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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 25th, 2023

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  • Anyway, 99%+ of people can’t consistently tell the difference between a 160kbps OGG and lossless, because of limitations in either their equipment, training, ears, or a combination thereof. This has been blind tested many times and the audiophiles that ‘swear they can tell’ are always proven wrong, they then usually blame the equipment or test. There’s tests you can run yourself too, eg here: https://abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html

    Ooohhh I did that test when I got a new speaker / amp setup at my PC and as a musician I thought “I got this”. Plus I was trying to decide if Tidal was worth upgrading to from Spotify.

    I did slightly better than average. Like just slightly. I might have the results somewhere.

    I ended up doing Tidal’s free trial. I couldn’t tell a difference. Went back to Spotify. (though now my group of people are on an Apple Music family plan).


  • I mean I’m sure it was a mix. There are a lot of stories out there about how if you didn’t stay on top of your outsourced factory they would look everywhere to cut corners to save a few extra cents here and there.

    You (used to?) have to constantly check production quality and make sure nothing was changed out for a low cost part or lower cost source material. Otherwise your product quality falls off and you’re losing money on warranties and repairs and losing customer goodwill.

    The other thing that happened is these factories, once they had your design, would make the same thing with lower cost parts / materials as a knockoff and sell it unbranded, as they don’t care about US or European IP Laws. Word might get around that “hey you can get the same brand X product as brand Y or from Aliexpress and save 50%”. Now they’re undercutting you, and you lose customer goodwill because people think your product is overpriced. Then the knockoff fails and they are happy they never bought your product in the first place because they think yours would have failed too. Through word of mouth people say “oh that broke after a month” not realizing the offbrand was made with shoddy materials, less screws, cheaper batteries, an inferior screen, literally anything they can do to save money.



  • Yeah I work at MSFT on a completely different team.

    Teams recently asked if I wanted this and I was like… “sure!”

    Now when I’m in the office and people check my status it tells people my desk location and when I’m WFH or elsewhere it tells people I’m not in the building. I don’t get people asking “hey are you in today?”

    A lot of people in this thread are taking the headline literally like it’s “are you online or away?”. No. This is more of "are you at your desk in the office or working from a different building or from outside the facilities.











  • My parents used to go down to Arizona. They sold their trailer back in 2018 (so just before Covid which was very lucky). They’ve done the odd trip down to the US (they sold because they wanted to go to different places) but plan to go out to Vancouver Island and other places more often now.

    Family friends with a house in Palm Desert sold their place after Trump joked about Canada being the 51st state and plan to never go back down again. At least for as long as he is president.


  • Software engineering in Canada in the 2000s. Most of the labs in my university ran Linux, at least in the engineering, math, and science areas of campus.

    Personally I ran, depending on the year, LFS (Linux from Scratch), Slackware, or Gentoo (which still lives on that laptop today but also it hasn’t been booted or connected to a network in like 10 years).

    I think there was only one lab with Windows. We also had a lab of Solaris machines but I bet those are gone now.

    No idea what Law, Nursing, and other faculties in the other side of campus used.