TBF this always ends up with a lot of misplaced blame on the consumer

TV manufacturers decided/figured out long ago that Joe public cares more about a screen being thin, at time of purchase, than it having any semblance of audio quality. And they assume anyone who cares about audio will buy a set of speakers or (increasingly) a sound bar anyway, so they just need the bare minimum included.

This has gotten to the absurd point now where the speakers included in your average TV aren’t much better than a particularly loud phone speaker.

It’s basically impossible to get something that sounds even audible on those speakers, without doing what adverts do and compressing the shit out of the signal, which has the bonus of sounding loud and bad for everyone, there’s no bringing the detail back that was squashed out. Movie studios aren’t going to mix a movie that sounds bad on a system designed remotely properly (e.g. a cinema or reviewer’s TV), so we’re in the current situation.

The unfortunate situation today is you basically need some kind of separate speaker(s) with a TV because the manufacturers all have cheaped out across the board and don’t include anything good enough any more. The consumer shouldn’t be expected to know this and have to pay extra, the TV should come with speakers capable of producing audio properly.

Focal length motherfucker, do you choose it?

If you don’t, you’re letting your focal length choose your photos

It’s not every day you get to use a word like dilettante, so I figured I’d make a salad

Flukey dilettante regards stochastic parrot as unfathomable prodigy

Read all about it

Yeah, but as someone who grew up down south and has lived in the north for the majority of my life:

Breakfast, lunch, dinner

Very clear, no fucker doesn’t know what you’re talking about

Breakfast, dinner, tea

What the fuck are you playing at, skipping lunch and having a drink to compensate?

Get in the sea

Tea is important enough in this country to not use the word again, especially not for the second most important thing: dinner

He wasn’t impressed and I didn’t make it to the next round.

Poor Stockholm syndrome afflicted fool

Breaks my heart to know people are still suffering this particular hell

That was always the fake dream that was sold, about 15 years ago there were a lot of people writing cukes

I never saw a single business analyst or product owner ever open even one of those text files that ostensibly primarily only existed for their benefit.

The closest we got was copy and pasting the user story from the ticket and hammering it into the shape of the existing regexes

Then we all woke up from the fever dream about 10 years ago and I’ve basically not seen one since.

Tbh with this AI bubble it’s only a matter of time before someone tries it again

Oh I’m aware we don’t have one global standards org, but generally at ISO, IETF, IEEE, ITU & IEC are all some that come to mind with some level of shared interest, however I wouldn’t say they act competitively to each other and tend to work collaboratively rather than competitively.

I suppose interestingly, to use your HDMI example, this is kind of what happens when you don’t have a central standards body handling this stuff, HDMI came from the television industry and DisplayPort came from the computing industry. There is no technical reason for both to exist, and one could have been adapted to fill the needs of both and become the one standard if it wasn’t for industry groups ultimately trying to profit (HDMI carries licensing fees and requirements, so does DP to a lesser extent).

I guess you’re right though, I probably should have thought it through a bit more before my last comment

Yeah I was going to say the same, this was created by someone with an overly basic understanding of how these things work

Natural monopolies over things like infrastructure and standards aren’t necessarily bad as long as they’re not privately owned nor profit seeking.

For instance, I can’t exactly imagine how a market of competitive standards orgs would even remotely be able to reach the consensus necessary to accomplish the goal of creating standards. It’d just be an endless XKCD 927

Letterboxd is pretty good, though it got bought by private equity a few years ago and they’re now trying to flog it off to Netflix or Paramount, so probably numbered days

Ahh cheers, yeah that one is more in line with the usual style

I think you’ve got the power dynamic wrong here

If OP is having to contact loads of estate agents, it’s probably because they live somewhere with in-demand property.

That means those estate agents are going to have loads of potential people to sell to

Someone who wants to do something differently than everyone else is going to get a lower priority over someone who just does everything they are asked without question.

The estate agent doesn’t really lose anything by doing this, OP risks reducing their chances at getting a place, ostensibly one they need to live in at some point soon.

Not sure I’ve seen that one, but this is the comic artist for The Onion, satirising the style of those right wing comics (e.g Ben Garrison) that show contrived situations with labels all over them to try and make some point badly

I assume the standard “I didn’t wait to see the reviews” cosmetic that all pre-orders seem to give people these days

Dino-mo

Oh don’t get me wrong, our intrepid adventurers are going to have to spend a good chunk of time on this with no guarantee they live long enough.

However assuming knowledge isn’t a gap (given they already built a time machine), iron ore is fairly abundant in many areas of the world, and it’s relatively straightforward to build a kiln that would reach the appropriate temperatures to smelt the iron into bloom (that can be hammered into workable iron)

It’ll take many, many years, but assuming they can avoid ending up as food, it doesn’t seem impossible

Assuming Dr. Stone is some kind of MacGyver regen:

Two obvious approaches to me that I’ll run through in high level: build a wind/watermill generators or potato/lemon batteries

First thing you’ll need to figure out for both is how to make some wire. That’s going to require finding some metal ore and a hot furnace, and creating a few tools out of stone to work with it.

The biggest difficulty with the former two is going to be finding some ferrous metal to turn into magnets. You can make a magnet without electricity by smashing the shit out of some iron as it’s aligned with the earth’s magnetic field, and it’ll become a weak magnet. From there with enough wire, you can build a generator. With the sails of the mill, you can build that out of wood and foliage.

For potato or lemon batteries, you’re going to need a shitload, as they give you about a volt and a pretty tiny current, but theoretically you could figure something out that way with enough. I imagine some things may want to eat your batteries though

Does anyone else have it where they see an image of the guitar hero neck and instantly get the intro to “through the fire and flames” in their head

I played so many songs on that game, why not some variety, brain!

And to save you jumping around different VPN countries looking for it:

https://unogs.com/

I have something similar with my phone plan

My current plan (that I’ve been on for about 7 years now) includes unlimited everything and global roaming across basically anywhere I’ve ever visited (only had to get a separate ESIM once)

I’m regularly getting offers from them to switch to a plan with limits and more restricted roaming for only an extra 25% more a month…!