Wavetable synths gave you a different set of trade-offs due to limited sample memory. You ended up with low effective sample rate at low pitches. If you compare Super Famicom and Mega Drive soundtracks, you can see the composers tailored them to the systems' strengths. For example, Mega Drive games could do a more convincing rendition of saxophones and brass. The Roland Sound Canvas was what most PC games with MIDI soundtracks were developed against. It was the first proper General MIDI synth module, and did a pretty decent job. Everything else was a fallback mode. The next big step forward was Yamaha's AWM.

I think this may be because in the 60s there was far less violent crime, so the only murders out there were domestics which are trivial to solve. It would interesting to test the idea.

This isn't true. After peaking in the '90s, violent crime is basically back down to '60s levels now. The generally accepted hypothesis is that the rise in violent crime was mostly due to burning fuel containing tetraethyl lead, and the subsequent drop is mostly due to reducing exposure to lead (and other heavy metals).

"AI" proponents keep touting language translation as something LLMs do well, yet they're absolutely dreadful at it for pairs of languages I'm familiar with. "AI" translation cannot get pronouns right when translating to/from languages where pronouns depend on the relationship between the speaker and listener (e.g. Korean and Viet). Admittedly it can be ambiguous if you only have a single sentence, but "AI" doesn't get better with more context. Give it enough material that it's unambiguous to any human, and the "AI" won't even be consistent between sentences in a paragraph. For another example, it can't deal with implicit topic when translating from Japanese. Someone recently posted an "AI" translation of a Japanese video game that never had an English release, and this was really obvious right from the intro. There's a guy telling you what you need to do, but the "AI" translated it as him saying what he needs to do. Once again, it's basic stuff that no human would screw up. You're trying to claim it works at "a super-human level" when out here in the real world, it screws up stuff that any kid who's been to a few language classes can get right. It makes the rest of your enthusiasm for "AI" seem completely misplaced.

I'm very surprised it's legal here. I thought the electric companies were legally required to serve their customers reliably, and not solely when they found it desirable to do so -- that's the agreement they made in exchange for being a natural monopoly (natural because you can't economically run more than one set of electric lines to every household). Apparently I was wrong about that?

the US is not trying to make the rest of the world dependent on US manufacturing by undercutting everyone and putting them out of business

That's exactly what the Bretton-Woods agreement was supposed to do - make US exports artificially cheap to try and put everyone else out of business.

As astronaut Frank Borman put it, "a superior pilot uses his superior judgement to avoid situations which would require the use of his superior piloting skill".

The programmer's version of that would be "a superior programmer uses his superior judgement to avoid creating the bugs that would require the use of his superior debugging skill".

The risk in this scenario is that after a few iterations of people applying AI-generated "black box" modifications, users start reporting that the ancient app is crashing on them now and then, and nobody has the first clue why, or how to fix it... and since the crash isn't readily reproducible, you can't even do a "git bisect" to figure out which commit introduced the regression. Now you're left with two unappetizing choices: either live with the instability forever, or roll back all of the "blind" commits to the last known-stable version and never touch the codebase again.

The BYD Shark petrol-electric hybrid with DMO AWD seems to hold up pretty well in tough Australian conditions. Ironically, it isn't actually available in China. There's no chance of it making it to the US market.

I don't think they're saying it's the only choice. They're saying that if you're using VMware to provide high-availability service with automatic hot failover, etc. then switching to IBM mainframes is cheaper than staying with VMware given Broadcom's new pricing. There are other solutions with their own pros and cons, but given mainframes' reputation for being expensive, this really says something about how much Broadcom is charging for VMware.

I don't know what the AC you replied to is referring to, but Don Ho has occasionally used the release notes (opened automatically after installing an update) and the web site to express anti-PRC opinions. I wouldn't call them "tirades", but some people apparently get very upset if software developers express opinions.

Those guys can't even vet their own social media posts, and those are ~100 characters of ASCII text. The chances of them being able to meaningfully review a multi-gigabyte binary file are exactly zero.

Spicy autocomplete indeed.

Chuckle.

AI is real. The implications of this are not priced in.

... other, more obscure platforms are also supported, but if you want to run NetHack on them, you'll have to compile it yourself from source. Kind of a baller move if you ask me :)

Trump's actions are 100% Trump's responsibility ("the buck stops here" is still part of the Presidential employment contract, even if Trump doesn't think so).

OTOH, it wouldn't surprise me one bit if Netanyahu played hardball to "encourage" Trump to help. It's one of the downsides of having a "colorful" sex life in your youth and then gaining political power later on -- too many people have solid evidence of your transgressions, and now motivation to use them to influence your decision-making.

So when Netanyahu phones Trump up and says "join my war, or else I'll release these Epstein videos of you having group sex with underage girls", does Trump do the principled thing and refuse? Or does he take the coward's way out, and allow Israel to dictate US policy in exchange for temporarily saving his own political skin? I think we know the answer to that.

Is every country rational enough to never actually use them, and also technically and organizationally competent to keep them out of the hands of private groups (e.g. Al-Qaeda) who would steal them and use them for them own purposes?

If not, then the MAD doctrine won't work there. It's either principled leadership by the major powers, or nothing.