It was really easy to tell which is which for the vocals.
On the other hand, the only sample in which I didn't hear ANY difference is Ennio Morricone's, to the point where I couldn't really tell it apart from its 56kbit/s version.
Can the hearing be selectively bad for some frequencies within the standard 20-20000 range, and normal for the others?
> Can the hearing be selectively bad for some frequencies within the standard 20-20000 range, and normal for the others?
Yes. Your ears are acoustic filters just like microphones and speakers. When you get your ears tested, you get a chart that looks suspiciously like a speaker/mic response chart. Frequency in the x, db attenuation in the y.
So a person with bad ears could have fine hearing below say 5 khz, but with a sharp cut-off beyond that. Or it could be any other way round. Or you could have a notch in the middle. Calibrated hearing aids just take this chart and boost the frequencies your ears are attenuating. You can eq your own sound equipment based on the chart, to get a result that compensates for your ears.
A truly fascinating part is that feature and quality-wise EGS is still, after years of development, miles behind Steam.
Epic likely has talented devs and clearly invests a lot of money into all of this, but it took them years to finally implement a cart. It's not the end of the world to not have one, but not if you are a digital store!
It doesn't even have (or at least didn't the last time I checked) a review system. Steam isn't just a store anymore- it's closer to a social network with communities, discussions, mod workshop (which makes it stupid easy to install mods if a game supports this).
With forums dying and reddit turning into whatever it is turning into, Steam forums is IT for a lot of gamers.
If I see a game on sale the first thing I turn to is a review section- more often than not it's enough to gauge whether I'll buy this thing or not. And it's a nice place to ask whenever something in the game bugs our or doesn't work, or to just vent.
EGS is (or least was) really damn slow to start (never mind to launch an actual game). Linux support is non-existent.
Sure, it is extremely difficult to tackle a leader when a headstart is this large, and when people already have massive libraries of their own on Steam, but it's been what- 7 years of development? Epic had a clean slate, no compatibility to worry about and all the features their main competitor had, mapped out to copy- and they didn't even try to reach feature-parity.
Giving out free games only takes you so far when people lack the necessities to stay at your platform
Apart from all the other things everyone mentioned, wired headphones never really become technically obsolete.
I can still connect my 15-year-old pair of headphones to a laptop, and they work just fine. Sure, I swapped cushions a couple of times, and the headband is all new leather, but the sound is great.
A pair of BT headphones from 15 years ago, even if they worked (which in my experience, they don't), would use an outdated audio codec- no one in their right mind want to listen to an SBC now
The kids tend to hang out with the kids of their parents' friends, with the neighbours' kids.
A bit later in life, when in school, we find friends among the classmates, who too aren't usually all that similar to us.
Maybe when we switched to a fully online adult world with its hyper-optimization of everything, we've put our potential friends in the same bucket with recommendation system-driven content like music and tv-shows. Dating too.
There are certain benefits in getting by with limited choice, when we learn to communicate with people who are not a 100% match.
And as for having a drink or a coffee- we can always just invite the friends over. Hanging out in each others' apartments is fun and cheap
Absolutely. If anything, private torrent trackers and NZB indexers are proof that it works overwhelmingly well.
The few I'm part of all have a real community (like in the net of old), civil conversation, and verified, quality materials being shared. Almost everybody behaves and doesn't abuse the invite system, because nobody wants to lose their access to such a wonderful oasis among the slop web. It's a great motivator to stay decent and follow the rules. When things go bad, it's usually not because of malice, but because someone got their account stolen. Prune the invitee tree and things are mostly under control again.
Entire trees of invitees, going back months and years, are pruned. Mercilessly, indiscriminately, and self-servingly for the few people privileged enough that they are above suspicion. And if you're unlucky to be on the wrong side of it, there's nothing like an appeals process.
>and doesn't abuse the invite system
That's wild.
>When things go bad, it's usually not because of malice,
I never said it was malice. It's because the system itself is pathologically flawed and there's no way to make it work.
Not really, they missed that chance when they released Load and Reload and who knows what they did after that. I got fed up with their foray into commercial music and moved on to prog metal and other more interesting stuff. If they had stopped after the black album or continued to release quality works, then things would be different, but they chose money, whining, lawyers and drunk teenagers as an audience. They became lame and popular, which excludes being a cult band. Cult bands are not very popular in fact, as you have yourself pointed out.
I'ts an open secret that even the larger news outlets mandate LLM use.
They buy subscriptions and have guidelines on how to mask the output (so that it would read less AI'ed), how to fact-check the links and the quotes etc.
The authors which aren't willing to jump on this particular train are quickly let go due to performance.
The expectation is to produce more with much less (staff), the pipeline is heavily optimized for clicks, every single headline is A/B tested- Ars isn't alone in churning out poorly reviewed clickbait (and then not owning their mistakes)
Is there any evidence that Are Technica management induced this journalist to use AI, or are you just claiming it's an "open secret" and don't know anything about this specific incident? Because without any kind of details it kind of sounds like the latter, maybe motivated by a reflex to blame management whenever workers blunder? Unless there's evidence that a actually points at Ars Technica management, dismissing the journalists professional responsibilities using vague rumors doesn't seem appropriate.
I didn't state that Ars Technica specifically mandate LLM use for their authors. What I did state about them is that their editorial standards are lacking, and they tend to produce a lot of clickbait.
I definitely interpreted his original post as suggesting that Ars also mandates LLM use, even if the words didn't say that explicitly. "even the larger news outlets" implies "in addition to the one we're already talking about"
How is it an open secret? Is there evidence for this? I still see typos in some articles so it feels like humans are in the loop, maybe that’s their AI masking?
I would love to hear more about this “open secret” - especially the guidance on how to “mask the output” etc. because as someone who works in news/media it’s news to me.
The idea of practicing these random interactions is also to get accustomed to rejections from the assholes.
After all, they aren’t the majority- most people are actually quite nice and often appreciate a company (or will politely tell you they don’t need one)
Agreeable comments will draw comparatively fewer replies, while disagreeable ones achieve the opposite.
But this then results in a "false experience" for the individual, where unlike in real life, the bad exchanges do not end up outweighed by the good ones, as you simply don't go on to have those. You just upvote and move on (often to avoid redundancy).
Maybe if the two were tied together (voting either up / down & sending a reply), communities would work healthier? I don't know. Not like it's easy to have this tried out.
I could definitely see challenges to this though, the aforementioned redundancy being one. I have some countermeasure ideas, but then I wonder if that would make the UX complicated enough to drive people away instead, which is a lose-lose.
Yeah, some of the responses in this thread I hope are just jokes. Asking someone how their day is going is bare minimum social behavior that should carry zero risk of anything.
And it mostly happens in government funded and/or commercially viable sports, with public schools where kids train for free, scholarships, numerous competitions etc.
To gather those selected elites we take an enormous pool of aspiring athletes and support them from the ground up (usually with our taxes)
Where such support systems don’t exist you have a relatively shallow talent pool, and the best performers are a far cry from what could have been possible otherwise
On the other hand, the only sample in which I didn't hear ANY difference is Ennio Morricone's, to the point where I couldn't really tell it apart from its 56kbit/s version.
Can the hearing be selectively bad for some frequencies within the standard 20-20000 range, and normal for the others?
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