The majority of technologies that power the internet were developed in the 80s and refined in the 90s. Everything since then is built as a layer of abstraction on top of those core technologies.
Also, the development and evolution of these open technologies relies on human interest and attention, and that attention can be diminished, even starved, by free, closed offerings.
Evil plan step 1: make a free closed alternative and make it better than everything else. Discord for chat, Facebook for forums and chat/email, etc.
Step 2: wait a few years, or a decade or more. The world will largely forget how to use the open alternatives. Instant messengers, forums, chat services, just give them a decade to die out. Privately hosted communities, either move to Facebook, pay for commercial anti-spam support, spend massive volunteer hours, or drown in spam.
Step 3: monetize your now-captive audience. What else are they going to use? Tools and apps from the 2000s?
We are facing a very real possibility of the end of the web browser as we know it. Google owns the chromium engine. Mozilla is on ever more precarious footing. It’s become logistically impossible to build competing products except for tech giant. Even then everybody else gave up and went with chromium.
That’s why I’m rooting for Ladybird.
I find it kinda ironic that they communicate over Discord, but it looks interesting
I appreciate you making me aware of such an amazing project.
And Mozilla is largely funded by Google. We all just hope they don’t pull the rug from them but I have no faith that our inept, slow government would stop that from happening before it’s too late.
Almost certainly the entire reason Google is funding Mozilla is to try and stave off antitrust lawsuits.
I think this reason is stupid. Why can’t there be a duopoly in the browser market like in the phone market? Even if there is no firefox, there will still be safari on its own engine
I think the phone market should also be broken up.
The reason a doupoly is bad in any market is that it’s essentially next to no choice for the consumer, and the businesses can force changes to the market that are anti-consumer with little reprocussion. In any given market the minimum number of legitimate competitors necessary for meaningful competition will be different, but even three is too few in the web browser game, especially when the market shares look like this.
Yep.
Google will spend more on a legal team working out how to prevent the lawsuits in the first place than they would be giving to Mozilla
The official reason is so that Big G is the default search engine on every install.
But that may very well just be a smokescreen.
Usenet:
Edit: I’m talking about step 3
But nntpd is still out there. Rebuilding Usenet will suck. But it’s not impossible. Start from the net2 sites again.
Old mail RFCs included an instant message channel. I’m sure I saw code in either sendmail or uw-imap for it too.
I like the fediverse, but the old ways are still valid for their particular payload.
for chat there’s IRC or bit more modern XMPP.
aka Enshittification
The key word is “majority”. I think IPFS will gain more popularity moving forward especially if fascism and censorship continue to rise.
And IPFS is not build on 90s tech?
Also compared to TOR, IPFS has 0 censorship resiliance.
I was a bit exmited for IPFS for a moment, but th more i tried it and thought about it, the less I saw a reason to use it.
An example of the flip side? Something built on the newest technology from the bottom up?
Most software is a terrible pile of unreadable code with no tests and horrible architecture choices, that somehow manages to keep working just through the power of years of customers finding bugs and complaining loud enough to get them fixed.
If you write any automated tests at all, you’re already better than most “professional” software companies. If you have a CI/CD pipeline, you’re far ahead.
Former process engineer in an aluminum factory. Aluminum foil is only shiny on one side and duller on the other for process reasons, not for any “turn this part towards baking, etc” reasons.
It’s just easier to double it on itself and machine it to double thickness than it is to hit single thickness precision, especially given how much more tensile strength it gives it.
Also, our QA lab did all kinds of tests on it to settle arguments. The amount of heat reflected/absorbed between the two sides is trivially small. But if you like one side better you should wrap it that way, for sure!
The interview is a vibe check first and foremost. If you vibe with the team we will overlook other things in your application. If you made it to interview, we already think you’re good enough so don’t stress trying to impress or apologize.
Managers are mostly people who get tired of watching other people do things badly and decide to try to do better. You don’t need a special degree or any magic to be a good manager, you should like people though.
Everyone is faking it to some degree.
people are generally ok. put them in a situation where they can climb over other people to advance and watch the rot begin.
so, while people are generally ok, corporate people are generally not.
Or any business, not even corporate.
You see the same crap in SMB.
Super Mario Bros?
Small/Medium-sized Business
The „you have to like people“ part took me nearly 20 years to figure out. I hate people in general with possible remedy for people who are nice. I‘m exceptional at managing people, I just dont vibe with them. This leads to absurd situations where everyone is happy, professionally but folks just hate my guts.
So, I now work alone and am happy with it. :)
If people hate your guts chances are you’re not a good manager.
I actually am genuinely interested in that fellow’s reasoning behind believing both that his job of managing people is successful, and also that all the people he managed do not like being managed by him.
Anecdotally, I have encountered workplaces containing a manager or employee that was universally disliked, and it was never because they were doing an awesome job. They did appear to think that people disliked them personally but benefited from their results. Often they seem to also believe those results would be unachievable in ways that do not produce the distaste. I am not sure these contradictions are entirely defensible.
As a fellow non people person, god I wish I was part of your team!
God I wish I was part of your team
As a fellow non people person
Press X to doubt.
Everyone is faking it to some degree.
Most valuable lesson I was ever forced to learn.
Can confirm with a very condensed anecdote: I once applied for a job that required engineering degree in electronics or mechanics. I’m a hischool dropout. Interview went well, and I got a job offer a month later. I got the impression that they were more interested in the right type of person with relevant hands-on experience, and in my case that experience meant IT/Linux (I was always a hobbyist geek)and being used to operating heavy machinery (Grew up on a farm).
I’m still in the same industry, and I earn more than my friends with masters degrees.
Personality, presence and confidence
Natural self confidence, but NOT an arrogant selfish confidence.
Some people naturally have confidence and presence and some people need to build it as a skill.
I know guys and gals with little to no knowledge or skill build up careers because they just knew how to talk and connect to people.
I also know guys and gals with years of education and degrees but have little to no way of politely or easily getting along with people.
The world is littered with fake empty buildings used to obscure phone line junctions and internet provider stuff.
Almost every neighbourhood has one. But they look like normal houses, so you can never tell unless you know where they are.
The cost of digital advertising cannot be justified by its effectiveness (or rather lack there of). We’ve collectively spent hundreds of billions of dollars creating the infrastructure for invasive hyper targeted ads that do not get better results than simple billboards and terrestrial TV ads even now. We’ve created a global economy of marketing, media, advertising and sales solely reliant on technofeudalist overlords who’ve provided very little actual improvement of anything.
If you value your privacy and you have a choice between using a browser to access a service vs installing their app, use the browser.
Online services can get much more information about you through an app vs the browser. Browsers are generally locked down more. Apps in general have access to much more information from your device.
The use of chatgpt for writing is so widespread in higher ed, it will cause serious problems to those students when entering the workforce.
Lots of fancy stuff is written about how we just have to change the way we teach!, and how we can use chatgpt in lessons! blablabla, but it’s all ignorant of the fact that some things need to be learnt by doing them, and students can’t understand how they hurt their own learning, because they don’t know what they don’t know.
The quality of education at college and university is in free fall.
Chocolate production is infested with slave labor, child labor and child slave labor.
So is banana production. And here I am with a bowl of banana-topped chocolate ice cream. Dammit.
Chunky Monkey by any means necessary
So what are you gonna do to stop it? 🍫🍌
I alone cannot stop it if that’s what you mean. In fact, often the reverse course of action seems the best. But I try to think forwardly and would stand up for what’s right even when I’m alone in doing so.
Not trying to be offensive, but could you provide examples of your second point? 😉☝🏻
The part about me standing up for what’s right?
Hehehe. That’s just plain mean.
i don’t think this is a secret anymore though
I used to think that at least the parts that are Fairtrade wouldn’t be affected as much.
Glad i basically dont eat the stuff ever.
If I’m not mistaken Nestlé, the firm that makes various brands of chocolate, are known or at least have been known to include slavery in really poor parts of the world.
When I look at a bottle or a cuddly packaged bit of chocolate, I shudder to think the shit conditions that a person, a child even was forced or on crap pay to produce that from the cocoa farming…
Ne*tle also does this thing where they lie to mothers in ‘third-world countries’ (I hate that term but can’t think of a better one rn) by telling them that their baby formula is better than actual milk, then give them some, which the mothers mix with dirty water, and when they can’t afford the formula, they’ll just give the babies plain dirty water.
An important part of that process that needs mentioning is that when the mothers are convinced by Nestle to feed their babies formula instead of their breast milk, their bodies will stop producing the milk before the baby is weaned from it.
So Nestle literally endangers babies’ lives just to sell more baby formula.
That’s an important addition!
Nestle also fucks up entire cities water supplies.
There is no financial motive for software to work well. The people who sign the check for it almost never have to use it.
That’s where you need people like me who give a fuck about nothing but customer experience and if my employer manages to make a buck, good for them. My employer is generally just a middle man who siphons money out of both our pockets. And makes me fill out a second, useless timesheet while you’re paying me to work.
Jokes on me though because I’ve been out of work for 3 months, so take my suggestion of fuck your employer with a grain of salt.
If they do a bad enough job they’ll create a niche for a competitor to fill.
I would love to see exactly how many people dropped Adobe after the latest drama, I would bet it would look exactly like the Netflix micro dip after shutting down password sharing.
I have a laptop where half the keyboard doesn’t work and the mouse gave out, but my full paid Acrobat works, so I keep it.
No one that works in the industry is going to drop Adobe, because there’s no other functional alternative that offers an even remotely similar feature set. A lot of the files I get from clients are .ai (Illustrator) or .indd (InDesign) files, and I have to use the appropriate programs to open them, and the most up-to-date versions of those programs, or else I end up missing parts of their files.
Users that are 100%, fully independent don’t have to worry about any of that. But those people are rare.
That’s a dream. The googles and such just buy them out and shut them down. There is always a bigger fish that spends more money preserving the status quo than making a product.
True - that’s a big reason I like open source software. Doesn’t help with search though.
That’s why a lot of us are here after all.
Depends on business model. Saas - quality is very important. Non-profit insurance/bureaucratic type - they’ll burn millions to hire plenty of QA then treat them like shit, ignore them, and push trash software all day
Quality is meaningless in SaaS. Only features matter.
Yeah no. Performance, reliability, uptime are huge.
Uptime isn’t quality. Perf and reliability are easily faked with the right metrics. It’s trival to be considered working on PowerPoint without working well for the user.
Uptime is quality. It’s why uptime is in SLAs. A quality product isn’t down half the time.
Opinions like that are why software quality sucks. And why using software is so painful for most people. “I have to use a stroller to set my phone number on the UI.” “Sure, but uptime if 5 9’s, so it’s quality software”.
Lol, saying uptime is needed for quality of why software quality sucks? What? Uptime is part of quality, it is not the sole determination of quality. You seem to be purposefully misunderstanding that concept.
False. Have a 70% up time and let me know how many clients you have left.
Uptime isn’t quality. Perf and reliability are easily faked with the right metrics. It’s trival to be considered working on PowerPoint without working well for the user
Uptime indicates reliability. Reliability is a factor of quality. A quality product has a high uptime. What good is a solution that doesn’t work 20% of the time? That’s exactly how you lose clients. Why do SLAs cover topics like five 9s uptime if they don’t matter and can be faked? This makes no sense.
You said quality doesn’t matter, only features. Ok, what happens when those features only work 10% of the time? It doesn’t matter as long as it has the feature? This is nonsense. I mean why does QA even exist then, what is the point of wasting spend on a team that only worries about quality, they are literally called Quality Assurance. Why do companies have those if quality doesn’t matter, why not just hire more eng to pump out features. Again, this makes no sense. Anyone who works in software would know the role of QA and why it’s important. You claim to work in tech, but seem to not understand the value of QA which makes me suspicious, that or you’ve just been a frontline dev and never had to worry about these aspects of management and the entire SDLC. I mean why is tracking defects a norm in software dev if quality doesn’t matter? Your whole stance just makes no sense.
It’s trival to be considered working on PowerPoint without working well for the user
No it’s not trival. What if “not working well” means you can’t save or type? Not working well means not working as intended, which means it does not satisfy the need that it was built to fill. You can have the feature to save, but if it only works half the time then according to you that’s fine. You might lose your work, but the feature is there, who cares about the quality of the feature… If it only saves sometimes or corrupts your file, those are just quality issues that no one cares about, they are “trivial?”
See, you just set the bar so low. Being able to save isn’t working well, it’s just working. And I have held the title of QA in the past. It is in part how I know these things. And in the last 5 years or so, companies have been laying off QAs and telling devs to do the job. Real QA is hard. If it really mattered you would have multiple QA people per dev. But the ratio is always the other way. A QA can’t test the new feature and make sure ALL the old ones still work at the rate a dev can turn out code. Even keeping up on features 1 to 1 would be really challenging. We have automation to try and keep up with the old features, but that needs to be maintained as well. QA is always a case of good enough. And just like at Boeing, managment will discourage QAs from reporting everything they find that is wrong. Because they don’t want a paper trail of them closing the ticket as won’t be fixed. I’ve been to QA conferences and listened to plenty of seasoned QAs talk about the art of knowing what to report and what not to. And how to focus effort on what management will actually ok to get fixed. It’s a whole art for a reason. I was encouraged to shift out of that profession because my skills would get much better pay, and more stable jobs, in dev ops. And my job is sufficiently obscure to most management that I can actually care about the users of what I write more. But also I get to see more metrics that show how the software fails it’s users while still selling. I have even been asked to produce metrics that would misrepresent the how well the software works for use in upper level meetings. And I have heard many others say the same. Some have said that is even a requirement to be a principle engineer in bigger companies. Which is why I won’t take those jobs. The “good enough” I am witness/part of is bad enough, I don’t want to increase it anymore.
I’m setting a new low sure, and you’re moving the goal posts. What “well” means is incredibly subjective.
You worked in QA, cool, and I’ve manage the entire R&D org of a nation wide company, including all of QA.
Your saying that since companies don’t invest in it enough it doesn’t matter at all? Why do they even invest at all then, if it truly doesn’t matter.
Yes a QA can test old features and keep up with new ones. WTF, have you never heard of a regression test suite? And you worked in QA? ok. Maybe acknowledging AQA is an entire field might solve that already solved problem.
You did a whole lot of complaining and non relevant stories but never answered any questions I’ve been asking you across multiple comments…
This is why Dog Fooding is important.
I mean, no? If you are at a SaaS company the software working well is the most important aspect. Loss of quality leads to loss of subscribers.
Subscribers? 90 some odd % of SaaS is sold to businesses, not individuals.
Yah, clients are subscribers
Okay then the users aren’t subscribers, thier boss or the boss above that are. And that person doesn’t really care how hard it is to use. They care about the presentation they gave to other leadership about all the great features the software has. And if they drop it now, they look like a fool, so deal with it.
They do care, %100 they care. If you take longer to do task X because the SaaS solution crashes or is unavailable, or causes issues in finance, or a dozen other things then the company will very much care. I literally work at a SaaS company and hear complaints from clients. Money is all that matters, if your solution isn’t as good at making/saving them money as another solution, you get dropped. And reliability is a big part of that. A solution that frequently has issues is not a money-making/saving system that can be relied on.
It’s not about looking like a fool; it’s about what your P&L looks like. That’s what actually matters. Say you made a nice slide deck about product X and got buy-in. Walking that back is MUCH easier to do than having to justify a hit to your P&L.
What experience do you have to be making these claims?
I have 30 years of work experience on both sides of the equation with companies of varying size. Once a company gets to somewhere between 500 and 1000 employees, the 2nd level managment starts to attract professionally ambitious people who prioritize thier career over the work to a more a more extreme degree. They never walk anything back. Every few years they will often replace a solution (even a working one) so that they can take credit for a major change. Anyway, you get enough of these and they start to back each other and squeeze out anyone who cares about the work. I have been told in one position that it doesn’t matter if you are right, you don’t say anything negative about person X’s plan. And many other people from other companies and such have echoed that over the years. Now small companies often avoid this. But most software targets the big companies for the big paydays. Of the ones I have worked at, some even openly admitted that financially they couldn’t justify fixing a user issue over a new feature that might sell more product because the user issues don’t often lead to churn, where as new features often seal a deal.
You seem to be basing how the entire industry works on some people you’ve encountered who want to climb the ladder. Again, when you stand in front of a board and have to justify your EBITDA, it doesn’t matter how good your PowerPoint slide was. They don’t have to walk it back, the P&L is numbers, they have to justify those numbers or deal with not hitting budget. A company runs off numbers not initiatives people want to push.
You seem to be ignoring the fact that you have to report metrics to investors. Spend, rev, output, etc. And a poor SaaS solution that has poor quality negatively impacts those numbers. Numbers don’t lie, no matter how much spin you put on them. You say you have 30 years of experience both consuming and delivering SaaS solutions but seem to ignore that you have defended your P&L and your performance, all numbers, not office politics. Investors only care about money, dollars and cents, numbers. So what happens when solution X that Bob pushed and no one can talk bad about tanks your topline, or your EBITDA? Then what? You tell the board not to say anything bad about it? That just doesn’t make sense.
And if the business needs aren’t met, said businesses will go to another SaaS company that promises them a better, brighter future.
The user might not be the subscriber, but the user being less productive because the software is getting in their way, will irritate the subscriber.
I know a SaaS company that put thousands upon thousands of engineering hours into making small (and sometimes large) optimizations over their overall crappy architecture so their enterprise customers (and I’m talking ~6 out of the top 10 largest companies in one industry in the US) wouldn’t leave them for a solution that doesn’t freeze up for all users in a company when one user runs a report. Each company ran in a silo of their own, but for the bigger ones… I’m not going to give exact numbers, but if you give every user a total of half an hour of unnecessary delays per day, that’s like 500 hours of wasted time per day per 1000 employees. Said employees were performing extremely overpriced services, so 500 hours of wasted time per day might be something like 100k income lost per day. Not an insignificant number even for billion dollar companies.
I’ve since left the company for greener pastures and I hear the new management sucks, but the old one for sure knew that they were going to lose their huge ass clients over performance issues and bugs.
The key phrase was work well. You are saying they have a motive for it to work. Like not freeze up. I am saying they have no motive for it to work well. As in be user friendly or efficient or easy to use.
It still worked - you could use the software with occasional hiccups, it’s not like there was data loss or anything. It just didn’t work WELL.
Ok, well really splitting hairs on what “working well” means but ok. Why do UX designers exist? I mean if you have a bad UI that takes a user 10 min to do something that can be done in 10 seconds in another solution, you lose. Time is money. Anyone who has ever been in magament knows it’s all about cost vs output. If a call center employee can handle 2x more cases with another solution due to a better UX, they will move to that.
You are saying efficiency doesn’t matter, which is just %100 false. A more efficient solution makes/saves more money. It saves time, which is also money and improves agility of the team. How can you say with a straight face that a business doesn’t care about efficiency of it’s workers…
Because I have worked with software for 30 years. When the employee is salaried, thier time costs nothing. I will say I have no experience with call centers. So those may be an exception. I believe the majority of computer use jobs are salary though.
Ugh, wrong again. Time is money. People have limited bandwidth and output, you want to get at much output as you can for the salary spend while realizing each person has a finite output. You keep saying things like “time costs nothing” and “quality doesn’t matter” which are just completely wrong and if true would upend the industry.
Also I’ve been in software for just over 20, the last 4 of those as a CTO. Since you seem to keep bringing up your credentials for some reason.
I mean that describes most things. For example, if I worked for a dentist to make oral braces for people, that doesn’t mean I myself am going to ever need or use them.
No… the decision maker on the purchase is the user in that case. For software, the decision maker is almost always someone who won’t use it. Like ticket tracking software. The people filing the tickets, and the people responding are not the people who decided which ticket tracking software to buy.
I don’t really get this point. Of course there’s a financial motive for a lot of software to work well. There are many niches of software that are competitive, so there’s a very clear incentive to make your product work better than the competition.
Of course there are cases in which there’s a de-facto monopoly or customers are locked in to a particular offering for whatever reason, but it’s not like that applies to all software.
I support accounting professionals using one of perhaps four or five highly complex pieces of software that handles individual, corp, trust, and other misc tax forms
The churn rate is very low YoY, because it’s what they know. They have the freedom to move their data, and we will help them to the extent possible, but at most they’ll get a subset of client data and lose the ability to query agai t prior year datasets, etc.
They’re not locked in, but between 10/15 and, say, 2/15 is a damn short time to implement and learn a new piece of software with that level of complexity.
Interestingly, I’ve never seen a long-standing calculation bug in the program. The overwhelming majority of support is d/t user error or data entry error. From that standpoint, there is of course a financial incentive for it to work well - arithmetic errors would be unacceptable - but in terms of UI/UX, no one cares and if anything were improved folks would just whine about the change anyway - even if it made their life easier
Not a CPA/not your CPA, just a software guy who got lucky enough to be in the right time/place when I decided I didn’t have the energy for the startup world anymore.
Software just has to be good enough that people put up with it. Once you get users on the system, you make it difficult to move your data out which acts as a lock in mechanism. The company that can make a minimally usable product that people are willing to put up with will typically beat one making a really good product that takes longer to get to market.
To wit, WorkDay is universally regarded as trash. But companies keep writing checks, so employees on both sides of the time clock have to keep tolerating it
Another aspect of the problem is that people making the decision of what programs to use don’t actually have to use them.
As long as the reports that the C-suite gets look pretty, that’s all that matters. Have seen that one from both sides.
“I need five developer hours to implement a UI for this manual process that is time sensitive and exposes us to significant risk if we screw it up. Oh, and I’m the only one who knows how to do it in prod, so we have a bus problem.”
“Nah, I want reports…. Wait, why did we write an HO4 policy in Corpus Christie, AFTER the hurricane warning was issued?”
“See above, and prioritise things that matter.”
yup
This is what I’ve seen too. Directors come back from a conference and suddenly we’re learning a newer but objectively worse system. Obviously the grunts using the systems aren’t consulted, but are expected to be team players through this educational experience.
When the buyer isn’t the user (which is most of the time), no there isn’t. Competitors try to win with great sounding features and other marketing BS because that is all the director will see. The users are then left with the product that has all the bells and whistles, but is terrible at doing what actually needs to be done. And the competition is the same, so they don’t really have much choice. Bell’s and whistles are cheaper than making it work well.
So you’re talking about SaaS / business tooling then? Again though, that’s just one of many segments of software, which was my point.
Also, even in that market it’s just not true to say that there’s no incentive for it to work well. If some new business tool gets deployed and the workforce has problems with it to the point of measurable inefficiency, of course that can lead to a different tool being chosen. It’s even pretty common practice for large companies to reach out to previous users of a given product through consultancy networks or whatever to assess viability before committing to anything.
Nor necessarily SaaS, but yes business tooling. Which is the vast majority of software if you include software businesses buy and make thier customers use. The incentive is for it to work, not for it to work well. The person who signed off on the purchase either will never know how bad it is because they don’t use it and are insulated by other staff from feedback, or because they are incentivesed to downplay and ignore complaints to make thier decision look good at their level in the company.
That is true for outsourcing companies, but not true for product companies usually.
I think it’s equally true for product companies. Do you know how hard it is to get a company to prioritize bug fixing over feature work? Shy of a user revolt, or a friend of the CEO reporting an issue, bugs are almost always second priority or lower.
I’d say this strongly depends on the industry.
In an entertainment or ad sales product, I’d completely agree with you.
In a medical or financial product, the bug will take precedence.
Medical? Your funny. Healthcare software is the worst. There is a reason the stuff that matters is decades old. Cause the new stuff rarely works. And the rest… tell me again why I have to fill out the same forms year after year, and they never populate with my previous answers? Or why I have to tell them my 2 year old son isn’t menstruating or hasn’t stolen a car yet (on the same form no less). The software is so hard to use the providers have given up.
You wish it was like that in the medical industry, but it absolutely is not
I work in the medical industry. Any software that controls any device or reports any data used in the OR is absolutely treated this way.
Not in my experience. Unless maybe if it causes loss of funds or other security issues, which usually get a fair response.
But not at the software companies that require monthly subscriptions, right? They get money every month, so they have lots of incentive to fix all the bugs. Right? … Right? /s
depends on how bad and widespread the bug is. Also if there are just to many they will do a bug squashing program increment. at least places I have worked have.
No idea what you are talking about. Product companies are exactly what I am referring to. Some director signs off on the purchase, probably has never even seen the software. But he has seen the sales pitch. That is what the C suite of small companies are for, mingling with the decision makers.
Found the Sonos employee.
Sonos has pissed me off. After the latest update, the app cannot locate the speakers in any of my rooms. The TV speakers still work with a signal from the TV, but the speakers in all other rooms basically cannot be used.
I’ve factory reset them, set them up in the app, and as soon as that is done, they disappear from the app again.
They worked fine for years, then this bullshit. I’m researching a home theater setup that doesn’t use Sonos and am planning on selling it all once I’ve found replacements.
It feels like I don’t own the very expensive hardware that I have bought. I guess since they are software controlled, I really dont.
I don’t know how well known this is by now, but just in case, I’ll add it.
The quality of your speakers is not affected by the cable from your amp.
The connectors are more important in terms of physical contact, but almost any new connector will do. The wire itself makes no difference. Pay as much as you want but the sound will not be any different than if you used metal coat hanger wire.
Gauge matters in some setups, especially over longer lengths, this is overly generalizing.
Not really. Most home hifi won’t be affected. I think that’s a reasonable generalisation.
By your reasoning I could use some 24 gauge wire that came with a pair of Walmart computer speakers with a receiver paired with 3-ways each with 10" woofers. Or even better yet, between a plate amp and sub as a fire starter.
I don’t disagree with your overall premise, but it’s too reductive, even for home theater. Throw in a “16ga in most non-sub applications” and only then does it become true.
You’re being way too pedantic. I said most home hifi and you’re example isn’t.
If you want me to be more specific, this article will cover pretty much anything you want know.
Master Handbook of Acoustics is your friend if you want to learn what to do to your room. Overkill for most, admittedly, but it contains everything you need to know.
Here’s the pdf to the 4th edition.
What improvements did you make based on the book? I’m skimming through it.
I made couple of bass tramps tuned to the room’s main resonant frequencies, which I measured. I followed instructions from the book.
I added sound absorber panels to the walls and ceiling to kill immediate reflections from the main speakers plus a sprinkling of additional panels to kill reflections and also act as decoration. I also needed to move one radiator because it was in the worst possible location for my setup.
The room got thick curtains to improve absorption, and they also darken the room as it is dual use music listening and home cinema room. A few defraction elements went into the ceiling for a good measure. The ceiling is made of custom panels that I made myself from wood and fabric to allow sound energy through to the various acoustic elements behind them.
I also spent a fair amount of time with subwoofer placement, but in the end it became a bit of a compromise between sound and placement of furniture. Nothing a bit of signal processing can’t deal with, mind.
Well done, that’s more than some do for actual production work!
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Username checks out! /s
No, they’ll be fine. And if they are connected reasonably well, will sound as good as any other speaker cable.
Of course, there are one or two scenarios where that can change, but for most people they aren’t applicable.
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Powered, as in active? No, those are connected internally. Cabling is then between the internal amp and a preamplifier, which is line level.
I would point you to the overwhelming lack of any reported incidents of speakers or amplifiers catching fire because the wires were too thin. This is simply fiction.
Coat hangers are generally much wider than any speaker wire, and the metal used makes little to no difference to the sound or the load. It is of no importance, you can do this safely.
As I’ve said, there are a few scenarios where you could run into problems, but these are very much outside of home hifi.
Isn’t conductor diameter important to supply proper wattage?
Not quite, conductor diameter is important to supply proper current, which will change depending on the impedance of your speaker. There are other values like inductance and capacitance in a wire that could affect how your speaker sounds. The good news is that you can pretty much buy any cheap 16 ga copper speaker wire and not worry about it, as it would take effort to make a speaker wire that sounds bad (and those companies are the type to try to charge you $1000/ft for it!)
Thanks.
I always shy away from the ad hype of products, I have been in different industries, and have seen that a $ product vs $$$ product is sometimes identical innards, and a refreshed outer…which didn’t cost the manufacturer anything extra.
I have tried to explain this to my spouse, but she will still gravitate to buying the more expensive; equating cost with quality
Yes! What he said is certainly a generalization for most speaker setups. Low resistance, larger gauge wire is of course better, but won’t be noticeable on your average sound system.
Adding to this, you probably don’t know how good your speakers are or not because you’re listening to your room, not your speakers. If you have given zero thought to acoustic treatment where you listen to music, you definitely don’t need to upgrade your audio equipment in any way. No amount of money you spend on equipment will help you enjoy music more until you treat your room
Who the fuck is up upvoting this dumb take? So you’re actually trying to argue there is no difference between a pair of $20 speakers and a $500 surround sound system with amp if they aren’t in the perfect room? That’s some music snobbery on a level I’ve never seen before.
Nobody is talking about a perfect room, and you are severely contorting what I said to meet your own agenda.
Nothing dumb about it, it’s actually quite on point. They didn’t mention price points or comparing speakers, but that the actual sounds heard from any speakers in a room depends greatly on room treatment (things like reflections, absorption, standing waves). This is where good usage of dsp room correction can help, along with rugs.
There’s no way you guys have friends.
These aren’t secrets, but may not be well known (unless you watch LPL):
Sentry Safes aren’t safes, they are fire boxes with a fancy lock.
High security locks are not high security because of the lock design, but because the keys are very difficult to have duplicated.
No one (except maybe intelligence agencies) breaks in to a house by picking a lock, especially in the US. Windows, weak door frames, and, in a pinch, making a hole in the wall are all faster ways of getting in.
Car keys are so expensive because many manufacturers charge a subscription or per-use fee to access and program the keys to the ignition. These costs are passed on to consumers
No one is picking your locks just to move things around or steal small, insignificant items. You are either suffering from a mental disorder or a trusted member of the household is gaslighting you (it’s not gaslighting though,
you’reyour grasp of reality is slipping. Don’t call me for a pick proof lock, just get help please)Some manufacturers (you know, in China) will put any sticker you want on the products they produce, including UL and ANSI stickers. Before buying a product that is supposedly fire-rated, such as a fire safe, check the UL website to verify the item is actually listed with them.
“Grade 1” door hardware sold in stores like Lowe’s or Home Depot is, at best, Grade 2, and is likely Grade 3 (residential grade). These grades are really just about how durable the product is over time, and how much abuse they will endure by the public.
And just a little practical advice. Find a qualified, honest locksmith before you need one. We’re like plumbers. If you wait until you have an emergency to find one, the quality will be questionable. There are a lot of scammers out there. If you don’t have a resource for locksmiths beyond Google, look on the ALOA website for members in your area. The good ones will know who the other good ones are, and won’t be shy about sharing that info if they are unavailable or too far away
I want to comment here so bad but given that I am one of two people that know and one of maybe a dozen that suspect, it would definitely violate multiple NDAs.
ProTip: Invest in off-grid solutions for your home.
Sure, not-13-year-old-kid-trying-to-sound-cool
As an NDA signer, they could be legit. I would like to comment also, but I don’t like law suits.
law suits
But without the suits for law people, how will tailors stay in business?
Just get tor browser, make a throwaway account, post your comment and delete the browser.
The Bucees logo tells me this is probably going to affect Texas more than other regions.
Ha! I used to live in Austin and I don’t fly, so Buc-ee’s and Cracker Barrel hold a special place in my heart. Unfortunately what I am talking about is a US thing, not just a Texas thing.
In what time frame would you say we’ll all know?
Hopefully never. I am trying to solve the problem by relieving this single point of failure, but I am not having any luck.
Worst case scenario: let’s say that what I fear happens tomorrow. Given what I have seen so far, some people (regional) will notice system degradation within a week, and nationwide within one or two months. Time to find a work around is about a year, but that could be me just applying hopeful thinking to cope. I have not idea how long a permanent fix would take.
I’m smelling an awful lot of bullshit here. If the power grid (or any other major infrastructure) had a known single point of failure that would cause the entire system to collapse, there would be more than 2 people who know about it, and they certainly wouldn’t be vague-booking it to Lemmy.
I’m gonna be honest, this sounds about right for 2024. Skeleton crews a dick hair away from disaster as far as the eye can see.
It’s less bs than you think, still unlikely sure, but not a non zero chance.
For awhile their was a single point of failure in telcom for the midwest in the us. Because the core router was so old and didn’t play well with failover. It took them several months and a lot of intermittent issues to get it replaced and working as expected.
That would be the sane assumption, yes.
The power grid does have a major point of failure, in that vital components are on backorder for years out so most places don’t have the spare parts to get back up and running if widespread attacks on the grid occur.
So you’re not describing the issue where internet connected EV chargers can be easily hacked, and potentially told to dump the charge of the connected vehicle’s battery on the grid en masse, causing overloads and transformer explosions.
But a slow moving issue like that sounds like a frequency or voltage issue - something goes under or over enough and isn’t detected via monitoring, causing premature equipment degradation, and potential system collapse. Definitely a lot of expensive damage, though.
(Basically, a stuxnet-style attack on the utility grid - and we’ve already seen evidence that SCADA/PLC’s can be hacked in the water supply system.)A destabilizing push, rather than a hit with a hammer.
The reason the problem I am talking about exists is because it is terribly boring and mundane. It is also 100% a cost center, meaning that it provides only cost and no possibility of profit. Things that explode or can explode are very high profile and people notice them. Mundane problems go unchecked until after the shit has hit the fan and politicians are looking for a scapegoat.
I deal with information security. Initially when I type that people instantly think “hackers”. True, information security does deal with a lot of “keep out the baddies”, but more than that we also make sure that data reaches its intended destination when it is supposed to reach its intended destination. For example, you might want your fire suppression system to trigger as soon as a fire is ignited and not after everyone in the building is burned alive or dead from smoke inhalation.
Right now I have a situation where everything is working well but I know that if something happens to this one thing, a very mundane system is going to collapse and literally nobody can fix it adequately. For the past five years we have done everything within our power to add redundancy but as I mentioned before, this is a mundane cost center. Nobody wants to spend money to fix something that works. So, when the thing no longer works, service will be tremendously degraded, people will figure out that it cannot be fixed, and the search for a replacement will begin. Eventually they will succeed but in the meantime things are going to suck and some people might die.
“Greed is good” – Gordon Geko
" Greed is self-defeating " – JoMiran
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Scary.
When everything works: “What do we even pay IT for?”
When everything’s broke: “What do we even pay IT for?”
“When you do your job right it’s as if you didn’t do anything at all”
- God to bender in Futurama
When they start looking for a scapegoat, I hope you find yourself far away from the eye of Sauron there.
Sounds like e911 or pots lines.
Water, electricity, or both?
Water, electrical, sewer, gas, trash, internet, cable, mail, plumbing, drywall, stairs, air. It’s all the government man.
Offgrid Internet… Hmmmm
They mean having a lan with your friends
Water, electricity and gas but I am sure this type of problem is present in many other sectors.
so you’re saying a fire sale is coming… got it
As an indigenous person who grew up without running water or modern plumbing for the first ten years of my life in Canada … I always appreciated this quote …
Will Durant Quote: “From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.”
There are more than 2 people that know that Texas’s power grid is a teetering disaster waiting for the right event to crumble and break in unfixable fashion
(Or water, water’s probably even more sketchy. Look up the incident in the UK where they accidentally put a shitload of treatment chemicals in the main water supply and a whole bunch of people got poisoned. Harder to do off grid solutions for though.)
There are more than 2 people that know that Texas’s power grid is a teetering disaster waiting for the right event to crumble and break in unfixable fashion
OP asked for a secret. The Texas grid sucking is not a secret.
Fair enough. I read your other comments and my current guess is abysmal cyber security coupled with clear indications that hostile state actors are trying to fuck it up, and showing no sign of having any more trouble than would an NFL team pushing past the volunteers who have signed up to work the door at the senior center social hour
In which case if that’s accurate I would say that yes that fits the brief
All the cybersecurity in the world won’t matter if a handful of
manipulated idiotspeople shoot a bunch of unguarded and remotely located substation transformers.
If you just want it for emergency purposes or irrigation, rain water harvesting can be fairly cheap and easy. Even a proper cistern, with a pump, and plumbed into your house is probably cheaper than whole-house off-grid solar. Probably want good filters for PFAS though.
A whole bunch of welds in nuclear reactors are visually inspected using cameras duct taped onto the end of incredibly long poles which also get duct taped together. This would be the inside of BWR plants near the fuel and jet pumps. There is also an “art” to moving the cameras and poles around to get the shots you need. And if you get stuck the talented people know how to get you unstuck. There are also cameras just duct taped to ropes that the camera handler “swims” to certain spots.
Don’t get me wrong, we have cool ultrasonic inspecting robots as well, but I was absolutely blown away by what visual inspection looked like in practice.
PS: The high dose fields make the camera look like it is being blasted with colorful confetti because of the high energy particles bombarding the camera module.
