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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 21st, 2023

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  • So just as a caveat, I imagine Tridactyl would really mostly be appreciated by those with a modal, and specifically Vim inspired mentality; its mission, after all, is to bring vim-like bindings and workflow to Firefox. This is mostly to say, it may not appeal to you otherwise (but who knows!)

    If you are already familiar with how key bindings are set in vim you’ll hit the ground running. In fact, many keys are pretty intuitive since they match vim, eg, scrolling up/down is controlled with j or k.

    I may not use every single function built into Tridactyl everyday, but as a person who likes to reduce his reliance on a mouse, I can easily navigate both a page and the web at large entirely with my keyboard. Typing f puts a hint at every link that you can follow by typing the letter in the hint. ]] or [[ can auto increment pages on forums (eg going from page 2 to page 3). I can quickly traverse my history, bookmarks, etc with a command prompt that can also access nearly every feature of Firefox. I often use a binding to pin tabs or close them, etc.

    On a regular day that might be all I do.

    On the other end of the spectrum, I’ll give a more extreme example. A friend needed help with his company’s wordpress site. They had a couple hundred articles that needed a uniform change. While there was probably an easier and smarter way of doing it, I used Tridactyl (with a healthy dose of pyAutoGui) to automate it. I made a couple of commands in Tridactyl to do things like open certain links as new tabs, navigate to each tab, open the WYSIWYG editor for each page, locate particular text, delete and replace it), save, and move to the next tab and repeat. I was able to do this with about 10-15 articles at a time…I got paid to press a couple keys, walk off to do something with my kid and come back to check on it from time to time (I added in fail-safes for when it needed manual intervention). Admittedly, this did go beyond the scope of Tridactyl, but it was an invaluable part of the whole deal.

    Another time I was doing a data entry job and needed to transfer both the hyperlink of, and several pieces of info, into a spreadsheet. It occurred to me that it would be nice to grab the URLs of all the pages I had open at once instead of manually going to each tab copying the url, alt-tabbing to the spreadsheet and pasting just to alt tab back to FF going to a new tab copying the url and so on.

    The creator of Tridactyl helped me write a command that allowed me to open as many tabs as necessary, and copy to the clipboard every URL of each tab open from the one I was on until there were no more tabs, each separated by a comma to easily paste into the spreadsheet. Saved me so much time and carpal tunnel.

    Ultimately, describing a few things I’ve used it for is a disservice because if you ask the next person, they’ll use it completely differently.




  • So, your first thought might be for enhancing clarity using techniques like compression and limiting to give the calls a consistent volume and avoid spikes that might bust an ear drum.

    This is partially true; I run all these calls through a compressor and limiter for that reason, though I am not encouraged by my employer to be obsessed with making the calls pristine…after all they are done on regular phone lines over regular phones (viz., not on nice microphone) and as such you can’t exactly get Hollywood sound; you actually rarely useful data below 175 hrz and what is audible above 2500 us usually very useful when boosted (it becomes very essy, harsh, and hissy)

    As a second consideration, many publicly traded companies, needing to carefully word their situations to their shareholders, will record two versions of their call and which one gets aired is dependent on news or other factors that come between the call and the airing of the call (could be a matter of hours, or a matter of days). This is also true to an extent and happens from time to time.

    A third consideration you might have is, throat clearing, coughing, rummaging of papers. I’ll tell you…the MFS have the driest mouths and lip smack louder than a firecracker. They also don’t seem to realize if they shuffle papers next to the phone it will pick it up.

    But no, even that is not the main reason.

    The main reason they need to pre-record is because they can’t read. They can’t read simple sentences. I’ve picked a sentence out at random, and knowing nothing about their insane vernacular (we had fantastic EBITDA margins that gross outstanding for the coming tailwinds that outshine our core foundation pillars and drivers of growth) I was able to read them without messing up.

    And yet they…will frequently have to read the same sentence 2-10 times. I’m not kidding. Most of these CEOs are fucking imbeciles and mean ones at that. They can barely read a sentence without fucking up. It sometimes takes me an hour to edit together a 15 min call.

    On rare occasions it’s because they care. I’m under NDA but I’ll just say I have worked with a certain publicly traded meat-alternative company that has a lot of re-recording and edits but it’s because their CEO (seems to me) very passionate about what he’s doing and agonizes over the right word choices even up until the moment of recording. Props to him. He’s taking pride in what he does and can actually read a full sentence.

    Other people on the other side of the spectrum can’t even be bothered to read their script before they show up and don’t know how to pronounce their own product names.

    TL;DR: I am mostly there to make sure I have a clear pronunciation of every line of the script, take notes on where there are errors, and edit the script together to make a coherent whole at the end without any gross factual error. I do a little bit of processing to get rid of throat clearing, make the volume consistent.



  • Like as in you traveled across the country to see them? If so, that sounds fun. I’ve driven across 3-4 times (assuming you mean the US) and it’s been a lot of fun each time.

    It would be really great to see them for me this time since they are playing with the Descendants (the two were my introduction into punk music)!



  • One of my favorite songs of all time. I revisit it once a year or so but have to be careful because as much as I love it, it can put me in a dark place. I’ve urged a lot of friends to give it a listen while paying attention to the lyrics but that seems to be quite a commitment for most people 😂