Notices by Don Romano (alt) (thor@noagendasocial.com), page 43

As for replies: They don't work very well.

Firstly, the original post isn't propagated across the network to everyone the reply is propagated to, leaving the reply dangling without context for many people.

Secondly, it's not always evident in the timeline feed whether a post is a reply or just a mention, and if you want to check that, you will have to expand it, and due to the issue above, proceed to view the thread on the originating instance.

That's just not what people do.

But removing the ability to write your own text on a post that you reshare doesn't give control back to the original poster. In fact, it rdeuces control, because it increases the likeliness of other people sharing screenshots of it instead, at which point you are unable to see it, and are also unable to delete it. Granted, having the feature doesn't prevent that from happening, but it definitely makes it less likely, since it's much easier to just hit the boost icon, type a text and post it.

I really want the ability to write my own comment when I boost a post here on Mastodon. Sometimes, I want to disagree with something and provide context, and making a screenshot of a post is a hassle. I suspect this feature was left out on purpose. That purpose was probably to let users maintain control over the framing of their content, which I expect is something people didn't like about retweets on Twitter.

Be yourself!

...unless you have an abrasive personality, have annoying habits, suffer from mental illness, have severe acne, are a necrophiliac, lack social skills, etc.

Yes, you could be yourself despite all of that, but is it good advice? No. Humans are obligate pack animals. If you are unpleasant to be around, look at or interact with, you will wind up alone. You can't always pick your crowd. Sometimes, you simply must change or cover up the nastiest bits of yourself in order to fit in.

Be yourself!

...unless you have an abrasive personality, have annoying habits, suffer from mental illness, have severe acne, are a necrophiliac, etc.

Yes, you could be yourself despite all of that, but is it good advice? I don't think so. Humans are social animals who need attention and validation from other humans. If you are unpleasant to be around, look at or interact with, you will wind up alone. Sometimes, you just need to cover up the ugliest bits of yourself.

I'm getting the hang of using transfer functions. I should probably learn how write transfer functions and how to transform them into digital filters. The only thing I could pull off with my current knowledge is to use an inverse discrete Fourier transform to turn them into filter kernels. Since these are IIR filters, they'd have to be windowed and the kernels would only approximate them.

I should probably give this simulator a better GUI. 99% of the editing is happening by changing the code at the moment.

From what I'm told, the warmness of a large diaphragm microphone is due to the gradual transition to an omnidirectional pattern at lower frequencies. Using two omni microphones in a figure-eight pattern, with a phase inversion + delay on one mic to turn that into a cardioid microphone, and some high-pass and peak filtering, I managed to produce a microphone with a characteristic like that. The bend down at 20 kHz is the tail of the comb filter created by the phase delay.

@blaha Oh, but that's a real country. It's recognised as such, and it has a head of state, etc.

The Sapmi area of North Scandinavia also has its own flag, but it's not a country, even if some of the Sami activists want it to be.

@blaha It belongs to Finland, so it's arguably not a country at all, at least not in the traditional nation state sense of the word "country".

@monerica Probably. I need to set up some kind of showcase website for these engineering projects.

Working on improving the plots in my microphone array simulator.

"On the other hand, to be directional the capsule must have rear sound ports with acoustical phase shift networks, which for any practical design has inherent non-idealities."

Mwahahah! But not the microphone array design I'm working on, because it uses a digital delay line!

I think what I'm going to do is give it an SPDIF output. My Focusrite interface has an SPDIF input, and many consumer sound cards have one too. Should make for a cheap way of equipping your home computer with a good mic.

5) Mathematicians also like to use confusing words. Take "conjugate", which means to negate the imaginary part of a complex number — a programmer would probably call that an iFlip().

Also, I kind of agree with Randall Munroe about complex numbers: If you're too cool for vectors, you use complex numbers.

Yes, yes, Euler and Fourier/Laplace transforms, but come ooon, you can write that stuff out as cos/sin and vectors...

5) Mathematicians also like to use confusing words. Take "conjugate", which means to negate the imaginary part of a complex number — a programmer would probably call that an iFlip().

Also, I kind of agree with Randall Munroe about complex numbers: They're just vectors for people who are too cool for vectors.

Yes, yes, Euler and Fourier/Laplace transforms, but come ooon, you can write that stuff out as cos/sin and vectors...

4) I mean, I basically had to spend half a day to figure out the math I needed to learn how to calculate a transfer function and make a Bode plot from it, and I'm a stubborn motherfucker.

I'm trying to use mathy variable names in my code but I'm very tempted to just use verbose names instead because my source code is damn near unreadable with all these one-letter variable names, much like the math it came from...

3) Kind of annoys the hell out of me that math people can't boil stuff down to the essentials. Most documentation for developers is far better than the crap math students have to contend with. If math was a programming language, who the hell would use it? If you think your language has unreadable syntax and bad documentation, try math.

2) More specifically, any constant or coefficient x in a transfer function H(s) that isn't imaginary is taken as a complex number x+0i. In other words, you turn everything into complex numbers. Any arithmetic is taken to be complex arithmetic.

ω is in radians per second, so ω = 2πf, where f is the frequency in hertz.

Output x + yi can be taken as a phasor/vector where sqrt(x² + y²) encodes amplitude and atan2(y, x) encodes the phase in radians.

1) Okay, so I now *think* I know how to use transfer functions, i.e. those previously so mysterious "H(s) = foo / bar" things you always find on Wikipedia instead of actual explanations when you're looking for information about audio equalisation filters.

I knew that s was the frequency, but not much else.

Solution:

s can be substituted with jω where j is the imaginary unit and ω is angular frequency.

The output format is a phasor, from which you can derive an amplitude and a phase.