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.

I have both Win 7 and Ubuntu running on this system (concurrently, the Ubuntu is a VirtualBox fullscreened on the second monitor), and I find your post interesting because on Windows side I have like 2 dozen icons pinned to the taskbar. Basically anything I need even semiregularly. On the Ubuntu, I have 2 icons in the Gnome panel: Firefox and gnome-terminal. I never use the Firefox icon. I think it was there by default. If I need Firefox on the Ubuntu for some reason (usually I browse with Chrome from the Windows) I'll do the same thing I do with any program other than terminal (which I usually have around 10 open on each of the 4 virtual desktops): open yet another terminal and type: firefox &

My thoughts exactly. At work (as a sysadmin) I'm running a Windows desktop with 2 screens. On the second screen (which isn't really essential, but still nice) I have a VirtualBox Ubuntu installation fullscreened 24/7. So I basically have two systems side-by-side except:

• I have one mouse and one keyboard.
• I can see what's going on in both OS at the same time
• I only need to lock/unlock my console once
• I can seamlessly copy-paste between them.
• If I need to remote from home, I can just take normal RDP and the Ubuntu is available in a window too.

Even useless eye-candy in compiz works fine (though it's a bit slowish with RDP over interwebs). Both systems run all the time (well, the Windows needs to be booted occasionally where as KSplice deals with the Ubuntu pretty well), and they work just fine. From work-flow point of view it's mostly like working with a single system.

I also have a console switch so I can access a separate Mac (for OSX) from the same console. It works too, but it's such a pain to hop from one system to another that I usually try to avoid having to bother. What this "hot switching" sounds like is basically like using such a console switch. Doesn't sound so great when you're used to being able to just focus another window.

No need to use 'dd' as you can just take a tar-ball of one filesystem. That way you don't waste space on storing (and more importantly moving) the garbage in unallocated space. There's nothing special about any of it, except whatever the bootloader (ie. grub hopefully) requires. You can use some Live ISO (usually the same one you used to copy the data over) to chroot into the system once the data is copied over and tell grub to reinstall itself (update-grub). The only other tweak required is patching new UUIDs to /etc/fstab (or you can give the old UUID to mkfs too I guess, though this could cause problems if you try to connect both drives at the same time).

I'd guess (and this is a pure guess) if you look at the life expectancy vs. attitude and quantize the attitude on a binary scale (positive thinking vs. depression) you'll see a corralation between life expectancy and positive thinking. But what happens if we compare positive attitude vs. realistic (or "average") attitude? It could be that negative attitude correlates with shortened life-expectancy, but once your attitude improves back to what can be considered "normal" there is no further advantage in being more positive. Kinda like some sort of "dimishing returns" situation?