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duped

9,144 karma · joined April 28, 2021

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duped··on The Egg Bandits Made a Thousand Times the Fine They Just Paid for Price Fixing
In this case they have literal correspondence between the CEOs.
duped··on The Egg Bandits Made a Thousand Times the Fine They Just Paid for Price Fixing
> "show me the incentives and I will predict the outcome" thing

There are supposed to be two stopgaps here.

First, the fear of going to jail for committing crimes. Secondly, the social reprisal for committing crimes that hurt people.

Like seriously these CEOs shouldn't be welcome at anyone's table or gathering in polite society as a result of their actions, bare minimum. The government should also put them in prison.

duped··on FFmpeg 9.1's new AAC encoder
I didn't say it did?
duped··on FFmpeg 9.1's new AAC encoder
I wouldn't call archiving a consumer application but I understand the point. Really it gets back to the word: fidelity. Some say it means "truth" but really it's latin for faithful or in the context of audio, perceptually identical (a faithful representation). Even among highly trained and skilled listeners, lossy codecs are faithful and imperceptible.
duped··on FFmpeg 9.1's new AAC encoder
The unit of a block size is samples (frames, technically), not seconds. When configuring audio devices for playback you tune both sample rate and block size for latency. It used to be far more common to tune sample rate than block size alone for tracking. This is getting into the weeds of actual devices though.

Also to your point, this is why compliant peak meters use a mandatory 4x upsampling at 48k.

duped··on Internal Combustion Engine (2021)
This is a stupid question but I'm a stupid EE/SWE who knows very little about physical objects.

In the all these animations of the pistons I see linear motion translated into rotary motion using the crank shaft - but how do you design the pison/crank to always turn clockwise or counter clockwise (based on how you view it, obviously)? Is it possible for the crank shaft to lock up if it's perfectly oriented at 0 degrees?

duped··on FFmpeg 9.1's new AAC encoder
Higher sample rates are lower latency for the same block size and resampling is not "free" (pick 2: performance, aliasing, latency) so there can be advantages to working with audio archived at higher sample rates.

But all the advantages come down to professional or editing use cases. There's next to zero advantage to using it as a storage format for listening. Just like 24 bit audio (do you have an amp with 96dB SNR?).

Just personally, I have seen little evidence (personally, professionally, or academically) that there is any advantage for lossless audio for consumer applications. For professional applications there are plenty, and it's endlessly tiring to convince people that "no, actually I need 96kHz for my use case."

Where the audiophiles have _some_ argument here is the design of reconstruction filters which I've heard alleged can perform better in the audible frequency range if the stop band is outside of it. But I have never personally tested this, nor cared enough to. But the theory is sound.

Whether or not it's perceptible depends on what you're measuring, though. In theory, there should be perceptual differences in sound localization if your DAC's reconstruction filter is at 24kHz vs 48kHz since it will change the group delay in a critical frequency region, where you'll get sound at >~2kHz arriving later at the lower sample rate. I think it would be extremely hard to test this though, because humans are really shitty at sound localization to begin with, and practically speaking most recorded material is processed to shit in that frequency range to intentionally decorrelate the channels for the perception of "width."

duped··on FFmpeg 9.1's new AAC encoder
> Higher sample rates than 48kHz only needed when you want to pitch down ultrasonic recordings (of whales, bats and other such animals for example).

There are numerous use cases for higher sample rates that go beyond this but it's hard to talk about it without starting flame wars filled with junk science.

duped··on Matrix Orthogonalization Improves Memory in Recurrent Models
> that will instantly 10x or 100x current capabilities.

In the 1920s we had legions of very smart, highly trained (arguably better trained in mathematics) basically chucking relays and vacuum tubes together with reckless abandon to build the most valuable and complicated systems mankind had ever come up with (telephony, radio, radar, etc). They had no idea how they worked and only ad-hoc rules of thumb to construct them.

It took the insight of a handful of these people both in and outside of industry to formalize the theory of operation of most of what people were already building and then use that theory to establish formal design practices.

The people before these theories were realized were exceptionally smart and good at what they did, it's just they didn't have better design tools to reason about the things they were building.

And once they had those tools they didn't 10x or 100x overnight.

duped··on Most arguments are about ego, not ideas
Yes. Your experience is not every experience.
duped··on How to corrupt an SQLite database file
Firstly, standards compliance is bad when the standard is bad.

Secondly nothing precludes defining '3' as the lowest file descriptor for open(), since stdin/stdout/stderr cannot be opened (they are opened before the process starts).

nb4 open("/dev/stdin"), that's not what I mean

duped··on Librepods: AirPods liberated
They suffer from that on both Linux and MacOS.
duped··on In San Francisco, Even $180k Tech Salaries Are No Longer Enough
Large asset managers aren't buying up significant amounts of property, this is basically an imagined problem that wants to demonize corporations/financiers for a problem created by local land use policy.
duped··on Librepods: AirPods liberated
No. Although I do use them on my Linux desktop I wouldn't recommend anyone use bluetooth on Linux regularly.
duped··on Mag 7 starting to underperform [pdf]
Don't forget that no auto manufacturer in the world, and certainly not in China, is poised to capture any of that TAM.
duped··on Professor denounces mass AI fraud on an exam at Brown
God forbid people do work
duped··on Librepods: AirPods liberated
Basically all the annoying shit I have to handle with my AirPods is made up by how good of a product they are. I have nice headphones, speakers, studio and other microphones, etc for a bunch of use cases. AirPods are my workhorse. I haven't found anything as comfortable with as good a battery life and as good fidelity and as good price. The active noise cancelling is also very good.

And I'm an apple hater, in general.

duped··on Thomann takes legal action against Fender
Kramer has been selling strat clones for 40+ years and a big reason they got popular in the 80s was because they were building guitars Fender wouldn't - they just had the same/similar body shape.

Also that first example is a Fender, afaict. Fender has been making cheap strats and teles in China for years. They used to do it exclusively under the Squire brand name but that changed about a decade ago.

duped··on White House app auto-downloads to government phones, can't be uninstalled
Depends on the software, this is not a hard thing to understand or debate.
duped··on Thomann takes legal action against Fender
The argument has nothing to do with the sound. A strat style guitar is characterized by:

- Flat top

- Solid body, typically softer/lighter woods

- Bolt-on neck (as opposed to set or through-body)

- Double cutout (as opposed to single/no cutout, V, or other irregular shaped necks) with a longer cutout on top compared to the bottom

- Carved cavity in the top of the body

- "Loaded" pickguard (electronics mounted to it, instead of the body)

- Straight jack mounted into the pickguard

- "Tummy tuck" carved in the back

- Fat/flat shaped bottom of the body like a tele, as opposed to rounded like an LP.

All of these are functional properties of the guitar that have tradeoffs and benefits compared to other designs.

You can have two strats sound completely different but look identical to the untrained eye and the reason for preferring the style has a lot to do with the weight of the instrument and how that weight is distributed when playing standing, and how the body fits in your hands/arms and against your body. There's an argument to be made that the strat is near optimal for comfort in playing.

If you look at competing designs that (PRS McCarty, Ibanez, Schecter, Gretsch - basically anyone) the specific curves may be different but they all look like a Strat because it's genuinely hard to design a different body that feels the same.

The St Vincent signature is one style that I think needs to get more popular but it's not for everyone.

duped··on Deno Desktop
Tauri is a good way of packaging offline PWAs. It kind of sucks for building proper applications. The entire model for integrating with a local backend is just bonkers (no, I don't want my local application to pretend to be a web server - it's not a web server, I want to give you actual host bindings and share memory).
duped··on Bun has an open PR adding shared-memory threads to JavaScriptCore
> the PR description is entirely Claude

You should be embarrassed to admit this, let alone do it. The lack of shame people have these days is gross.

duped··on SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible
Why didn't you get your company to pay for it?
duped··on SMPTE Makes Its Standards Freely Accessible
I think people have a flipped understanding of how these standards come to be.

They don't gather industry experts in a conference room and whiteboard out a perfect design that everyone agrees on and then go off to build products.

What happens is that companies develop products and services, and at some point it becomes more useful for those products to inter operate and protocols/interfaces between them need to be agreed upon. Oftentimes it's the mutant bastard children of the existing approaches by multiple stakeholders, encumbered by patents and legacy.

Adherence to a standard is not the goal, defining interoperability between existing systems is. And everyone participating is already a paying member of SMPTE.

duped··on Swiss parliament lifts ban on new nuclear power plants
Here's a decent page outlining how the industry deals with waste:

https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/nuclear-fuel-c...

Basically, nuclear waste from power generation is a much smaller problem than people assume it to be, the solutions for managing it are already in place, and there have been few/if any accidents that have ever caused contamination from waste disposal.

Also I'm not an industry shill, but orphan sources from industrial/medical radiography have killed and injured more people than nuclear plants and their waste. Yet there's hardly the amount of opposition to those systems that you see for nuclear power, despite nuclear power having a far more significant impact on the healthiness and stability of global populations if we stopped banning it.

duped··on Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore
Anecdata here but I'm a landlord in an area with low 10s of thousands of residents and low 100s of rental units. I absolutely do not care about new housing being built, other than encouraging it because economic development of the town is good for everyone.

My neighbors, the homeowners who don't rent, are typically on the other side. And it's not unreasonable to want to keep SFH neighborhoods predominantly SFH.

My main risks have have absolutely nothing to do with more housing. It's more physical risk to the property and depreciation.

duped··on Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
A pattern I have seen repeatedly for the last year is people who assert this, then have a problem and come to me/people like me for help, only to find that the basic research they did was complete garbage.

AI is very, very good at spitting out language. It's very, very bad at ascertaining the quality or correctness of the language it spits out.

And the problem with plausibly correct output is that sometimes it's good enough until it isn't, which is the pattern of behavior I've seen with heavy AI driven research.

I'm not going to discount that it's better than google searches. But it's hardly good enough to equate to undergraduate understanding. The act of reading and writing from primary/secondary sources crafted by humans is in itself the way to acquire and retain knowledge. Having it hallucinated at you in a plausibly correct way is dangerous to equate to that.

duped··on Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
But the "research" you're getting from the AI is also low-quality content. And particularly susceptible to the X-Y problem because unless you're already learned in a subject you won't even know how to craft the prompt to get the answer you're looking for.
duped··on Sixty percent of US consumers say 'AI' in brand messaging is a turnoff
It wasn't obvious from the project outset that everyone would hate it, no matter how well designed it is?
duped··on Is Meta destroying its engineering organization?
> There is no organisation that has their hands clean. Not even the one you work for.

There are plenty of organizations that don't enable genocide.

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