having """good people""" is insufficient to get even mediocre change. See self-described socialist AOC speedrunning ghoulification.

Yeah I know, that's why I'm telling you now which door was picked (door #1 according to the caption on the Wikipedia page I stole borrowed this image from) 🙂

In search of a new car, the player chooses a door, say 1. The game host then opens one of the other doors, say 3, to reveal a goat and offers to let the player switch from door 1 to door 2.

Huh, I suppose if you do support Palestine, you can’t be a DNC delegate?

Of course not, you simply shouldn't be a DNC delegate if you support Palestine. Because they'll point at these delegates and use them as props to say "see, we're listening to Palestinians" while not changing course.

These are not ordinary voters, these are sometimes local politicians but competing to run the same machine as their more successful national counterparts. These individuals have some degree of power and influence, and they're choosing to use it for the American Empire.

Zero pity for these turbo-losers getting bugs in their food. Admittedly, making "putting bugs in food" a popular protest tactic doesn't set a great precedent considering the food safety implications for everyone else, but food safety concerns are NOTHING compared to what Palestinians are suffering at the delegates' party's hands.

I'll show myself the door.

Do you want to pick door No. 2?

Edit: these assholes are complicit in genocide. Fuck these people, fractally.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity

Emphasis mine. Incompetence on Microsoft's part is not an adequate explanation for this latest action matching a pattern of other actions designed to antagonize FOSS users.

Doesn't change my answer, except that Putin/[insert dictator of choice here] shouldn't be planning our destruction either, because no one should.

Also see this comment. Tl;dr: I literally don't care about governments' rights to defend themselves from each other when, in any case, it will be the rest of life on Earth that pays the price.

It's so hard!

It's really hard! But it's really rewarding too. And as a computing/music student [1], you're in a great major to start!

First off, if you just want to make your own effects and you're not really interested in distributing them or making them public, I recommend using JSFX. It's way easier. You can read through the entire spec in a night. JSFX support is built into REAPER, and apparently YSFX allows you to load JSFX code into other DAWs, although I haven't tested it. JSFX plugins are compiled on the fly (unlike VST plugins, which are compiled ahead of time and distributed as DLLs), so you just write them up as text files.

However, their capabilities are limited compared to VST, AU, LV2, AAX [2], and other similar plugin formats. Also, pre-compiled plugins perform better. That's why plugins are released as such.

So if you plan on writing pre-compiled plugins for public consumption, you'll need to do some C++ programming.

IMO the most important thing to learn for plugin design is how to code well, particularly in C++ with Git and JUCE.

If you learn how to code with good practices, you can compensate for all other deficiencies.

Between "music", "engineering", and "software development", plugin design feels the most like "software development".

99.9% of all plugins are written in C++, and most of those are done (both proprietary and FOSS) with the JUCE library. School taught me the basics of C++ but they don't teach you how to code well. Particularly, your DSP code needs to meet a soft real-time constraint. You have to use multithreading because you have a thread for the audio signal (which must NEVER get interrupted) and at least one thread for the GUI.

You also need to figure out which parts of the C++ standard library are real-time safe, and which aren't. Here's a good talk on that.

If you use JUCE or a similar development library then they have well-tested basic DSP functions, meaning you can get by without doing all the math from scratch.

Start watching Audio Developer Conference talks like TV as they come out. JUCE has a tutorial, and MatKat released a video tutorial guiding the viewer through coding a simple EQ plugin [3]. JUCE plugins are basically cross platform, and can typically be compiled as VSTs on Windows, AU plugins on Mac, and LV2 plugins on Linux.

JUCE is a really complicated library even though it vastly simplifies the process (because audio plugin development is inherently hard!). You're going to have to learn to read a LOT of documentation and code.

I also recommend learning as much math as you can stomach. Start with linear algebra, calculus, Fourier analysis, circuit theory, and numerical analysis (especially Padé approximants), in that order. Eventually, you'll want to roll your own math, or at least do something that JUCE doesn't provide out the box. Julius O Smith has some really good free online books on filters, Fourier Analysis, and DSP with a music focus.

If you're willing to sail the high seas to LibGen buy a book, I recommend Digital Audio Signal Processing by Udo Zolzer for "generic" audio signal processing, and DAFX: Digital Audio Effects by Zolzer for coverage of nonlinear effects, which are typically absent from DSP engineering books. I also recommend keeping a copy of Digital Signal Processing by Proakis and Manolakis on hand because of its detailed coverage of DSP fundamentals, particularly the coverage of filter structures, numerical errors, multirate signal processing, and the Z transform.

A little bit of knowledge about machine learning and optimization is good too, because sometimes you need to solve an optimization problem to synthesize a filter, or possibly in a fixed time as your actual output (example: pitch shifting). Deep learning is yielding some seriously magical effects, so I do recommend you learn it at your own pace.

DSP basically requires all the math ever, especially the kind of DSP that we want to do as musicians, so the more you have the better you'll be.

[1] IMO that would have been the perfect major for me, that or acoustical engineering, if anything like that existed in my area when I went to recording school 10 years ago. While my recording degree taught me some really valuable stuff, I kinda wish that they pushed us harder into programming, computing, and electronics.

[2] AAX requires you to pay Avid to develop. So I never use AAX plugins, and I have no intention of supporting the format once I start releasing plugins for public consumption, despite its other technical merits.

[3] Over half of MatKat's tutorial is dedicated towards GUI design, i.e. the audio part is basically done but the interface looks boring and default. GUI design and how your GUI (editor component) interacts with the audio processor component are extremely important and time-consuming parts of plugin design. Frankly, GUI design has been by far the most complicated thing to "pick up", and it's why I haven't released anything yet.

So I don't value high fidelity video because I don't see very well even with glasses, so it wouldn't make a difference for me.

I do value high fidelity audio because:

• I am a musician and producer, although not as much as I used to
• I have ear training
• I went to recording school
• I am autistic with sensitive hearing
• I have audio and acoustical engineering as special interests
• I'm doing a master's degree in electrical engineering where I've already designed audio gear for my projects
• I am teaching myself audio plugin design for fun

But I simply can't afford high fidelity gear for every day listening. For my studio monitors, I spent as much as I could to get the best speakers I could afford so that I can be certain that what I'm hearing is an accurate representation of what I "commit to tape". However, for walking to class or going to the market, I'm not gonna pay for expensive headphones that could get stolen, broken, or lost. It's impractical.

My $20 Bluetooth headphones [1] are sufficient for every day carry. They sound "95% of the way there", they don't get in the way when I'm walking, and if I lose them, I can have an identical pair delivered to my door with a couple days. 95% is good enough for me. Actually, I could probably settle for less.

And then there's storage. My library is already > 110GB in MP3 format, so storing it all in uncompressed formats would be unwieldy.

So in the rare cases that my listening hardware is insufficient, I'll usually consult a software equalizer. For example, on Linux, Easy Effects allows me to apply equalizers, dynamic compression, and a bunch of other plugins in LV2 format to the PipeWire output (and input). It's super convenient for watching YouTube college lectures with questionable microphone quality on my shitty TV speakers. Other than dynamic compression for leveling and an equalizer for frequency effects, I am typically not interested in doing anything else for intelligibility. Said differently, I am not interested in exploiting the nonlinearities in real speaker systems (other than possibly dynamic compression), so I should be able to fix any linear defects (bad frequency response) with a digital equalizer. The nonlinearities in real speaker systems are, for HiFi listening purposes [2], defects.

Also, I'm extremely skeptical of products marketed towards "audiophiles" because there's so much marketing bullshit pseudoscience surrounding the field that all the textbooks that cover loudspeaker design and HiFi audio electronics have paragraphs warning about it as the first thing.

Like I experience the difference between different pairs of binoculars and speakers dramatically, and graphical analysis backs up the differences, so how could they sound/look negligibly different to others?

Next time you do a graphical analysis, check out the magnitudes of the differences in your graphs versus the magnitude of the Just Noticeable Difference in amplitude or frequency. We probably do experience the differences between speakers differently than others. We're outliers.

What's your take on both major and, at the high end, diminishing returns on higher quality sensory experiences?

For personal listening, the point of diminishing returns is basically $20 because I can't afford shit. For listening to something I plan on sharing with others, I'd be willing to put in whatever I can afford. But frankly, I'd be just as likely to straight-up do the math and design my systems myself because I 100% don't trust any """high fidelity""" system that doesn't come with a datasheet and frequency response.

Lastly, I do wear glasses. I typically get my glasses online because, once you have the prescription and your facial measurements, it is the same quality as the stuff you get at the big-box stores.

[1] I acknowledge that Bluetooth sucks, particularly for audio.

[2] As a metal guitarist, I'm not against speaker nonlinearity for guitar speakers, but then again, guitar speakers are really convincingly simulated by impulse responses, which are a core linear systems concept, implying that they are nearly linear devices even at the volumes they are typically played at.

Her word means nothing.

Sorry I ate it

It pains me to inform you all that KnowYourMeme seems to have the best coverage of this story.

Internet users and news outlets have speculated that the sperm cups are aimed at Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz and his wife's infertility issues. The Walz's had their children using in vitro fertilization (IVF).

The cups therefore could be a way to champion Vance's natural ability to have children. However, many Americans (regardless of political affiliation) struggle with infertility and use IVF.

Despite being humorous, it's currently unknown if the J.D. Vance cup photos are real. For one, the original X user that posted them, @UsaCamy, has a profile that's raised suspicions among many, as pointed out by X user @elisethoma5.

So basically, if this turns out to be a real thing, then they're dunking on people who want to have kids but have infertility issues. Which ... that's just kind of a ridiculously petty thing to do.

Ok so if intelligence reports claim there's a risk of a coordinated attack

The US is the only nuclear armed country with a history of actually using it. I'm a LOT more scared of the US doing the coordinated attack on someone than I am of the thought of any of the other nuclear armed countries striking first.

Also implying I trust literally anything the US intelligence machine ever says ever.

what do you think the US should do to defend itself?

Boring answer: Not fucking use nuclear weapons, that's for sure. Diplomacy should be enough.

Honest answer: I literally don't care about the US government's "right" to "defend" itself literally at all. As far as the innocent people who actually live here, we will respond in the only way that our government has planned for us in any disaster scenario: get sacrificed to maintain continuity of government and capitalist power.