D/A and A/D | Digital Show and Tell (Monty Montgomery @ xiph.org)

This is a video about the digital vs analog audio quality debate. It explains, with examples, why analog audio within the accepted limits of human hearing (20 Hz to 20 kHz) can be reproduced with perfect fidelity using a 44.1 kHz 16 Bit digital signal.

There is no audible difference between an analog and digital audio signal.

Among other things, xiph.org maintains the .flac and .ogg vorbis audio formats - they know a little about audio encoding and reproduction.

You could save a lot more time and money very easily… by not playing this derivative knockoff drivel.

reap what you sow

Apparently the shooter was in the crowd, which means it wasn’t a long gun of any kind. Probably a pistol, something small enough to conceal. 22 makes sense.

A world without responsibility has no future.

Responsibility means that you can’t just quit and walk away at any time.

The IRS cost $16B total to operate in 2023. Federal tax revenue in 2023 was $4.44T.

This idea that you’re trying to project, that funding the IRS is somehow not worth the cost, is absolutely bonkers.

I hate the rent-seeking economy.

Microsoft put themselves in this position when they started giving out Windows 10 for free. It was effective in bringing most of the market onto the new version, but it set an expectation which it now feels like they can’t break, so they’re also giving Windows 11 away. Now to offset that missing revenue, they have to do something to extract value from users.

I don’t see how they could stop this without replacing it with something more exploitive.

Ahh… hmm. In some ways it is literally inaccessible, because we can’t observe it directly. All of our experimental (e.g. real) subatomic knowledge comes from smashing particles into each other at near-light speed and observing the bits that come out, which is somewhat like dropping a smartphone off the Empire State building and trying to figure out how it works by picking up the broken pieces off the sidewalk. We can probe the structure of molecules with electron microscopes, but there are no tools for directly observing anything smaller than that. We draw conclusions for how smaller things behave through inference.

And frankly, the entire concept of spinors and the relationship to observed properties like electron charge is pretty mysterious, and nobody really understands wave-particle duality, that’s just the best explanation we have for what we observe.

These are the same chucklefucks that have repeatedly voted against election security bills. They don’t care about improving the integrity of the voting process, they care about making it harder to vote.

It is not that simple, when we’re talking about the national vote. Yes, another candidate could win the primary, but none of them have the kind of national presence to compete with Trump this close to the election. If they had been the candidate 2 years ago, maybe. Switching candidates this late will damage voter confidence, and will result in lower turnout, regardless of who the candidate is.

Imagination has nothing to do with it, this isn’t a Disney movie.

I don’t think a single person on your theoretical list is electable, if that’s what you mean. But I would need you to be specific about who you think might be a viable alternative in order to have any useful discussion about them. I have no need to be disingenuous. You need to actually support your point of view with more than vague suggestions and hand-waving.

The democratic establishment just needs to put their weight behind a candidate that people are willing to vote for

Which would be who?

Also, that just is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this sentence, as if it were that simple.

OK, so you don’t have an answer either, got it.

What is this list?

And yet they’re getting into bed with Belarus.

Do nothing that I tell you to do.

EV manufacturers have been searching for ways to make better/cheaper/denser batteries, not better/cheaper/denser lithium batteries.

Sure, it’s the lithium battery manufacturers that are invested in making better lithium batteries. Everyone has been buying their products for decades and they want that to keep happening, so they pour resources into research and development. And they have a lot of resources, because everyone has been buying their products.

Once a market settles on a particular technology it becomes self-feeding and tends to accelerate. It’s difficult for a competing technology to break in primarily because of momentum - it’s hard to catch up.

A device manufacturer might be interested in using a different battery technology, but if they have a whole design and production process already built around lithium batteries then it’s not just the battery that they have to change. It’s their logistics chain, on-device electronics, design theory and possible regulatory concerns. Changing an established system is expensive, so that has to be justified somehow.

I’m not saying that it can’t happen - I’m sure that it will eventually. What I’m saying is that in order for a different battery technology to really change the market and push lithium out, it will have to be significantly better (not just marginally better).

Where I live, there are security cameras all over the buildings and the lamposts and the traffic intersections and the parking lots, plus Ring/Nest doorbells everywhere. There are more cameras outside the buildings than inside. Everybody is carrying a smartphone and I see people taking pictures or video with them all the time.

Drones and satellites are really only outside.

So I don’t agree with your conclusion.

I’ve been testing Magic Earth recently as a replacement for Google Maps for navigation, and it’s generally pretty good. It uses OpenStreetMap as its map data source, so how up-to-date things are depends on how many OSM contributors there are in your area.

The benefit it provides over other OSM-based apps such as OsmAnd and Organic Maps is the traffic data. This is real-time-ish based on the movement of other Magic Earth users who consent to sharing their location information - so the accuracy of the traffic data will depend on how many other ME users there are in your area.

Overall I think it’s an acceptable replacement for Google Maps navigation. However, it’s not good for finding things like restaurants or stores, checking operating hours or reviews, or seeing what a place looks like - for this kind of thing I haven’t found a substitute for Google Maps. I generally find the place I want to go in GM then switch to ME for the actual navigation.