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It's not just internationally. China has done that to its own people. Or worse. Look at Evergrand and Sunac.
The government of China let developers sell un-built apartments to future residents. The residents not only paid down payments, but took on a mortgage obligation for an un-built building. "The majority of new properties in China — about 90% — are sold before being completed." - CNN. This produced a terrible incentive for developers to do huge numbers of housing starts and then not finish the building.
In most of the rest of the world, developers have to finance construction with their own money or a high-interest construction loan, then sell the completed building. This gives developers a strong incentive to finish the job. Building quality control is often a problem, but unfinished projects less so.
You're paying retail rate. The utility pays spot prices and attempts to manage the spot price vs retail rate spread over a window of time.
> The entire US military budget is federal,
False. For instance, California’s military spending in FY 2023-2024 is budgeted at $293.6 million (putting it between Paraguay and Niger in military spending), of which the majority is state funds, not federal support (by state funds alone, its somewhere around Monogolia’s military spending.)
It is true that the vast majority of the US’s defense spending is federal, though.
[0] https://ebudget.ca.gov/2023-24/pdf/Enacted/GovernorsBudget/8...
> I also don't see any mention of the CDC monitoring your personal communications and search histories, and I assume that would NOT be part of any national disease monitoring program.
I suspect it's referring to fairly mundane things like Google Trends, which has already been used (fairly unsuccessfully) to monitor flu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Flu_Trends
Or reviews for Yankee Candles on Amazon: https://www.npr.org/2022/10/17/1129542486/what-yankee-candle...
If you believe it, it isn't fraud.
This article only covers the musical aspects of AI voice cloning, but there's another dynamic to AI voice cloning that's more complicated: replacing general voice actors in movies/video games/anime (example: https://www.axios.com/2023/07/24/ai-voice-actors-victoria-at... )
Unlike musicians who can't be replaced without significant postprocessing, have enough money to not be impacted by competition, and have legal muscle, voice over artists:
- Can be reproduced with good-enough results from out-of-the-box voice cloning settings on ElevenLabs or an open source equivalent (Bark, VALL-E X)
- Are already underpaid for their work as-is
- Have no legal ownership of their voice since they are contractors, and their voicework is owned by their clients who may not be as incentivised in protecting the VO.
I want to write a blog post about it but I suspect most people on Hacker News won't be interested in a treatise on the cultural impacts of the voicework in Persona 5 and Genshin Impact.
Works for me too. Have you modified your trust store and removed signers? It's signed by the Amazon Root CA, so it's a short chain, but if you removed them then it would show as invalid.
You're throwing away the biggest advantage for the company allowing remote work -- hiring talent from anywhere. WFH has a lot of advantages for employees, but also for the employer. The main one being a diverse workforce.
What I've seen work, which I think still hits your goals of occasional face time, is to have a quarterly offsite for the whole company. Everyone works remotely, but once a quarter you find a nice location that is easy for everyone to get to, pay for their flights and hotels (and if you're really nice, their family too, or at least child care at home while they are gone), and then have a couple of days of quarterly planning, hacking sprints, and general social activities that don't involve alcohol or strenuous physical activity (but if people want to organize that for themselves they are welcome to do so).
> and the company has no obligation to keep an employee working in a remote context that the company doesn't favor anymore.
Unless laws change to require them to [1], workers organize to require it be provided [2], or you've had the working arrangement codified in your offer letter or other contractual documentation so that requiring you to come into an office is constructive dismissal [3]. This whole "employers can do whatever they want" era can't come to an end quick enough.
[1] https://globalnews.lockton.com/new-remote-working-legislatio...
[2] https://prismreports.org/2020/04/23/suddenly-working-remotel...
[3] https://www.newsweek.com/let-them-fire-you-remote-worker-urg...
(recently dropped coin on sending tech workers to a conference on how to unionize their tech workplaces, looking forward to seeing that pay some dividends)
AIUI, one of the worst cases of interoperability legacy I've ever seen. If even one thing in the pipeline is compatible with POTS ("plain old telephone service", i.e., land lines in all their 3KHz glory), the whole call degrades, and since the whole call is going to be degraded anyhow, almost everything written to handle voice calling just drops straight to the POTS lowest common denominator. Which in a digital world can be even lower than POTS due to our ability to just set a number on our lossy compression codecs with all the regard for how much money bandwidth costs and no regard for quality.
This includes hardware too, e.g., microphones that work fine in the POTS frequency regimes but don't produce high quality audio, speakers chosen just to work well in the old frequency regime, etc.
So, despite the fact I have to imagine the odds of a call hitting the actual physical POTS system approaches zero today, and that in general in 2023 a high-quality phone call wouldn't actually be that expensive, the odds of a call traversing something that lazily fell back to POTS-level standards for whatever reason is still quite high.
One could write a brief sci-fi story in a Star Trek-inspired universe in which galactic war is started because the video call to High Command in the year 2642 is still running on POTS audio quality standards and some words are fatally compromised....
In general, if your reaction to finally understanding "functors" is "so what?", there's a reasonably good chance that means you've actually understood them: https://jerf.org/iri/post/2958/
The useful thing about functors isn't that they are particularly complicated, it is that they are a useful interface to be able to write things generically over. It's very similar to iterators. Being able to present items out of some collection one at a time is "so what?" It is not interesting on its own. But having a common interface over them allows for a lot of good code to be written that you can't write in a language that lacks them, and have to one-off ad-hoc all the time.
That a Parser is a Functor means you can apply all the functor tools in writing them. This is one of the appeals of parser combinators, which is again not that they are some sort of brilliant insight on their own, but that they work well with the generalized tools rather than needing specific implementations of them.
Round here it seems like Quickbooks is the default. They even advertise on TV.
A big use case for kwargs is not breaking compatibility and not having to copy/paste a ton of parameters when just forwarding them. But that's exactly the case which is difficult to type correctly.
> They will look the same (Å vs Å)
No. In my browser the first A has the ring glued to it, and the second has a little gap.
> English (USA), English (UK)
> This deserves a separate discussion. I doubt many English speakers (let alone those who don't live in a particular anglophone country) care to distinguish between English dialects.
While that is generally (though not always) true, I would assume it's really a stand in for the much more relevant zh locales.
It is also rather relevant to es locales (america spanish has diverged quite a bit from europe spanish hence the creation of es-419), definitely french (canadian french, to a lesser extend belgian and swiss), and german (because swiss german). And it might be relevant for ko if north korea ever stops being what it is.
> Wouldn't this make you more critical of what you are learning and better able to adapt to changing technologies in the long term?
Probably not. If anything, its probably better to learn programming before the teenage rebellion phase, or, at least, to learn the kind of problem solving skills that programming exercises early.
> acknowledging that a nation doesn't exist without borders
At a minimum, you are confusing “nation” with “state”, as the former manifestly can exist without borders, which are a feature of the latter.
Smart. Pull forward any future needs to the present if possible, because the future is too uncertain to be confident needs will go fulfilled then.
I've been quite pleasantly surprised by the $250 Chromebook I got from Costco nearly a year ago when my Linux machine's hardware started failing. I originally got it because it was the quickest way to have something for writing emails that wasn't my phone. I ended up quite happy with it though.
It does everything I need outside of heavier duty programming, and I don't do so much of that in my spare time these days. You can code with it; I set up a for-fun Elixir/Phoenix project that I coded mostly on the Chromebook.
I do a lot of writing/communicating and I don't need anything more than what this computer provides.
I wonder how practical (or not) would be to set it as your shell.
Not that much, as it is rather limited on the terminal.
The same experience that you only get on Apple devices nowadays, or something like Raspberry Pi 400, an integrated vertical experience of hardware and software designed to work together, and the related ecosystem.
It felt that the computers had a soul, while the PC felt like a pile of hardware stuck together with duckt tape. that happened to work.
Intel and AMD have had a decade to provide similar tooling, instead of a crap OpenCL experience stuck in C.
Except history shows otherwise,
ISO Modula-2 common extensions (including generics),
https://modula2.awiedemann.de/manual/comp3.html
While using Go is certainly better than plain C, most of its design steams from the authors' bias.
The closest thing is a ZX Spectrum Next, for the lucky ones that manage to own one.
> Do you know what you are implying with this?
Ironically you're replicating the phenomenon being described: taking something out of context, exaggerating it to the Nth degree, racing down the slippery slope, and using this to imply that OP is Hitler.
20,000 phone lines in 12 cities would be like 70 PRIs per city? It's a big order, but doesn't seem like one that MCI wouldn't happily cover. Unless "city" means "suburb", and not like major metro market. Just nerding out, because I ran (tech for) a mid-sized ISP in the late 90's.
Rewriting in Go and Rust, with a blog post afterwards, would qualify.
Guest languages on the JVM and CLR.
Mobile apps with hybrid stuff, instead of the SDK languages.
Also using SPAs for what would be doable in PHP.
I think you've made this point at least 50 times in as many COVID threads and you've been refuted at least as many times, why do you keep doing this?
https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/covid-19/covid-shots-previous-inf...
> Unvaccinated, infected inmates had an estimated 36% risk of spreading the virus, compared with 28% among infected vaccinees. After adjustment, any vaccination, previous infection alone, and both vaccination and previous infection cut the risk of SARS-CoV-2 transmission by 22%, 23%, and 40%, respectively.
> Booster doses and more recent vaccination further lowered infectiousness among vaccinated inmates, with each dose conferring an 11% risk reduction; the risk of transmission rose 6% for every 5 weeks that had elapsed since the last shot.
The PET had an IEEE-488 bus and these more rounded PETs are gorgeous machines.
Sadly, these are not abundant at all - they were far from a commercial success. As why they are attractive over x86 and Macs, is because they are different. Much like the Lisa, they represent the road not taken, or, at least, a past long lost.
I'm not so sure. I used to use a 30Hz display while waiting for a driver update (was a 4k early adopter), and I found programming with a 33ms key latency to be maddening. Even 60Hz feels slow if you've used higher refresh rate devices. (I wrote a toy editor with imgui and tried it on my 360Hz monitor vs. my 60Hz monitor and the smoothness was wonderful; high refresh is good for more than just shooting people in a game, though that's why I have that particular monitor.)
e-ink displays are nice, but I wonder if it's just because how contrast works? The software asks for #000000 text on a #FFFFFF background, and with e-ink, that's maybe a handful of stops apart. But if you do that on an HDR display, maybe it's twice as many stops apart. The solution might be to ask for #555555 text on a #AAAAAA background, or something like that. (I dark mode everywhere, so I'd do the opposite. In fact, I do do that, my terminal background is not black, and my text is not white. I pick like grey10 and grey90.)
206 should be one of those cats that got shaved, and so it has a puffy head and legs, but a thin body.
The other day I was reading an article here about how one big problem with desalination plants is that they produce raw salt that increases the salinity of water near them. The consensus was "oh well the ocean is big", but if you put these things around where you're dumping the salt, at least you could get a little bit of the energy that you spent removing the salt back. So desalination becomes more efficient.
Indeed. With enough energy we can convert recycled plastic into literally anything. All you need is to fuse the right nuclei together.
It might need more energy than you would spend mining it from a distant star system, or release enough heat to melt the factory, the crew, and the planet it's on, but, still, there is no fundamental law of physics preventing you from doing it.
The mere suggestion of this in Oxford has caused people to go completely mental and invoke all sorts of WEF conspiracy theories. It might work but the public transport alternatives need to be the working default first.
That's getting close to something reasonable to achieve on a (non-"e") bicycle. I have always wanted to get a speeding ticket on my bike, but never have.
There's probably a huge cultural difference here, but the image there sure does not look like a 30km/h street to me --- more like a 30mph one. That said, I've seen pictures of other European streets, far narrower and meandering, where even 30km/h would seem too fast.
It is also launching a campaign with the slogan: “We drive 30 for each other.”
Not surprisingly, the socialism is blatantly obvious.
Is it one more case where a good technology was killed by incumbents fearing disruption?
Their tech seemed solid and a good match for tablets such as the Kindle Fire family that tries to overlap tablets and e-readers.
I definitely have a preference for made in America, but that really only applies to physical products since there are strong associations with reputation and quality; the "country of origin" of software is far less well-defined in general, especially in the case of OSS.
That's actually an ad.
The article says the organization behind this is the Hopewell Fund. Here's that fund's Form 990.[1] The long list of organizations they support, and how much each got from them, starts at page 41. They also run ad campaigns of their own and spend a lot of money with Perkins-Cole, a law firm. They seem to fund a long list of nonprofits doing all sorts of things. Somewhere in that list may be an anti-encryption organization. Can anyone find it?
[1] https://www.hopewellfund.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Hope...
July 17, 2023: https://www.bmj.com/content/382/bmj.p1701
I’d assume the validation is parsing the uuid with a uuid library (to decode it), and the library eagerly validates the version field, either to check for garbage or because it wants to yield a different subtype for each version.
We could make the string representation more compact with more characters, but I’m not sure compactness and readability are the same, especially any compactness that takes more than the ASCII character set (sure, just the hexadecimal digits may be fewer than ideal.)
I find that answering tech support scams with "I don't have a computer" tends to make them shut up pretty quickly.
This seems like a bit of a "duh" article? Most widely-used plastics are basically (very) long-chain hydrocarbons. Hydrogen and carbon. It's just like crude oil, except less... crude.
"NATO could send Serbia back to the Stone Age with their pinky finger" isn't true without nukes.
If you don't use nukes, it's at least months of airstrikes. A ground operation would be even slower, and bloodier.
All of my Teslas have gone up $30-$50/month in Florida within the last six months, but more of an artifact of the FL insurance market (25% of Florida drivers are uninsured and the cost of both parts and labor have gone up significantly) vs EV/Tesla specific.
My dad saw (here in the US) a fairly hefty insurance bump going from a bells-and-whistles Acura to a Tesla Model 3.
The single-cast underbody is a big and expensive single thing to repair if it gets damaged, as is the battery.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a42709679/tesla-insurance-...
This works until it doesn't. A classic example of someone that would want this 99.99% of the time but find the remaining 0.01% a showstopper might be a new parent. Blocking all the solicitors, scams, strangers, salespeople et al sounds great - until your kid is lost, finds a friendly adult with a cell phone, tries to call you, and can't get through because nobody that isn't on the whitelist can reach you. (Yes, we still have our kids memorize our phone numbers, or write them on labels with the kid.). It also doesn't really get better as you get older - if you're 70 years old and your 40-year-old kid is in a car accident and the doctor's trying to reach you, you would probably want to know.
> The US system is actually more monarchical than the parliamentary systems found in most of Europe and the Commonwealth,
If you redefine “monarchy” to refer to concentration of power and not the proprietary, hereditary, personal character of paramount leadership, strong Presidential systems are more “monarchical” within their scope of power than most parliamentary systems. OTOH, the US federal government has a narrow scope of authority than most national governments, which makes the overall concentration of power less even though the concentration of that power actually held by the feds is greater.
Really, ignoring the essential proprietary factors of both monarchy and feudalism, the decentralization of feudalism is probably a better comparator to the US system than the centralism of monarchy (whereas European countries were more centralized in the 18th Century and have generally gotten even more centralized since, with a little but of recent backoff.)
Its probably more significant that many European (but mostly not Commonwealth) countries, are more effectively democratic than the US, but parliamentarianism is less important than proportionality there.
The lab where it's being built: https://mirrorlab.arizona.edu
Pre-covid they offered tours of the lab (looks to be coming back next year), and if you were lucky they had one of the spinning furnaces going.
You got it to provide a chat response with a remotely plausible (but still somewhat unlikely, Bard probably isn’t running on MacOS servers, though training data with samples from which it might project the answer probably disproportionately is from people running code on MacOS desktops) answer to what the result of doing that would be.
Odd contrast in culture; as someone who spent all my life in a society where "sleeping on the job" is considered absolutely unacceptable, this feels to me like it's solving the symptom but not the cause.
I also get the same error (in Chrome) when testing a forged email:
telnet learndmarc.com 25
Trying 87.239.13.42...
Connected to learndmarc.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 allspark.uriports.com ESMTP URIports Mail Portal 1.03.2 Sun, 01 Oct 2023 21:55:40 +0000
HELO there
250 allspark.uriports.com Hello <my host> [<ip address>]
MAIL From: me@example.com
250 OK
RCPT To: ld-49101f55f6@learndmarc.com
250 Accepted
DATA
354 Enter message, ending with "." on a line by itself
.
250 OK id=1qn4QF-00CUhd-5j
I remain amused at how much email I've sent over the years with "HELO there" instead of my hostname in there. I also wonder what % of internet traffic is "Enter message, ending with . on a line by itself".
I'd rather they force them to release documentation instead, documentation which they certainly already have, and which hardware manufacturers used to freely provide.
If they're worried about IP, that's what the patent system is for.
Marketing people are trash, episode someverylargenumber
You know where we need lots of marketing people? Mars. I think we should send them there first to build the consumer society that will be necessary for colonizing a new planet, perhaps in some sort of space Ark.
Infinite fun to be had with a MITM proxy... less maliciously, it reminds me of the "mobile proxies" that were common in the 2000s which would resample images dynamically to save bandwidth --- back then, cellular data was both slow and extremely expensive.
Commercial airlines routinely move planes from JFK to LGA at night. There is a popular ATC recording of one not having the paperwork to fly IFR, so they want VFR instead. Mildly amusing twist on a common operation.
I really like this. Other than an upvote I would very much like to express my support for this idea and I hope someone with connections to the halls of power passes it on, there is a lot of merit to this. It would immediately result in hardware manufacturers having to document each and every input and output of their hardware if they expect any sales at all and it would also do an end run around various monopolies.
Check out the idiocy around Broadcomm's WiFi/Bluetooth drivers on the Mac, it's absolute insanity, there are so many of them that to install Linux on one of the machines with such a chipset you need to copy your drivers from the Mac operating system (if you still have it installed...) in order to give Linux the ability to load firmware onto the devices so that they can work. Three different files iirc.
That's more likely to be brake dust.
Lame excuses, Google could do the same as Microsoft with PC standards and OEM legal obligations.
They have chosen not to.
Because that is the software developer/systems engineer division that already existed 20 years ago.
The idea behind devops was to be a single team.
Just as info for the young folks, Safari had a Windows version until 2012.
>How will it make my everyday experience better as an Apple customer without the integration of software and hardware between my Mac, iPads Watch, Airpods and phone?
Perhaps that's the wrong question. Perhaps "making my everyday experience better as a customer" is not the be all end all.
> is it hard for an advanced AI model to differentiate the intention of the prompt and then if it's mature content may be not generate the image?
Or, better, if the prompt has nothing NSFW in it and the generated image triggers a detector for NSFW content, dump and then regen the image with a new seed. Displaying an error message that is basically “We generated something that we think is objectionable, even though your prompt called for nothing like that, so you get no photo” is an idiotic design.
Even Google "can't" follow their own rules, and mix transactional and marketing notifications in same channels.
Push notifications are the next regulatory target after cookies.
Sandia built something like this about 20 years ago. It was a ball with a combustion-powered pogo stick piston. A weight inside allowed the ball to orient itself, and then the piston would be fueled and fired to launch it towards the next destination.
The intended application was swarming land mines. Drop a few hundred of these from an aircraft. They sense nearby targets, and when they find a good one, such as a convoy, they call to others nearby to come join the fun.
Everybody is. I'm strongly of the opinion that all this 'needy tech' is a net negative and I try hard to keep it out of my life. But some of it, mostly associated with my kids schooling, is very hard to avoid. 10 emails per week about some school portal with 'an important message' (which you need to separately logged into, of course the message is so important that it can't be entrusted to mere email, even though the account recovery does use that same email) that ends up being nonsense but you're not able to block it because one day an actually important message might show up.
Tech should serve us, but meanwhile instead of having terminals to the internet we are now the terminals to the internet. Push notifications and all manner of intrusive interaction have become the norm, not the exception that they should be.
Democracy is dying worldwide.[1][2]
- Russia had real elections for a while, but got rid of term limits and now seems to have a president for life.
- China now has a premier for life.
- Israel seems to now have a premier for life. (15 years and counting, despite some short gaps)
- The US has Trump.
- India has become an "electoral autocracy".
A common factor is dysfunctional legislatures/parliaments. This leads to the executive taking over more legislative power. Then a "strongman" emerges. Then the legislative branch becomes irrelevant.
It's also a common factor that the current crop of autocratic national leaders are under-performers. There's not an Eisenhower, a Ben-Gurion, a de Gaulle or an Ataturk in the bunch. Let alone a Roosevelt or a Churchill.
[1] https://freedomhouse.org/issues/democracies-decline
[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/half-worlds-democracies-declin...
>Impact of major awards on the subsequent work of their recipients
They don't directly care about CRE. But their wealthy friends (and most likely most F500 CEOs) own or are invested in CRE. By convincing all their CEO friends to force RTO, they can boost the CRE. Also some of biggest companies are effectively invested in CRE because they built huge campuses and while those are technically owned by others, they are in super long term leases which require them to have a certain number of people there every day, as well as local tax breaks that they get for having a certain attendance.
And some scientists aren't exactly helping by making it seem as if this inherent conflict between 'this' and 'better' isn't part and parcel of the whole but instead driven by personal conflict. The damage done like that is likely long term fairly massive, hopefully prospective scientists won't be discouraged by these vendetta like phenomenon.
> a lot of prime real estate is taken over by an army of hotels that are only at ~50-60% load on average
Isn’t this a textbook case for Airbnb (or something akin to it)? Residents live year round, except during the festival, when they rent out their homes?
Put another way, would the hotels be open to long-term leases which black out the festival?
50 years after the civil war, Ireland would not particularly keen to start up the random violence again.
I suspect everyone assumed normality would resume "tomorrow", for a lot of tomorrows. Which is the other reason you can't just start up the lynchings, this isn't America and you'll have to live with these people and their families on a comparatively small island.
You can write a database in Go, sure, but if you want to compete at the very top end, you need all the control. Go is nice in the way that Go is nice (if you even agree with that statement) precisely because it doesn't have that control. Unless it is a terminal goal for a database to be in Go simply to be in Go (BoltDB seems to fit into this category) or you don't care to compete at the very top end, I think it's a mistake to even start in Go.
To be honest, most of the "we started in Go and switched to Rust" stories read to me as "you should have always known that you should have started in Rust" (or C++ or something, though I'd choose Rust out of the viable set of languages here too). It's IMHO always been obvious that Go was not really viable, I mean, sure, you can get farther than you could with starting with Python, but, it's not something Go was even trying to solve.
With this, and yesterday's cardboard bed...
In other words: you're proposing to replace a set of possible, if difficult, technological solutions, with an near-impossible social solution. I'd call that misguided.
Technological solutions tend to be discussed because they can be implemented. Social solutions may work better, but only in imaginary la-la land where they can actually be put into practice. In the real world, you can't "just" get people to not drive.
If they're that high why are you looking for a job?
Perspiration is only useful via evaporative cooling. It is of no use underwater.
Anything above 104F/40C will rapidly lead to heatstroke in humans, that’s why hot tubs are kept at 100-102F. Depending on human, you’ll last 10-20 minutes, but the flesh eating bacteria or brain eating amoeba might still get you.
Edit: hah
Ever since Musk took over, Mastodon has felt pretty much identical to old Twitter for me; same people, same conversations. I recommend it. I've stopped paying attention to Bluesky.
Everybody always points out that the alternatives to Twitter are inferior. The issue there is, X is also inferior to Twitter. Pick your poison.
The backstory here is they were doing a rewrite anyways, for reasons that had not much to do with languages; they expected to write some C++ for the new version. Rust was the right call for them.
> China’s Chebai think tank says the emerging consensus is that EV sales will hit 17m or 60pc of total Chinese share by 2025, rising to 90pc by 2030, assuming that the grid can keep up.
This is greater than total annual US light vehicle sales. S curve going parabolic indeed! China crushing OPEC was not on my ‘20s bingo card, delightful.
i found this statement (fta)
''' Most doctors are taught and believe that the brain dies after about five or 10 minutes of oxygen deprivation,” Parnia said. “One of the key points that comes out of this study is that that is actually not true. Although the brain flatlines after the heart stops, and that happens within seconds, it doesn't mean that it's permanently damaged and [has] died. It's just hibernating. What we were able to show is that actually, the brain can respond and restore function again, even after an hour later, which opens up a whole window of opportunity for doctors to start new treatments. '''
quite remarkable.
So far, the alternatives are 'inferior' in various ways.
But after the owner of the site started posting various anti-semitic things (blaming the ADL on the site's problems, going off about 'Soros'), I decided I'd rather use inferior products than support that kind of thing. Not just me who thinks this: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/elon-musk-antisemitism-on-x-twi...
My impressions of the alternatives:
* Mastodon seems to not have a great deal of traction. It could be cool for the right small, tight-knit community, but I don't see 'normies' hanging out on it too much.
* Blue Sky has a "cool kids" vibe and people I know, but I wonder if it'll grow. For a long time they were very slow to hand out new invites.
* Threads seems like the best so far. Zuckerberg is no angel, but at least it's a public company which probably adds a little bit in terms of guardrails. And they seem to be investing in improving the product, fairly quickly.
Some of it is people ask the wrong questions. On a loudness-war-wrecked pop song I may not be able to tell 128Kbps from the original, but on specific content I have been able to tell. I'm not even claiming golden ears or anything; some specific audio content is the audio equivalent of visual confetti [1], and anyone can hear the difference, because the codec isn't even close. And let me underline, I mean, anyone. No special claims being made here.
But all in all, that content is relatively rare, and generally transient even in the music they appear in.
Even though they’ve been talking about it for 2 years AFAIK Spotify still does not have a lossless offer. And lossy bitrate is adaptive and middling (especially if not using premium).
EQ-ing and mastering could also be different.
There are definitely consumer electron microscopes available. I remember a video from a couple years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t60I0Z7qCsU
I am not sure if the video actually says the name of the microscope, though, because he was mad at them for not testing it at high altitude where he lived at the time.