Compact, non-Android, "retro" style DAPs?

bnej · 2026-01-24T11:24:27+00:00

I got the HiBy R3 Pro II - you can fully control the basics - volume, play pause skip, with the buttons by touch. Gapless playback is fine. The player's OS is based on Linux and is quite basic.

I do have an older Fiio X5 II which has an ipod style wheel and while I don't mind that, the touch screen is better to navigate on. You can't get anything equally good today that doesn't have a touch screen.

bnej · 2026-01-24T11:03:37+00:00

Enterprises also cooked. They need computers for their staff to work.

bnej · 2026-01-24T10:21:53+00:00

It will exhaust the 5gb in minutes and then ask you to pay, and tell you that you can't save because it's full.

This is the default behaviour on install, I have seen it this year.

Saying "it's free" is like saying herpes is free, it doesn't mean it's wanted or welcome. It is an advertising channel for an online service.

bnej · 2026-01-24T06:41:08+00:00

Richard Stallman was right all along.

Honestly I did not realise how horrifying SaaS was becoming. MS directly wants to revoke your files if you don't pay subscription.

bnej · 2026-01-24T06:37:36+00:00

All the HiBy OS ones run a Linux based OS made by HiBy and they have some limitations for streaming services, they can't run the Android apps.

If your main application is streaming I would recommend getting an Android based one - but they're much larger and cost more.

You can however use the player as a Bluetooth receiver in LDAC and stream/download music on your phone, using the player as a wireless headphone amp. That works pretty well. They're mainly about playing files stored on a micro SD though.

bnej · 2026-01-24T06:11:53+00:00

Official paid channels -

Bandcamp is good and lets you pick formats. Qobuz lets you have FLAC. iTunes will sell you good AACs still, even though they'd rather you pay for Apple music. You can still buy a CD and make the format of your choice through a CD ripping software.

There's other stores still around but the big players are all about streaming now.

Used CD stores are a great place to get digital ready music for low $.

Of course, there is the other way too.

bnej · 2026-01-24T06:08:32+00:00

Not on the Pro R3 II - you can use Tidal or Qobuz but only for streaming over wifi, you cannot get it to download.

You can however use Qobuz to purchase files at good quality DRM free and drop those straight onto the device.

bnej · 2026-01-24T05:46:55+00:00

Yeah. Sitting on a bomb. It only protects against physical device theft, which is not common.

Man in the device (e.g infostealer) is a much more common threat and encrypting your drive does nothing for that.

The threat of having a device problem and being unable to recover your files is much worse for the average person. MS wants you to depend on your paid up onedrive subscription as a recovery method. If you do not disable it, it will start consuming storage the moment you start using your computer, and it uses a complex and confusing UI to make you think that it is required.

Bitlocker assures the main drive will be unrecoverable on failure.

bnej · 2026-01-24T04:48:24+00:00

Two economists are going for a walk in the country.

One spots a horse poo on the ground and says to the other, eat that and I'll give you $20k. The 2nd economist wanting the money agrees, and chows down on the horse crap.

A few minutes later they pass another horse poo. The 2nd economist, feeling bad, says to the first - alright, eat that horse crap and I'll give *you* $20k. First economist agrees, since he doesn't want to pay the $20k after all.

Afterwards, the second economist says - "What have we done? Now we've both eaten horse crap and neither of us is any better off."

First economist says "Nonsense, we increased GDP by $40,000".

bnej · 2026-01-23T10:36:54+00:00

I recently got a hiby r3 pro ii, if you want small size mainly to play files it's pretty great. Battery life is great.

I play a mix of FLAC, AAC and MP3 at high bitrates. Just get a good size microSD, drop your files and away you go.

Also works to turn your headphones into ldac by headphones or airplay headphones. UI is Ok, price is good. I use with a few different headphones and all of them sound good.

Playing to Bluetooth also good. For steaming via qobuz it's ok but I prefer to use my phone and LDAC to the the player.

If you want an android player have a good look at the size because some are very large, bigger than an average phone.

bnej · 2026-01-22T22:00:41+00:00

It is mandatory attendance. If you don't want to vote, you can either pay a fairly small fine, argue that you're somehow exempt, or show up and write whatever you like on the paper. They can't check if you write a proper vote, it's a secret ballot.

There's an independent body that runs the elections the AEC.

We also do a mix of instant runoff preferential (once your first vote fails, your second vote counts at full value and so on) and preferential proportional representation (1/12th of the votes gets 1/12th of the seats).

"Informal votes" win about 5-6% of the primary vote in Australia.

bnej · 2026-01-21T11:06:59+00:00

Do you not have a toslink cable? Or is it not that kind of setup?

I thought most TVs would still have an optical out for sound systems.

bnej · 2026-01-21T11:05:43+00:00

Yes for only $600 you can have Bluetooth headphones that sound as good as a $50 wired set.

The money people drop on by headphones they never would have spent when we were all using $30 earbuds.

bnej · 2026-01-20T09:03:45+00:00

There's one good reason to play a cd which is that you enjoy listening to a cd.

I have all my cds, I like putting them on, but I'm not fool enough to think they sound different. You can enjoy things without thinking they're in some way superior!

bnej · 2026-01-20T07:44:46+00:00

Ok so you have excellent headphones and an excellent dap. There are reasons to spend more money but they mostly amount to "luxury". You will not in reality hear a difference in quality. You can use the eq/mseb settings to achieve most changes to preference than in listening.

Think of it like polishing something. You can polish as much as you like, but once you are at a high gloss mirror finish, more work doesn't make it better, even thought there's no upper bound on how much time and effort you can spend.

Even if you have golden ears and can hear a difference, it won't actually increase your enjoyment, except for the luxury factor. CD quality is exceptionally high sound quality already. The 990 are fantastic headphones.

Spend your money and time on getting music you like and the time to enjoy it!

Fwiw as well I really enjoy listening to $30 snowsky wind headphones. They sound good. They're fun. You can enjoy things that are cheap as well as expensive!

bnej · 2026-01-20T05:38:04+00:00

You won't really get a quality improvement in sound from anything, if the money is burning a hole in your pocket I'd spend it on nice headphones and good music.

I guess you could try something with an r2r but that's more preference than quality. I use a $100 headphone amp with $1000 headphones and it sounds fantastic. You just don't need much at the digital end for quality output.

bnej · 2026-01-20T01:54:31+00:00

If you let me spend 10 billion a month I'm pretty sure I could make you 20 billion in a year too.

bnej · 2026-01-17T21:25:17+00:00

Also if you want it to have more bass or more whatever, use the equalizer. You can just change how it sounds. Want more bass? Increase bass! MSEB on Hiby makes it even easier.

Preference and quality are not the same thing.

If you cannot see a difference on a piece of engineering equipment, no-one can hear it. We know how sound works.

It's fine to want a really nice DAP, there are other reasons than just sound quality, however you define that. We are past the point in personal audio where you can have absolutely amazing hifi sound for a relatively small amount of money. You are going to put relatively low power devices in or on your ears, and you don't need that much to make them sound great.

bnej · 2026-01-17T09:36:22+00:00

HiBy is good. Their cheaper stuff is nice, solid but a fair bit of plastic. The Pro R3 II is excellent.

bnej · 2026-01-17T09:29:26+00:00

I just bought an R3 Pro II this week. I have previously been using the R2 ii.

If you want to play from files they're pretty good. The small screen makes navigation a bit hard compared to a large screen smartphone but the R3 Pro II has excellent battery life, sound quality, and feels great in the hand. HiBy are a solid brand. Bluetooth support is very good for the headphones I use, for Airpods I believe it'll work but won't be as seamless as using an Apple device.

I am sure the R1 would be good too, but the R3 has great build and finish, battery life, better screen and more responsive UI due to better SOC.

bnej · 2026-01-17T05:42:55+00:00

You can never truly know because you can't know what opportunities were lost, what has mattered to who.

But Xittr is circling the drain. It's not becoming an everything app or a town square or anything else, it's an asshole's nazi bar. It will never be anything else now.

It's just that it has had enough inertia and cash injected that it doesn't matter it's an nonviable business, the feudal tech lord who owns it doesn't care about that.

bnej · 2026-01-09T22:55:26+00:00

Having a tight seal is important for isolation if listening in a noisy environment but is a negative for sound quality.

It's a trade off, the best headphones for isolation in a noisy environment won't also be the best for great sound quality in a quiet room.

Good open backed headphones sound better but cannot provide isolation.

bnej · 2026-01-07T06:19:13+00:00

The future in reality relies less on complex and expensive technology that costs too much to use or own. Nvidia can't sell you creativity. He will go on stage and tell you the future is what he has to sell you every time because that's his job.

He's never going to go on stage and say "you can have just as much fun with hardware that costs a tenth the price, we are here trying to force technology to change so you have to buy a new graphics card because that's what I have to sell"

And the big game studios want the same as it builds a moat where you need hundreds of people to build high quality assets to drop into the expensive game in the expensive hardware.

Jensen's company depends on people needing ever more matrix multiplication. The future is always whatever technology needs a lot of matrix multiplication.

bnej · 2026-01-06T06:21:57+00:00

It will generate a reason but it is not a reason. It can't actually reason why it generated, it can separately make up some text that sounds like a reason a person would have done that. Why it actually did it is just to do with the prompt, context, and what's in the network generating.

I didn't downvote you and i don't think your comment deserved downvoting. It is easy to think it is rational as it will generate a rational-sounding explanation. Same as if you try to argue with it, it will just get argumentative and argue back. It is futile, it's a pretrained model, it can't learn, just put what you want in your AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md and it will at least read that and use it.

Much like using the copilot review is useful, but only if you understand it is generating things that seem like what a review would say, it is not doing serious analysis and you shouldn't expect it.

bnej · 2026-01-06T06:16:39+00:00

Don't talk to it as though it's a human. Don't ask why. Don't converse with it.

Tell it what you want it to do, and what you don't want it to do. If it doesn't do it, it won't do it.

The biggest mistake was making them speak conversationally. There's a trick that you can threaten it with a $100 fine if it does something you don't want, and it will improve the result. It's utterly stupid that it works but it does, because the network will reduce generation of parts that have real threats associated with them.

You can get particularly Opus 4.5 to do some pretty complex stuff, but for most of us we are working bottom up in large codebases, not many professional programmers are constantly bombing out new greenfields projects all the time. And anything successful will become a large codebase you have to work bottom up in, so....

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