>>35533
Wizchan is a weird place. The /hob/ threads have a semblance of coherent discussion and hint that intelligent people do inhabit it (e.g. the math and programming threads have decent beyond-high-school-level discussion), but all other boards seem to be a dumping ground with a terrible signal-noise ratio. It feels like there's potential for it to be decent, but there's zero moderation so it ends up being a free-for-all.

I spent some years on some of the well-known places when I was younger until I started to feel that it was doing me a lot more bad than good, eventually found small imageboards and liked the atmosphere, been on and off the internet for a long time but to sum things up I'm mostly a lurker and occasional poster only in small places (mostly TC, sometimes lain and sushi).

What happened feels like a cycle, back in the day imageboards had a relatively small user base keeping things alive, there was a sense of community and a developing culture around it, time passed and things moved to the era where the internet gained both mainstream accessibility and popularity, traffic peaked and the quality of content declined, ruining many board's culture and inspiring the creation of smaller sites.
Now regarding the present it seems like a lot of people that used imageboards because of a fad are moving onto social media sites for good, and the younger generations are getting hooked to those places too, leaving imageboards behind.

Personally I feel that the most important thing on any board is to preserve it's culture and never forget it's roots.

there were a couple that i used to lurk but i never have time any more

>how do you not have time to check an imageboard a couple times a day?
I got a job and started getting very invested and very busy. to the point where i could no longer participate in any threads or games or events anybody in the community planned. checking the site because self inflicted sadness because all i would ever see are threads i missed, inside jokes i was no longer privy to, and even if i spent time trying to catch up id just get pulled away by work again and the cycle would restart. now after years it feels like the community has moved on and ive been completely forgotten, and all the friends i thought i made have forgotten about me

maybe one day ill be able to go back.....

Even though it's pretty bad now, most of us made good memories there. I like this year's ceremonial artwork, though not because of what it's referencing, but due to it being a rather simple affair depicting simple fun.
Next year, 4chan will be turning twenty, which will feel weird. But goodness, TC is getting up there too, and I can only hope it will also see two decades of existence.

>>40582
>many of them grew up raised by the computer
Sure, but you have to realize that most of it has been catered for Gen Z. They won't find anything if they don't look, and for a lot of Gen Z there isn't much to look for. Most people my age don't know much about computers or the internet outside of popular social media platforms. Even the PC gamer crowd is pretty dumb, with how simple things are.
>I can't be assed maintaining that friendship and so I just appear offline.
I don't think that's much of an age thing. I don't like conversating often. Even if I like someone, it ends up feeling like a chore to keep up with them. Not that I dislike them, but I'd rather not talk everyday. Ideally it's catching up every month or so. Rarely works out that way.

>>40584
Despite the difference in culture and technology use between younger / mid generations, I think there is interestingly a shared trait and that's a sense of bleakness and non-excitement about the future. Although what I can't really figure out is why despite knowing this they continue to let themselves be prisoners of the walled garden. E.g. if you were to survey the youth about whether big corporations have too much power, I'd bet a near unanimous majority would agree. And yet they seem content to have content spoonfed to them by the same corporations.

>>40585
I absolutely agree with your post, and I have thoughts as to why things are this way, at least for my fellow members of Gen Z. Mind you, I'm no expert in the Gen Z psyche, rather someone that has made observations in a fairly small sample.
I think it's an issue of outside pressure and a perceived lack of alternatives. I will use streaming subscription services as an example. While they provide tons of options for a seemingly fair price, they require an internet connection, you can lose access at anytime, and you end up paying a lot of money for a subscription in which you own nothing. It sucks, but the alternatives are to:
A. Pay for everything yourself which would be more expensive up front for something you might never watch more than once.
B. Pirate and risk infecting your computer/device with malware, being dropped by your ISP, or a costly lawsuit.
To the uninitiated, the subscription service will look like the only reasonable choice, when really, one of these choices has every upside with no downside if you aren't an idiot. The thing is, in my experience average person is. The issue isn't a lack of knowledge, but an unwillingness to learn for themselves.

For another example, more related to "outside pressure", would be smartphones. When I was in school, you'd see people making fun of android devices for being seen as cheaper and lower quality than iPhones. There was a stigma to owning an android for most people, and probably still is. There is your outside pressure. Now, even for the person that doesn't really care about such things, an iPhone will still probably be the best phone on the market at face value. As I've stated in the last example, these people don't do their research. They will still go to the iOS device despite it's less powerful software options and poor durability.

In short, I think this is what would be called learned helplessness. Despite living in the information age, they refuse to learn for themselves. I will say again however, these are just my thoughts based on anecdotal evidnece on the normal Gen Z. There are probably plenty of people my age that aren't entirely s

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Didn't know where else to post this, but I think it's really funny. When bodybuilders debate math.
https://forum.bodybuilding.com/showthread.php?t=107926751

No need to watch D+'s She-Hulk; Disparu@youtube has already done it for you..

>>40595
Heh. I saw that. I don't follow him or care about that but I came across it when looking for Rings of Power Reviews(I had a suspicion it would be bad so I was not going to watch it and I was right).

>>40596
>I had a suspicion it would be bad
Everyone did, everyone. The more die hard fans more than anyone knew what we were in for and tried to warn everyone else.
I've seen some interesting theories that suggest even creators behind these recent train wrecks know they're going to be garbage, and they use controversial casting to deflect criticism. The Drinker puts it well here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngqO9Hp19_4

>>40598
I think there are a few issues at play. I think that the creators of RoP don't actually have an interest in Lord of the Rings(the books or the movies) or war or history. You have to have somebody that likes this kind of thing and knows about it so they can create a believable organic world and so they can create a show in this genre that is actually good. That's why LoTR was so successful, even on something as simple as costume design. A lot of thought was put into it and it was based heavily on real life cultures and the clothes were made with authentic methods so even a layman could be transported to the world. Whereas RoP uses plastic looking armour and modern materials with gold imprints instead of embroidery and stuff like that. Even if you knew nothing about period clothing, you probably would not know why it looks off, but you would feel that it does.
Also of course, they want to add politics into it to appeal to who knows who and also the writers are simply incompetent.

Post edited on 30th Sep 2022, 9:39am

>>40589
yeah I'm not a fan at all either. I don't use any streaming services so all that clutter is pointless to me. They have this annoying tenancy to have as few buttons as possible on the tv itself, so you can't adjust things worth a darn without the remote and have to use really obnoxious combos with the 1-2 buttons they give you. If it's connected to the net, you might get ads via the tv itself. For some reason they don't like switching to new signals the way non-smart tvs do.
I don't know but it's possible you might have just gotten a cheapo crap smart tv though. The thing with cheap crappy tvs is they're always crappy regardless of the era they come from, while at the same time high quality TVs from ages past will still be noticeably high quality.
Even if you put the smart garbage aside, I think it's safe to say an average $1500 TV from ten years ago will still be better in quality than a $300-400 TV from today.

>>40589
I don't have any issue with mine. But then I don't use any of the smart TV functions, I use my PC and PlayStation on it.

>>40593
Same, except I only use the usb port to watch stuff I torrented. I have an LG one.

Post edited on 30th Sep 2022, 5:54am

>>40591
What's one more thing spying on you? I don't bother connecting it to the internet. If I use the TV for some reason, it's usually to play on a console or some other device that can do everything the TV does, and far better.
>>40592
>They have this annoying tenancy to have as few buttons as possible on the tv itself
I'm pretty sure my TV has no buttons at all.
>it's possible you might have just gotten a cheapo crap smart tv though.
Yeah, mine probably is pretty cheap. It was a random gift from my mom, probably intended as a sort of bribe. For most purchases, quality isn't really considered by my parents. It has caused a lot of headaches through the years.

It makes me miss my old TV that I had for 10 years or so. It wasn't anything special, but it was perfect for my needs. Unfortunately it stopped working some months ago, probably from rough treatment over the years. I wonder if you can even find new non-smart TVs now. I'd imagine you can with a bit of extra effort, but with a quick glance, it all seems smart. I wish there was more of a market for things without tons of useless features.

>>29945
I think I noticed a slight increase in clarity for songs with a very high pitch, but I wasn't 100% certain if it was legitimate or only seemed that way because I was listening for it.

Then again, it could boil down to a difference in our sound systems. I'm running some fairly old speakers.

>>29954
My sound system on computer is basic stuff as well.
I also don't hear too much of a difference on my computer and, actually, the first time I tried it and heard the amazing difference was when I changed it on my PS3.
My computer is stock from an office so the sound card is pretty trash, I learnt recently, but the PS3 actually has a very good sound card and so that's why I noticed such an improvement on that.

Audio/video synchronization is a weird rabbit hole to get into. For video, most displays have a refresh rate of 60hz. If you have a 30fps video source this works nicely, but most anime is 24fps so some frames end up being repeated more than others in 3:2 pulldown. More advanced techniques here might involve frame blending or interpolation plus resampling.

Then you get to audio. Most soundcards will be configured to accept a given range of sample rates, and provide an audio clock to synchronize with (usually defaulting to 48khz). If your audio driver is smart it can switch the soundcard to the appropriate mode, otherwise it has to resample the input to the output (interpolating if necessary). I don't think either osx or windows dynamically set the sample rate of the soundcard [1]. The 44.1khz -> 48khz upconversion might technically introduce some artifacts depending on the specific filter used (because in the real world you are limited to finite impulse response filters), but I really doubt you'd be able to perceive any difference.

Finally you have audio/video sync. I don't really understand under what conditions this happens. In an ideal world if both audio and video clocks were stable and we are able to keep up with the clocks (the individual stream successfully plays independently without drops), then I don't think there would be any sync issues since you can just let them play independently. But in the real world I guess for some reasons if we cannot keep up with the clocks we are given (maybe we're doing some post-processing on the video so can't make it in time for the next tick) or maybe a frame can't be decoded at all, then we are at a situation where desync might occur if they played independently. So we have to tie them together, and the easiest naive solution is to just skip video frames as needed in order to match the audio (this works nicely if audio clock is 48khz and video is 24fps).

[1] https://lists.apple.com/archives/coreaudio-api/2008/Jan/msg00280.html

>>40586
And then there's other things like the fact that just because you deliver samples to the soundcard at time X doesn't mean it gets delivered to the user (i.e. played_ at time X. There's usually some latency there, which will be higher for wireless headphones. So a good audio driver must also estimate the latency to the user, and then present this to the software so it can delay the video by the same amount. Similarly there might also be a lag between data delivered to the gpu and the actual display on the screen, which should also be factored in if you want the utmost accuracy.

So even if you don't have any fancy interpolation, getting A/V sync is non-trivial. The simplest case I think I can reason about is when you use the audio clock to drive things. If we assumed we had perfect speakers with 0 delay between soundcard and speaker output (speaker_latency), and 0 delay between sending audio samples and sending video frames (code_latency), then all we have to do is send a new frame every 1/fps sec. But to account for real-world delay, we actually have to end up waiting "1/fps + speaker_latency - code_latency" since a large speaker latency means we need to delay the video by the same amount, and conversely a large delay between sending audio and sending video means we need to hurry up and send video sooner.

Post edited on 29th Sep 2022, 9:56pm

Well, I'm of the opinion that the US did it. The incentives are there
Regardless, I don't want to get nuked, anons: I haven't read enough manga; watched enough anime; read enough visual novels.

>>40568
>I don't want to get nuked, anons
Unless you're in the ukraine or russia, I don't think there's any risk of this. Directly attacking any of the NATO countries would be a complete suicide mission, and despite media portrayal no world leader is genuinely irrational.

>>40567
I wouldn't expect things to be completely a noop for the average citizen in russia. Given that US has signaled its intention to ensure russia will not intertwine with Europe, I can't really see any situation in which this ends favorably for Russia. At most they could cut their losses, but maybe they think they've already sunk so much resources into this and want to continue to some endgoal.

>>40568
>I don't want to get nuked
I'm always hiding behind no less than 12 proxies. In order for someone to nuke me they would have make a lucky guess.
You should do the same, to protect yourself from any sort of targetted attack, nuclear or otherwise.

>>40570
Someone should tell Cirno she has skin cancer.

>>40307
>I like japanese but am not japanese
That's a paddlin'

as a weeaboo I don't like normalfags going to japan but it's the way it is

Fukushima presents Samurai school
https://samurai-spirit.com/

>>40530
Flick that katana.

The "other side" of the Earth isn't actually completely empty.

Allow me to explain. At some point, possibly from watching a video, I saw a globe, and my mind was blown. Basically, all of the landmasses of the world, are literally just on one side of the Earth. Every "World Map" I've ever seen was basically kind of lying to me because it only displayed the major landmasses that are all, coincidentally, on the same half of the Earth.

When you go to the other side of the Earth, indeed, there's a lot of water, but it isn't actually totally empty like I had assumed. There's tons of little islands! I actually know where Hawaii and Samoa are now, and that "Fiji" island I would occasionally hear about.
So yeah, that's the new thing I learned today. I got reminded of the existence of Google Earth today, and so I figured I'd use a virtual globe to investigate the Earth's "empty space" and lo and behold, it's not totally empty.

I'd love to see what the combined landmass is of all of those little islands. How big are they, relative to a country?

>>40534
You might like playing around with [1] and [2]

[1] https://projections.charemza.name/
[2] https://www.jasondavies.com/maps/transition/

>>40545
This is something of an aside, but I think the Mercator doesn't get nearly enough credit nowdays. The main criticism of it is that it doesn't accurately portray landmass scale, but what a lot of those people fail to realize is that aside from simple visual purposes, a lot of those "better scale" maps are completely useless Garbage. The Mercator excels at one thing incredibly well, and that is ocean navigation. So much so that all map software still uses it, because we've yet to come up with something better for 2D maps in the 450 years since its invention. The trick lines in being able to draw a straight line between any two points and always maintain a constant bearing. None of those aesthetically appealing maps could hope to rival this simple but vital function. So much so that for the purposes of understanding marine navigation, it would be better for children to visualize the world as a Mercator and not, say, a Robinson.

Linux isn't as scary as it seems.
I'm not really sure what I expected to be different. Maybe it's a little more involved than Windows, but it feels like there's better information out there as a result. Problems are better documented, and the solutions don't require you to dig through a ton of menus. If you're willing to learn, I imagine it is much faster and easy to use than Windows.
That isn't to say I know what I am doing, I don't. I slip up quite a bit. It's just that it feels easier to pin down what I did wrong and correct it.

I also learned that it is okay to connect USB 2.0 ports to pins for USB 3.0, even if they aren't the same. I was pretty worried about it until I looked and thought about it. If I keep things up, I might just become computer literate.

https://nickdrozd.github.io/2021/09/25/spaghetti-code-conjecture-false.html

Very interesting article, demonstrating how busy-beaver TMs exhibit the same kind of emergent structure that cellular automaton do. The CFG representation of the TM is something I had not seem before, but it makes perfect sense in this context and really helps to get an intuition for why busy beaver machines can be so "busy" while having so few states.

I wonder how the CFGs for some of the 5-state and 6-state BB contenders look like. Even in the linked 4-state CFG there is still some structure you can discern of "while (tape == 1)" loops, but the real intuition that's missing is when exactly we break out of these loops to switch state.

Jaroslav Flegr's "frozen plasticity" theory of evolution adds nuance to Darwin's original theory of evolution that we are taught in school.

The core idea of the theory is this:
>The old Darwinian model of evolution [phenotype-based selection] was recently substituted with the selfish gene theory [allele-based selection]. The present book suggests that this mainstream theory is just as erroneous as Darwin's original model and we can soon expect another revolution. It suggests replacing the selfish gene model by a theory called "frozen evolution". The new theory assumes that the vast majority of species encountered in nature are not capable to evolve even when exposed to extremely strong selection [due to the genetic variability that is maintained in equilibrium in part via feedback loops of frequency-dependent selection] and thus only passively wait until changes in their environment accumulate to such a degree that they have no choice but to quietly die out.

>Only a negligible fraction of sexually reproducing species at a given time (the species originated recently, for example, by peripatric speciation) are plastic [capable of responding to significant selection pressure]. Most species behave as elastic in microevolutionary processes and as frozen in macroevolutionary processes. They respond to a minor environmental change by reversible change (accompanied by a decrease in fitness) and to a major environmental change by extinction rather than by evolutionary adaptation.

I can't find this discussed anywhere else on the web despite the fact that the author isn't a random nobody, and the theory isn't really too radically different but just adds nuances to existing theories.

There's an interesting old-school site that's worth browsing around [1] but the best summary of the theory I've found is probably the short original paper itself [2]. It discusses not only how the Darwinian model of evolution differs from the one proposed by Dawkins, but also discusses additional nuances in the process of genotype, phenotype, and allele inheritance that I hadn't considered before but seem obvious in retrospect. That is, this entire process should be thought of more as a dynamical s

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>>40503
I remember wondering if this was the case on my own once. If most species are incapable of adapting under very heavy evolutionary pressures. I'd imagine the "lag time" between a species place in their environment and the slow buildup of changes is the primary culprit, everything likes to resist change and that means that the better something can cope in the short term, the worse off it is in the long term. Going beyond just genetic evolution, I would guess the most successful societies will be those that proactively prepare for changes and wipe out threats. Those that wait around watching the old world fade around them will simply become dinosaurs.

>>40540
>>40540
That's a nice succinct way of putting it. Basically when species switch from the plastic stage to the elastic stage they have undergone a phase transition from a near homogeneous genetic makeup to a diverse genetic makeup that "locks them" in evolutionary. The homogeneous genetic makeup is good because the species as a whole can respond quickly to major changes, but it has the downside that it provides little stability (the chance of some event causing mass extinction is high). The diverse makeup is good because it provides stability and short-term adaptability, but this makes it worse-off in the long-term.

>most successful societies will be those that proactively prepare for changes and wipe out threats
It's interesting that humans are probably the first species that has the capability to have an asymmetric influence on the environment – we can "control" the environment more than it controls us. This means that a lot of traditional evolutionary theory might not apply, because those assume the species is a passive victim of environmental circumstance, but in our case we can actually actively prevent or outmaneuver those changes. E.g. if an asteroid were on its way to earth today we'd probably be able to nuke it from orbit or something. I wonder what Flegr would say about this, because this means that despite having a genetic makeup that is "locked" macro-evolutionary, we can nonetheless survive on a very long-timescale even when conditions don't match those we originally evolved in thanks to technology and inguinity.

Maybe it makes us more vulnerable though, as conditions keep changing we may need to rely more and more on technology to bridge the evolutionary gap between past and present. And then we're only one black swan event from having that technology taken away from us.

>>40533
Those school are considered "good" because of the Asians living there, not the other way around. I would know since I'm from a town like that. Yeah, there wasn't rampant delinquency, but the teachers weren't better at teaching. It was the same conveyor belt model as everywhere else.

>>40533
NOVA has a massive tech presence via our datacenters and government contractors. You don't hear about us the way you hear about silicon valley and D.C. likes to keep it that way. I can't imagine it's ever been enjoyable to live there since the start of the Cold War, but it has gotten a lot worse in the last 25 years or so. On paper it looks good but it's one of the most expensive places to live in the U.S. outside of NYC/LA, and is beyond soul-crushing. A lot of people move there for jobs and the schools I guess.

>>40535
Yes I 100% agree with this. That said despite the teachers not being any better, there will be opportunities there you won't see in other schools. E.g. there'll be a dozen AP classes, math contents will be a "normal thing", cross enrollment between college/high school will usually be offered. But as you said despite this the teachers themselves aren't any better (and in fact I'd argue that the teachers might even be worse since the students already know most of the material coming in). It's absolutely demoralizing if you aren't a canonical "good" asian student because from middle school you're treated as inferior if you can't keep up with your peers.

>>40539
Ah you're right, it never came to mind that gcp and aws have data centers there (the notorious us-east-1 in aws's case).

>>39381
Thanks for responding – in terms of temperature/seasonality I have felt that it's worse during the colder winter months. But I'm not sure if temperature alone is the factor responsible, since I've experimented with no heater vs. running heater and using thin sheets vs. thick sheets and I have not found too much of a difference. That said, I will try logging temperature vs. intensity of dreams to see if there is indeed any correlation here.

In terms of time of day I'd guess it happens around 5am or 6am, which is closer to the end of the sleep cycle (I go to bed at 12am and wake up at 11am). Yes I'm usually jolted out of bed at around the same time every day.

>>39391
>But I'm not sure if temperature alone is the factor responsible, since I've experimented with no heater vs. running heater and using thin sheets vs. thick sheets
Maybe relative temperature would have been a better term. Based on my experiences my dreams tend to get fucked up when the relative temperature is cold. By relative temperature I mean the temperature and weather and absence or presence of ventilation your body will be subject to while you're asleep. Per example, a person using thick blankets all over her body with no fan on a cold winter night will have a relative temperature that's warmer and better than someone in a very hot summer day going to sleep with minimal clothing and no blankets right under the fan, maybe this person feels hot when the night starts, but as her body is subject to direct ventilation and the night gets a little colder the situation changes.
>In terms of time of day I'd guess it happens around 5am or 6am, which is closer to the end of the sleep cycle (I go to bed at 12am and wake up at 11am). Yes I'm usually jolted out of bed at around the same time every day.
I did not understand. You have them around 5 am, but then go back to sleep and wake up at 11 am?

>>39409
>Based on my experiences my dreams tend to get fucked up when the relative temperature is cold.
Yes, this matches with my observation that the nightmares are worst on days when it's not quite cold enough to use a heater but also not warm enough where I can forego the sheets. Particularly whenever I have to try to sleep in a position that conserves heat (e.g. knees tucked up, hands wrapped around, etc.).

>I did not understand. You have them around 5 am, but then go back to sleep and wake up at 11 am?
I go to sleep at ~1am, and will sleep well until about ~6am. From 6am to 11am I will have back-to-back nightmares, waking up sweating after each one. This might be because sleep tends to become lighter (and dreams more likely?) as you progress throughout the sleep cycle though. It could also be because 6am-9am is the coldest parts of the day though.

I guess with these observations I will see if I can try to avoid the conditions that are conducive to these nightmares. But I think that's still not solving the root cause, because the content of the nightmares is too specific and recurring to be dismissed. E.g. just this morning I dreamt I was having the kitchen sink of weapons being thrown at me – knives, bullets, arrows, etc. The nightmares also seem to be a relatively new phenomenon since I remember in the past I used to sleep in far colder weather without a heater on just fine.

Post edited on 27th Mar 2022, 2:19pm

Dreams are an insight to your mind. Is that true?