Notices by Kat (kats@chaosfem.tw)

If you're already preparing to flee your country, and you're looking at Spain as a destination, talk to me. I may be able to help you with somewhere to stay when you get here.

I'm not ruling out other people, but for obvious reasons my primary focus is on helping other trans folk.

No promises yet, because I need to verify how I can make this work.

@roadriverrail I'm being mean.
Her voice is lovely, their cover of Bela Lugosi's Dead is inspiring and, from the live footage I've seen, they don't miss on stage either.

It's just that for me this is disconcertingly girly.

Pet peeve: no, compression does not make the quiet parts of your signal louder, and I really wish people would stop repeating this.

• Compression makes loud sounds quieter. That's all.
• Compressors usually have a compression stage, followed by a separate volume-boost stage which makes the entire compressed signal louder.
• These are not the same thing.

Why does this bother me? For many years, I looked in vain for an explanation of how compression makes quiet sounds louder.

There actually is a related technology that dynamically makes the quiet bits louder. It's called upward expansion. It's a crucial part of how Dolby noise-reduction works.
Yes, there's also downward expansion; that's how noise-gates work.

Thankyou for coming to my TED talk.

#Music #GuitarEffects

These hormones are great and all, but I think the side-effects could be more clearly communicated.

Apparently I'm going through a Nouvelle Vague phase. What's next? Cheesecloth dresses and scented candles?

Adventures with Google's creepiness on Android continue: I found an entire new section of settings, where I have to tell it not to "learn from this app" - individually, per app.

I'm at the point of shopping for a physical metronome, and seriously considering buying a physical navigation device, just to keep even that data out of Google's (easy) reach.

On that note, is anybody working on an OSM-based equivalent to Garmin/TomTom?

@engagedpractx True.
Same question stands with modified phrasing, though.
@glyph @mattly

@engagedpractx @glyph @mattly "What value are you giving me in exchange for the fruits of my labour?"

Yes, I think it does. In the case at hand here, we're looking at one party creating value and another making use of it without providing anything in return.

If you have a counter-argument, please go ahead and state it.

@engagedpractx @glyph @mattly I don't see how that qualifies as value received by the developer.

I understand "that's what I was taught," but I don't find it at all persuasive. I certainly don't see how that's the kind of exchange of value that can reasonably construed to bind the developer to any responsibility of unpaid labour for the benefit of the user.

@adriano @cwebber @lanodan @shtwzrd OK, gamers, today we're porting Doom to... oh dear God, what is this abomination?!!

@jeffowski Or who fears being treated the way he's seen other men treating insufficently-overtly-masculine men.

Sorry, but this one's rubbish. Please stop repeating it.

@clacke Then somebody found one from 1650.
So it's probably (but not necessarily) newer than "this generation of kids is destroying civilisation", but appears to older than "are tattoos becoming mainstream?"

It's good to keep the timelines in approximate order :)

@mike @anarchiv "Snakes... why did it have to be snakes?"

Raiders of the Lost Rack - coming soon, to a datacentre near you!

@darrellpf @actuallyautistic This is an autistic thing?
Not just me, then. That's affirming :)

@enigmatico I'm old enough to remember putting some time into learning VRML.

@chris @revk Oof. Thank heavens for managers who understand that people are fallible.

@revk I'll never forget an SQL optimisation moment near the start of my career.

There was a report whose query would run for well over 11 hours (this was in 1997 or so), and was usually interrupted by the DBMS being shutdown for the nightly backups.

One day, I took a closer look at the query, and realised two tables had been joined in the wrong order. Fixed that, and it completed in under 5 minutes.

It's missile knows where it is Monday!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iBeRfOAAwk

@neil @drandrewv2 Depends on the café.
I still miss Caffiends, a 24-hour place, where 3am was a reliable time to find students desperately writing their assignments for the 9am deadline. Pajamas weren't unusual.

I'm just going to start blocking people who say "bullying (people I don't like) is good."

To restate: if you're punching up, it's not bullying. Pick a different word.

"Bullying" is punching down against people who can't fight back. If that's what you're proud of, I'm here to throw you under the next available bus.

Timeline cleanser!

It's nice to catch a moment like this, when they're not being little jerks to each other.