Aesthetics, plus the seductive appeal that pre-modern, pre-liberal-democratic societies (when the governments were authoritarian, the women were submissive, and the men “were men”) have for reactionaries, incels, and cryptofacists.

Oh, don’t get me wrong - Budweiser/Coors/Michelob etc. are all awful. However, most US states have good local breweries and craft beers. Lagers are generally not as popular as IPAs, but you can still get good ones. Admittedly, this varies quite a bit depending on where you are in the US.

1. No it’s not.
2. I already use salted butter for toast – American is still worse.
3. Yes it is.

As a cooking ingredient, maybe, but if you’re using butter on toast, bread, etc. then Irish/French/British butter is clearly better.

Also, the superiority of European chocolate isn’t to do with the cocoa content or the sweetness - it’s just creamier and has a smoother texture.

I’ll agree with you on the beer, though.

Elections bring these issues into sharp relief, so of course people are talking about it – especially since this particular election features the two most deeply unpopular candidates in US history.

It’s never the wrong time to condemn the two-party duopoly for the facade of democracy that it is, or point out that the sentiments and circumstances that led to the rise of Trump need to be tackled at their roots before they go away.

Even if Biden somehow manages to beat Trump in November, there will be no meaningful political change until the dominance of the corporate two-party system is broken up and the financial burdens of the working classes are alleviated.

Big tech companies making vast profits off of users providing data for free instead of paying workers wages in exchange for manufacturing goods is only going to deepen the disparity of wealth in society.

What we desperately need is essentially a Digital Bill of Rights so that we can legally own our own data.

True, albeit a very small minority.

British accents are non-rhotic, so really it should be “ga-ridge”, not “gare-ridge”.

Opus @ >128 kbps sounds as good as FLAC, even for audiophiles (as much as some may try to deny it). The real advantage for FLAC is for archival purposes.

Nah they got it right the first time.

For your use case, I’d go with LosslessCut as opposed Shotcut, Openshot, etc.

The reason being that it is much simpler and faster to use, and generally results in smaller filesizes because you aren’t having to re-encode from scratch.

Going from 192kbps to 320kbps would be audibly negligible unless you used a really bad codec to begin with, in which case adding AI into the mix would likely just compound the problem.

Probably not even worth it, tbh.

Hitchens wasn’t really ever an actual Neo-Con; it’s just that his stance on the second Iraq war made him look like one from some angles.

He always did have a bee in his bonnet about despotism and dictatorships (which, incidentally, is why I personally think that he spent so much of his later years debating against organized religion), and this is what lead him to support the toppling of Saddam Hussein, who was by all accounts a brutal and sadistic dictator.

In that, his interests aligned with the Bush Jr. administration, but he was never fully on board with their American exceptionalism and disdain for international institutions, as far as I could see.

Except this “series of unfortunate events” appears to be entirely self-inflicted.

We’re not talking about a couple of hobbyists making YT videos in their spare time; LTT/LMG are by this point a huge media content factory whose unrelenting drive to produce the next hot slice of monetized infotainment means they are making constant (and often quite large) errors and not giving these products the time and attention required to assess them properly.

If you have the time, Gamer Nexus’ initial video critique where they matter-of-factly listed all the reasons why LTT need to seriously reevaluate how they do business is a very interesting watch.

https://youtu.be/FGW3TPytTjc?t=99

Edit: wow, it seems to have finally sunk in - LTT posted this video not two hours after I posted my comment.

(Piped link because apparently the apology video is monetized 😑) :

https://piped.mha.fi/watch?v=0cTpTMl8kFY

In that case, you’d also want Lygisk instead of Magisk, to automatically have root reinstalled after every OTA upgrade. (Lygisk is a fork of Magisk, you get the same functionality otherwise)

Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think Lygisk is a blanket recommendation for all devices running Lineage OS. I believe it’s for A-partition-only devices, so phones with A-B should use Magisk instead.

If I were you, I would stick to streaming in that case.

However, if you’re dead set on storing files locally and there’s no other option but to transcode, then use 128kbps Opus instead of AAC - assuming that iPhones support it (I haven’t checked). It’s a lot more efficient.

A good converter program to use is fre:ac but don’t ask me for an iOS only app because I’m not an Apple guy at all.

Converting from one lossy codec another isn’t generally recommended, plus you aren’t likely to save that much disk space by converting to AAC.

10 GB is actually pretty small for a local music collection, quite honestly. If I were you, I would try to expand your storage capacity instead of wasting time, and potentially audio quality, by transcoding.

Headsets and headphones are not the same thing and have very different market demographics.

Very nice!

This is a great base for people to create their own. I much prefer the wider page width to Lemmy’s default on desktop.

Personally, though, I find the box outline colors in these themes to be a little loud.

I tweaked the CSS and made it look a bit more understated.