I feel like if Google really wanted to improve search, a much better investment than these LLMs would be to figure out how to train an "AI" to weed out the SEO garbage. That could actually improve things, 'cos then you could have a page-rank style algorithm work again... but that would not be very sexy, 'cos then the "AI" would just be a backend filter component. That's probably the common theme with modern technology, where the stuff that "just works" somewhere behind the scenes isn't sexy, so instead we have a bunch of flashy junk to waste everyone's time.

I have a fairly similar experience, though it was on PC with GWBasic which mainly taught me that I needed a real programming language instead. My main language of choice ended up being C and later C++ .. but it was really the direct access to the capabilities of the machine (with inline assembler if necessary, though I quickly grew interested in the types of programs where that's not necessarily the way to go; you'd think kids wanted to program arcade games, but I wanted to do things like compilers and what not by the time I was a teenager) rather than the capabilities of whatever was built into the basic interpreter that was the real eye-opener.. like suddenly you could do anything the machine was capable of rather than spend time trying to work around interpreter bugs and try to remember line numbers.

Perhaps I should clarify as I wasn't really trying to argue as much as just add more thoughts into the discussion. As a plugin developer I generally think that having every plugin oversample internally is overall the better engineering trade-off (and sometimes you want different amounts of oversampling for different stages in a single plugin), but the real point I was trying to bring up is that when processing audio, the bandwidth beyond what's audible can often become meaningful due to distortion (including aliasing) products in non-linear processing. It's generally agreed that we only need about 20kHz of bandwidth as far as ears are concerned, but producing 20kHz of clean audio might require more bandwidth during processing.

The same applies to precision too. For distribution of end-user audio going past 16 bits is IMHO pure marketing snake-oil, but this doesn't mean that you might not want to use significantly higher precision when processing, because then numerical errors come into play. When considering feedback in IIR filters, even single-precision floats are sometimes insufficient and in extreme cases this might even lead to unstable algorithms. Sometimes you can fix this by choosing an alternative algorithm with better numerical behaviour, but in some cases you might opt to have your plugins work in double precision. Even simple volume control (and certainly sample rate conversion if you're playing 44.1kHz on a 48kHz DAC) does lose a tiny bit of numerical precision, so there's no harm in having the PC convert the 16 bit media to higher precision for mixdown before sending it to the DAC... but that doesn't mean there's any real benefit in distributing anything more than 16 bits.

Overall I feel like the biggest problem with a typical discussion (online or offline) with regards to audio quality, sampling rates and precision is that it's very common for people to read something that applies to processing and then insist that it also applies to distribution media where in fact the engineering tradeoffs for the two are very different. A fancy high gain guitar amp sim might want to process with 16x oversampling and use double-precision floats internally to improve the numerical behaviour of it's circuit simulation, but that absolutely doesn't mean that there's any benefit whatsoever in 700kHz/64bits for distribution. For whatever reason, people treat audio as if it was made of magic pixie dust (and that's really what I was talking about with the gold plated ethernet cables). In the real world there's no magic and digital audio really is just regular engineering and all about finding the right engineering trade-offs which tend to be different depending on the purpose.

Oversampling DACs are a thing, but usually you'd be oversampling with something like 1-4 bits in order to produce a signal that's equivalent to the 24 bits signal that you're advertising, rather than to try and improve beyond (since that's already mostly beyond the analog limits).

Oversampling in audio processing is also very much a thing to mitigate aliasing from non-linear processing (ie. any sort of distortion). This way hopefully the most significant aliasing will fall into the excess bandwidth so it can be filtered out by the downsampling filters, rather than folding over to contaminate the baseband. Usually it makes little sense to manually work with higher rate audio here though, since the oversampling is usually built into FX processors and plugins directly (generally makes more sense in terms of CPU efficiency, since you'd need the filtering mostly equivalent to resampling between different processors anyway to avoid letting the aliasing accumulate further).

Finally recording "ultrasounds" at high rates can be useful for stuff like SFX work where it's perfectly normal to record some ordinary everyday sound and then play it back at much slower rate to produce an extraordinary impression. When slowed down, the ultrasounds become audible and the results tend to be more convincing when the final Nyquist rate doesn't exceed the original Nyquist rate.

So... there are reasons to work with higher sampling rates for audio, but basically none of them have anything to do with anyone's hearing in terms of the final media. Even with 24 bits the extra dynamic range is mostly useful in a studio (ie. don't need to worry about leaving plenty of headroom). For final distribution media going past 44.1kHz/16bit is basically about as useful as using a gold plated ethernet cable for watching youtube.

Ignoring hardware considerations (eg. whether the chips can be write-protected), at least from the usability point of view the "lazy user" problem could be solved rather trivially: just make the jumper (or perhaps a dip-switch) both enable firmware updates and disable normal booting at the same time. This way as long as the firmware update mode is enabled you will not be able to use the computer for anything else and doing the wrong thing is no longer an option.

From the point of view of a functioning society going forward, I feel like it might make sense to focus at least some of the mandatory CS education in schools (not just in US, but worldwide) on teaching people the basics of what they need to understand about internet security (hands on, so the point really get across). I'm not talking about security in the sense that a programmer would need to know about it, but rather in the sense of what every modern human needs to understand in order to protect themselves from basic scams, how support personel will never need your password for anything, how an email or SMS can be spoofed or sent by malware, things like that.

Most people seem to learn to hate math in school and I personally feel like trying to teach them to also hate programming is probably not going to be that useful. When the most common password is apparently still '123456' teaching people some basics of how to avoid the dark alleys of the digital society would seem like something that should have a much better return of investiment to the society as a whole, than trying to teach everyone to write code.

The whole point here is that when you're writing a program that is supposed to be running as setuid (especially setuid root), you're NOT supposed to expect "normal operation" (or normal values of environment variables, or normal anything) but rather prepare for the absolutely worst non-sense that your program could technically be subjected to, because pretty much every time you fail to account for some possibility, it's probably a local priviledge escallation waiting for exploitation.

This is why you don't just set any old program to setuid, because most "normal programs" expect "normal operation" and setuid binaries just don't get that priviledge (pun intended). Writing setuid programs is very much a topic that needs to be studied specifically (and preferably restudied every time you start writing a new setuid program), because simply following normal good development practices (whether or not those were followed here) is simply not enough when your program effectively becomes part of the security policy and therefore part of the attack surface.

Complex numbers do not behave like 2D vectors, but they do behave like scaled (by complex magnitude) 2x2 rotation (by complex polar angle) matrices (or 2x2 sub-matrices in case your complex numbers are already elements of some matrix).

It'd be interesting to see the numbers pooled differently, comparing those with private offices vs. those with shared offices (or cubicles, or open plan or whatever). Now, there is likely going to be some correlation between "manager" and "has a private office" but it'd be interesting to see how much correlation there would be to the actual office conditions, rather than just the job description.

In a particularly lame move, somebody put Bing search into Thunderbird. When searching your emails, you can also get irrelevant web search results via Bing. What the use case is for that I have no idea.

San Francisco already did this. Almost all the masonry buildings in SF have been reinforced since the 1989 quake, and now the rules are being tighened on wood buldings. If you've been in an older building in SF, you've probably seen huge diagonal steel braces. That's what it looks like.

All new big buildings meet very tough earthquake standards. The bridges and freeways have been beefed up in recent years. Overpass pillars are about three times as big as they used to be. Two elevated freeways were torn down after one in Oakland failed in the 1989 quake. The entire eastern span of the Bay Bridge was replaced with a new suspension bridge. The western span was strengthened, and there are now sliding joints, huge plates of stainless steel, between the roadway and the towers.

What I'm worried about is when AIs start doing better at corporate management than humans. If AIs do better at running companies than humans, they have to be put in charge for companies to remain competitive. That's maximizing shareholder value, which is what capitalism is all about.

Once AIs get good enough to manage at all, they should be good at it. Computers can handle more detail than humans. They communicate better and faster than humans. Meetings will take seconds, not hours. AI-run businesses will react faster.

Then AI-run businesses will start deailng with other AI-run businesses. Human-run businesses will be too slow at replying to keep up. The pressure to put an AI in charge will increase.

We'll probably see this first in the finanical sector. Many funds are already run mostly by computers. There's even a fund which formally has a program on their board of directors.

The concept of the corporation having no social responsibiilty gives us enough trouble. Wait until the AIs are in charge.

It's been tried. Nobody bought. Except for the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, no news outlet adds enough value that people will pay for it.

The usual rules on this have to do with consecutive days worked. Six days in a row -> 1.5x pay. Seven or more days in a row -> 2x pay.

There was a time when most US employees got that.

And double time on Sundays.

Unions - the people who brought you the weekend.