It reminds me of how vinyl records are fairly lossy, but they provide a superior experience in some cases because those limitations have been accounted for during the mastering process.

It's an entire pipeline from photomultiplier to recording medium to the inverse process and everything is optimized not for any particular mathematical truth but for the subjective experience.

Vinyls are sometimes preferred because people like white noise, same as tube amps.

Granted some CDs are mastered like garbage, and that led to some bad press for awhile. But you can master a CD so that it sounds exactly, as in mathematically exactly, as a vinyl record, if so desired.

It is also possible to make a digital amplifier that sounds exactly identical to vacuum tubes.

Humans have well and mastered the art of shaping sound waveforms however we want.

I mean I've always thought the kinetic experience of vinyl was the point: my childhood memory is the excitement and anticipation of carefully putting the needle on the lead in and hearing the subtle pops and scratches that meant it was about to start.

The whole physical enterprise has a narrative and anticipation to it.

Not to mention the wider context of starting off by opening a beautifully designed record sleeve, and the chances people choosing to listening to vinyl are doing so on a beautifully engineered soundsystem that cost as much as a car when it was released 50 years ago, or a turntable setup that's designed for them to interact with.

You could add all of that to CD. Bigger packaging for "audiophile pressings", a play ritual, extra distortion and compression, especially in the low end, limited dynamic ranges, minimal stereo separation, even a little randomness so each listening experiences was slightly different.

This is consumer narcissism. It's the driver behind Veblen signalling - the principle that a combination of collecting physical objects. nostalgia, and the elevated taste and disposable wealth required to create a unique shrine to the superior self.

Buying houses, watches, cars, vinyl, yachts, jets, and politicians are all the same syndrome.

Some people take it further than others.

You could add the audio distortion. You couldn't add the ability to place it on your DJ turntable or vintage record player (which you might have paid a small fortune for or obtained from Dad or a car boot sale). The CD is also unnecessary to obtain the music anyway.

Tbh freshly pressed vinyl is a significant way down the food chain from new cars, never mind jets and conspicuous consumption fine art, and the demographics that buy it don't necessarily have more disposable income than the demographics with Spotify subscriptions hooked up to a mid range modern soundsystem. If you really want to go full Veblen you can probably buy an NFT to give you all the bragging rights of having signalling money to waste without the inconvenience of actually having anything to look after or listen to :)

  > carefully putting the needle on the lead in and hearing the subtle pops and scratches

Led Zeppelin III actually used that lead in as part of the music experience, and the original CD pressing didn't capture it. I've heard CD pressings (even the name remains from vinyl) that do capture it, I don't know when that started.

> CD pressings (even the name remains from vinyl)

The name comes from the CDs being manufactured by pressing into a master mold to create the pits. Replicated (mass manufactured) audio CDs are pressed not written with a laser like duplicated ones (CD-R/RW).

Most records these days use CDs as masters, sadly.

No. A friend of mine worked at United Record Pressing. The majority of the masters they received from customers were commercial CDs. No special master.

Are you referring to the loudness wars?

The term I've seen a lot is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_in_the_last_place

So I'd probably rewrite that code to first find the ulp of the larger of the abs of a and b and then assert that their difference is less than or equal to that.

Edit: Or maybe the smaller of the abs of the two, I haven't totally thought through the consequences. It might not matter, because the ulps will only differ when the numbers are significantly apart and then it doesn't matter which one you pick. Perhaps you can just always pick the first number and get its ULP.

This is what was done to a raytracer I used. People kept making large-scale scenes with intricate details, think detailed ring placed on table in a room with a huge field in view through the window. For a while one could override the fixed epsilon based on scene scale, but for such high dynamic range scenes a fixed epsilon just didn't cut it.

IIRC it would compute the "dynamic" epsilon value essentially by adding one to the mantissa (treated as an integer) to get the next possible float. Then subtract from that the initial value to get the dynamic epsilon value.

Definitely use library functions if you got 'em though.

Because of the representation of floats, couldn't you just bitwise cast to uints and see if the (abs) difference was less than or equal to one? But practically you probably should check if it's less than or equal to say ten, depending on your tolerance.

There should be an opposite thruster for each axis. I wonder if the short bursts were due to heating limits.

There are opposed thrusters, but I assume that in atmosphere and under parachute canopy it’s harder to make sure they are perfectly opposed.

Heating likely plays a role as well.

I am not a rocket engineer, but I have read How Apollo Flew to the Moon and Ignition!: an informal history of liquid rocket propellants, both of which cover these issues. Highly recommended.

The short bursts are just the period of the control cycles. Control cycle starts, loop sees error, commands thrust; next control cycle starts, loop sees error is nulled (or in deadband), commands no thrust.

The space shuttle, too, was able to communicate. I imagine the smaller the craft the smaller the angle you can "speak" out of and, below a certain size, it just doesn't work.

You can't do software updates securely, but it strikes me that compromising the revocation process is a good thing. Suppose you can use a key to sign a message saying "stop using this". If someone else breaks that key and falsely signs that message, what are the downsides?

You revoke a cert because you lose control of it; if someone else can falsely revoke that cert, doesn't that truthfully send the exact same signal? That you lose control of it?

This reminds me of Magicore Anomala, a side scrolling game being made for the 1985 Atari. I wish there was a way to know how people contemporary to the release of the Atari or the N64 would react to seeing these modern engines.

Magicore Anomala seems to actually be a sideview non-scrolling bullet hell game for the Amiga, which came out in 1985. Teen me owned one of the first Amigas in my city and the in-progress videos I can find of Magicore don't feel too out of place with the games I was seeing on it by the early nineties. It's moving around a couple of sprites and rendering a single-bitplane image of projectiles, and has some basic copper list tricks to get a 3-plane background image to have more than eight colors, which was pretty normal for the Amiga.

Here's a dissection of the title screen of Shadow Of The Beast (1989), for instance: https://codetapper.com/amiga/sprite-tricks/shadow-of-the-bea... - you can find a ton of video of this game very easily, go have a look.

Magicore is generally a bit zippier than most Amiga games, so many of them were kind of chunky and sluggish when I look back at them. Also the dev notes on using modern compression schemes that use what would be apocalyptic amounts of RAM and CPU by 1990 standards to crunch the data are amusing, but it's not like 1990 me wasn't used to chilling out for a few minutes between levels for a disc load, it was still worlds faster than the horrible load times of the C64 that was my first computer.

You know that 1985 was when 50-year-olds were starting high school right?

I think he meant: “How people at the time would have reacted.”

Wouldn't that be the play, though? Get a buttload of bitcoin, turn it into real money, then destroy bitcoin. If you found a break in bitcoin you wouldn't rely on keeping your wealth in bitcoin and then hoping nobody else discovers it.

The trick would be to find some financial instrument that lets you short BTC, or make prediction-market bets on a falling price.

I think translation should be the only exception. It might even need to be, given how all automated translators use LLMs these days. The only alternative I see is to have people post in whatever language they're most comfortable in and then everyone else has to translate for them which just feels inefficient.

And of course, a more limited exception for posts about LLM behavior. It might be necessary for people to share prompts and outputs to discuss the topic.

Conservation of angular momentum. Once everything is in it, and it's spun up, it won't stop.

You have to generate random bytes with sufficient entropy to avoid collisions and you have to have a consistent way to serialize it to a string. There's already a standard for this, it's called UUID.