Appreciate this, I was feeling the same way as the original comment. It looks maybe over-sharpened, but I don't see anything as glaring as the text of the article makes it sound! (Of course, I'm not a video codec developer.)
It does remind me of how stereo & speaker manufacturers sometimes boost treble a little bit (rather than being perfectly "transparent" to the original signal) because it gives the impression of clarity. But ideally each step in the processing chain "colors" the signal as little as possible, because those little differences can add up.
Yeah, audio response curves have always been a bit confusing to me. Like, they say that headphones should use a Harman curve because that sounds 'best' to listeners, but how valid is it as an objective measure? (E.g., will listeners 50 years from now find a different curve 'better', the same way that instrument tuning has changed over centuries?) And how much of it is responding to current practices in recording and mixing?
Of course, you won't get a sound as if you're in the same room (without a very fancy setup), so you'll generally want some sort of transformation to get an acceptable output. And artists often want to aim for a certain effect on top of that. But with how things currently are, many of the decisions going into the final sound are very opaque.
> Like, they say that headphones should use a Harman curve because that sounds 'best' to listeners, but how valid is it as an objective measure?
It should be valid because it's "neutral". IIRC it's basically a conversion to simulate how a neutrally tuned speaker would sound if you were in the same room.
There are many reasons objective headphone measurements aren't actually objective for you though. The biggest one is that they're taken in a silent room, so a single CPU fan or anything near you makes it invalid. Noise cancelling can mean a lot in practice.
The other reasons are that different people have different ear shapes, some people wear glasses so the headphones can't get a seal, your amp isn't electrically compatible with the headphone, your music is badly mastered so you prefer a headphone badly tuned the opposite way, etc.
> It should be valid because it's "neutral". IIRC it's basically a conversion to simulate how a neutrally tuned speaker would sound if you were in the same room.
Is it, though? Blogspam posts about it waffle over the exact definition, but Olive's original post [0] gives the methodology, "A panel of 10 trained listeners rated each headphone based on overall preferred sound quality, perceived spectral balance, and comfort," and a later Harman post seems to cite the original methodology without comment [1].
Unless the subjective part was just to select between different headphones that had been calibrated to simulate neutral speakers? The posts don't make it entirely clear where the curves originally came from.
The thing that gets me about audio is people obviously have different ears. Some are more sensitive to high frequencies, etc. It's even age-dependent. It's like salt preference on food.
One thing I've worried about with self-hosting small (or smol) services is that I'm responsible for securing them against attackers. Even if my circle is 15 people using a particular service, potentially thousands of malicious actors will be poking at it over the months and years I'm running it.
I'm a big fan of self-hosting, especially things that I can run inside my home with no internet-facing ports. But anything that will be outward facing has to be sandboxed from everything else, kept up to date, and monitored for intrusions. It can be daunting unless you definitely have time to stay on top of it. I'm curious if any self-hosters have thoughts about this.
I have been running an SBC server at home for years with many publicly available services for friends and family. To keep everything secure and easy to maintain, I use Yunohost.org which is a distribution containing most of what you need to easily install, secure, update, backup, and manage the server. It includes fail2ban and other security measures. If you or your server would be target of a persistent attacker, using VLAN's or a VPS would be a good idea. I am sure somebody will comment on some tangents to go down a rabbit hole, but I am like probably 95% of self hosters whose servers contain nothing of any value for a hacker.
As the "Administration" tag for my blog will attest, the sysadmin side does take a lot of work. Every now and then something is down, something needs defending (like the current HN users all clicking on the site which is running without any caches…), and on and on. In my experience, it's not so much cybercriminals that keep me busy but bad programmers that write spiders that treat every website in the world like corporate infrastructure. Stuff like git, cgit, radicale, a bunch of web apps, a netnews server, an IRC server, those things aren't tricky. But of course I also decided not to host mail, matrix, Next Cloud and so on. You need to pick your battles, too.
In the past I ended up in a place where I self-hosted virtually everything I consumed within my network that could be self-hosted. Right down to major OS software update caching.
It’s definitely exhausting and I hit upon a point where it felt like I couldn’t distinguish between home and business infrastructure. I expanded to include family stuff, and that became a massive headache. When you do that, it’s not always easy to extricate yourself either. It took several years to downsize so my services were only consumed by me again. Then a few more to fully move to non-self-hosted almost-everything.
I used to host my mail but that eventually becomes a headache. It didn’t become an admin headache, but overtime it became either/or (depending on the time) a technical liability or a security concern.
These days I try to buy/pay for the services I consume instead of self-hosting. However I’ve been moving back to assuming a “self hosting first” mindset because it seems like so many tech companies are actively trying to alienate their user base lately.
Tailscale does make sharing services amongst groups of technically minded friends _crazy_ simple.
I mean, bandwidth doesn't really matter if we're talking about whether the device is sending home private information about what content you watch. It doesn't need to stream video back to Samsung to be basically malware.
I'm liking vimwiki, for what it's worth. It feels like a pretty small set of changes to vim that make the wiki stuff "just work", and otherwise it's my regular ass plaintext world that I love.
I'm running Jellyfin on a recent Intel-based Synology (they also have cheaper ARM CPU models), and it can transcode H.265->H.264 on the fly using about 50% CPU. It also runs in a Docker container so it's pretty easy to manage. I'm a big fan!
Its provided by Google Lens suggestions, so you'll need to have that enabled in the Camera settings for it to appear. It also seems a little slow sometimes, give it a few seconds for it to show up a small suggestion bubble at the bottom of the viewfinder.
I'm using Google Camera version 8.1 on a fully updated Pixel 4a and it works for me.
I wrote "for taking away control from the legitimate user" at the end. I can't believe people are taking the worst possible interpretation of this, but I suppose that's HN. I have since posting this edited "the device owner" in at the top.
It does remind me of how stereo & speaker manufacturers sometimes boost treble a little bit (rather than being perfectly "transparent" to the original signal) because it gives the impression of clarity. But ideally each step in the processing chain "colors" the signal as little as possible, because those little differences can add up.