This post was originally published on 2023-06-28. Its indicated post date might be updated to keep it pinned to the top.
For TLMC, other topics and latest posts please scroll down.
Recently discussion of artificial intelligence and consequences of its development has finally somewhat reached mainstream. I decided I needed to share my thoughts too.
Wednesday, June 28, 2023
Sunday, January 15, 2023
TLMC "timeout" version, 2023.01.15
If you prefer your touhou albums somewhat disorganized, but later, rather than organized, but never, then this version is for you.
Single torrent : 1.55 TiB or 1 701 548 530 091 bytes.
Torrent file size is 18 106 928 bytes; contains 67 197 files.
Magnet link.
Added on 2023-04-25: Recent versions of uTorrent are broken (see user problems in comments) and will fail to open this torrent. Use other clients. I suggest qBittorrent.
This torrent contains only new content relative to TLMC v.19, so if you want a complete collection you need both.
Single torrent : 1.55 TiB or 1 701 548 530 091 bytes.
Torrent file size is 18 106 928 bytes; contains 67 197 files.
Magnet link.
Added on 2023-04-25: Recent versions of uTorrent are broken (see user problems in comments) and will fail to open this torrent. Use other clients. I suggest qBittorrent.
This torrent contains only new content relative to TLMC v.19, so if you want a complete collection you need both.
Friday, July 1, 2022
Looking for volunteer domain owners
Some time ago I encountered a problem with this domain, but was able to resolve it with external help. However, current owner is no longer comfortable with that role.
Unless something is done about it the tlmc.eu domain will expire in early 2023.
So, once again I'm looking for a EU citizen (or an owner of a EU-based company) to acquire ownership of this domain and keep pointing it to the same location. You will need to disclose your real name and other info to the EURid and your registrar of choice.
If you're willing to help, please contact me (xmpp: rwx@headcounter.org, preferred) or the current domain owner (removed as no longer applicable).
Added on 20 Jul 2022: The issue is resolved thanks to Thyra.
Unless something is done about it the tlmc.eu domain will expire in early 2023.
So, once again I'm looking for a EU citizen (or an owner of a EU-based company) to acquire ownership of this domain and keep pointing it to the same location. You will need to disclose your real name and other info to the EURid and your registrar of choice.
If you're willing to help, please contact me (xmpp: rwx@headcounter.org, preferred) or the current domain owner (removed as no longer applicable).
Added on 20 Jul 2022: The issue is resolved thanks to Thyra.
Tuesday, March 1, 2022
A slight delay you probably shouldn't worry about.
Summary:
Next torrent version is in a state I'm not entirely content with, but I'm willing to just add some finishing touches, share it that way and apply fixes in the version after that. Unfortunately because of circumstances outside of my control I will have much MUCH more important things to do with my free time in the next several weeks (I wish). However, after that I expect to plan to resume working on it and make a release.
Long version:
I happen to live in a certain country whose senile mass-murderer at the top decided to attack and invade Ukraine.
I spent most of the last week in shock (call me weak if you want), primarily because there was nothing I thought I could realistically do about it (call me slow if you want).
Right now I'm looking for job offers in other countries, but because of a strong and quite literally one-in-a-million preference[*], there is only one country (US) which at the moment satisfies it and it's neither easy nor fast to get in there and two moves are as bad as two thirds of a fire... but I digress.
If there's any western company which can offer permanent relocation + status adjustment, which needs a C/C++/Go/etc software engineer with 5+ years of job experience who also accidentally got a PhD in theoretical physics when he was young and adventurous, please don't hesistate to contact me at xmpp-jabber address rwx@headcounter.org or offer other contact channels here in comments that are more convenient for you.
There is also a slim, but worryingly nonzero chance that the scum in the Ministry of Censorship will completely cut off internet connectivity (and then blame it on the Evil West). In that case, OOPS.
One last thing. I don't think this warning is needed here, but just to be sure: pro-kremlin commenters will be shot on sight.
[*] I'm not telling what it is, but you can have this cute picture instead.
Next torrent version is in a state I'm not entirely content with, but I'm willing to just add some finishing touches, share it that way and apply fixes in the version after that. Unfortunately because of circumstances outside of my control I will have much MUCH more important things to do with my free time in the next several weeks (I wish). However, after that I expect to plan to resume working on it and make a release.
Long version:
I happen to live in a certain country whose senile mass-murderer at the top decided to attack and invade Ukraine.
I spent most of the last week in shock (call me weak if you want), primarily because there was nothing I thought I could realistically do about it (call me slow if you want).
Right now I'm looking for job offers in other countries, but because of a strong and quite literally one-in-a-million preference[*], there is only one country (US) which at the moment satisfies it and it's neither easy nor fast to get in there and two moves are as bad as two thirds of a fire... but I digress.
If there's any western company which can offer permanent relocation + status adjustment, which needs a C/C++/Go/etc software engineer with 5+ years of job experience who also accidentally got a PhD in theoretical physics when he was young and adventurous, please don't hesistate to contact me at xmpp-jabber address rwx@headcounter.org or offer other contact channels here in comments that are more convenient for you.
There is also a slim, but worryingly nonzero chance that the scum in the Ministry of Censorship will completely cut off internet connectivity (and then blame it on the Evil West). In that case, OOPS.
One last thing. I don't think this warning is needed here, but just to be sure: pro-kremlin commenters will be shot on sight.
[*] I'm not telling what it is, but you can have this cute picture instead.
Wednesday, December 15, 2021
Quality check
Recently I ran a CueTools scan on an entire previous version of TLMC, as I was planning to do since I discovered I had this option. Not exactly the v.19, as it was already slightly dismantled (~25 albums replaced with better versions, renames applied), but something pretty close, say 99+%. The results were quite unexpected for me. If you're curious you can download full check logs (the checker might've also grabbed some extra files from bonuses) and a summary in both original text format and a table. Visual html+css table form uses some heuristics to transform summary text into color-coded quality representation, so it's not entirely precise. If in doubt refer to the detailed logs. You could also run the check yourself, although be prepared to let the program single-threadedly crunch numbers for a day or so, the bottleneck is the audio decode time, which runs at ~200x realtime on my CPU for the TTA codec. My logs slightly differ from the ones produced by the original Cuetools, because I patched it a little for my convenience, but the change only displays calculated offset in CTDB checks, which is not shown in the unmodified version.
The summary of the results is as follows: about 20% of all disc images fail verification. Here by "fail" I don't mean "disc was not found", I mean "was found to be different and unrepairable". Oh, and completely by coincidence the peak level of the supermajority of such rips is almost exactly 98%. And by another coincidence normalization to 98% is the default value in an admittedly turned-off-by-default setting in "Exact"AudioCopy. In addition to those there are another 15% of disc images, which also have peak level of 98% and return "disc not found" and it'd be fair to assume they would also fail to verify.
Lessons to be had here:
1. Not only it is your duty as a software developer to provide sensible defaults, doing only that and no more is clearly insufficient to produce reasonable outcomes. Out of 10 monkeys that see an unknown lever at least 3 will pull it and leave it there. Any option that does anything unpredictable to the dumbest possible user should be hidden behind a curtain that requires a certain intelligence level to bypass, which is enough to understand what the thing that was hidden actually does. In our particular case it could have been a domain-specific scripting language interpreter window for general purpose audio transforms, not a "please ruin my rips" on-off switch in plain sight. Of course there is another danger that by simply removing anything the unfortunate could use to shoot their feet off, instead of properly hiding it because it is easier to do so, you risk turning your software into iCrap.
2. We don't know how badly mangled these rips are.
Maybe they were improperly done and there are stutters or clicks or anything else that wasn't in the original CDs.
Maybe the only problem is the normalization, so it is displeasing on an intellectual level, but would not be audible as a defect.
3. In my defense those album versions were the only ones available, so the only alternative to including these rips was not to include them. I could not have done anything differently, had I known about it, but I wasn't aware of the problem and its extent. Now I am and so are you.
The summary of the results is as follows: about 20% of all disc images fail verification. Here by "fail" I don't mean "disc was not found", I mean "was found to be different and unrepairable". Oh, and completely by coincidence the peak level of the supermajority of such rips is almost exactly 98%. And by another coincidence normalization to 98% is the default value in an admittedly turned-off-by-default setting in "Exact"AudioCopy. In addition to those there are another 15% of disc images, which also have peak level of 98% and return "disc not found" and it'd be fair to assume they would also fail to verify.
Lessons to be had here:
1. Not only it is your duty as a software developer to provide sensible defaults, doing only that and no more is clearly insufficient to produce reasonable outcomes. Out of 10 monkeys that see an unknown lever at least 3 will pull it and leave it there. Any option that does anything unpredictable to the dumbest possible user should be hidden behind a curtain that requires a certain intelligence level to bypass, which is enough to understand what the thing that was hidden actually does. In our particular case it could have been a domain-specific scripting language interpreter window for general purpose audio transforms, not a "please ruin my rips" on-off switch in plain sight. Of course there is another danger that by simply removing anything the unfortunate could use to shoot their feet off, instead of properly hiding it because it is easier to do so, you risk turning your software into iCrap.
2. We don't know how badly mangled these rips are.
Maybe they were improperly done and there are stutters or clicks or anything else that wasn't in the original CDs.
Maybe the only problem is the normalization, so it is displeasing on an intellectual level, but would not be audible as a defect.
3. In my defense those album versions were the only ones available, so the only alternative to including these rips was not to include them. I could not have done anything differently, had I known about it, but I wasn't aware of the problem and its extent. Now I am and so are you.
Thursday, December 9, 2021
Some bonuses while you wait
I didn't upload a lot recently, so it came as a mild surprise to me that nyaa pantsu is dead and nyaa si closed registrations.
I'll be posting some discographies of non-touhou circles that are nevertheless pretty awesome to make waiting for the big torrent slightly less annoying.
As always extract cues and use cuesheet-aware player (foobar/deadbeef) to play individual tracks.
2021.12.09 ArsMagnA (Ariabl'eyeS, -LostFairy-, Seraph) lossless music collection.
Magnet link, torrent link, CUETools verification results.
I'll be posting some discographies of non-touhou circles that are nevertheless pretty awesome to make waiting for the big torrent slightly less annoying.
As always extract cues and use cuesheet-aware player (foobar/deadbeef) to play individual tracks.
2021.12.09 ArsMagnA (Ariabl'eyeS, -LostFairy-, Seraph) lossless music collection.
Magnet link, torrent link, CUETools verification results.
Monday, August 2, 2021
Why do we need a database-based filesystem.
Note 1: there is a small TLMC-based demo at the end of this post, I recommend to check it out.
Note 2: these ideas are neither original nor new. I'm fairly sure there exist similar thoughts in written form from 20 years ago and at least three abandoned prototypes of this kind.
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