electrograv

However, one note about CD quality — it may not be as perfect as you think! A peer-reviewed meta-analysis has shown that humans can hear the difference between CD quality (44khz/16bit) and “high-res audio” recordings (e.g. 192khz/24bit)! The perceptual difference is relatively small, but measurable (assuming high quality speakers and signal chain):

https://phys.org/news/2016-06-people-difference-high-resolut...

I doubt 44khz sampling rate is a problem, but fixed point 16 bits per sample does seem fairly constraining, given how our perception of linear audio loudness corresponds to exponential increases in signal strength.

Also, if anyone tries to test it yourself, beware that it is actually quite hard to do so properly:

1. Any listening tests in a web browser will just resample to CD quality automatically anyway, because they just play into your OS’s shared audio mixing system, which mixes all audio sources before they reach your DAC, which usually resamples them all to CD quality in this process.

2. The above point applies to ANY app that doesn’t take exclusive control over your PC’s audio output capability, and even then there are many pitfalls where you can almost accidentally trigger a default CD quality resampling stage somewhere in the pipeline.

3. Be careful to ensure the audio file you’re playing wasn’t just a regular CD quality file that was simply upsampled to 192/24 or whatever high res rate it claims to be. Sadly, this happens a lot. Your audio file MUST be recorded AND mastered (edited) in the studio at every stage using high res formats.

4. Make sure your audio signal path doesn’t have any components introducing dynamic range (loudness) compression (many default to this, these days), or any other resampling, equalization, etc. stages.

5. Your DAC may not even support anything higher than 44/16 data streams, so resampling may be inevitable!

6. Make sure you played the audio samples on extremely high quality speakers (often costing many thousands of dollars, making this whole point moot/irrelevant for most people anyway). The vast majority of consumer headphones and speakers can’t render a low vs high bitrate MP3 very differently, let alone the subtle differences we’re talking about here.

For example: I’ve seen cases where there’s disagreement as to which of two technical paths to pursue, where one side (not liking the way consensus is currently leaning) demands a data driven proof that one of the choices is best. Ordinarily this would be fine, but in this case, it would take no less work/time to gather said data than to entirely implement both solutions and directly compare them.

If you display the color image on a black-and-white monitor, you will be seeing something virtually identical to the grayscale version.

By the logic I'm seeing here against Amazon, it would therefore be considered copyright infringement to sell black-and-white monitors?

I’m no expert here and have not thought about this extensively, so I have no strong opinion here. That said, at first glance:

* It seems reasonable that courts need some power to compel people to cooperate with investigations — otherwise they’d be unable to act on certain kinds of crimes, conspiracies, etc.

* What alternate justice system would you suggest specifically, which is presumably more fair and effective that this one?

Because: Until large strides are made in artificial general intelligence [1], simple little challenges that are creatively designed will be very difficult for a single general-purpose AI system to crack 100% automatically.

In contrast, if your site is targeted with actual human engineers trying to crack your anti-bot system, there’s a good chance they’ll succeed no matter how strong your system [2]. In the case of such targeted attacks, presumably your company will be so important and successful that you’ll be able to afford similarly expensive resources to defend from such attacks.

[1] Don’t get me wrong, I’m not doubting that sufficiently general AI is coming that can easily solve such challenges. But for now, to get your startup off the ground, this is apparently an effective short term solution that is very easy to implement.

[2] Human-operated “sign up farms” are definitely a thing, in addition to actual human-operated spam / advertising / propaganda farms (imagine a typical “call center”-style office hired to do this).

When I’m using an advanced UI to do some specialized task, I generally appreciate when the UI patterns I learn on one OS transfer seamlessly to any other device and OS I may use to do the same task.

But I especially appreciate that apps can choose the UI style and design to suit the task at hand, rather than some notion of conforming to OS style patterns that may or may not work in its favor. For example, I prefer that Visual Studio Code looks the same on all platforms, because I find its UI to be superior to the default style of any OS!

What do you think about these thoughts? Am I alone in preferring custom UIs per app, with consistent app experience across devices?

[1] For the sake of this argument, I’m not counting differences in runtime performance and efficiency, since that’s a whole other topic, and one theoretically orthogonal to the UI design.

And because all the money is in selfie sharing apps, that’s where a large percentage of the brightest minds go to spend their career (as opposed to something less financially responsible, like nuclear fusion engineering, astronomy, or space flight)

By my interpretation, your last paragraph seems to accuse police of very specific misbehavior, but without any evidence, and even with an explicit desire to avoid resolving your accusation one way or another.

I hope you agree that we should take every single accusation of wrongdoing extremely seriously: only then can we truly achieve accountability for bad behavior, while celebrating and rewarding good behavior.

Unfortunately, purely speculative accusations of specific wrongdoing like this compromises our ability in general to take accusations seriously! It also subtly harms the reputations of good people within the accused group, if the accusation is unfounded.

For example, imagine if I said out of the blue:

“I worked with <anilakar> through all April 2019. (Don’t ask me if <anilakar> ever stole a MacBook Pro from the Apple Store on April 5th 2019 at 3:45pm. I don’t want to know anything about whether that did or did not happen.)”

Hopefully this illustrates the potential harm of such comments.

... Despite having painstakingly turned off every available tracking switch from every service I’ve ever signed up to.

... Despite no longer using any services from Google, Facebook, and many others (except when I must via a link from someone else).

... Despite using privacy oriented browsers with all privacy features turned on.

There are so many problems with the current “opt out” model:

1. They do not make it easy to find all these switches. (And it seems intentional, though I can’t prove it.) In addition to there being no global “off” switch, they nest countless switches behind deep hierarchical navigation graphs, where it is extremely difficult for a human to reach every node without missing some.

2. Even when you find the switch, it’s not always clear which choice is the “most off” position, and some switches do not have a “fully off” position.

3. Many switches use extortion to convince you to keep them on: For example, sometimes you’ll be shut entirely out of a service for turning off a tracking switch with dubious explanations as to why they can’t operate the service without it.

4. Many switches will automatically and silently turn back on if you so much as visit the wrong link to their service. Sometimes this happens silently, and sometimes it happens via confusing “dark pattern” prompts.

5. Google isn’t the only one. You have to repeat this whole process for every other service you use (if they even have the switches available).

6. Despite all this, you’ll still be tracked by trackers that don’t need or want you to have an account with them.

The last item can perhaps be summed up by the fact that I still get very targeted ads for things I’ve been searching for on DuckDuckGo even despite all these efforts. Clearly trackers are still embedded into various endpoint web pages and are figuring out what I’m doing despite it all.

It’s an interesting experiment to try yourself: try to actually not be tracked via a regular or even fairly privacy oriented browser.

As far as I can tell, aside from getting into something like Tor, it really can’t be done: If companies can track you, they will. And they can. So they do.

If anything, this is a great move in the right direction for both privacy and fair compensation: It’s opt-in (you’re opted out by default), AND you get monetary compensation!

What more could you want? More money? Yeah, but that could actually start to happen if a competitive market of such things grew (though I doubt that will happen so long as it’s legal to collect data without compensation or permission; for that we probably need regulation).

Regardless, $10 is far better than the $0 from others who take (and sell) your data without even asking first.

IMO the creepy and dangerous privacy violations come from the always-on tracking systems pervasive throughout the web from Google, Facebook, and others. With those, not only are they on by default without your permission, but you can’t opt out, and you receive no compensation!

So the real question is: Who is going to pay the bill?

And the problem I see here is, whoever you ask this, the answer is always “not me!” Everyone wants to reap the benefits of cheap labor (e.g. cheap, fast shipping), while proclaiming they want to treat the labor force well, but without a willingness to actually “put their money where their mouth is” and pay for it when it actually comes down to it.

For example: If you could willingly add 50% to the cost of every Amazon purchase if it gave workers better conditions, would you? If your first reaction to that is “Hey, that’s not my problem! The [government/market/unions/etc.] should have to solve that!” ... then yeah, we’ll the thing is that’s what everybody says when asked these sorts of problems.

That said, it still sounds like Google is trying to convince us that the data they capture (not just the metadata) is never linkable to personally identifiable information, which if true would genuinely ease many privacy concerns here.

As far as I know, just because data is not explicitly annotated with PII doesn’t erase the legal (and ethical) responsibilities associated with handling data that contains PII.

So even if they worded their response so it’s truthfulness is legally/technically defendable, it’s still a bit of a ‘red herring’ at least (I don’t think anyone is accusing Google of explicitly associating these audio recordings with user IDs).

’Yes, we hire people to listen in to and transcribe some conversations from the private homes of our customers (so as improve our speech recognition engines); but the recordings aren’t linked to personally identifiable information.’

Even assuming they have only the purest intentions here, I still don’t understand how they can possibly guarantee that these recorded conversations are not linked to personally identifiable information!

For example, what’s to stop me from saying “Hey Google, I am <full legal name / ID> and my most embarrassing and private secret is <...>”?

One might argue that they could detect this in the recognized text and omit those samples, but presumably the whole purpose of hiring people to create transcripts is because the existing speech-to-text engine isn’t perfect, and they need more training data.

Another question on a tangentially related topic: Could you perhaps shed more light on why there so much pessimistic skepticism towards any claims of working reaction-less propulsion drives (violating conservation of momentum), for example?

I understand the experience-based reasons for skepticism (since there have been many claims that don’t replicate), but why do there also seem to be so many physicists claiming with 100% confidence that no such thing could ever work, according to current physics theory?

I’m referring for example to skepticism about things like “EMDrive” from a theoretical perspective (e.g. the posts from physicists here: https://www.reddit.com/r/EmDrive/) as opposed to focusing on experimental failures to replicate.

Edit: Removed my own confused interpretation of the article’s confused interpretation and correction footnote.

(Obviously I’m just speculating, and I’m not assigning belief either way to any of this; I just enjoy thinking about the possibilities here.)

https://www.reddit.com/r/EmDrive/comments/bgr3ex/comment/elp...

That said, you’ll always be able to find a way to explain away the weirdness if you speculate: Maybe they wanted the patent, but wanted to dissuade other people from reproducing the tech. One effective of doing this could be to actually patent a design that itself works, but is accompanied by a theoretical description that comes across as a joke / gibberish to any educated scientist. That would (and does, as you can see here) shut down most educated scientists interest in the topic immediately.

I’m not saying I believe that’s the case, just that we can always find a way to believe what we want to believe; belief is very dangerous in that way. (Generally, it’s best to just absorb evidence and withhold any “belief” until you absolutely have to make a binary decision.)

Therefore, I think speculation is pointless: Instead, we should just try to build what is described here, and see if it works or not.

I think we do this not because this is the most accurate way to think, but because our minds are finite, and we need some simplifying approximation (e.g. quantization of a continuum into categories, or binary decisions) in order to make thinking about the immensely complicated world even possible.

For example, we tend to seek conclusions like “we have decided that A is good, B is bad, C is bunk, and D is science — case closed!” When in reality, our understanding of truth is far more a continuous and constantly evolving thing, as new information and ideas flow through.

Put simply, I think most people are just uncomfortable answering important questions with “I don’t know”, and avoid that answer at all costs, even when it is the correct answer.

If they wanted to mislead rivals into thinking we have technology we don’t (so as to waste their resources trying to develop tech down a dead-end), why not write it in a more credible way?

If they just wanted to publish “schmuck bait” as you say, I suppose I just don’t see the point of that. It could be explained as an inside joke / trolling I suppose, but for example, look at the credentials of the people here:

https://dpo.tothestarsacademy.com/

Their team includes the recently retired director of Lockheed Martin Skunkworks group. I don’t know how to dismiss that.

Antigravity conspiracy theories has been a favorite source of fascination/amusement for me for a long time (see my username), and I cannot describe how eerie and weird it feels to read official Navy patents and claims by ex-head of Lockheed Martin skunkworks literally corroborating some of conspiracy theories I’ve heard going around for decades. (Yet the skeptic in my brain still won’t allow me to fully believe it until I see a working prototype.)

The whole story here is just so utterly bizarre; the deeper you dig, the weirder it gets. These TheDrive articles seem to do a great job of investigating and reporting on the facts without too much speculation, and I highly recommend diving down the rabbit hole of linked articles (especially on this connected “To The Stars Academy” organization making similar claims of incredible technology by a panel of founders with astoundingly impressive and official credentials).

To add to the strangeness of the Navy patents: the actual patent contents reads almost like gibberish, or the kind of pseudoscientific technobabble you’d write to add scientific explanations of space ships to a sci-fi novel. If the technical descriptions and phenomena are real, then these patents really are describing or hinting at new physics, but in a way that misuses existing terms and reexplains obvious basics of physics with what seems like amateurish imprecision (like referring to cross products as “multiplication”) — which just doesn’t make sense at all given the credentials of those vouching for the patents.

Yet, the descriptions match almost exactly the rumors and conspiracy theories of how electrogravitic propulsion systems of secret military craft worked. And, they describe something that should be testable even without a room temperature superconductor (one could take a charged super capacitor and spin it and/or vibrate it at extreme frequencies and see if this has any measurable effect on its inertial or gravitational mass), which intrigues me.

Look into the “TR-3B” or “Aurora project” conspiracy theory and you’ll find tales and descriptions of the crafts antigravity drive that is absolutely identical to what is described in these patents: a superconducting medium carrying an extremely high charge density, that is rotated and vibrated are incredibly high frequencies — and this is claimed to somehow reduce the inertial mass of the surrounding area.

This TR-3B conspiracy theory is decades old, at least, and it matches these official government patents exactly.

It’s almost as if someone took some of the most intriguing rumors or conspiracy theories of secret government craft from decades ago, and started filing patents from extremely official government sources on exactly the kind of tech that was rumored to exist; yet in a way that sounds much like pseudoscience to anyone educated in modern physics.

This is the kind of thing which, based on the content itself, you’d immediately dismiss as a crackpot conspiracy theory technobabble. But the highly official credentials of the source of these patents, and of the people claiming or hinting that the tech is real (the ex-head of Lockheed Martin skunkworks — it doesn’t get much more credible than that) makes it impossible to ignore in that way.

So I honestly don’t know what to make of any of this. It would be interesting to try experimenting with some of the testable claims that these patents describe.

Of all the modern systems level programming languages I’ve seen, I like Zig the most. It combines a powerful, modern type system (generics, algebraic data types, statically checked null references) with an impressive simplicity (e.g. without the productivity-consuming and mentally burdensome “borrow checker” of Rust).

Could you elaborate more on this claim?

In an ideal world, criminal behavior is supposed to be defined as abnormal and unwanted behavior.

* Is my definition of “criminal” for an ideal world way off target?

* Or, are you mostly critiquing how non-ideal our current world is, and the injustice of many laws currently on the books?

* Something else?

“Well, sure, they shut down that API I don’t use — big deal; all things come to an end eventually! But, they’d NEVER do that to this API I rely on — that would be so horrible, Google just would not do it!”

I hope we all can acknowledge that this argument is on perpetually eroding ground, at the very least.

[1] Am I getting old or is it weird realizing that 1970 was almost 50 years ago?

Do you really think they are so incompetent so as not to have thought of this?

I’m sure the labs developing these are aware of what you’re suggesting, have probably even tried them, and have their reasons for the design they’ve chosen.

In fact, many such piston AR retrofits exist in the US civilian AR market, but they’re generally thought to be of “unproven” longevity, at least.

The advantages of the retrofit piston being slim and light is that the recoil increase is small. The disadvantage is that durability is questionable, as those pistons experience a lot of violent force and most guns designed from scratch to be piston operated have significantly heavier duty pistons, for good reason.

You can read online of Marine armorers lamenting how their M27s are breaking down at a rate much faster than their M4s. This is of course anecdotal, but it is also not entirely worthless data.