Mastodawn

myrmepropagandist Mar 13

You must pick one very minor talent:

you can make realistic modem noise with your mouth

5.2%

you can understand modem noise as text

8.8%

you can meow and cats understand what you mean

35.3%

you can understand cats if they make noise

50.7%

Poll ended at Mar 16 at 9:56pm.

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Huey Mar 13

@futurebird Now obviously the cat communications are winning here, but hear me out. I already understand what my cat says (it's almost always "give me food"), and she wouldn't care about much I had to tell her.
But if I could understand modem noise, that's 56kbit/s. It wouldn't be too hard to play back arbitrary text as modem noise, so I'd be able to speed-read at 7000 characters per second. I'd be able to read Ulysses in under 5 minutes. Clear win.

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Thomas Sturm Mar 13

@y6nH @futurebird From personal experience of listening to many ZX Spectrum games loading from tape: The Speccy loader was running at roughly 1200ish baud, and with a trained ear you could actually discern between long groups of 0, structured bitmaps, or large semi-random code blobs.

Not enough to "read" random text by listening to the noise, though. 😅

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Huey Mar 14

@tsturm @futurebird
I'm having a fun evening importing executable files into Audacity as raw PCM and listening to the results, reminiscing about loading games from cassette in the 80s.

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Thomas Sturm

@y6nH @futurebird The soundtrack of my youth. 😅