Experienced traders can make a quick estimate of the purity by rubbing it against a touchstone, which has been used since ancient times. And by treating the rubbings with mineral acids you can make even more accurate determinations, although I'm not sure if this was done in the 1620s.
>The quality of music and enjoyment of it isn't depending on fidelity
It depends somewhat on personal preference, but also on genre. Classical music often has very high dynamic range, so analog recordings can have obnoxiously loud hiss in the quiet sections. This is probably a big reason why classical music labels were early adopters of digital recording, and why classical recordings often have a SPARS code [0] prominently displayed. Classical music was also much less affected by the loudness war, removing one incentive for buying on vinyl. You rarely see any preference for analog among classical listeners.
I have CDs from the 80s that still play perfectly. The only CDs I've had fail were a multi-disc set that were packaged with foam padding in the case, touching the label side of the disc. The plasticizer leached out and diffused into the protective lacquer, which softened and stuck to the foam, and tore away when I took them out, pulling chunks of the metal layer with it.
They weren't anything rare so I wasn't too bothered, but it later occurred to me that they technically could have been saved. The data is pressed into the polycarbonate, so if I'd very carefully peeled off all the metal, ideally in a laminar flow cabinet to avoid any dust, and then had them re-coated in aluminum with vacuum deposition, they would probably have still played. I think this is true for CDs lost to "disc rot" too.
I don't have any nostalgia for tapes. I used them as a child, but I never liked them. The first music I bought was on CD. I still buy a lot of used CDs on Ebay. Lots of great bargains are available and they sound identical to brand new CDs. It's worth finding sellers who'll combine postage and buying in bulk or you'll end up paying more for postage than the discs themselves.
I'd give this the benefit of the doubt because the y section is more complex than I'd expect from AI. If it said "it's about the ubiquity of these tools", I'd agree it feels like AI slop, but "it's about what the ubiquity of these tools signals" has a deeper parse tree than I usually see in that negative parallelism structure.
CAS latency is specified in cycles and clock rates are increasing, so despite the number getting bigger there's actually been a small improvement in latency with each generation.
While it has nothing to do with how responsive your mouse feels, as that is measured in milliseconds while CAS latency is measured in nanoseconds, there has indeed been a small regression with DDR5 memory compared to the 3 previous generations. The best DDR2-4 configurations could fetch 1 word in about 6-7 ns while the best DDR5 configurations take about 9-10 ns.
RAM latency doesn't affect mouse response in any perceptible way. The fastest gaming mice I know of run at 8000Hz, so that's 125000ns between samples, much bigger than any CAS latency. And most mice run substantially slower.
Maybe your old PC used lower-latency GUI software, e.g. uncomposited Xorg instead of Wayland.
I only felt it on Windows, maybe tht is due to the special USB mouse drivers Microsoft made? Still motion-to-photon latency is really lower on my DDR3 PCs, would be cool to know why.
Dan Luu actually measured latency of older computers (terminal, input latency), and compared it to modern computers. It shows older computers (and I mean previous century-wise old) have lower input latency. This is much more interesting than 'feelings', especially when discussing with other people.
There is no scenario where AI is a net benefit. There are three possibilities:
1. AI does things we can already do but cheaper and worse.
This is the current state of affairs. Things are mostly the same except for the flood of slop driving out quality. My life is moderately worse.
2. Total victory of capital over labor.
This is what the proponents are aiming for. It's disastrous for the >99% of the population who will become economically useless. I can't imagine any kind of universal basic income when the masses can instead be conveniently disposed of with automated killer drones or whatever else the victors come up with.
3. Extinction of all biological life.
This is what happens if the proponents succeed better than they anticipated. If recursively self-improving ASI pans out then nobody stands a chance. There are very few goals an ASI can have that aren't better accomplished with everybody dead.
What is the motivation for killing off the population in scenario 2? That's a post-scarcity world where the elites can have everything they want, so what more are they getting out of mass murder? A guilty conscience, potentially for some multiple of human lifespans? Considerably less status and fame?
Even if they want to do it for no reason, they'll still be happier if their friends and family are alive and happy, which recurses about 6 times before everybody on the planet is alive and happy.
It's not a post-scarcity world. There's no obvious upper bound on resources AGI could use, and there's no obvious stopping point where you can call it smart enough. So long are there are other competing elites the incentive is to keep improving it. All the useless people will be using resources that could be used to make more semiconductors and power plants.
One advantage of a motor-generator set is that it's relatively easy to get high-voltage isolation using an insulating shaft. It might be possible to build something that could survive nearby lightning strikes to the incoming AC line. I don't think any standard UPS can do this.
Even if there's very little audio-frequency attenuation, it's possible for higher frequencies to produce audio-frequency intermodulation distortion, and filtering could reduce this. This is one reason "high definition" (ultrasound sampling rate) audio is a bad idea as a listening format.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touchstone_(assaying_tool)
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