And as now Tesla has moved past that early 'greenfielding' stage, their situation has changed to be dramatically more similar to the 'legacy' car makers. And suddenly, Tesla sees that their supposedly superior quirky approaches to carmaking generally are probably going to 'solidify' into systems eerily similar to the legacy ones.
Whoever was dismissive of the legacy car makers was also assuming decades of innovations in maintainability planning and reuse logic in one of the most highly competitive industries. Turns out, Tesla - even though the shook up the legacy contenders early on - is losing a lot of the advantages quicker that they have imagined to stay. Hardly a surprise to anyone who understands that millions of highly skilled engineers in the car industries aren't exactly less competent than the average Tesla engineer.
It seems to me that Tesla still makes the best functioning EV if you overlook their warts like being all proprietary, difficult to repair, and so on. Even the best EV sucks compared to an ICE car, and that is reflected in demand. Furthermore, Tesla is essentially competing with China, which they rely upon for many components and which seeks to cut them out of the domestic market. I don't think any Chinese EV is actually better than a Tesla but it is cheaper for various reasons, and that can cut into their market share. Remember, the Chinese government is investing heavily in EV tech and they basically force their citizens to buy the things regardless of how good they actually are. It would be foolish to think that they will always suck compared to Tesla. The Chinese government is willing to lose money to put every Western manufacturing company out of business. You can't compete with that, their protectionist policies, or even their cheap labor, without serious protectionism of your own.
Spotify high quality is usually 320kbps. If not, it's because only worse qualities are recorded/available. I have sincere doubts you're able to hear a difference to lossless qualities, especially if you're listening on the go or in non-hifi setups.
I've heard this argument so many times - but personally I can trivially easily here the difference between Tidal / Apple Music and Spotify's 'high quality' setting - even on wireless headphones. Music on spotify sounds flat and drained. No idea if this has something to do with their compression technique, some kind of EQing, or a flaw in some other part of the pipeline, but I've blind tested it many times and its night and day.
Generally the problem with this type of argument is that the two sources are not volume-matched. Try out an ABX test here, of lossless vs various lossy codecs: https://abx.digitalfeed.net/
I used to be like you many years ago, thinking that high samplerates and bit depth were essential and the ultimate way of getting the best possible sound quality, but in reality 44.1khz 16bit is plenty for humans. Get over it. Whoever mixed the 192khz version essentially remastered it and put a bit of a spice over it. You can easily prove it by producing a downmixed 44khz version (use a high quality resampler) from the 192khz version and trying to blind ABX both, I doubt you will be able to spot any difference, and if you do, congratulations your sound system has some weird intermodulation issue from the high frequencies present in the high sample rate version, that is causing a listenable sound to appear (which should not be there).
I think you're missing the wood for the trees here. It makes no functional difference to the listener whether the reason spotify sounds worse is their use of lower quality masters, or some aspect of their streaming or compression. In practice their library sounds significantly, measurably worse to many people. I've also blind tested this with friends when I signed up for Tidal, and most people I tested were able to clearly hear the difference.
This. No double-blind ABX test has ever been able to discern the difference between an above-CD quality file and its downsampled CD-quality equivalent, or even a 320 kbps MP3 encoding of it.
Most people are not listening closely, nearly meditating over music. If you average over most people, this is what you will find. Look at the "outliers" in those same studies.
It seems more like you need to get over it. I have never cared about bit rates etc. I just care about how it sounds and I know that lossless sounds significantly better to me and to many others.
The amount of gaslighting when it comes to audio is always bizarre to me.
Read my post again, I'm strictly talking about the audio format and not about the codec nor compression. I would expect anyone caring enough to compare CD quality 44khz and 192khz/24bits to be using lossless or uncompressed audio, otherwise what's the point? Pretty much all lossy codecs will put a low-pass filter and trow out any sound above 16khz~20khz anyway, and some will even resample to 48khz, no matter what lol.
I can't speak to Apple Music or Tidal, but I did a test between the Spotify and CD versions of Xtal from Selected Ambient Works 85-92 by Aphex Twin and the difference would be clear to absolutely anyone - the Spotify version is very tinny.
People often trot out the "most people can't tell the difference" argument, but I wonder how many of those people have actually tried a variety of tests? My hunch is very few.
Are you sure you are not comparing a normal release to the remastered version? There are plenty of albums out there that have "improved" or remastered versions but are not labelled as such in the album title, and Selected Ambient Works 85-92 is one of those.
Xtal is a gem. I just tested both and the Apple Music version had more oomph the first time I tested for a bit. Then I went back to the beginning a second time and they sounded the same. Whether or not it's true I don't think I can trust myself to be a good tester.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Fwiw I believe Xtal was originally made from samples recorded on cassette, so there's definitely a ceiling on how dynamic it could sound.
You can't judge the quality of a digital audio file purely on its bit rate.
There are many things that (can) go into digital mastering and re-encoding that can make huge differences in actual audio quality of the final product, even with the same file format and bit rate.
I can easily hear the difference between Lossless and AAC on my two IEMs (Blessing 2 Dusk + IE600) as well as my open-back Focal Clear. And even with Bluetooth via AptX HD.
With the quality of audio improving so much in recent years I would take a guess that almost anyone can appreciate the significant difference in sound quality for < $50.
Same. There's a difference in texture, primarily in the trebles, but there's also a general muddiness and lack of separation. Everything feels like it's been smoothed over, but not in a good way, or too "crunchy". Transients don't have the right amount of bite and the stereo image doesn't feel as three-dimensional. It's harder to hear the "room". Currently using Sony IER-M9 with a Linum DualBax Zebra, which is a great cable, btw.
I feel like if I was playing Audiophile Bingo, I'd just have won.
I mean I can't claim complete 'ignorance', I have more audio toys than many (a "Schiit Stack" on my desk (DAC, mixer and amp) and a couple of "low end" headphones, Sennheiser and Hifiman planars), but by the time you are discussing cables... next thing it's whether wood volume knobs will eliminate unwanted resonances from your sound stage.
Favorite comment I heard on such things: Music lovers buy equipment to listen to their music. Audiophiles buy music to listen to their equipment.
I can too, but only because AAC has such an unnatural stereo presence that I can pick it out in a lineup of codecs with my eyes closed. If it was a direct comparison between downsampled FLAC/WAV then I'm not sure I could tell the difference.
Theoretically, if Spotify's claims are true, Ogg Vorbis at 320kbps should be indistinguishable from lossless in most listening scenarios. In practice, I found this not to be the case and there is a significant difference, even when using lossy equipment like Apple Airpods Pro.
I do not understand where the difference comes from. It could be that Spotify uses a crappy encoder. Could be that they "cheat" on bitrate. Or it could be the interplay of different compression schemes. But something is definitely off. I compared to Apple Music with lossless and Roon ARC playing my own FLAC-encoded media.
Spotify does some loudness normalization that you could disable in the settings. (Don't know anymore as don't use Spotify for years). Maybe worth checking.
But that's just an auto volume level, it doesn't actually change the sound balance or dynamics or anything like that. It just makes the average volume of the track closer to the average volume of other tracks.
Yea, I'm wondering the same. Is there any good resource to look up whether copilot follows the ChatGPT updates? I would be renewing my subscription, but it does not feel like it has improved similarly to how the new models have...
I check the GitHub blog[0] from time to time. They also have a RSS feed if you'd prefer that. The is also a waitlist for o1 access you may sign up for[1]
According to this (1), they are using the 4o model. And looks like you'll be able to pick your model(2) in the starting with version 1.94 released this September.
Maybe it's just me but I expected these links to open in the recently established apple maps web page. However, on an Android phone, Google Maps opens.
Up on the ramp you're coming from the tollway that is, you can see quite a lot from up there.
But on the street view the Google car is heading SW at grade on the 2-lane frontage road, the main freeway lanes are to the right and become elevated, and the overhead ramp had to fly over everything that was already there.
Notice how the frontage roads give a street address and access to properties facing the "limited access" highway.
Good to hear. The authors are touching on the journey it is to make Cython continue to work. I wonder how hard it'll be to continue to provide bdist packages, or within what timeframe, if at all, Cython can transparently ensure correctness for a no-gil build. Anyone got any insights?
I'm just unhappy that this will mostly end up to make the moat larger and the platform lock-in more painful either way. iPhones have been going up in price, serious compute once you're deep in this will be simply extortion, as leaving the apple universe is going to be nigh impossible.
Also no competitor is going to be as good at integrating everything, as none of those have as integrated systems.
That supercharger dominance is much less so in Europe. I'd even say, completely nonexistent. Therefore, much more even competition. And Tesla's competition at similar prices is just getting started - to me it seems that the technological gap (if there ever was such a thing) has been completely levelled, and the cars from all other factories are iterating faster and more efficiently. Turns out that if the big car companies really go for it, their ability to build good EVs isn't systematically worse than Tesla's. Not that any sane person ever really thought that, other than hype believers.
Fortran also has the disadvantage of numerous separate dialects/flavours that plenty of times can't be mixed. And rarely is the exact style mentioned in random code found somewhere.
It got a lot better with Fortran 95 and newer, but in the old world of e.g. lahey compilers and custom commands only available there, any LLM has failed me consistently to stick to these intricacies. I can't even blame them, when asking humans questions about these topics, you'll get all sorts of answers that are equally close to a correct solution, but almost never precisely correct.
Did not think that my early morning would be spend trying to imagine how thawing a frog works. :)