To the best of my recollection, Opus is absolutely better than AAC, according to the blind tests done by hydrogenaudio, among others. Vorbis was very slightly worse than AAC, but much like all benchmarking, sometimes it did better, sometimes worse.

HE-AAC, the "High Efficiency" branch, has proven to provide higher quality than Vorbis at low bitrates (ie. 48-56 kbit, IIRC). That said, I don't know exactly how Opus fits into comparisons with HE-AAC. I seem to recall Opus is better than HE-AAC in the general case, but much like Vorbis vs AAC, the performance is similar.

Either way: I think it's kinda nuts that HEVC has been out since 2013 (nearly 12 years), has been succeeded by VVC in 2020, and HEVC still hasn't settled its patent wars. I don't keep track by any means, but I gotta wonder how many of the HEVC cases end up being tossed as "moot" because the patent expired...

Good point, and I'm not here to argue with you -- the problem when we talk about Costco is the Wing drone's max capacity of 5lbs. That's not a Costco trip -- that's barely a trip to a Costco food court :).

5lbs feels like not enough to really replace most trips to actually stock your groceries, unless you break up your shopping trip into multiple delivery flights. It's much better for impromptu consumption (though that said, I feel like most of my trips to the local hardware store are "oh crap, I need this one thing ... " which would be under 5lbs)

Go fuck yourself, asshole.

(You're welcome)

Dude, relax. It was a joke.

Not to mention that "Judy's" also conflicts with the contraction of "Judy is" ...

Reasonable stance, though I'd argue "some quarters are special" are a particularly good reason to stick with quarterly reporting -- because you don't get the smoothing effect of, say, bundling in your best quarter with your worst quarter. Most companies will have the same 'best' or 'worst' quarter YoY, so it's less about comparing, say, Q4 of this year with Q3 of this year, and more comparing Q4 of this year with Q4 of last year.

I'm a Pokemon Go player; been playing it pretty intensely for the last 16 months or so, level 74 (of a max of 80).

Firstly, this is not in any way surprising or upsetting. Niantic's been pretty clear for a long time now that they were making location-based games for the purpose of training systems.

Secondly, I should note that POGO does not actually require you to take pictures of anything. It's an option, one way to do what Pokemon Go calls "Field Research Tasks" (FRTs), but "take a scan of that place" FRTs are a small subset of the FRTs you might choose to do (and when I was attempting to get as many as possible on my way to level 74 I ignored all the scanning ones).

Also, "helped FBI" is true but also misleading. Proton Mail does business in Switzerland, and is subject to Switzerland's laws. The Swiss authorities made a lawful data request of Proton Mail, which Proton Mail had to oblige, and then the Swiss authorities shared that data with the FBI.

Really minor note: You mentioned Biden using his power to help his sons. Biden has three adult children (He had a daughter who died in the same car accident his wife died in, in the 70s, when the daughter was about one year old; I'm not counting her). Of these three children, there are daughter Ashley (who has led a relatively boring life, other than having her diary at some point stolen by some people), and two sons, Beau and Hunter. These are the sons you'd have referred to.

Now, Hunter is a scumbag, and Biden did way too much to help him (including that pardon, though by Trump standards that was pretty mild). Beau, on the other hand, was a pretty respectable politician with nary a scandal attached to him, who sadly died way too young at 46 in 2015 (way before Biden became President, obviously).

So it's more how Biden helped his son (singular) than sons (plural).

Feels like you may be having a bad day. I'm sorry about that. I think this news is interesting and relevant to this website. We continue to see a strong interest and engagement with news stories about workspace cultures; pretty much everyone out there who works today is having to contend with how AI will be used in their workspace; and this story is right in that sweet spot of internal conflicts springing up in a whole lot of companies (including my own) around the use of AI (though in my company's case it's less "use our internal AI tool, not the actually good one," and more Leaders: "Use more AI!" followed by Security going: "Don't use any AI!").

Poorly, presumably.

When you refer to "my cash register," you mean The Internet Archive? Is that right?

I'm not seeing a paywall on the site. uBlock Origin must be doing something.

The UHF app on our Apple TVs & iOS devices and the UHF Server in Docker to act as a PVR gives us everything for a few $ a month paid in crypto.
We haven't had cable since ~1999-2000. Downloading and the *arrs have kept us happy, but the better half wanted to check out some live sports. So IPTV it was.

One of our guys said something to the effect of "Copilot is Corporate Chat. It knows all the useless filler of management-speak, but lacks the competence of the people in the trenches.

Ouch.