Oh there is a difference. but I strongly suspect its not as pronounced as you think it is.
THe biggest difference that most people hear is EQ. (oh these are very bassy, or too clean, etc, etc)
The people that have external DACs are almost certainly hearing a difference in EQ rather than _quality_. Is that a problem? for me I couldn't care less. However when that starts bleeding into advice or gatekeeping, then it becomes an issue.
(I am a former sound technician for both recording studio (analogue and digital) theatre and TV)
Personally, I run all my signal chain flat (incl. speaker crossovers). No equalizer, tone & loudness is off in every step of the chain.
Given the same set of speakers, I'm pretty sure that almost anything I throw in to the chain will sound pretty similar (unless it's designed to color the sound some way). This is one of the reasons why I don't plan to change any parts of it .
For me the DAC has some serious benefits in the sound quality department, though. First, it doesn't have the 3dB loss like the Logitech, second I can stream AAC or aptX to it, which really sounds better than SBC, given the song is mastered correctly and has the detail which can be carried by the codec itself.
I listen to some of the albums I have as CDs in streaming services and even though it's labeled as "lossless" I can hear that the files are butchered pretty badly.
Ex studio tech here. Legacy doesn't cover contracted manufacturing.
I'm not defending apple here, but using chinese drivers (which I assume is a synonym for poor quality) is fine so long as they are binned for performance, and matched/tuned to housing. I'm assuming the mic inside the ear cup is there to do dynamic EQ.
Also the drivers are screwed into a solid aluminium housing, so they aren't glued.
NS10s which are the standard reference mixing speakers were chosen not because they were high quality, but because they were average. If you could get your mix to sound good on those, it'd sound great anywhere.
So yeah, they are expensive. Would I buy them? probably not. I'm reasonably happy with my plantronic jobbies. Are they perfect? no, are they comfortable? yes. Is the active noise cancelling actually effective? also no, but then ANC is only really useful for a small subset of noises types. (even on Sonys. )
> Legal documents, on the other hand? Have you ever tried to get an LLM to do your taxes? It's not easy.
Taxes are numerate, which is where LLMs fuck up.
Legal documents are structured texts, which is where LLMs shine. Should you blindly trust the outcome? fuck no, but a good first pass is trivially achievable if you set the right parameters. and make sure its relevant to the right jurisdiction.
UK planning law is not the same as medical research regulations.
UK planning law is the physical manifestation of legal tech debt. It will not be tackled until the daily mail and their readers are dead, and not replaced.
To make changes it requires lots of will from the government, and the consent of a bunch of people who are unlikely to give it.
medical regulation is fucking trivial by comparison. Most of it is arms length and technical. it can be changed according to evidence, rather than gut feeling. Its only in a few cases are there actual legal hard lines (like embryo research, and vivisection)
Fully agree - I think there's a core legalism inherent with especially the british political class. The first indication is always to build more guardrails and take fewer risks. It ends up killing innovation
People may not realise how bad uk planning law is unless they are here. Anybody can veto a development for any reason, and there is no disincentive to do so even if it is found to be spurious. They can just do it again. A development isn't just building either, it can be as simple as changing the use of something or making an improvement to it. On top of that are all the actual regulations, newt surveys, listed buildings restrictions, etc, and the many months of associated delays and costs with each one. In London the body set up after Grenfell now has a 10 month backlog and approval rate of 30%, so nothing is built in London except storage centres.
Where a conman made claims to lure the desperate and gullible.
The Vet case is instructive here. This is to stop suffering in animals.
The same with the people experimenting on themselves. THis is to avoid stuff like Tuskegee Syphilis Study, where unacceptable risks were taken to gain data.
tldr: these regulations are there to stop bad actors killing people for either profit, data or fun. Claiming ignorance as to _why_ these regulations exist is bad research and I would suggest is either incompetence or dishonesty.
THe most appropriate treatment is required, not "step therapy". For antibiotics this makes sense, as last mile, powerful antibiotics need to be used sparingly.
The same with cancer, it'll be treated according to the requirements of the cancer, with guidance from nice about the most effective therapy.
Is it perfect? no.
Does it lead to mistakes? yes.
It is better than american style insurance denying care based entirely on price? 100%
If you could find the original video, I would like to see it. I mistakenly thought the article was referencing his talk at Cambridge Union, but it sounds like the "antichrist" talk was closed door.
His Cambridge Union speech didn't strike me as evil either.
I'm not sure being a pseudointellectual (if that's what he is) would make him evil, would it?
I've seen his 'antichrist' talk as part of headlines out of context and to be honest assumed that this is a rhetorical/hyperbolic device, rather than a literal thing. Is your claim that he actually literally thinks someone is the antichrist? So far he just seems to be someone with a bent against degrowthers?
Is there a specific quote or position that makes him _evil_? Rather than just ill-informed or with an unpopular political opinion? Like he might just believe in tech growth at all costs because he really does think it will benefit everyone, or he might pretend to think that because he thinks it will benefit him at the expense of everyone else. It's hard to tell from what you've provided so far.
I should have been more clear, I am not asserting he is "evil", that is a caricature.
Given his background, and where and how he grew up, the couching of his views through evangelical eyes is cynical. I am asserting that he is a dickhead, who believes he's playing 4d chess, whilst cultivating a band of people who you would describe as "odious" at best.
Now some people might say "oh he's keeping his viewpoint broad", which is bollocks. He's always been an edgelord who thinks he's Machiavelli.
The fact that he keep Karp about, who is so obviously limited as a CEO, and doesn't put a huge fucking gag on him is a leading indicator on what he thinks is reasonable
I think it's more than fair to say that Thiel is an evil person. I mean evil is not like a fictional invention, 99.9% of your ancestors understood the capability of people to be evil. It's more like a 80s era "it's all just rational incentives man" thing to pretend that actions have no moral weight. He's a pro-monopolist anti-democracy ("I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible") billionaire who's busy constructing the surveillance state; it's pretty straightforward really.
Niantic are a number of people who are doing this. Its not that clear from the article, but niantic spatial are using the images captured from users to create a 3d model of "THE WORLD" or where people play pokemon go.
They have then fed that data into a more modern version of colmap (https://github.com/colmap/colmap) to create a point cloud. Then the engineering to make sure that point cloud is aligned accurately and automatically.
Once you have that point cloud aligned to the world, all you need is another image with some overlapping feature. Using simple trigonometry you can work out where the camera is from one picture
This is largely trivial to do for a few 100 sqaure meters. the hard part is doing it fast in at the city scale. Extracting a few thousand features from an image and then matching them against >billion other points is hard to do quickly, without some optimisations.
The thing that is not mentioned here is that data freshness is actually more important. Building change (advertising hoardings, paint jobs, logo changes, building remodelled etc) so the data goes stale. Its actually not that expensive anymore to just send your own people to scan areas. (A number of startups pre 2020 did it, mapillary provides a platform for it, although now owned by facebook)
The robots will be feeding that data back in to the map. the special sauce is updating the map without infringing patents, and doing it efficiently.
Thats because Tesla is useless, not because the data isn't valuable.
Tesla has explicitly ruled out using "HD maps" for autonomous vehicles. This means that all the data they have is going to not building maps, but building scenarios for testing its self driving models.
If you look at Wayve, they are building nerf maps to allow them to create scenarios for edge cases. all of that comes from the gathered data.
If you want to build visual navigation systems, you need lots of fresh data from all over. Seeding it with the data that naintic has is useful, but a lot of that data is out of date so not that useful anymore.
THe biggest difference that most people hear is EQ. (oh these are very bassy, or too clean, etc, etc)
The people that have external DACs are almost certainly hearing a difference in EQ rather than _quality_. Is that a problem? for me I couldn't care less. However when that starts bleeding into advice or gatekeeping, then it becomes an issue.
(I am a former sound technician for both recording studio (analogue and digital) theatre and TV)
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