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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • I think you are conflating a few different concepts here.

    Can you comment on the specific makeup of a “rendered” audio file in plaintext, how is the computer representing every little noise bit of sound at any given point, the polyphony etc?
    What are the conventions of such representation? How can a spectrogram tell pitches are where they are, how is the computer representing that?

    This is a completely separate concern from how data can be represented as text, and will vary by audio format. The “simplest”, PCM encoded audio like in a .wav file, doesn’t really concern itself at all with polyphony and is just a quantised representation of the audio wave amplitude at any given instant in time. It samples that tens of thousands of times per second. Whether it’s a single pure tone or a full symphony the density of what’s stored is the same. Just an air-pressure-over-time graph, essentially.

    Is it the same to view plaintext as analysing it with a hex-viewer?

    “Plaintext” doesn’t really have a fixed definition in this context. It can be the same as looking at it in a hex viewer, if your “plaintext” representation is hexadecimal encoding. Binary data, like in audio files, isn’t plaintext, and opening it directly in a text editor is not expected to give you a useful result, or even a consistent result. Different editors might show you different “text” depending on what encoding they fall back on, or how they represent unprintable characters.

    There are several methods of representing binary data as text, such as hexadecimal, base64, or uuencode, but none of these representations if saved as-is are the original file, strictly speaking.





  • It’s an extremely bizarre suggestion given your request. I do want to defend the game (though not the suggestion) a little though.

    It initially presents as you say, but offers you opportunities to fight back in your capacity as border control. Letting in the right people can help the resistance and incite a coup, or enable you and your families escape from the country. It isn’t just Be A Good Tankie Simulator 2013, though you can play it that way too.




  • For those of you who’ve never experienced the joy of PowerBuilder, this could often happen in their IDE due to debug mode actually altering the state of some variables.

    More specifically, if you watched a variable or property then it would be initialised to a default value by the debugger if it didn’t already exist, so any errors that were happening due to null values/references would just magically stop.

    Another fun one that made debugging difficult, “local” scoping is shared between multiple instances of the same event. So if you had, say, a mouse move event that fired ten times as the cursor transited a row and in that event you set something like integer li_current_x = xpos the most recent assignment would quash the value of li_current_x in every instance of that event that was currently executing.