Social Schmarrn

I had fun playing around with matplotlib today!

Notice how above an angular frequency of pi, aliasing occurs. See Nyquist Shannon sampling theorem (Wikipedia) for more information.

All the technical stuff aside, I think there are some pretty patterns emerging the fewer points per period the time-discrete signal has. Almost like there are multiple sines, even though there only is one.

Also, each point seems to have its own frequency, which gets higher the further away from zero it is. Kinda hypnotic!

You know, I love to listen to music. I, like many others, pay for Spotify. Mostly to be able to download music to listen to on the go.

Lately, I've noticed very annoying things with Spotify. I am sitting in the train, thinking "Hey, haven't listened to that specific album I've downloaded in a long time, let's give it a listen". Only to find out that I don't have it downloaded anymore? I am either crazy, or Spotify just deleted the album. Slightly annoyed, I chose another one to listen to, but to be completely honest, that's just a workaround, not a solution.

Today, I am on my computer, with internet access, all seems fine. I open Spotify in Firefox (because the native app is utter garbage), click play on some playlist, only to be greeted with a message "Spotify can't play this right now".

WHAT DO YOU MEAN? I am literally throwing money at your service to listen to music. And then you refuse to work?

The moral of the story: I want to leave Spotify. I am done with it deleting things I've downloaded. I am done with it not working when I want to listen to music. I am done with it not even paying artists well.

But Spotify does two things reasonably well: Throwing new artists at me that I might like (even though it feels like that got worse too) and having a huge library of music. I want to listen to some old song hardly anyone knows about? It's probably on Spotify.

And this is why I now scream into the endless void of the fediverse, fully knowing that nobody may hear my voice, with a question:

Where do you get your music from? What are good places to buy digital music? How do you discover new music to listen to? Are there streaming services that aren't as bad as Spotify?

Note: I am not interested in pirating music. I want the artists to get at least some amount of compensation.

Your skill is someone else's luck

I love the way CWs are used in the corner of the fediverse I'm in. They give context what the post is about, and if I don't want to read it, I don't read it or just skim it (uspol, for example). BUT, I think Content Warning isn't the best term for it, and partly the reason why others don't understand why they should CW their post — after all, they don't post pictures of spiders or NSFW content (things traditionally associated with CWs), why should they warn someone about their shitposts or ramblings or politics? I think a better name would be Content Description or something like that, just because Fedi-Culture took the CW feature and "misused" it for describing what their post is about (and I love it).

To me, CWs on Fedi feel like alttexts of images, but for text — very valuable pieces of information complementing the original content.

An interesting blog-post about notifications: Pull vs push: intentional notifications

There are two things I can really vibe with:

On their phones, my peers usually have a list of notifications a mile long, full of new emails and YouTube videos and Slack messages and “your lives are restored!” messages from mobile games and so much more. I think reducing that barrage — on all systems, not just phones — is a great way to start building a healthier relationship with technology.

I myself disabled most notifications on my smartphone, the only apps allowed to send push notifications are instant messaging apps like element, whatsapp, signal and the like (but not discord) and the K9 email client — stuff where I want to know if someone messaged me.

The other thing are RSS Feeds. Instead of visiting a dozen or so sites, I only visit my miniflux instance and quickly skim the headlines. While RSS Feeds seem like this really old thing of the past, they are really really great!

Are you ready for a very cursed way of printing out a array containing a lot of "true" values?

If you want to play with it: https://godbolt.org/z/8E3rjP9zE

This morning was brought to you by not getting Zoom Screensharing to work on my Linux (Hyprland, somewhat understandable with it being Wayland) and my Android Tablet (not understandable).

Followed by "Windows doesn't connect to my WiFi" even though when running Linux, the same hardware connects within seconds.

After a few minutes, Windows finally connected to my WiFi. After not finding the "Download" button on the zoom website, I installed it with winget (winget is really nice and installed by default in Windows 11 I believe, try it if you have to use Windows) - and now I can finally screenshare in Zoom. Only took an hour or so.