Amazon Fire Tablet 7in. I bought it literally just to read PDFs, and it was so slow that it was basically unusable. I tried switching out the launcher to something more minimal (Niagara launcher I think), and I figured out how to disable the ads that were all over the place. It helped a bit, but not enough to overcome the hardware and Fire OS. (I think I needed ADB for both of those fixes; I had to put in some real work to unfuck that tablet.) Plus the screen was too small for my pathetic human eyeballs.

Was it worth $30? At the time, yeah, because I literally couldn’t afford anything else, but I now have an $80 10in generic Android tablet that’s wildly faster.

But if you really want to play the game at the highest level, America is the place to do it.

I mean if “the game” is having the largest prison population per capita then sure, but otherwise America is mid in almost every category.

America sucks. The government and the “America” it upholds is an institution of evil, a factory for global war and oppression all while insultingly calling itself “land of the free”, and anyone who latches onto its historical “achievements” probably sucks too.

/c/DSP. Digital signal processing, i.e. how to transform, filter, and live with digital signals (e.g. audio files, image files, video files, sensor measurements, etc.). It involves a lot of math, so unless we get R*ddit-like numbers I don’t really know how such a community could keep moving.

I have a “unique” accent of some kind. Basically, I don’t sound like I’m from “around here”, even though I have lived in the same area for my entire life and so have my parents. Probably because I read a lot more than I actually talk to people.

Going to bars. I can’t drink with my medications and I don’t like going to loud, social places unless there’s some other reason to be there.

Desperately needs more upvotes

DSP (digital signal processing) is the field of applied mathematics and engineering dedicated to transforming and manipulating digital signals.

Examples of real digital signals include audio files, image files, video files, and digitized recordings of various physical quantities by computers like the configuration of a robot as it moves in time, measurements of the processes in a factory, the trajectory of a spacecraft — almost anything that can be periodically sampled and take on a finite set of values [1] can be seen as a digital signal.

DSP includes using tools like the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT), the Z-transform, wavelet analysis, probability, statistics, and linear algebra to do things such as filter a signal (example: audio equalizer), predict future values (example: weather forecasting), data compression (example: JPEGs), system identification (example: fit a model of the earth to predict seismic activity), control (example: make a DC motor to respond to position commands), and stabilization (example: keep plane from “wanting” to smash into the ground). Particularly, it requires a careful consideration of the effect of sampling a signal (example: if done carelessly, you can make the sampled system unstable [read: explode]), as well as an interpolation process of some kind if you plan on using that signal outside your computer (example: you want to hear an audio signal stored on your computer).

I got into DSP because I was an audio engineer and musician [2], and I wanted to design my own audio plugins. IMO I think almost everyone would benefit from some knowledge of DSP, but the math is really intense. Personally, I found out late in life that I have a nearly infinite appetite for math, so it’s a good fit for me.

Here’s a playlist about DSP if you’re interested.

[1] Actually, a lot of basic DSP books don’t restrict the signal to be in a finite set because it makes the math easier if the signal could be any real number. However, certain structures that would be exactly equivalent in theory are not equivalent on a real computer because ordinary computer arithmetic is approximate.

[2] I still play music, but not as much as before engineering school.

Digital signal processing

No, turtles never even existed, I’ve never seen one. /s

Infinite-dimensional vector spaces also show up in another context: functional analysis.

From an engineering perspective, functional analysis is the main mathematical framework behind (1) and (2) in my previous comment. Although they didn’t teach functional analysis for real in any of my coursework, I kinda picked up that it was going to be an important topic for what I want to do when I kept seeing textbooks for it cited in PDE and “signals and systems” books. I’ve been learning it on my own since I finished Calc III like four years ago.

Such an incredibly interesting and deep topic IMO.

I actually designed a digital equalizer using an IIR filter this semester, which actually does theoretically work on sequences of numbers, which constitutes an infinite dimensional vector space. The actual math was just algebra and programming, but it was an implementation of a Z-transform transfer function which is a sequence operator (maps input sequence to output sequence).

IMO infinite-dimensional stuff shows up in two types of problems:

1. For some reason, you need to solve the partial differential equation you started with, i.e. you can’t use symmetry or approximations to simplify it into an ordinary differential equation.

2. When you’re dealing with signals that change in time or space, you have to decompose those signals into simpler signals that are easier to analyze.

some wysiwyg editor for LaTeX

LyX is basically that.

IMO LyX is way simpler than LaTeX for basic stuff, but because it is literally not Microsoft Word I couldn’t really use it to collaborate with people this semester, let alone convince them to work on a full LaTeX document. LyX would be the way to go if my colleagues were even remotely interested in learning about literally anything. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink…

I’m just a 12-inch 60 watt guitar loudspeaker with tailored mid-range frequency response primarily used to record metal trying to find other guitar loudspeakers with tailored mid-range frequency responses primarily used to record metal

Yes.

Maybe TMI but hygiene. When I’m too sad to clean up then obviously I don’t do it, but when I’m doing really good I get so caught up in my work that I forget to clean up.

Stop funding a genocide

Abolish the police

Abolish prisons

Abolish the military

Reverse course on climate change

Open up the borders

Drop all student loans, pay back previous loans with interest

Free college

Drop the TikTok ban and replace it with a data privacy law

Cancel all defense contracts

Do any one of these for real and I’ll vote for him. But I have my doubts…

One kinda emphasizes, if not “otherizes” the other… usually in a not good way…

Yeah. People have been killed over being Catholic in a non-Catholic Christian society and people have also been killed over being a non-Catholic Christian in a Catholic society.

But that doesn’t mean that we can’t or shouldn’t differentiate at all between the dogmas of Catholics and the wider practice of Christianity.

(orientalize or occidentalize)

I mean there are lots of non-Catholic Churches with European origins, for example Lutheranism and Anglicanism. So I think it’s a bit more complicated than “otherizing” with respect to that specific dichotomy.

Catholics are Christians, but Christians are not necessarily Catholic. For example, Orthodox Christians are not Catholic. Being Catholic requires, at the bare minimum, agreement with the Holy See and implicitly the dogma he endorses. Even this “minor” difference can be used to find non-Catholic Christians.

Precisely, Catholic ⊊ Christian.

The reason why this is the case has to do with the history of Christianity, specifically the various schisms throughout the ages as the Christian faith evolved. That’s an incredibly complicated topic which I’m not qualified to discuss.