I find that the likes of Ariana Grande have a lot more air in their music those 00s acts you describe, while still being quite loud. So do my absolute favorite artists Tame Impala, Caroline Polachek and Dua Lipa.

Commercially this probably works out with better headphones and earbuds as a default listening mode, as opposed to things like the 00s earbuds delivered with digital music players and early smartphones.

That first Billy Eilish record would probably not have been a hit if the target audience was getting their first impression of new music in cars driving at highway speeds.

Even with decent headphones, the difference between these samples isn't trivial to spot, unless you have moderately trained ears.

I'm not an audio professional but I have a great interest in this space. My first impression is that the the bass in the second sample stands out a bit more in the mix, perhaps thanks to higher dynamic range. The high range is muted and the mid range in the percussion and such may be more pronounced.

That's not to say you're wrong about audiophiles. A lot of claims made by this subculture are nonsense and especially not applicable to situations where an everyday person seeks some improvement to their audio reproduction.

For example, lossy audio codecs have a bad reputation among certain people, due to old technology. Mp3 is undoubtedly garbage, 90s tech. If I waste a bunch of time on blind tests, I can spot even a 320 kbps mp3 sample with my regular listening headphones. Lower bitrates are a lot more obvious to spot.

However, this problem is gone for almost all people in most listening environments, mine included. This is thanks to the more modern lossy delivery codecs at decent bitrates, as employed by the the premium tiers of the big streaming services, which are Vorbis (Spotify) and AAC (Apple and most others) and Opus (Youtube Music in some circumstances).

Archival and editing copies of audio should obviously be lossless. Generational loss over lossy media are as real with digital re-encodes as with analog tape.

A regular person who wants to improve their listening experience can easily get decent headphones now. However, anyone who wants to invest in a better shared listening experience than a decent portable mono Bluetooth speaker can offer, should probably start by thinking through the the acoustics of the room they want to listen in.

This doesn't have to be fancy, just having shelves with actual books on the walls in the direction looking towards a speaker system does a lot.

Spending more than 200 USD on speakers in a room with blank walls is ridiculous, unless it's a log cabin. Those actually sound great.

The only reasons I can think of are fear of the controller and slow load times due to mechanical HDD on last-gen systems.

I don't spend time away from gameplay trying to get optimal setting. I'm just the type of neurotic that I will do that stuff even though I absolutely don't enjoy it.

I can jump directly into gaming without anxiety over how my hardware is falling behind. With my PS5 being in my living room, gaming is also time away from my desk, which I, much like doing anything on a Windows PC, associate with my IT jobby job.

A console is an appliance. It's like a toaster or dishwasher, except it lets me play games without any work.

With PS5, I also don't have to worry about weird glitches with audio through HDMI in my living room setup, since that's how I prefer to play. And PS5 now also renders Dolby Atmos, without any glitches.

These are of course all me-problems, but I thought I'd mention it here, since gaming is too much fun to be confined to the tuning-happy garage mindset of PC.

Depending on the individual and their patience, Primer (2004) might also be a great fit. The pace is a bid subdued but thematically, it's mind bending. I don't think it includes anything particularly awkward as an early scifi movie to watch together with your own child. I would probably start with one of the spectacles from the above picks, though.

That said, Ex Machina might be a little intense in that regard, even though I seem to remember that the explicity is mostly some nudity. It's a great movie, but probably not the first or fifth I would show a 12-year-old with the above discursive parameters included. The themes of corruption and "fucking around and finding out" are so heavy that you don't want to just leave a child with it.

It could be your tenth pick, though, or perhaps something for 6-18 months on of successfully watching and discussing movies and their depiction of life in an open way.

The "internet person" knee jerk response about paywalls, does have a certain degree of truth about relevance of journalism though, but that's a longer term loss of a commons rather than a business model issue, at least right now.

Soft paywalls often allow you to read a few articles when you click through to google, but then you share an article with someone who's wrong on the internet. And you end up looking like a ding-a-ling because a paywall is presented when the user opens the article url directly with no google referrer, and no normal person is going to google an article to be allow to read an opposing view.

Essentially, it's a shame that the open web business model didn't work for 'real' journalism, because there's plenty of dogshit-tier content to happily take its place.

Here in Finland, public service broadcaster Yle has been a good source for good information in text form, but the media industry has fought tooth and nail to try and impose limits like Yle only being allowed to publish certain types of longer-form journalistic text, like investigations when enough rich media is included.

I can appreciate the argument about public service distorting the market in this case, but I'm really worried about the local information that's going to be available sans paywall on search engines in the long run with these restrictions.

It's unclear how big the impact of the above is going to be, but remember, this is a small market, too. Especially if Yle's budgets are slashed to allow less longer-form journalism that qualifies for web publishing with the rules, it might get hairy.

In the old print model, you paid for up-to-date news on whatever topic. If you didn't want to pay for that, the news was available to you anyway, just slower. Your friend subscribes to a magazine and you can read it once she's done with it. There's a newspaper in the break room, usually 2-3 days behind today. Which newspaper it is varies.

Internet paywalls seem to place more emphasis on restricting their content permanently. Subscriber content goes to subscribers, and non-subscribers aren't supposed to see it.

I suspect that the availability-with-delay model of the older system generated a lot of influence for the content that permanent locks don't generate. If you can't afford a subscription to Seventeen, you might still care what it says because you can follow it anyway. If you can't follow it, it's a short step to not caring what it says.

As in, you can't sign on to several business organizations like you can in Slack. It's so dumb and disqualifying. Utter nightmare if you work with several organizations.

https://feedbackportal.microsoft.com/feedback/idea/c9995dc8-...

I've bookmarked that page and I check in on it regularly, as Microsoft claims multi-account support is due for late 2022.

I think they were really hoping they could make that cross-tenant thing work where you only have one account that you can use as a guest in other orgs, but that really doesn't reflect how things work in the field (you have separate accounts at each organization).