Haha, that and the two running box fans I have on full blast pointing at my head and pillow are my greatest sources of comfort.

Yes I like being really really cold.

Not really? Although I’m probably way more tolerant to (wideband!) noise than others because I sleep literally inches from two box fans.

But you don’t need to run it while you’re sleeping. It goes from room temperature to ice in under 10 minutes (20 minutes for the “good” ice after the insides have had a bit of time to cool down).

To be clear, what I have is a Frigidaire portable ice maker. Here’s its Walmart product page, although I can’t vouch for Walmart’s website respecting your privacy.

I actually bought a knockoff of this a couple years ago off Amazon, and it worked for about a year, but:

1. The infrared sensor was crap from day 1, so I always had to manually override the machine’s decision that the ice was full, even when it was completely empty.
2. The water where I was living (dorm room in city) was much…harder I think? It was safe to drink, I even tested it myself, but whatever minerals were in it very quickly fucked up my machine’s internals. I’m living at my parents house with better water.

So far, the Frigidaire is a much better unit, and I use it tremendously more often because I don’t have to babysit the thing and constantly override the infrared sensor.

The water supply is just an ordinary tank. Basically just open the lid, dump a Super Big Gulp of water into the tank every few hours and you’re set. Everything is self contained.

It doesn’t keep the ice cool for you, i.e. it’s not a freezer. Once the ice gets dumped in the bucket, you’re on your own.

So if you go down this route, I recommend getting a decent version of it. Mine cost about $87 in store from Walmart but I really bought this unit as an impulse buy, so I imagine you can get it cheaper if you do some shopping.

Very nearly! I have desk that I scrounged from the garbage literally right up against the bed and a nightstand right next to it. It’s on the desk since the nightstand holds my TV.

So it’s not literally on a nightstand, but it is literally bedside, i.e. I can use it without getting out of bed.

With just the information provided, not weird at all. Good luck with your program 🙂.

No I don’t like myself

Ice machine

Infinite bedside ice

It’s so hard!

It’s really hard! But it’s really rewarding too. And as a computing/music student [1], you’re in a great major to start!

First off, if you just want to make your own effects and you’re not really interested in distributing them or making them public, I recommend using JSFX. It’s way easier. You can read through the entire spec in a night. JSFX support is built into REAPER, and apparently YSFX allows you to load JSFX code into other DAWs, although I haven’t tested it. JSFX plugins are compiled on the fly (unlike VST plugins, which are compiled ahead of time and distributed as DLLs), so you just write them up as text files.

However, their capabilities are limited compared to VST, AU, LV2, AAX [2], and other similar plugin formats. Also, pre-compiled plugins perform better. That’s why plugins are released as such.

So if you plan on writing pre-compiled plugins for public consumption, you’ll need to do some C++ programming.

IMO the most important thing to learn for plugin design is how to code well, particularly in C++ with Git and JUCE.

If you learn how to code with good practices, you can compensate for all other deficiencies.

Between “music”, “engineering”, and “software development”, plugin design feels the most like “software development”.

99.9% of all plugins are written in C++, and most of those are done (both proprietary and FOSS) with the JUCE library. School taught me the basics of C++ but they don’t teach you how to code well. Particularly, your DSP code needs to meet a soft real-time constraint. You have to use multithreading because you have a thread for the audio signal (which must NEVER get interrupted) and at least one thread for the GUI.

You also need to figure out which parts of the C++ standard library are real-time safe, and which aren’t. Here’s a good talk on that.

If you use JUCE or a similar development library then they have well-tested basic DSP functions, meaning you can get by without doing all the math from scratch.

Start watching Audio Developer Conference talks like TV as they come out. JUCE has a tutorial, and MatKat released a video tutorial guiding the viewer through coding a simple EQ plugin [3]. JUCE plugins are basically cross platform, and can typically be compiled as VSTs on Windows, AU plugins on Mac, and LV2 plugins on Linux.

JUCE is a really complicated library even though it vastly simplifies the process (because audio plugin development is inherently hard!). You’re going to have to learn to read a LOT of documentation and code.

I also recommend learning as much math as you can stomach. Start with linear algebra, calculus, Fourier analysis, circuit theory, and numerical analysis (especially Padé approximants), in that order. Eventually, you’ll want to roll your own math, or at least do something that JUCE doesn’t provide out the box. Julius O Smith has some really good free online books on filters, Fourier Analysis, and DSP with a music focus.

If you’re willing to sail the high seas to LibGen buy a book, I recommend Digital Audio Signal Processing by Udo Zolzer for “generic” audio signal processing, and DAFX: Digital Audio Effects by Zolzer for coverage of nonlinear effects, which are typically absent from DSP engineering books. I also recommend keeping a copy of Digital Signal Processing by Proakis and Manolakis on hand because of its detailed coverage of DSP fundamentals, particularly the coverage of filter structures, numerical errors, multirate signal processing, and the Z transform.

A little bit of knowledge about machine learning and optimization is good too, because sometimes you need to solve an optimization problem to synthesize a filter, or possibly in a fixed time as your actual output (example: pitch shifting). Deep learning is yielding some seriously magical effects, so I do recommend you learn it at your own pace.

DSP basically requires all the math ever, especially the kind of DSP that we want to do as musicians, so the more you have the better you’ll be.

[1] IMO that would have been the perfect major for me, that or acoustical engineering, if anything like that existed in my area when I went to recording school 10 years ago. While my recording degree taught me some really valuable stuff, I kinda wish that they pushed us harder into programming, computing, and electronics.

[2] AAX requires you to pay Avid to develop. So I never use AAX plugins, and I have no intention of supporting the format once I start releasing plugins for public consumption, despite its other technical merits.

[3] Over half of MatKat’s tutorial is dedicated towards GUI design, i.e. the audio part is basically done but the interface looks boring and default. GUI design and how your GUI (editor component) interacts with the audio processor component are extremely important and time-consuming parts of plugin design. Frankly, GUI design has been by far the most complicated thing to “pick up”, and it’s why I haven’t released anything yet.

So I don’t value high fidelity video because I don’t see very well even with glasses, so it wouldn’t make a difference for me.

I do value high fidelity audio because:

• I am a musician and producer, although not as much as I used to
• I have ear training
• I went to recording school
• I am autistic with sensitive hearing
• I have audio and acoustical engineering as special interests
• I’m doing a master’s degree in electrical engineering where I’ve already designed audio gear for my projects
• I am teaching myself audio plugin design for fun

But I simply can’t afford high fidelity gear for every day listening. For my studio monitors, I spent as much as I could to get the best speakers I could afford so that I can be certain that what I’m hearing is an accurate representation of what I “commit to tape”. However, for walking to class or going to the market, I’m not gonna pay for expensive headphones that could get stolen, broken, or lost. It’s impractical.

My $20 Bluetooth headphones [1] are sufficient for every day carry. They sound “95% of the way there”, they don’t get in the way when I’m walking, and if I lose them, I can have an identical pair delivered to my door with a couple days. 95% is good enough for me. Actually, I could probably settle for less.

And then there’s storage. My library is already > 110GB in MP3 format, so storing it all in uncompressed formats would be unwieldy.

So in the rare cases that my listening hardware is insufficient, I’ll usually consult a software equalizer. For example, on Linux, Easy Effects allows me to apply equalizers, dynamic compression, and a bunch of other plugins in LV2 format to the PipeWire output (and input). It’s super convenient for watching YouTube college lectures with questionable microphone quality on my shitty TV speakers. Other than dynamic compression for leveling and an equalizer for frequency effects, I am typically not interested in doing anything else for intelligibility. Said differently, I am not interested in exploiting the nonlinearities in real speaker systems (other than possibly dynamic compression), so I should be able to fix any linear defects (bad frequency response) with a digital equalizer. The nonlinearities in real speaker systems are, for HiFi listening purposes [2], defects.

Also, I’m extremely skeptical of products marketed towards “audiophiles” because there’s so much marketing bullshit pseudoscience surrounding the field that all the textbooks that cover loudspeaker design and HiFi audio electronics have paragraphs warning about it as the first thing.

Like I experience the difference between different pairs of binoculars and speakers dramatically, and graphical analysis backs up the differences, so how could they sound/look negligibly different to others?

Next time you do a graphical analysis, check out the magnitudes of the differences in your graphs versus the magnitude of the Just Noticeable Difference in amplitude or frequency. We probably do experience the differences between speakers differently than others. We’re outliers.

What’s your take on both major and, at the high end, diminishing returns on higher quality sensory experiences?

For personal listening, the point of diminishing returns is basically $20 because I can’t afford shit. For listening to something I plan on sharing with others, I’d be willing to put in whatever I can afford. But frankly, I’d be just as likely to straight-up do the math and design my systems myself because I 100% don’t trust any “”“high fidelity”“” system that doesn’t come with a datasheet and frequency response.

Lastly, I do wear glasses. I typically get my glasses online because, once you have the prescription and your facial measurements, it is the same quality as the stuff you get at the big-box stores.

[1] I acknowledge that Bluetooth sucks, particularly for audio.

[2] As a metal guitarist, I’m not against speaker nonlinearity for guitar speakers, but then again, guitar speakers are really convincingly simulated by impulse responses, which are a core linear systems concept, implying that they are nearly linear devices even at the volumes they are typically played at.

Basically just normal people because everyone is a monster in the eyes of “anti-woke” types except for themselves.

… one begins to recognize looting as a genuine form of decentralized political protest and that it works to, at least temporarily, redefine property relations and, consequently, relationships amongst people.

Sofas, because they’re sofa king hot.

Honest question: Why does it matter if he’s a transphobe when choosing which Fediverse software to use?

1. Because some people have actually financially supported him. I’m not trans, but I would be devastated to know that my money went to feed someone who wants to destroy me.
2. I already have trouble convincing transgender people in my social circle that Lemmy as a software is safe for them to use even with the variety of trans-inclusive servers like yours, and will be safe and inclusive in the future.

A great example of (2) is the fate of PolyMC. Thankfully, the other developers forked it into Prism, but transphobia put that whole project in jeopardy for a bit.

The software is FOSS and anyone can make their own instance.

IMO that’s why I’m not immediately dropping my account and running for the hills, but it’s still not good. Most people don’t have the technical skills or the interest in learning them to run their own instance.

I really want to understand what I might be missing.

IMO it’s that even though he does not personally control how Lemmy instances are run, and even though we do have a good degree of robustness to transphobia because the software is FOSS, it is still both morally and technically ill-advised to have a transphobe at the helm of an open-source software project.

Haha mood

Not great

So one of my mother’s friends very briefly died from COVID-19. According to her, being dead was peaceful, basically just nothingness, and she was slightly miffed that they brought her back.

Can’t find work

Sounds like a huge feature creep that would require many more developers, specifically those with experience in audio software development and low-latency content delivery. Plus, Matrix practically has this feature.

but channels i watch dont upload to this right?

I mean if you watch The Linux Experiment then yeah, and only because he chooses to upload to both YouTube and PeerTube (different instance). Generally speaking though, most of my favorite creators don’t upload there. Yet…

isn’t this a whole different site?

Correct, and that’s why it’s so important to get creators to put their stuff on PeerTube!

IMO, PeerTube is the long-term solution to YouTube. Eventually, they will block Invidious, break FreeTube and NewPipe, and generally make YouTube unusable for people who cannot afford to pay and/or give up all privacy to Google. Or, knowing Google, they might just kill it for funzies.

We need to learn how to use PeerTube, and we should convince creators to upload to PeerTube in addition to YouTube.

Because it is a federated video platform completely independent from YouTube and Google. So Google has no say on what goes on it, who gets to post, how it is administered, etc.

Eat them out of stubbornness