If I am not mistaken the 47.0.0.0/8 ip block is for Alibaba cloud

That’s an ARIN block according to Wikipedia so North America, under Northen Telecom until 2010. It does look like Alibaba operate many networks under that /8, but I very much doubt it’s the whole /8 which would be worth a lot; a /16 is apparently worth around $3-4M, so a /8 can be extrapolated to be worth upwards of a billion dollars! I doubt they put all their eggs into that particular basket. So you’re probably matching a lot of innocent North American IPs with this.

Classful IPv4 was obsoleted 32 years ago. Only 8 years left before it’s literally older than a standard career.

It’s fascinating the sheer inertia that leads formally-trained IT professionals to use and perpetuate such profoundly useless and obsolete nomenclature. You’d think that having an incorrect use of the term “class A” and not having any use for classes B and C would tip off academia that they should cordon off classful networking to the “History of Computing” course next to ARPANET.

Maybe next time someone refers to 10.0.0.0/8 as a Class A network I’ll refer to it as the ARPANET Network. That’s only very slightly more anachronistic (3 years).

I guess Greek house building was several decades ahead of Belgian house building then, because I’ve yet to see a pre-war house with cavity walls. I guess the cheap coal heating and lack of a need for cooling must have something to do with it.

The 100 years old brick buildings don’t have any voids. That only started post-WWII when ventilation became a real concern.

But even then those houses are likely to have wooden floors and more modern drywall remodeling in some areas. My house is hurricane-proof but not rat-proof.

Yeah it’s Ctrl+D. I do use bookmarks on occasion (especially for stupid websites with non-intuitive URLs and page titles I can’t easily find by typing in the omnibar), but not as a way to organize my work.

The reason I mention ADHD for this in particular is I saw a home organization tip for ADHD that I related strongly to: ADHD brains really benefit from having everything spread out on a table, visible and immediately available. Trying to force an ADHD person to constantly put things away is super counter-productive even if it’s apparently good advice for neurotypical folk. Though of course ADHD is not an excuse not to clear the messy table once the project is finished.

My computer desktop follows the same principle. I’ll have as many workspaces as I do ongoing projects, and every workspace has all the tools I need open. And the good news is it’s much harder to run out of virtual space than it is to run out of space on a real table.

I feel like it’s often bad game design from developers who think they need to put in consumables without understanding their gameplay value.

In too many games using up all your consumables is just A Thing That Happens. So the game is balanced to allow you to survive anyway. But then the corollary is that if it works for a bit then you can finish the game without using any of the consumables. The consumables are just a way to make already achievable portions of the game easier, which is just sloppy game design IMO. Bethesda games for instance are very guilty of that.

People not understanding that we understand bookmarks exist is weird to me.

For me it’s a suspected ADHD thing. If I make a bookmark:

• I have to context-switch into “cleaning up” mode. Leaving a tab open is not distracting, having to name it and categorize it is.
• Bookmarks are virtual drawers. Anything I put in a drawer might as well be in a cave in Alaska guarded by a troll as far as my brain is concerned. If I intend to look at this in the next 2-3 weeks, I keep the tab open because it’s a virtual reminder I’ve not yet done the thing.
• Yes, I’ve got tabs open from over a year ago. Those ones don’t serve a purpose, I’ll get around to cleaning up… eventually.

Honestly if I was forced to close my browser sessions at the end of the work day, not joke, not an exaggeration, I’d switch jobs. I’m working on too many different complex things to have to rebuild my mental model of where everything was at from scratch every morning. I would not get anything done.

Ironic, IKEA is married to PZ2. Which to be fair is a fine standard (aside from the fact that unaware people tend to confuse it with PH2 then wonder why their screws are stripped), it’s just annoying that I have to switch my drill from T20 to PZ2 to build IKEA furniture.

Downmixing is a pretty straightforward affair. You have 6 channels, you need to go to 2, so you just average 4 signals per channel using some weights.

Good media players (Kodi) allow you to change those weights, especially for the center channel, and to reduce dynamic range (with a compressor). Problem solved, the movie will be understandable even on shitty built-in TV speakers if you want to do that for some insane reason.

The problem is that there are “default” weights for 2.0 downmixing that were made in the 90s for professional audio monitoring headphones, and these are the weights used by shitty software from shitty movie distributors or TV sets that don’t care to find out why default downmixing is done the way it is. Netflix could detect that you’re using shitty speakers and automatically reduce dynamic range and boost dialogue for you, they just DGAF. But none of that is the movie’s problem.

Right?! A track like Spanish Sahara by Foals that uses the full dynamic range is such a pleasure to listen to. Then there’s In the Air Tonight which IIRC has a digital release with super compressed dynamic range. The whole point of that song is that it slowly builds up to a genre-defining drop, so it had better stand out!

But people want to listen to movies on their built-in TV speakers with children crying in the background, and they don’t want to understand how or why things are the way they are, they just want to complain that the world doesn’t revolve around them.

I had a 5.0 setup before I even bought my first TV. I was just using my PC monitor until then.

It’s counter-intuitive but decent sound comes first. I’d much rather watch Interstellar in 360p with 5.1 audio than in 4K OLED HDR with built-in speakers.

But when you say that people get mad because they spent a grand on a TV that sounds like shit and they feel they have to defend their choices.

I see that, but that is not what I am saying.

This is just not how things work on a technical level. The default is how cinemas work because that’s the experience movies are made for; literally every other way to consume movie audio is “general usage audio programs fine tuning” and that’s what needs fixing. That’s my entire thesis. By calling me elitist you’re just inventing things I’m not saying to get mad over.

Yes 500 € is a lot of money. But I will say I bought a good audio setup years before I even had a TV (some parts second hand so it did not actually cost me that much, and a 3.0 setup gets you 80 % of the way there). It’s a markedly better experience to watch a movie on a shitty PC monitor with good audio than on a 55" OLED with built-in speakers, and I will die on that hill. And anecdotally I’ve heard actual filmmakers say as much.

people watch stuff on TV and cannot hear any dialogue

did you read anything I said or do you just want to complain?

have a doctorate on audio / put in thousands of dollars into a hobby

Good news then, a more-than-decent 5.1 setup can be had for ~500 €. A decent soundbar for a few hundred.

and let people like you mess around with the settings for your home cinema

I can’t if the audio source is fucked up because directors have been forced by studios to release with low dynamic range.

My whole point is that your audio goes Master -> 5.1 channels -> downmixer -> your shitty 2.0 channels speakers and my audio goes Master -> 5.1 channels -> receiver -> my 5.1 setup.

You’re asking the master to change to fit your needs. I’m asking the media players to fix their fucking downmixers because that’s where the problem lies. Leave the studio mastering alone god damn it.

Where do you draw the line? If you use a soundbar, someone else is complaining because they use their built-in speakers. But if you optimize for that, someone else is using their laptop speaker on the train.

What really pisses me off with this “argument” is that the audio information is all right there, which you would know if you bothered to read the second half of my comment before getting all pissy.

5.1 audio (and the standards that superseded it in cinemas) all have multiple audio channels with one dedicated to voice. If you have a shit sound system, the sound system should be downmixing in a way that preserves dialogue better. Again, the information is all right there as there is no stereo track in most movies, your player is building it on-the-fly based on the 5.1 track. It’s not the director’s fault that Netflix or Hulu is doing an awful job at accounting for the fact that most of their users are listening on a sound setup that can barely reproduce intelligible speech.

Nah, I have a good sound setup and I don’t want to be watching movies with less dynamic range because some people are using their shrilly built-in TV speakers with their children screaming in the background or $5 earbuds.

If you don’t want to have a proper 5.1 audio setup, it’s not the director’s problem, it’s the media player. Audio compression, center channel boosting, and subtitling are things that media centers have been able to do for decades (e.g. Kodi), it’s just that streaming platforms and TVs don’t always support it because they DGAF. Do look for a “night mode” in your TV settings though, that’s an audio compressor and I have one on my receiver. If you are using headphones, use a media player like Kodi that allows you to boost the center channel (which is dedicated to dialogue).

Nowadays “buggy” is not how I’d describe it, though there were certainly teething issues at the beginning. By now other DEs have learned to deal with it.

However it’s still true that the GTK4 design is ill-fitting, and very opinionated. Quite exemplary of this are the applications that hardcode the GTK file picker (like Firefox and chrome) even though it’s inferior in every way to the Qt file picker and forces the infuriating GTK “design” choice of doing fuzzy search when you type in the file list instead of jumping to the relevant file. Very annoying when dealing with organized directories especially when no other file browser on my system works that way!

High-five the group of Belgian, Chadian, and Romanian vexillologists who were also sweating profusely throughout.

What?

The house I’m sitting in right now is made out of bricks, with the roof being a untreated wood frame covered in ceramic shingles. No hydrocarbons involved (except for the insulation but that came a good sixty years after initial construction). There are other construction methods besides the American “just wrap it all in vinyl” approach that aren’t necessarily more expensive, such as covering the outside insulation layer with clay/mortar.

The problem isn’t air moisture, at 60 % air RH wood is like 10 % humid and won’t rot. What causes wood to rot is pooling water, something that’s easily avoided by decent house building.

Dry wood will last centuries without any oiling. Which is good news for timber frames because those are left untreated. As long as your house is water-tight, the frame will be fine because wood rot simlly can’t metabolize in typical indoors humidity evels.

What we typically protect wood from is water, mechanical wear, UV, and stains. But even a furniture piece will not always get treated on internal parts where wear and wood expansion are no concerns.

Lol at everyone in the replies inventing crazy conspiracy theories.

As someone who has microwaved tea a bunch of times because my workplace didn’t have a kettle, let me bestow upon you the ~~~truth~~~:

Microwaved water is slow to boil (especially compared to a 2500 W kettle for us chad 230V enjoyers), about 2:30 for one cup IIRC and the cup will be uniformly heated including the handle which is annoyingly hot to the touch (and I’m not particularly squeamish with hot things).

Tastes the same though.