I still gotta get a tape player

Sincere question: Why? They sound terrible, and get worse over time. Is there any reason to use them? Aren’t they just generating plastic waste at this point?

The article says:

To me the reasoning is simple, local bands make tapes, it’s easy to put your own music on them, and to share them with friends.

But all of these apply equally to Bandcamp or any other way of sharing digital files, or even CDs (I can’t imagine it’s meaningfully easier to churn out copies of cassettes than CDs).

I suppose, though, that if local bands are making them - whatever their reasons - then that’s reason enough for a listener to use the format. I also guess if people are getting second-hand tapes, then that’s not generating new plastic waste, and there’s probably stuff to that’s not available digitally in any format.

Anyway, I was watching this video recently - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DWtkSVNvTg - and it was quite interesting, but I’ve been wondering since then why people would use tapes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUxzaQrOAOA

I’m an Australian, and I also don’t know why I know Oodnadatta! Probably it’s just one of those words that sticks in the brain, and it comes up every so often because it is a key point between Adelaide and Darwin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oodnadatta (population 102)

Wittenoom, WA - population 0

I didn’t instantly recognise the name, but I’ve heard the story.

Coober Pedy, SA - population 1437

This is a very solid one.

@gnu@lemmy.zip beat me to the punch with Port Arthur, and I think they’ve hit the nail on the head there. Although, as they note, maybe the name recognition isn’t there for younger generations.

Here’s some suggestions that haven’t been made yet:

• Gundegai - population 2,057 (2021 census) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gundagai
  • Featured in songs and poetry, most famously Along the Road to Gundegai
  • ‘The Dog on the Tucker Box’ sits on the road outside the town (and is itself a reference to a poem mentioning Gundegai)
• Betoota - population 3 (2023) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betoota,_Queensland
  • Known because its name was adopted by the satirical news website The Betoota Advocate

Tucker and Dale vs Evil (2010) and The Cabin in the Woods (2012) (go in spoiler-free with this one) are both good comedy horror.

Marinara.

He has a neurological condition, spasmodic dysphonia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spasmodic_dysphonia)

‘Multi-Account Containers’: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers

With it, you can open tabs in different ‘containers’, which have their own set of cookies, etc… So, for example, you can be logged into two accounts for the same website, just in different containers, or keep all your shopping accounts in one container (and set those sites to always open in that container) to reduce tracking and targeting.

• Tab-organisation features (e.g. stacking, trees)
• Synchronised history - so you can find something you were looking at on your phone on your desktop or vice-versa
• Containers (Firefox) are great
• Full-page screenshot (Firefox) is very handy

There’s a nice list of this feature by language on the Wikipedia page for anyone interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_coalescing_operator#Examples_by_languages

Yeah, you’re quite correct, it’s not exactly equivalent, I just went on auto-pilot because it’s used so much for that purpose 🤖

It’s much closer to being a true null-coalescing operator than ‘OR’ operators in other languages though, because there’s only two values that are falsy in Ruby: nil and false. Some other languages treat 0 and "" (and no doubt other things), as falsy. So this is probably the reason Ruby has never added a true null-coalescing operator, there’s just much fewer cases where there’s a difference.

It’s going to drive me mad now I’ve seen it, though 😆 That’s usually the case with language features, though, you don’t know what you’re missing until you see it in some other language!

Ruby:

a || b

(no return as last line is returned implicitly, no semicolon)

EDIT: As pointed out in the comments, this is not strictly equivalent, as it will return b if a is false as well as if it’s nil (these are the only two falsy values in Ruby).

That is so much better 👍

It’s open source, so you could just go find that answer in the code, right?

Also, now I think of it, couldn’t you just do this with one account?

I don’t mean to ruin the fun or anything 😆