Viewing profile — tomc1985

Spectrograms are used in speech therapy to help with pronunciation. I remember using one such program to correct my own speech, at elementary school in the 90s. It was even a game:…

No, I am not saying this is a fact-free zone. What I am saying is that it is a zone for opinions, which may or may not be true (counterfactual may not be the best word choice here,…

Growing up I do not remember political associations to be so strong in folks. Twenty years ago, when 9/11 hit, we put aside our differences in a remarkable display of national unit…

The past as you see it here doesn't exist, by my own perception. There were a lot more extremeist groups in the shadows, but that contained them and isolated those that sought to j…

Yeah, online communities reflexively "other" anyone who does not agree with their increasingly robust (aka fascist) political dogma, given that that sort of thing seems to be inesc…

They don't start fresh every three months. Usually they have multiple leagues cooking up in the oven at any given time, so that if the league they want to release isn't ready in ti…

Humorists all over the western world are finding that the newest members of their audience don't even speak their language any more. Kind of reminds me of the Funnybot episode of S…

I've gotten good enough at Linux to where I don't need to constantly look stuff up after long periods of use, but not FreeBSD. Which is why I love FreeBSD so much. It's consistent,…

Haven't tried Mono, Node, or anything NoSQL, but Java, Ruby, and Postgres all run pretty well. It is runtime-compatibile with Linux executables and you can even install a linux dis…

And supporting them is supporting a faceless corporation run by young, ageist technocrats, where all your rights are squashed under DRM

On a high quality record with a high quality setup, you can have both. It's because the distortion is really subtle, and hits all the right harmonics. On bass-heavy music it makes …

Yes, but it really isn't that far. As soon as you leave the edge of suburba-mega-town you're in wilderness again. Where I live it's much less than a half-hour of driving, from the …

Maybe on the popular coasts, but most of inner USA is little pockets of development spread out among large wilderness Hell even the California countryside is like this, once you ge…

I wonder if it made the association from being shown images with various kinds of fights, a large portion of which may have been bloody.

Stop anthropomorphisizing computers! They hate that!

Maybe it's the prevailing trend among non-HN people that sucks.

Would a confidant or ally obscure the reasons for problems behind a friendly face? Would they use subtlety and emotional manipulation to push you to use the things that they want y…

touche

The tonality of all the new copy in Windows 10 is just bad. It's like a bunch of nontechnicals got together and tried to cuteify the OS. I had totally forgotten about how obnoxious…

I miss the bluescreens that didn't have emoticons

Computers don't have feelings, they process data. I don't want servants, I have computers for that. So how I talk to them shouldn't matter. In fact, if you have a servant at all, Y…

They're trying to come off as friendly and inviting, but I read it as half-assed. Perception is a bitch. If I had my way we'd dispense with all these stupid pleasantries. My comput…

Kind of like how Windows' first-time boot-up greets you with a flat (and totally inappropriate) "Hi" Like fucking seriously, not even "Hello"? "Hi" is how I greet the coworker I do…

I don't know what's so demonstrably false about it; there is credible evidence (cited in another comment) suggesting mineral/electrolyte loss from drinking demineralized water and …

I'm thinking demineralized water, of which distillation is several ways to produce it. The rub seems to be that it leeches minerals from both the body and distribution mechanisms (…