augustuspolius

It’s a false dichotomy only if you indeed believe that Russia has “created” Ukraine and that Ukrainians are not a real nation. Russia has as much right to claim Ukraine as Ukraine - Russia. None.

While I don’t necessarily agree with the commenter you are replying to - I can relate to how hard it is to separate Russia’s contributions from what is currently happening in Ukraine.

Modern Russia is fascist in all meaningful ways. This—at least emotionally—overshadows the positive contributions the country made in the past.

Wonder if the person you are replying to meant Russia, not USSR.

I am aware that genocide is a disputed term in this context. I lean towards it because the famine disproportionately affected Ukrainians (and Kazakhs) and was at least in part not mitigated intentionally to punish minorities with a stronger anti-Soviet sentiment.

We have to agree that either “modern Ukraine” was created in 1920s from Russians and Russian territories or there were different people on that land long before that.

If you are leaning towards the former then this could be extended even further: Soviet Union only ever harassed itself. There were no occupied Baltic states, there was no Ukraine, etc etc - just one big happy family called USSR.

Never really thought of that in this way. Do you think Russian poets, writers, composers, artists of the early and mid 20th century were a product of the Soviet culture more than the Tsarist/pre-Soviet world?

Interesting - I never attributed that to moving borders. USSR had a pretty mixed society with many people moving between different republics during their lifetime (especially in the 40-60s). Don’t think borders changed much during that period.

Just to clarify - native Russians in Ukraine or outside of it? If the former then it’s not surprising, the genocide was directed at specific territories.

I am curious to know whether this Western perception was supported or opposed by the Soviet state. They have definitely “prioritized” Russian culture internally, so I wouldn’t be surprised if this conflation was at least in part created by the Soviets.

Commenter didn’t say anything about “modern Ukraine”. Russia has been harassing Ukraine for a very long time, modern or ancient.

That sounds good - thanks for clarifying. Excited to see this project grow!

The phrasing they use is a bit confusing. "Speech" is not a clear quality description, so it's odd to compare speech to a CD quality recording (presumably 44.1 kHz). Speech can also be sampled at CD quality. If they meant to emphasize the difference in frequency range or dynamic range - there were, perhaps, better ways to do that (e.g. "telephone conversation" vs "symphonic orchestra recording").

Shazam produces an embarrassing number of false matches, which I assume are hash collisions or something similar in the world of their fingerprinting system?

The interesting part to me was that they used specifically a 64kbps example, not a higher bitrate that would be more appropriate for music listening. Just speculating, but if they managed to get 10x higher compression rate compared to 64kbps MP3, could they achieve an even higher compression rate when compared to 320kbps MP3? If the algorithm is so good that it can compress audio down to 6kbps with just a few artifacts, would it sound almost good at 12kbps? 24kbps?

Between this effort and the recently announced Google-led multi-channel/immersive audio codec initiative, I am pretty excited about the future of audio streaming and distribution.

It's quite amazing how they can build something so ingenious and yet make such a glaring mistake in the announcement post (48 kHz CD quality).

On your second point: they probably meant that there is no loss in perceived quality, of course it's a lossy algorithm.

6kbps sound demo is really impressive! Initially I was turned off by aliasing artifacts (hiss) but to be fair 6kbps is a really really low bitrate.