> I like the feeling of taking something that feels like a magical black box and systematically breaking it down to the point where it doesn't feel magical anymore.
This is also a good working definition of “engineering”.
Isn't engineering the opposite? Taking a bunch of the mundane world (physics, chemistry, etc) and building something up until it does suddenly feel like magical black box?
I think of engineering as constraints satisfaction, balancing trilemmas. Like civil engineering. Divine all the bridges which may best satisfy all the requirements. I liken it to finding min/max solutions, in a given problem space. aka optimization.
This metaphor allows for creativity, cleverness, novelty, esthetics.
Most of my software development, production of code, does not meet this standard, so is not "software engineering".
I liken curiosity to foraging. The problem space isn't well known, or poorly defined. Or just new to me. Let's go play, see what we find.
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As for your OC, your form of curiosity is yet another form of smart.
Some people are book smart. Some with better working memory are better at mental gymnastics. Some, like with your book summaries, are smart at generalization, distilling concepts to their essence.
I like to think my form of smart is fondness for metaphors. My contributions to humanity have come from noticing when apparently dissimilar problems can be reframed, using the parallel, applying notions from one problem to another. It's a bit like reframing an optimization challenge to look like Traveling Sales Person, applying all that prior work to a new problem set.
This isn’t unique to Netflix. The replays in syndication are also 16:9. As are the blu-ray releases. I finally bought the full series on DVD as I’d rather the original aspect ratio.
I do this with fastmail already. I have a domain that accepts email to *@domain.tld —- all the messages reach one inbox. All my online accounts have the form service-name@domain.tld
Makes it easy when I receive spam to see who sold my email address.
There’s also zero overhead to “create” a new one. It works for any address.
I did this with even less setup. accountname+extratext@gmail.com has worked forever and you can do the same with a custom domain. I gave up fairly quickly because unless you keep meticulous records, there's no way to figure out the exact email you used very easily and I didn't get that much out of doing it.
I actually don't accept *@domain.tld even though I have a custom domain because I got too many fishing emails that weren't caught in spam. I didn't have the patience to deal with it. That might have changed over the decade+, though.
> unless you keep meticulous records, there's no way to figure out the exact email you used very easily
I haven't found this to be a problem. Usually it's in my password manager. Otherwise they've sent me an email, which I can quickly search my inbox for.
Be aware that using the “+” is giving you the illusion of privacy and control. A privacy research has shown, back in 2020, that companies like Oracle’s Bluekai (a massive ‘data broker’) has functions to normalize email with + in them to help with ad targeting and matching.
Other vendors and companies like FB are surely doing this too, as companies send FB emails for matching / ad targeting.
I guess it's good to know, but I never had any illusions of using it for privacy. It was mostly to see when I get added to a mailing list, where it might have come from. Another reason I abandoned it so quickly is, if someone sold my email address and put me on a new list, what can I do about it?
> I gave up fairly quickly because unless you keep meticulous records, there's no way to figure out the exact email you used very easily and I didn't get that much out of doing it.
Does one need to keep records? I just do service@domain.tld, for example: ycombinator@example.net.
I started receiving a lot of sexually-explicit spam addressed to recruiting@mydomain.tld, so now I know that one of the recruiters to which I gave this email address had their inbox/contact-list compromised.
Where I got bit was email was used as login. I was trying to log in but couldn't remember the specific email I had used even though I generally had a fairly specific schema.
A lot of services already worked out the + trick. Not many know about this feature of gmail yet: You can also put a dot anywhere inside your username. eg.
The trouble with *@domain.tld is that you get that many times as much spam. Unless your spam filter is 100% accurate, that increases the amount of spam that gets through.
I work through this by only accepting wildcards on a subdomain. I have a 'real' email address on the parent domain for actual human correspondence. Services and salespeople get the subdomain.
I am using name@random_site.mydomain because i encountered a few sites that rejected name+random_site@mydomain. reduces the "random name @ domain" spam, but still works good.
I do this too, have for 15 years. It works really well. I run a well configured postfix mail server for inbound and outbound mail. Incoming mail gets delivered to my fastmail acct. I get very little SPAM, a few messages per week, but I have spent a lot of time over the years getting it that way.
I do this too. My only issue I am having right now is I am "locked" to my current registrar because of how it is set up. Do you have a mail server you are using or just having your registrar do it? I am looking for alternate solutions that dont cost much.
Exact same for me. So far the only addresses (in probably around 200) that have been sold/leaked/spammed have been the one on my public site and Facebook, where it was public for a time.
At least for me, the main advantage is that I can instantly block or delete a "masked" email address. With a catch all, you'll still be receiving mails.
The weirdness to me is judging whether the ideas expressed across this thread are altruistic or just garden variety envy. Maybe the answer is “both/and” depending on one’s perspective.
I think it’s simpler than that: wide age gaps in relationships are rare and thus call
attention to themselves. That a culturally significant body of fiction exists to cast negative attention on them (Lolita, American Beauty e.g.) just amplifies the American sense that “this is unusual”. Prejudicial perhaps. But most people choosing where to live and with whom will optimise for familiarity and security. No one is saying we should ban age gaps. Only that they present perceived additional risk once imported from “society in general” to “my living space”.
The usual guidance to “mind your own business” doesn’t really work here because who I live with and where is entirely my business.
I don’t disagree. However, the principal objection to racism is not discrimination, but rather that on the basis of immutable characteristics. No one chooses their biological skin colour. So we reject discrimination on that basis.
Age gaps are not an immutable characteristic. Nor are they culturally common in the USA. So they are fair game for discrimination just like any other exercise of free association.
I'm not quite convinced. Acting out on your non-heterosexual orientation or dressing up as opposite biological sex is also not immutable. You may act straight, and dress accordingly to your biological sex. Dressing as opposite sex is even similarly as rare as gender gaps.
And yet discrimination against people that display those voluntary behaviors would also be strongly frowned upon.
I don't think it's due to some innate nature of gender gaps. It's pure prejudice. "We don't like people like that because we believe people like that are less moral than us."
Maybe the time will come where ageism will raise to the same status as transphobia, but currently as you notice it's far from it.
I don’t see how social media changes this. Life is filled with people who don’t reach out first. It’s not like instagram changes them. The number of direct, meaningful messages between you and them is probably the same, independent of the platform.
Social media facilitates indirect interaction (seeing posts from one another) but it won’t make “Han shoot first” more often.
Stated another way: if you long for others to make first contact with you, social media won’t scratch that itch.
Right, but before social media other people made direct contact (phone, ICQ, Skype...) just as much as I did - now they feel it's enough to post on social media, and if you don't participate in that then you must make the contact.
My grandmother gets 2-5 random calls from her friends daily, the last unexpected call I received from a friend was in 2013 as we all switched to social media posting/commenting then.
Somewhat disagreeing with my previous comment: but I’ve definitely seen this effect between iMessage / Whatsapp vs SMS. I’m more likely to interact with people one-on-one through those platforms instead of SMS because of the link/image/gif handling. My android friends without whatsapp/telegram/signal don’t hear from me as much because of that added friction.
ccTLDs are special as they are entirely delegated to the countries that they're assigned to. WIPO offers UDRP servicing for ccTLDs, but they need to opt-in to it [1].
Notably .ar (and .su as the other responder to your comment notes) is not part of that. Therefore the process is going to depend upon the specific country/agency overseeing the ccTLD.
Sample rates in audio hardware aren't like programming constants, where they're the same for everybody. Over 30 minutes, a 0.05% sample rate error gets you 1s of drift over the recording. As a reference, USB 2.0 has a 0.25% frequency tolerance (and is used to clock many audio devices).
Cheap quartz clocks in computers and some USB ADCs especially are prone to slightly changing their rates depending on temperature. So the sample rates can differ relative to each other.
The clock drifts. Something needs to count those seconds. Even when the drift is small, phasing distortions become pretty obvious on lengthy recordings.
There's some interesting work going on in the AES to support synchronised audio over wide area networks, either through better recovery of PTP clocks distributed through WANs or using PTP with GNSS.
Maybe actual clock differences? Not sure if that's the case, but in audio engineering, a separate clock may be used to keep all devices involved in-sync (many pro-level audio devices have a "clock" input for this very reason).
In RF engineering, it's typical to have all of your equipment referencing the same 10MHz clock (or a 1 pulse per second or IRIG-B). If I don't have a GPS receiver or a rubidium source, then I'll just pick the newest, most expensive piece of equipment with a built-in reference clock and fan it out to the rest of the equipment on the bench. Some portable spectrum analyzers have built-in GPS receivers so even out in the field you know you have a good reference.
Huh, I've consciously thought in the past of this as an outsider and concluded that by now it's a common enough task so of course they must've had an algorithm for doing it automatically.
As someone who worked as an audio engineer, solving problems before they can occur saves so much time and headache. There's no reason to faff about with software or complexity-inducing algorithms when the whole problem can be fixed by toggling one switch.
Technically you could accomplish the same thing by applying a parametric eq to the master buss, but then you're no longer software agnostic.
It's like photography; sure one can post-process photos in photoshop. But getting everything right before taking the picture, at a hardware level, simplifies things for everyone involved.
There are plugins for different scenarios, but it turns into one of those problems where hearing and correcting issues is much easier for humans than computers. The tools available make it easier to fix problems, but it still takes a recording engineer to spot-check.
Do you have any insights you can offer on how best to do this? I have to deal with drift issues on signal processing of .wav files, and I have always used a marker pulse every so often.
This became worse during COVID as many of the presenters work from home and aren’t as savvy with their momentary mute. Lots of swallowing, coughing, and nose whistling. Particularly during Morning Edition.
Back in the day, whenever Mr. Overby would come on the radio, I would have loads of fun imagining that he had just been rudely interrupted at the dinner table to do his segment. Then, I would guess at what kind of food he had in his mouth as he gave his hurried report. To me at least, the particular tone of his voice made it sound like he was eating mashed potatoes or a sandwich, and he wanted to get back to his dinner with his family. Yes, I have a colorful interior life inside my head. Don't judge me. But seriously, he has a very unique sound to his voice. I tried to look up his background and where he grew up, but couldn't find anything. It's surprising to me that he hasn't done voice work or animation, as he would be perfect for those roles.
This is also a good working definition of “engineering”.