Stupid/Small Questions Megathread

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mystes: May 31, 2006

The comments on that philip glass piece are saying that Shazam identified other stuff as that too

# ¿ Oct 26, 2023 20:04

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 06:29

mystes: May 31, 2006

Earwicker posted:

my dad has several birdfeeders because he likes to watch birds eat seeds he buys from the store. he also grows blueberries, which are native to his area, and which the birds would love to eat. but he jealously guards his blueberry bushes with nets so that the birds cannot eat them, then insists on picking every single ripe blueberry every day in the season, and ends up with massive amounts of blueberries that he doesn't know what to do with

is your dad a squirrel?

# ¿ Oct 29, 2023 19:35

mystes: May 31, 2006

Silver Falcon posted:

Piggy backing on that because this has been bothering me for a long time:

What is the origin of "dungeons" in RPGs? Medieval dungeons were just prisons or jails. RPG dungeons are multi-room, sometimes multi-floor, mazes stuffed with traps, loot, and enemies to defeat, guarded by a boss.

I assume Dungeons and Dragons is responsible and probably just for the alliteration!

What was the earliest rpg-ish game with specific "dungeon" areas that used that term? Zelda 1 occurred to me as one of the earliest games that could qualify, but it appears that it just used "labyrinth" (zelda 2 then switched to "shinden" (temple/shrine) in Japanese which the zelda series has used ever since but the English manual for Zelda 2 appears to have just used "castle" to avoid religious connotations)

# ¿ Nov 6, 2023 21:40

mystes: May 31, 2006

oh yeah games like MUDs were already using the term "dungeon" since the 70s I guess

# ¿ Nov 6, 2023 21:49

mystes: May 31, 2006

obi_ant posted:

Is there a 3-D printing mega thread somewhere? I potentially want to buy a 3-D printer, but want to know more about the process

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3973815

# ¿ Nov 8, 2023 02:19

mystes: May 31, 2006

Maybe it's an autocorrect error for "accutane" or something?

# ¿ Nov 9, 2023 14:38

mystes: May 31, 2006

two fish posted:

Random American history-related question: let's say that the Whig Party from way back in the day was resurrected in modern American politics.

What would their position be on the modern left-right spectrum, and who would they target as their voter base? Do we have any modern American political figures that would fit in with them?

I don't think that's even a meaningful question because I don't think anyone particularly cares about the issues the whigs were concerned with now. If you brought whigs to the present via a time machine they would probably have to individually figure out whether they wanted to be leftists or conservatives in the current sense and which party they would want to join.

I think the current political party divide is fairly arbitrary even given current political issues and it would probably change pretty drastically if something happened to switch the US away from the current two party system, like a constitutional amendment to change to a parliamentary system (not that that will happen but I can dream)

# ¿ Nov 17, 2023 02:48

mystes: May 31, 2006

BonHair posted:

you're looking for yospos

I don't think that thread is what they're asking for

# ¿ Nov 25, 2023 16:36

mystes: May 31, 2006

Marx Headroom posted:

Would it be possible, using contemporary materials, to build a log cabin on the moon that you could hang out in without wearing a spacesuit?

A log cabin is usually made of logs

# ¿ Nov 25, 2023 22:12

mystes: May 31, 2006

Yeah I think it becomes more of a question of "what's the definition of a log cabin"

# ¿ Nov 25, 2023 22:16

mystes: May 31, 2006

Yngwie Mangosteen posted:

Log cabins are usually sealed with resin or similar binder like pine tar or thick mud, it's conceivably possible to me that you could air seal with that.

a log cabin where the logs are sealed in a solid block of epoxy

# ¿ Nov 26, 2023 02:58

mystes: May 31, 2006

You probably want an older iPad or something but I don't use Apple products so I'm not sure what version would be advisable

# ¿ Nov 26, 2023 05:05

mystes: May 31, 2006

thepopmonster posted:

Estimating a moon outhouse is left as an excercise for the reader.

We already have moon outhouses

# ¿ Nov 27, 2023 13:45

mystes: May 31, 2006

butt dickus posted:

then how do you explain all the skin bars i've saved up over the years

just wait until they nerf your unlimited max skin bar trick in the next patch

# ¿ Nov 29, 2023 18:21

mystes: May 31, 2006

I think that was a joke

# ¿ Dec 3, 2023 18:15

mystes: May 31, 2006

I think all of the major services have added or announced plans to add ad supported plans at this point

# ¿ Dec 3, 2023 20:59

mystes: May 31, 2006

Earwicker posted:

does the idea of "mechs" as portrayed in e.g. battletech have any kind of realistic basis for being a military technology we will see in future phases of human development?

or is it just pure fantasy concocted because they look cool and have a somewhat humanoid form and thus battles between mechs even in some far future setting recreate on some subconscious level the glorious battles between individual human warriors in days of old? but there's no reason to like actually, make them?

I mean swords are also probably loving useless against poo poo like halberds and everyone loves swords in historical games and rich people have historically loved dumb swords for show, so I suppose in some sort of space fantasy future people could use mechs even though they're useless

It's not like most sci-fi representations of space combat don't have stupid impossible dogfighting or whatever

# ¿ Dec 5, 2023 20:07

mystes: May 31, 2006

TooMuchAbstraction posted:

I wouldn't say it's so much "murky" as it is obvious, but at cross-purposes to what corporations want. As Earwicker says, corporations want to be able to use AI to cut their operating costs, by firing 90+% of their "creatives" and using the remaining 10% to fix AI's mistakes. So they want AI to be legal, but controlled and monetizable. Meanwhile, the actual models are only possible through massive copyright infringement, by downloading everything everyone has ever uploaded to the internet, without regard to associated licenses and copyright, and shoving it all into a neural net. The models could only be made in the first place by using an academic-only exemption that permits copyright infringement for research and educational purposes.

How copyright relates to ai models trained on copyrighted works is still an open question. Also, when you say "could only be made in the first place by using an academic-only exemption that permits copyright infringement for research and educational purposes" I'm not sure if that's meant to be hypothetical or saying there is actually such an exception but the latter I don't think there is specifically an exception that anything goes for academic research in the US, it would just have to fall under fair use generally which is mostly up to the courts

# ¿ Dec 7, 2023 17:42

mystes: May 31, 2006

I can't imagine that there aren't going to be a bunch of lawsuits over the next few years. It will just be easier to sue when it's like "this chinese movie was created using ai models that were trained specifically on disney movies" rather than "this model was trained on tons of stuff on the internet which may or may not have included works a handful of people created"

# ¿ Dec 7, 2023 17:54

mystes: May 31, 2006

RCarr posted:

None of that is gonna happen. Write a review if you want to.

It's very rare but there are cases where people have, for example, sued people for writing negative reviews online

99% of the time it will be fine but I would personally be hesitant to write a negative review of a small business under my actual name because you never know if they're going to be crazy

I think there is a definite chance if you're identifiable they'll at least try to contact you to resolve the situation / get you to take the negative review down

mystes fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Dec 7, 2023

# ¿ Dec 7, 2023 19:20

mystes: May 31, 2006

Mister Speaker posted:

Is there such a thing as a functional USB splitter or switch? I've been editing photos on my laptop at my desktop lately, because it's a newer computer that can run a better version of DxO Photolab than my desktop. So I connect it to my large 4K monitor and do exposure correction and stuff there. I've been unplugging my desktop's keyboard to connect it to the laptop so I'm not actually awkwardly sitting there using this tiny-rear end keyboard when I have a full one and a trackball. Is there something I can get so that I'm not constantly unplugging my desktop keyboard and plugging it back in?

yeah those exist. just search for 2 computer usb switch or something on amazon

you can get really cheap ones compared to full kvm switches that handle video if you just buy a random one

# ¿ Dec 9, 2023 02:51

mystes: May 31, 2006

Bright Bart posted:

I got contact today. They offered to let me return the goods despite their policy on opened products. They did not agree to refund shipping or pay for shipping it back to them, that's on me.

They also did not agree to change what's on the website. What I bought isn't a shirt, but in my 100% Italian cotton shirts example the argument these guys gave was the equivalent of 'We do make 100% cotton shirts. We get pure cotton, which we then blend with polyester to make our fabrics. And we buy the cotton from Italian wholesalers. It might not have been processed in Italy or even physically been in Italy but it's not a lie to say it's Italian cotton.' I pointed out that while I can't do anything about it, it clearly is intended to be misleading, and these also are terms defined by law and one day they'll get into trouble. And they're not a big enough company to hire the lawyers to get out of it. The person told me they can't make these decisions and has no direct access to people on the level that would. Which is likely true, but frustrating.

All in all I'm not sure what to do. I don't know if I want to take a review that could warn others about this for what amounts to less than half of what I paid when you factor in shipping.

imo if they were willing to give you a 100% refund including shipping and pay for return shipping you could update your review with an addition to reflect that they were nice enough to do that but otherwise you shouldn't change it in that case since their site is still misleading

if they're not even willing to do that even though the product isn't as described that's not any kind of resolution. you would also be justified in cancelling the charge on your credit card.

If the product isn't as described it doesn't matter what their stated return policy is, they need to fully refund you imo. It's entirely their responsibility to not say things like "100% italian cotton" if it's not 100% italian cotton.

mystes fucked around with this message at 15:44 on Dec 11, 2023

# ¿ Dec 11, 2023 15:37

mystes: May 31, 2006

NotNut posted:

Do you know if it specifically allows you to use the TV as a second monitor, as opposed to just mirroring your screen?

I think you would need to use third party software to create a virtual monitor in Windows or an HDMI dummy plug and then cast from the second monitor

Alternatively if that's what you want you could look into getting a wireless HDMI transmitter receiver set but they're more expensive than getting a Chromecast

You could also get a Miracast receiver rather than a Chromecast if your main interest is screen mirroring but that requires your computer to support it and I'm not sure how well supported it is since it never really caught on

Also if you want to do games or something you should probably look into using moonlight to stream it to an android device rather than any of the other options. Chromecast is more for just mirroring your web browser and basic stuff like that

mystes fucked around with this message at 14:31 on Dec 14, 2023

# ¿ Dec 14, 2023 14:28

mystes: May 31, 2006

It was renamed to iran in 1998 after the release of the imac obviously

# ¿ Dec 15, 2023 20:10

mystes: May 31, 2006

Drunk Driver Dad posted:

This is a dumb question but please humor me.

I work a lot of hours, I'm always exhausted, yet I'm also always anxious. I have this sort of self inflicted problem. It usually only happens when I have a day off the next day and my brain knows I can be more irresponsible. But I like to fall asleep in my computer chair, nodding off while trying to watch a space video or something is a nice peaceful feeling I don't get a lot of. The problem is, even though I'll set an alarm, I often just ignore it and sleep the whole drat night in my chair. Luckily it doesn't cause me too many issues other than the sleep being lower quality. But how likely am I to get DVT and a clot and die from this? I know for a fact I tend to adjust and straighten my legs out under my desk a lot without thinking about it because it hurts my knee to have a bent leg for a long time. Do I need to actually worry about this? I'm normally very active and walk at least 10-12 miles a day at work most days if that makes any difference. I'd say I'm in my chair sleeping about 6-7 hours most of the time, sometimes I might get up and go sleep walk to the olive jar and go right back to the chair.

Maybe ask a doctor, but I'd be more worried that you have some other problem like sleep apnea (which is dangerous) if you're that tired that you keep falling asleep in your chair

# ¿ Dec 16, 2023 17:24

mystes: May 31, 2006

If you don't want french press coffee, just get a cheap pourover cone that sits on a mug and makes one cup of coffee and use a paper filter in it. That will get you most of the way to good coffee with a minimum of fuss and as long as you use a paper filter in it any pourover cone will be fine so you can just buy the cheapest one off of amazon (or from your supermarket).

That said you probably could just stuff a filter into the basket of your teapot if you really need to

Also if you ever need hot water for any beverages do yourself a favor and get an electric kettle if you don't have one already.

mystes fucked around with this message at 23:36 on Dec 16, 2023

# ¿ Dec 16, 2023 23:32

mystes: May 31, 2006

BonHair posted:

As an aside, coffee needs water that has recently been boiled, so 90-98 degrees roughly, not boiling.

Lots of people like James Hoffman disagree.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2023 15:35

mystes: May 31, 2006

Grassy Knowles posted:

i think BonHair is speaking in terms of degrees Celcius. Hoffmann says to pour water just off the boil and I perceive the overall point being made in this conversation is not to boil the grounds themselves. (If that's not BonHair's point, it is mine)

Edit: I'd expect to lose 2 degrees C simply between performing the boil and pouring.

Perhaps that wasn't what was meant but some people do argue that you should intentionally heat the water to below boiling before doing a pourover or whatever so it's not too hot so it's probably worth noting that there are people who disagree with the advisability of that because by time the water hits the grounds it will be a good temperature anyway

mystes fucked around with this message at 15:53 on Dec 17, 2023

# ¿ Dec 17, 2023 15:51

mystes: May 31, 2006

Powered Descent posted:

Would it be possible to engineer noise-canceling headphones that instead of canceling what they detect as "noise", they'd take an audio input, and cancel out anything that sounds like it matches that, from moment to moment?

I had a crazy idea: earbuds for retail employees that could connect to the store wifi and receive the real-time audio stream for the Muzak, and so know exactly which sound waves to cancel to make the drat Christmas carols go away. But I admit I have only a vague notion of how noise cancellation actually works, so I don't know if such a thing is even feasible.

I don't think that's like theoretically impossible but it would be insanely complicated to set up and it would also probably require dynamically modelling the distortion of the music entering the earphones and correcting for it in a way that probably wouldn't really be feasible

If the music is known in advance it might be able to do that ahead of time off the device on something with more cpu power, so it might theoretically be possible with current technology, but the timing would be dependent on your exact position and orientation and the physics of the room you were in, and if you were moving at I think that would change, so even if you were able to perfectly model the distortion, it would presumably stop working when you moved at all, so I don't think it would be practical?

mystes fucked around with this message at 17:38 on Dec 17, 2023

# ¿ Dec 17, 2023 17:29

mystes: May 31, 2006

Earwicker posted:

there are function in Adobe Audtion that allows you to enter a sample of audio input, and then try to remove anything resembling that sample from another (longer) piece of audio. I use this all the time to remove background hisses etc. from dialogue. However, first of all it of course doesn't function in realtime.. tho I could see that sort of thing coming in the future. but also, it kind of sucks for anything other than very consistent drone-like sounds. Hisses, engines, rumbles, that sort of thing is what it can get rid of. If you give it like, a saxophone playing an A and then try to apply that to a recording of some sax music and try to delete any instances of the sax playing an A, it's not going to work like that, it just sounds kind of uh.. wonky. it's hard to describe. it's not good. yet.

I think one thing that makes noise cancelling harder is that it apparently can't just receive the current audio, process it, and produce the correct signal to cancel it, because it wouldn't be in time to cancel it. Instead it has to predict the audio a little bit ahead and cancel that, so it's significantly harder than just removing noise from audio data in realtime.

Otherwise, you could just run something like RTX Voice to figure out what to keep, and then compute the signal to cancel the rest of the audio and it would be fairly trivial

However, it's still possible that fancier machine learning approaches could do a better job of prediction than whatever current noise cancelling earphones are using with enough processing power. It might not require knowledge of the specific song to do an adequate job predicting a millisecond ahead in a song most of the time, but I haven't looked into it at all, and I don't know whether there has been research into it.

mystes fucked around with this message at 19:05 on Dec 17, 2023

# ¿ Dec 17, 2023 19:01

mystes: May 31, 2006

Flipperwaldt posted:

That's exactly how noise cancelling works though. Microphones placed a determined distance from your ear drums receive the audio before it reaches your ear drums and the signal to subtract is calculated in the time difference. It can do this because electrons travel faster than sound. It doesn't have to predict poo poo.

I don't think this is possible because to cancel the sound the earphones have to produce the opposite signal in the frequency domain using a fourier transform which is effectively a prediction, and they can't literally just take the current from the microphone and invert it or something like that. My understanding is that this is why active noise cancellation is better at handing some kinds of noises than others.

But I'm not an expert on this and I could be wrong.

mystes fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Dec 17, 2023

# ¿ Dec 17, 2023 19:58

mystes: May 31, 2006

BonHair posted:

If anyone has good suggestions without noises, my wife would be quite pleased.

If you need a fidget toy that makes zero noise at all that's probably going to limit your options. If you can accept a little noise there would probably be more possibilities.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2023 21:39

mystes: May 31, 2006

Flipperwaldt posted:

You've got it the wrong way round. The window required for useful fft doesn't require to make predictions, it requires you to make do with sound of the past. So instead of the idealized subtracting current from current sound, they're subtracting past sound from the current sound. This is why constant self similar sound like hum gets filtered out well, but transient sounds don't.

Isn't that saying the exact same thing just saying "current" and "past" instead of "future" and "current"? Either way it's effectively a prediction because frequencies don't exist instantaneously and if the sound changes the produced signal won't cancel out the noise you're hearing.

Your original post sounded like you were saying the cancellation could be done instantaneously simply by taking the microphone input, inverting it, and sending to the earphones faster than the sound can travel, which as far as I can tell is impossible. However, if that's not what you are saying, perhaps it's simply a semantic difference?

mystes fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Dec 17, 2023

# ¿ Dec 17, 2023 22:00

mystes: May 31, 2006

ultrafilter posted:

No, because if you're doing real-time filtering, you observe the current and the past sounds, but you don't observe the future.

Unless the earphones can look at sample n from the microphone and say "oh frequency component x has suddenly ceased to exist since sample n-1" aren't they sometimes going to produce a signal that does not actually cancel the current audio, in which case isn't it reasonable to view the algorithm of performing a fourier transform, inverting it, and performing an inverse fourier transform as "predicting" the future signal in an attempt to cancel it?

# ¿ Dec 17, 2023 22:14

mystes: May 31, 2006

GWBBQ posted:

Windows 10 and 11's "Connect to a Wireless Display" functionality is integrated , fully functional, and licensed Miracast.

I think you still need driver support in both your video card and wifi card (because it requires wifi direct). But I don't have any devices that can act as miracast receiver so I haven't tried it in a while. Maybe most computers support it now.

My impression from before was that it seemed like it usually only worked on laptops with intel integrated graphics and an intel wifi chipset but maybe that's not true anymore.

It's definitely worth trying in case both your laptop and tv happen to support it though.

mystes fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Dec 18, 2023

# ¿ Dec 18, 2023 17:44

mystes: May 31, 2006

Nevil Maskelyne posted:

the concept of 3d chess has existed for decades, it was in star trek TNG like 30 years ago. it's just shorthand for complicated strategizing, it has nothing to do with goofy internet conspiracy dipshits lol

Are you saying that star trek used "3d chess" as a meme or just star trek literally depicted a three dimensional version of chess?

# ¿ Dec 20, 2023 19:50

mystes: May 31, 2006

at any rate the current usage definitely predates trump

This blog post from 2009 has an image referencing a meme about "11 dimensional chess" in relation to Obama: https://www.ghostinthemachine.net/the-myth-of-11-dimensional-chess/

# ¿ Dec 20, 2023 19:54

mystes: May 31, 2006

artsy fartsy posted:

Ahh I actually watched something about this recently, and it probably does explain why I need the subs so much (also some ADDish audio-processing reasons--I also have trouble understanding actual people talking to me.) But what I'm talking about is the dialogue being completely removed. I assume it has something to do with being edited out, but, why do the subs still have it?

You're talking about english closed captions for shows originally in english, right? where have you been seeing this (tv/movies? what platform?)? I don't think I've encountered that particular problem yet

# ¿ Dec 25, 2023 01:45

mystes: May 31, 2006

I feel like recently I've had more problems with subtitles that are clearly just done by some random person listening to the audio without the script and maybe not fully understanding what's going on. I think the amazon originals tend to be like that.

# ¿ Dec 25, 2023 02:43

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# ¿ May 3, 2024 06:29

mystes: May 31, 2006

The current state of the art like aws/azure is a lot better than old text to speech and I think there are some open source ones you can use offline that are also supposed to be decent too as long as you have a good enough GPU

I haven't seen any software that will just do an entire ebook at once conveniently either using the AWS/azure text to speech APIs or offline but I'm sure someone will make one soon since it should be trivial

If you're at a computer you can try using the text to speech functionality in Edge to see if the quality is good enough for you, although it's not that convenient to use for something like a whole book that you need to pause and resume

mystes fucked around with this message at 23:37 on Dec 25, 2023

# ¿ Dec 25, 2023 23:22

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Stupid/Small Questions Megathread

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