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Cake day: November 4th, 2023

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  • That’s assuming raw PCM data, no compression (lossy or lossless) whatsoever.

    LDAC can do lossless redbook audio (16 bit 44.1 KHz) at 990kbps. All other modes are lossy.
    It’s probably doing something much like FLAC- lossy encoder + residual corrections to ensure you get the original waveform back out, but with less bandwidth than raw PCM.


  • Don’t think there is an ounce of principle in this either way. Toyota bet the farm on hybrids and hydrogen. Turns out EVs are the future, the one thing they bet would never happen. As a result they are now 10+ years behind everybody else in battery technology. If they pivoted and went 100% EV today, it would still be years before the models they start designing today make it to dealer showrooms. And here’s more before they made any kind of the per unit profit that current gas and hybrids do.

    So they see laws like 100% EV by 2035 and they panic, because they aren’t ready to do that and probably aren’t going to be.

    Thus, they try and stop EV mandates. And that gives them some unlikely allies, namely climate deniers.

    It’s too bad that the company that made hybrids popular is now on the wrong side of history.





  • Lol Just because the automation exists doesn’t mean it’s always used. In big planes, the system is called cat III autoland and it only works at some airports. It also produces a notoriously rough landing. In little planes, it’s an emergency assistance feature that gives you a ‘emergency land’ button in the cockpit. Not something that you use everyday. And also not something most little planes have, it’s part of a top of the line autopilot system. Given that everything for airplanes costs way too much due to ridiculous certification requirements that do more to keep safety tech out of people’s budgets then to improve safety, not many little planes have it. To take a basic Cessna type airplane and add the system can cost as much as a car.

    You can still get a private pilot license if you have 20/40 vision or your eyes can be corrected to 20/40 with glasses or whatever. Even without that, if you can drive you can fly a light sport aircraft. That’s a different category that has more limitations. But those limitations are rapidly going away, FAA is working on something called MOSAIC which will expand the definition of light sport to cover an awful lot of single engine airplanes. And with that you only need a driver’s license.


  • Pilot here.
    There’s already a huge amount of automation available for airplanes large and small. The current top of the line will allow the airplane to connect every phase of flight except for the takeoff, coming all the way down to landing on the runway. In your average airline flight, probably 80 to 95% of the flight is flown by computer. The pilots are managing the aircraft, talking to ATC, etc. So you could argue that that is already there.

    If you mean the ability to conduct a trip without an operator, IE little girl jumps in the back of the car and says ‘Tessie take me to school!’ and the car drives her to school, that will absolutely happen in cars before airplanes. The simple reason is edge cases and emergencies. In a car, if something goes wrong, you simply pull over. Or, worst case scenario, just slow down and stop. It’s not great but it’s not terrible. If something goes wrong in an airplane, you need to keep operating the airplane for anywhere between 10 minutes and 4 hours including a landing. A lot of what pilots do in emergencies is figure out exactly how their airplane has been damaged and strategize around that. A lot of that is intuition, the rest is deduction based on understanding of how the airplane works. Since the computer can’t see out the window or feel things like buffets and sound, a computer won’t necessarily be as good at that. So the pilots aren’t going anywhere.



  • create an out-group so they can control the in-group

    That’s not just the media. It’s basically everyone in power. Media, politics, government, corporations… Everyone.

    It applies to the Democrats too. Especially in the 2016 election, they managed to successfully make Republicans the out-group. But I believe that was hugely damaging to the country, it created a lot more division when what is really needed is unity to focus on the issues that most people can agree on.

    Because here’s the cold truth- there is a body of policies that probably 80% of Americans would agree on. Things like efficient government, ending government corruption, reducing corporate control over government and elections, reducing income inequality, etc.
    To quote Dylan Ratigan’s famous rant, the United States is being extracted. And I think most people would like to stop that extraction.
    But no major candidate stands for that. Bernie did, but the DNC iced him out because their wealthy corporate donors didn’t want Bernie.

    And that in my opinion is why Trump won. Harris certainly didn’t push any major message of radical reform, just a bunch of the usual ‘help the middle class’ talk. Trump may be terrifying, but he does push a message of radical reform and changing the system.
    To write that off and say half the country is racist or misogynist is to avoid learning from this situation.


  • I think most commenters here are missing the point.

    There is a more extreme reaction to transgender people as opposed to gay or lesbian people, because of issues like sports and bathrooms. And that hits at people’s sense of injustice. For example if you have a young daughter, a lot of people will hate the idea of a person with a penis going into the women’s room and being around their little girl. Or if that daughter grows up and joins a sports team, the idea of somebody who is hormonally male and thus naturally more muscular competing against your daughter is unpleasant.

    Put differently, I think a lot of people we now classify as ‘transphobic’ don’t actually have much problem with trans people themselves. Rather, with how the efforts to ensure trans people receive the full treatment of their chosen gender can affect the rest of society.

    For me personally, I don’t know what the answer is. I generally don’t care which bathroom you use as long as you wash your hands. I have no problem with anyone presenting themselves to the world as whatever they wish, if it makes you happier than by all means. At the same time though, I don’t think it’s transphobic to point out that somebody who is largely or entirely biologically male will have a natural competitive advantage in the field of sports.
    So while I certainly don’t want to exclude anybody, I think there is at least a little justification for restricting some women’s sports to those who are genetically female.


  • My 2c-
    It is well understood that China and USA need each other. And that has generally been seen as a desirable situation, if only to prevent the two of us from needlessly going to war over some stupid nonsense.
    US has basically outsourced all manufacturing to China, to the point that it would take a decade or more to undo that. We depend on them, they depend on us too.

    Most of this is just boilerplate recognition and encouragement of that fact. Stating in a great many words that China wants to continue to be a US ally. But it is also a warning, that China is not a third world nation that the US can boss around as it sees fit. So China is warning us to follow through on our word and generally be honest and do what we say.

    The red line things are the real meat of that. This is an instruction / warning to Donald Trump and his incoming team. So the whole message basically says we will work with you and be friends but don’t fuck with us on these four issues.

    Unfortunately, those are kind of four issues that we really should fuck with them on. USA should not turn a blind eye to human rights violations of any ally, regardless of our level of dependence on them.

    And US should absolutely not support China taking over Taiwan. Not just for reasons of principle, but for our own ends- Taiwan produces an awful lot of the world’s computer chips. If China gains control of TSMC, that essentially puts them in control of the US economy because if TSMC stops sending us chips, the vast majority of the supply from Qualcomm, AMD, Apple, and others just goes away.

    Our strategy so far has been to officially acknowledge the ‘One China’ policy that includes Taiwan as part of China, while simultaneously taking actions to help Taiwan stay independent. China is calling us out for that here.



  • Here’s a fun one

    You know how you go to the public pool and you smell the chlorine keeping the water clean? That’s not chlorine you’re smelling.

    Chlorine is a great sanitizer but when dissolved in water it has almost no smell. However, chlorine binds to organic substances like dead skin cells and especially strongly to urea (aka pee), forming chloramine. Chloramine has significantly less sanitizing capability than chlorine, but it has a very strong chloriney smell.

    You can get rid of chloramine by ‘shocking’ the pool- adding an oxidizer or increasing the chlorine level very high to what’s called breakpoint chlorination. Shock powder is expensive though so it’s not always used as often as it should be.

    So when you go to the public pool and you get that strong chlorine smell, all that means is either the pool water is dirty and hasn’t been shocked in a while, or someone peed in the pool recently.

    Enjoy your swim!


  • Xmpp definitely wins in privacy. What is there to privacy more than message content and metadata? Matrix definitely fails the second one, and is E2E still an issue for public groups? I don’t remember if they fixed that.

    XMPP being a protocol built for extensibility means it will be hard for it not to keep up with times.

    Okay so how does modern XMPP protect this? When I last used XMPP, some (not all) clients supported OTR-IM, a protocol for end to end encryption. And there wasn’t a function for server stored chat history (either encrypted or plaintext).
    Have these issues been fixed?



  • (This is not an insult, I just had a realization that I think might affect you)-- do you know what the name comes from?

    Years ago there was a thing called a beeper before everyone had cell phones. It was a one way paging system-- you’d give your friends your beeper number, they’d call it, type in their phone number, and their number (or whatever they dialed in) would appear on your beeper. You’d then use a landline phone to call them back (early versions of the system had no text or reply capability, only numbers and only one-way).

    I always thought it was a cool name. But thinking about it I realize someone less than maybe 25-30 years old might literally have never encountered such a device. Much like a 5.25" floppy disk or rotary dial phone, they went out of style years ago and a young person might never have encountered one.

    Curious if that’s you?



  • This is really not accurate. Matrix is not designed to be a super privacy first protocol. It’s like Lemmy in the it’s designed to solve a problem and be a useful federated collaboration tool. It borrows features from a number of popular messaging platforms. Message history is stored on the server but encrypted client side so privacy is preserved. It supports group chat rooms. It supports voice and video. And most importantly, it supports bridges- you can connect your matrix to other services that are completely incompatible with matrix using a bridge. Perhaps the best example of this is Beeper, which is built on matrix. They are trying to replicate the user experience of the old app Trillian- beeper can link with a number of chat services including Google messages, slack, WhatsApp, telegram, signal, etc. Thus you get all your chats in one place.