1,822 karma · joined January 28, 2019
There are two ways of resolving this conundrum. You either give rights to computer programs, or take away the rights of people. Which option sounds more likely to you?
Traffic cameras are publicly available in London. The first thing I used to do when coming to the office each morning was to look myself up in the traffic cameras along my journey (historic footage is also publicly available).
Yet there’s an immense complexity and structure in natural numbers, starting with primes, and ending in algebraic- or analytic number theory!
Why is it that this thing we use for counting objects has such rich structure? Where does it come from? Why does it have to be this way?
It certainly feels something divine to me. It certainly feels as something that humans didn’t invent, rather was always “out there” to be discovered. Physical laws (which are mostly just OK approximations) feel much more arbitrary and down-to-Earth compared to mathematics.
Only when Apple comes out with a flagship app written in Swift (I would require SwiftUI too, but I don’t want to be that cruel…) will I entertain the idea that ObjC can be replaced. If they were eating their own dogfood internally, they should be aware that it is nowhere near ready for AAA app development.
Oh, most people aren’t either. Until they get burned. Then suddenly privacy becomes a major concern for them.
I feel there’s a nugget of wisdom in here for you!
E.g. create a full-scale sine wave, split it into two files, then convert them to "gapless" Opus. Now open the files in Audacity and you'll see that there's a small amount of ringing at the boundary, so it is not truly gapless.
If you try the same with AAC using Apple's gapless metadata (i.e. iTunSMPB) you'll find that the boundary is perfectly continuous.
No, we don’t go back to the office.
You cannot do the same with MP3, AAC, OGG, Opus or any other lossy codec.
Sure, it's just metadata. It's just about backwards compatibility.
By the way, the checksum is calculated on the raw data fed into the encoder. It doesn't make sense to decode the data you've just encoded.
But I have one nitpick with FLAC in this regard: they chose MD5 as the checksum instead of something sensible like CRC32/CRC64... It makes no sense, because we're not doing cryptography here - we're doing an integrity check. Moreover it makes a parallelized FLAC encoder somewhat problematic to implement, as there's always going to be a serial bottleneck at the end for computing the MD5 hash. CRC on the other hand could easily be parallelized. But I'm afraid we'll have to live with this shortcoming forever now ¯\_(ツ)_/¯