Notices by 🇳🇴 Thor — backup account (thorthenorseman@octodon.social), page 20

The neighbours are partying. I wonder if I should go over and ask if they have something that I can smoke. I don't particularly need it—I never really do—but I'm bored...

@DialMforMara @shinesurge Sounds like a dark pattern.

@shinesurge @DialMforMara This is probably the reason why every big YouTuber is so adamant about telling their users to please like, share and subscribe at the end of every video. Reminding the users to do that seems to be really important.

That LG phone was basically just a piece of glass glued to a circuit board and a plastic back cover. I was attempting to attach it to a surface so I could ride my scooter and use the navigation when the screen on the damned thing broke. I replaced the screen, only for it to break again after I put it in my front pocket and sat down. I probably should have used a cover, but why even make such a shitty phone to begin with?

Why one developer is ditching Android: https://kevq.uk/why-im-ditching-android/

For my part, it started when I bought a Mac Mini. I needed a small affordable desktop computer with an Intel CPU in it and got a friend to buy one for me in the US where it was cheap. One day, after Windows had made me particularly agitated, I decided to boot to the small macOS partition I had left in there and try it out for a while, and I liked it. Later, after my shitty Android phone from LG broke, I bought my first iPhone.

@KevinMarks Now you are extending the problem space to electromechanical devices. These require physical modelling synthesis in addition to the electrical modelling. In the case of a case with a spring in it falling to the floor, you'd probably want a full physics engine... It's doable, but yes, tricky.

The impulse response of the spring, when not falling to the floor, could probably be simulated without too much effort, though.

@bamfic Well, a waveform with odd harmonics is typically a square or triangle wave, a waveform with even harmonics just means it's asymmetrical, and if it has both odd and even harmonics, it's probably a sawtooth wave, a PWM square wave, a pulse train or some kind of FM or sampled waveform. I mean, there are VA synths that let you manipulate all of those parameters.

My criterium for audibility is that it can be detected in A/B tests, and/or that the psychoacoustic models in the scientific literature back it up.

Of course, none of this is about facts. People get emotionally attached and like a mystery. What they don't like is boring facts.

"Software synths could never replicate this sound."

Are you telling me that we are unable to perform accurate electrical circuit simulations on a computer, and that Harry Nyquist and Claude Shannon were wrong?

Your only hope of winning that argument is to prove that there are (audible) aspects of analog circuits that we haven't yet taken into account in the digital simulations. And once you can prove it, we can go right ahead and implement it.

It's always so funny with these people who want to make music exclusively with outboard analog synths, and they have to spend thousands of dollars only to get a rig that sounds vaguely like Kraftwerk and could easily be outdone by a laptop with an audio interface and a DAW. The live performance aspect isn't hard to pull off either. There are thousands of MIDI controllers available on the market.

I just learned that Eurorack YouTubers exist, and it's hilarious.

@bamfic Keeping societies stable is like keeping milk warm without causing it to boil: You must do it very carefully.

@bamfic But I suspect it is exactly this leftist zeitgeist and ensuing political correctness in Sweden that prompted opposing movements to develop in a more extreme way. Any applied force has an equal and opposing force, after all.

@bamfic Also, perhaps more importantly, Sweden's populist party has a more controversial history. The Swedes have struggled to deal with Nazi movements that kept cropping up everywhere, and one of them turned into a party. The party has since become more moderate, but no one wants to touch them. The Norwegian populist party was more harmless; they started as an anti-tax party and adopted an anti-immigration agenda later on, so they were easier to include in a coalition.

@bamfic The system is heavily characterised by pragmatism. The one thing that is now threatening this system is the hot button issue of immigration. Swedens consensus historically sat further to the left than Denmark or Norway's, so while the latter countries have decided to just move to the right a little and be stricter on immigration, Sweden is facing a parliamentary crisis at the moment, unable to form a government because no one wants to negotiate with the populists.

@bamfic Arguably, the Nordic model, which attempts to contain it within a system of strong unions and an extensive welfare system, has perhaps worked better, but I suspect that it wouldn't survive without the strong decision-by-consensus culture that exists here, which is also makes up the foundation of our parliamentarism. Some would argue that the result is a system where both the capitalism and the socialism is half-assed, but this way, no one gets to do too much harm.

Norwegian prime ministers rarely get a third period in office, though, even though the law imposes no limit on it. I think I'm just having some trouble seeing Jonas Gahr Støre, head of the Labour Party, as prime minister. I'm sure he'd do a fine job, but I frankly like having a woman as the prime minister. I grew up with a female prime minister and they always seem to keep things in order, like strict but fair mothers. It's very reassuring. Have you ever seen a female dictator?

I think I'd be prepared to reelect Erna Solberg from the Conservative Party for a third period in office. They're more of a center-right party now anyway, whereas before, they were classical liberalist. Meanwhile, the Labour Party is center-left and are of course trying very hard to look like victims. They're branding the government as stealing from the poor, and I'm just not seeing it. I'm seeing a government that has successfully taken much of the Labour platform and owned it.