• 3 Posts
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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: March 14th, 2025

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  • no

    I would vote for it, because it seems nice and I don’t see myself sitting still regardless, just that I’d choose more fulfilling / societally beneficial work if there weren’t this idea of needing to provide and work with market forces. But then it came up with my cousin and she said she’d do fuck all, travel, spend time horse riding or whatnot, anything but work because why bother. Less anecdotal studies show cautiously positive results (or exceedingly positive in misleading headlines until you open the study and find two sides to the coin), but afaik have so far been very limited in both scale and duration. So idk but it seems at least worth a real try. Do we always need to have strong opinions?



  • As someone who can’t hear high pitches at all, I do recognise this funky bouncing of frequencies at the edge of my hearing range (probably around 15 kHz, I haven’t precisely measured it). It’s surprisingly hard to locate sound sources when you only hear them when you’re facing a certain angle in a certain spot in the room! These are always too quiet for my phone to pick up, so that’s no help sadly

    I wonder if there’d be a market for a variant of a phone model that is just all-round decent, but has a better microphone and other sensor upgrades. I run into the sensor limits a lot (probably weekly) but also don’t want to permanently run around with a bulky sensor board in my pocket :<


  • Probably related: apparently (some?) people can learn to use echolocation. Particularly useful for blind people of course, but I’ve read it’s too much effort and too limited compared to the alternative solutions so that it’s generally not considered worth pursuing. Naturally I had to try it myself: distinguishing the distance to one wall isn’t hard at all, at least coarsely; the difficulty seems to be in rapidly (while walking) finding smaller objects (especially ones that dampen sound), figuring out angles if you’re not facing or precisely perpendicular to a wall, and dealing with background noise

    With your superhuman hearing, maybe you’d enjoy casually learning to do this at some level and getting some use out of the hearing sensitivity :)


  • All lights? Also battery-fed DC lights somehow?! I’m no expert but that seems strange

    I’ve caught a lot of lights and light-emitting displays flickering with the 980fps camera that’s built into my phone (best thing since sliced bread for a nerd like me), but also quite many lights appear solid. I’d imagine few have such high-frequency electronics that it pulses well beyond 1 kHz. Otherwise the sensor should sometimes capture a frame during a low or a peak

    As an example, I was recently looking at car lights in Germany, expecting to see duty cycling in most modern ones, but the majority (2/3rds or so) were actually solid so far as I could tell. A few cars had a mixture of flickering and solid lights in seemingly the same fixture. All flickering ones were high frequency though, not like 50 Hz as grid-fed lights do but much more. I didn’t bother with ffmpeg and counting frames but I estimated on the order of 250 Hz for one of them



  • I definitely can’t hear high frequencies (I’m assuming due to ear infections as a child, feels mildly unfair that other people my age get to hear and understand conversations better but oh well) but coil whine is a thing for me as well.

    Had a router once that would whine depending on the network packet rate. My computer screen makes a noise when displaying large grids like a screen full of terminal text or a mostly blank spreadsheet. The led lights in my bathroom make a noise and I often turn them off while transacting my business. My Bluetooth headphones make similar noises depending on the connection state but that one is probably interference and not coil whine

    It happens at all frequencies. Although you don’t need to be able to hear special frequencies for it, of course you’ll hear it in more places if you have superlucg hearing ^^



  • Interesting perspective I haven’t heard about before, thanks for sharing this food for thought!

    I’m wondering if this can be extrapolated beyond physical things like the hammers and houses you mentioned. Would a rule of thumb like “one shouldn’t be able to appropriate more resources than one can personally make use of” fit with your point of view?

    E.g.: nobody should earn 3 million a year (thinking of the mozilla ceo here specifically lol, but I’m sure it’s common among big businesses), not leaving the heater on if you’re not home because (in most cases) someone else could have used that electricity or gas, selling or donating non-sentimental things you’re surely not going to use it again so that someone else can get use/value out of it, etc. As ideals to strive for of course, not necessarily all hard-and-fast rules









  • Saying this gift is awesome sounds like a straight-up lie, given what OP wrote about their true feeling

    Weasel wording around it, like acknowledging their thoughtfulness (as you say with “appreciate that you noticed how much I use it” without mentioning the gift’s downsides) seems like a really good option and I’d leave it at that, leaving options open to later discuss what to do with the instance of this object that has sentimental value attached. Hearing that question/thought (later, when not in the middle of a gift-giving ritual), the partner presumably realises the error without needing to be told and can warm up to the idea that this new one might not be what OP would prefer to keep