Its not that they don't have pitch, per se, it's that the nature of the sound they produce makes the concept of "pitch" kind of meaningless.

Except for a pure sine wave, every tone is going to have multiple harmonics over the fundamental which is what actually gives an instrument, even the human voice, its timbre.

Percussion instruments like cymbals and the snare drum create broad-spectrum noise. There's essentially so many frequencies that it's difficult for our brains to nail it down the fundamental pitch. It's also what helps us hear them over the rest of the ensemble.

Drums in general produce very short pulses of sound, which also makes it harder for the brain to tell what pitch it is. In harmonic analysis, any very short sound is actually broad-spectrum because it takes a ton of harmonics to produce a single sharp spike with rapid decay.

I highly recommend downloading a spectrum analyzer app on your phone to get an intuition for this. If you're on Android, I recommend Spectroid.

Just run it and watch the screen while you make different sounds, approach various sound sources, play music, or just talk or sing. If you can whistle, that also produces an interesting result. You can actually see the frequency of the power grid in the harmonics produced by electric motors and transformer coils which is personally really fucking cool.

Well shit, that's a non-starter then.

I would also like to know where Pastafarianism falls.

The AUR was doing "sketchy third-party packaging for the apps you need" before Docker made it cool.

Jesus Christ, what crawled up your ass and died?

I actually added detail that wasn't already discussed in the article?

We don't even have true 64-bit addressing yet. x86-64 uses only 48 bits of a 64 bit address and 64-bit ARM can use anything between 40 and 52 depending on the specific configuration.

I wonder why I haven't seen a standard open-source license for this.

Seconded. Having an awesome Fish setup doesn't help at all when you're constantly having to shell into other machines unless you somehow keep your dotfiles synced, and that sounds like a total hassle.

I'd rather my muscle memory be optimized for the standard setup.

The consensus on Powerwash Simulator DLC from what I've seen so far is that it's not a lot of content for the price.

What do ya'll think?

This would be a lot more readable with some paragraph breaks.

The person who correctly guesses when the AI bubble is gonna pop and shorts Nvidia stock is gonna make a lot of money. Call it The Big Short 2: Electric Boogaloo.

I've recently been thinking a lot about the recyclability of plastic. I have several stacks of plastic drink cups from various fast food joints in my kitchen; as much as possible, I try to save up and bundle together similar types of plastic before I throw it in the recycling bin, to try to save some sorting effort. And in doing so, I noticed something.

The thing is, a lot of single-use plastics have very similar properties. PETE, HDPE, Polypropylene, solid polystyrene, they're all used to package similar or identical products. I think they're more or less interchangeable, and the choice of a given plastic for a given application has more to do with cost, availability and the preferences of the product engineer than any specific material properties of the plastic itself. There's obviously going to be some exceptions, but I think those are going to be few and far between, and a lot of them could be addressed by switching to other materials.

I think a great first step would be for regulators to encourage/force industries to standardize on one or two types of plastic at most, and eliminate plastics that aren't worth recycling, like polystyrene. That should reduce the manual labor required by a significant amount once the other plastics are eliminated from the waste stream, and make it feasible to recycle plastics locally instead of shipping them off to a third world country.

I think companies should be taxed or otherwise penalized for the plastic waste they foist on consumers, because often there's little choice involved unless you want to boycott a company entirely. If I wanted to eliminate plastic cups from my life, I'd pretty much have to stop getting fast food altogether (yes I know I should probably do that anyway, but that's beside the point). A tax on bulk purchases of plastic may end up being passed down to consumers, but the revenue could be put towards subsidizing production of more renewable materials.

I think food stamp programs could be a strong driver for change on this, as they could refuse to cover products that generate excessive waste. With enough warning, there should be enough time for companies to switch their products to be compliant with little disruption to the consumer.

America doesn't do anything big unless it's to beat either China or Russia. Maybe this collider will be the impetus we need to build a bigger one.

It is being used to develop a quantum compass – an instrument that will exploit the behaviour of subatomic matter in order to develop devices that can accurately pinpoint their locations no matter where they are placed,

[...]

The aim of the Imperial College project [...] is to create a device that is not only accurate in fixing its position, but also does not rely on receiving external signals.

These statements imply the device can know exactly where it is in space just by measuring some purely internal quantum effect, which conflicts with the principles of Lorentz invariance and relativity.

Both are constructed around the same idea that there's nothing special in the laws of physics that changes with where you are or how fast you're going. That observation is what led the conclusion that the speed of light is the same in every reference frame, and to Einstein developing the theory of relativity.

In reality, the device needs an external signal to learn its initial position. And it's unlikely to be perfectly accurate so it may still need periodic updates, just hopefully a lot less frequently.

The London Underground is actually kind of a dumb use-case because it's fixed infrastructure. You can just have something like RFID tags around the track that the train reads as it goes by. And there's going to be sensors in the track that report trains' presence to a central control room. It's just a good setting to test the device.

What it's really potentially quite useful for is nuclear submarines since they can stay underwater pretty much as long as their food supplies last, and knowing their position without using sonar or being able to receive GPS signals is quite important for navigation and obstacle avoidance. But the author was probably told to downplay potential military applications.

It's a troll toll. It'll get you a software engineering job with a roman numeral in the title at a company you've actually heard of. But if you're almost done then there's no reason not to stick with it.

The early years of my career were quite a slog, having taught myself to program. I started out on freelancing websites, competing with devs from the third world who worked for pennies a day. I lucked into my first salaried job, got hired through my cousin.

I will say, having some theory knowledge does come in handy occasionally. You might never have to write your own hashtable, but being able to understand the implementation of the structures you're using helps a lot to make informed decisions about how you organize and access data, especially when you're trying to optimize for performance or memory usage.

One piece of unsolicited advice you might have heard before is to not discount the power of networking. The best written cover letter in the world can't hold a candle to knowing someone who can put in a good word. Make friends with your professors and classmates, you never know who might think to look you up one day when their company is hiring. My old boss still offers me a job occasionally, more than five years later.

The article describes the device working in ways that violate relativity, but the actual technical description is a lot cooler.

It's not a quantum compass, really. It's a quantum accelerometer and gyroscope. The hope is that its accuracy will lend itself to long-term inertial guidance, which normally needs regular GPS updates to correct errors which accumulate over time.

Wanting to and actually doing it are two different things.

The problem is that open source devs also have to be their own project managers, but those two jobs have very different skillsets.

In regular software development, it's the PM's job to deal with the drama, filter the idiocy out and collect concise and actionable user stories, and let the developers just write code.

In open source, you tend to deal with a lot of entitlement. All kinds of people, who never gave you a dime, come out out of the woodwork to yell at you over every little change. The bigger and farther reaching a project is, the more this happens, and it wears you down. I can only imagine what it's like working on a huge project like GNOME.

And the toxicity feeds into itself. Be kurt with one person, and suddenly it gets out that you're an asshole to users. Then people come in expecting hostility and react defensively to every little comment. And that puts you in the same mindset.

At the end of the day, you can't satisfy everyone. Sometimes you gotta figure out how to tell someone their feature request is stupid and you're not gonna work on it, especially not for free. And a lot of people need to learn to try to fix problems themselves before opening an issue. That's kind of the whole point of open source.

I'd tell myself not to waste the time, money or energy on college.

I'm not against it in general, but going for a compsci degree when you've already gotten software dev work is definitely a waste of time unless your employer is paying for it. I just let my dad talk me into it after getting out of a bad job. Thankfully I only wasted one semester on it and got out because I found another job.

Still, that turned out to be $4k in loans for just 6 units because I couldn't file my FAFSA in time to qualify for any grants, thanks to my fucking undiagnosed ADHD father who couldn't be bothered to file his taxes or even give me an accurate income required by the form. That was $4k I could have put into savings or invested instead.

https://lemmy.zip/comment/11156711

It doesn't excuse the behavior, but I get where it's coming from.