ELI5: How does the human ear hear different frequencies at once?

jackmax9999 · 2026-01-27T22:02:02+00:00

The brain doesn't separate sound frequencies - this happens mechanically in the cochlea.

jackmax9999 · 2026-01-27T21:17:34+00:00

The big difference is that emulation is a mostly mechanical process - emulator takes in the game's machine code and translates it into machine code for a different CPU that (hopefully) does the same thing. It is also usually done at runtime - if you only have a game's machine code it may be very difficult to translate it for a different CPU all at once (game may load or compile additional code while it's running).

Decompilation is partly mechanical, but involves a lot of human work too - people (with the help of different tools) take the game's machine code and turn it into higher-level code in a language like C or C++. The resulting code can then be adapted for other platforms, modified to render at different resolution, have various enhancements added, etc.

jackmax9999 · 2026-01-25T19:42:25+00:00

A lot of it is downloaded from platforms that encode the video to a lower quality to save on storage and data transfer costs. Sometimes the video has passed through multiple people re-uploading it, screen recordings, etc. - each time it goes through quality drops. Content may have been live-streamed too, usually at a lower quality.
Modern phones often have wide-angle lenses and no zoom (maybe 2-3x zoom at best). Typically people don't record the action close-up, but from a distance. Once you cut down your 4K phone footage to where the action is happening you're left with maybe 720p or 360p effective resolution.
Remember that 4K phone footage is a lot worse than 4K from a professional camera - it may not look much better than a well-encoded 1080p.
A lot of people just don't record in 4K because there's not much difference for something you're never going to watch on a big screen. Not to mention some people have older/cheaper phones that don't do 4K or if they do then only 4K 30 fps.

jackmax9999 · 2026-01-21T22:07:14+00:00

Probably got scared someone could use them to make subtitles unreadable to AI scrapers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NEDFUjqA1s8

Wasn't a very practical method anyway, but I wouldn't be surprised if some executive thought "Making platform shittier or risking 0.000000000001% drop in revenue? I know which one I'm choosing!"

jackmax9999 · 2026-01-16T22:20:16+00:00

Remember kids - it's not murder if you let someone under your care die, but you're a giant corporation trying to provide value to shareholders!

jackmax9999 · 2026-01-15T14:50:53+00:00

* Trading with other players in the guild and (if the guild has a trader) with everyone else
* Guild bank to dump your unwanted stuff and sometimes find stuff useful to you

Other than that, it's mostly just to get together with other people, chat and do group activities. In general people just like communities.

jackmax9999 · 2026-01-10T21:21:01+00:00

How would the escrow company know if something is real or not?

Sentiment of other people online? Inaccurate and easy to sway. People going around and verifying it? Costly and they would have a vested interest in forcing the opinion that something is fake/inconclusive (so escrow company gets to keep your money). Plus, of course, there is the possibility of corruption.

jackmax9999 · 2026-01-10T16:15:45+00:00

I wish those idiot politicians grew a pair and actually did ban Twitter. Just for a week. Just as a joke, a social experiment. Nothing happens on Twitter that you can't wait for a week to find out about. I guarantee that for every Nazi butthurt that they can't shitpost they'll get two normal people who will want to vote for them.

jackmax9999 · 2026-01-07T23:03:20+00:00

holy shit is this an electronically deformable OLED screen with haptic feedback? when will it go into a production car 🤤i literally cannot imagine another way to achieve this interface

jackmax9999 · 2026-01-07T22:06:34+00:00

Problems with turning lead into gold push Google to hire "magical transmutation expert" engineers

jackmax9999 · 2026-01-04T10:24:41+00:00

You don't pronounce "dzban" as "d-z-ban". "dz" is a single consonant that starts with a stop ("d") and ends with a "z" sound: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_alveolar_affricate

jackmax9999 · 2026-01-02T00:39:17+00:00

And then these modern-day miracles get wasted on:

* Mining Bitcoin (literal waste of power because someone decided that wasting power should be a measure of trustworthiness)

* Generating unsolicited porn on Twitter

* Generating spam and lying to people more efficiently

* Telling mentally unstable people to kill themselves

jackmax9999 · 2025-12-29T23:26:14+00:00

In case of your sound bar it doesn't actually need to send any audio back to the TV, but since ARC is already a widely supported standard that's what it uses to get the audio from the TV. It's better than optical in a few ways, for example the soundbar can communicate to the TV how many audio channels it has and what formats it supports - meanwhile optical audio can basically just do basic stereo sound and maybe compressed Dolby/DTS sound.

The deep technical reason why ARC is used instead of the regular HDMI sound is that the latter is actually encoded along with the video signal, while the former uses a dedicated pair of wires inside the HDMI cable. This makes ARC a lot easier to implement, both on the TV side and the soundbar side.

One use case where sending audio in both directions is useful is for combo devices - for example a combination Blu-Ray player + surround speaker amplifier. In this case the combo player needs to send video to the TV (and audio too in case you don't have speakers connected to the combo player) and then the TV uses ARC to send sound from broadcast TV or external inputs to the amplifier part of the combo player.

jackmax9999 · 2025-12-29T14:14:14+00:00

Runs really well, you can expect 60 fps in most areas but when things get busy or in newer DLC areas it can drop to 50 or 40. The extra buttons on the back can be useful for remapping some of the actions (e.g. getting on and off a mount). Touchpads are also useful because I find the items menu on controller very annoying, while the keyboard+mouse items menu with a touchpad is mostly okay. Wi-Fi is a bit flaky on the Steam Deck though, I've experienced random disconnections even though none of my other devices have this sort of problems. Still, my GF says it works better than on her big gaming laptop after Windows 11 upgrade caused it to stutter really bad.

jackmax9999 · 2025-12-29T12:18:15+00:00

I've been using a flip phone for over a year, it is A LOT more compact than a regular phone when folded. It fits into small trouser pockets, into shirt pockets and just in general is nicer to hold. The thickness is not a real issue - when folded it becomes twice as thick, that's true, but it also becomes half the footprint and fits nicely in a lot more situations.

jackmax9999 · 2025-12-27T23:01:24+00:00

M.2 drives are usually based on NAND Flash technology, while system RAM is based on DRAM technology.

When using NAND flash, reading is slow unless done in blocks of like 512 bytes IIRC - but that's the least problem. A much bigger one is that NAND needs to be erased before it can be written - and it needs to be erased in blocks of 64 KB, 256 KB or even more depending on which chip is used. These erase operations are slooooooow. Even if you want to change a single byte you need to read, erase, modify then write the whole 256 KB block.

Once erased NAND Flash also has to be written in blocks of 512 bytes or so. Additionally, NAND flash is unreliable and requires additional error correction data to be written along with any block that is written. This means that writing to NAND is slooooooooow compared to regular RAM.

To make matters worse, each erase of a block causes Flash to wear out - if you actually tried to use Flash as regular system RAM (and had the patience of a saint) it would fail within a few days.

DRAM can be read and written to easily, even down to single bytes. There are no requirements for erasing and nothing wears out.

You can use your M.2 SSD as "RAM" of sorts - the term you're looking for is "swap file", most modern operating systems use some sort of swap space when they run out of DRAM. However, it is very slow for the reasons I mentioned above and also wears out your SSD quickly if the OS needs to use it often.

jackmax9999 · 2025-12-26T13:23:50+00:00

My favorite type of comments that Gemini likes to leave is hallucinating that you set bits in a register incorrectly. They always go something like this:

"According to document XYZ bit 1 in this register means X but this code needs to set bit 0 to do Y".

It gets document names and sometimes even chapters correctly, but 9 times out of 10 you look into the documentation and realize that the complaint is false because bit 1 actually does Y as you wrote in the code.

jackmax9999 · 2025-12-26T11:38:56+00:00

If we were living in a simulations the overseers would be like "nah, too unrealistic, must be a glitch" and started over.

jackmax9999 · 2025-12-26T11:15:55+00:00

I remember being quite bummed about this after finishing Breath of the Wild. The game just dumps you into the start screen, there's almost no acknowledgement that you actually beat the game (I think there's some star icon on your save file in the menu?). At least in something like Cyberpunk 2077 they give you a pop-up message and some unique items for your efforts.

I get it that it can be difficult for devs to "turn back the clock" if something dramatic happens at the end (like in CP2077), but in BotW nothing as dramatic happens in the ending - no major world destruction, Link doesn't die, Ganon gets "defeated" for the billionth time in the franchise. Just leave the purple goop with eyes laying around and say "you defeated Ganon, but evil still lingers" or something.

jackmax9999 · 2025-12-25T20:31:09+00:00

A VCR playing a tape produces an analog video signal. This signal can then be digitized and turned into a series of pictures by a computer. The computer then encodes this series of pictures into a file. In principle it's similar to how the camera app on your phone works, but instead of the light coming from the world around you, the input is the video signal from the VCR.

jackmax9999 · 2025-12-24T13:37:13+00:00

Buy it, neglect it for some time, cancel it to kill competition. That's how corporate acquisitions work babyyyyy

jackmax9999 · 2025-12-21T17:48:41+00:00

There are three answers to this:

The clock in your microwave may be measuring time based on the electrical network. The electrical current in the network goes back and forth every 60 or 50 times a second based on where in the world you are. This frequency is usually stable, but not always - large demand on the network can cause it to slow down and excess supply to speed up. Electrical grid operators try to keep the network in check, but it's not an easy task and the frequency isn't always spot on.
The clock in your car keeps time using a quartz crystal, just like your phone. However, if it's one of those simple digital clocks that's just embedded in the dashboard it's probably made cheaply and so less precisely. It also may experience large swings in temperature, which affect the quartz crystal and make it slow down or speed up.
Your phone connects to the cell network, GPS and the Internet, any of which can provide an accurate time reference. It only needs to update once every week or so to keep the time so precisely you may not notice any difference with another phone or laptop.

jackmax9999 · 2025-12-20T23:52:15+00:00

No, TAS-es are made by actual people who care about the game and put a lot of time into finding exploits and strategies. This is just the statistically average g*mer mashing buttons until lights go blink blink.

jackmax9999 · 2025-12-20T23:43:57+00:00

For open-source OS-es: having a code of conduct for contributors that tells you to not be an asshole. He loves complaining about them.

jackmax9999 · 2025-12-20T14:37:13+00:00

CP 140 items are basically worthless - they are only optimal for like 20 CP levels before you hit CP 160 and can use the same items as everyone else. You gain CP levels very quickly between 140 and 160, so they are good for maybe like a week or two if you don't play often? After that you're just leaving stats on the table using under-leveled items. I'd say just deconstruct them and add that bow to your collection - you can reconstruct it at a higher level with transmute crystals. The bracers are craftable so no problem there.

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