evo

I think there's a close linkage between "predictable" and "stationary". Ultimately, if you strip everything away, either there's a core where the future looks like the past (which is equivalent to being stationary), or there isn't. That core could be "the laws of physics and base conditions are stationary", and everything else is deterministic functions applied on top, but the fundamental process is trying to find that stationary core.

In the finance space, the stationary core is often some 'stylized fact' that you're hypothesizing will hold true. This could be e.g., the momentum factor, that if you strip away the noise, there's an underlying trend that will hold over an extended duration.

I wonder if there's also distortion or ring modulation stages where some of the energy above hearing range might spill into audible sidebands if they're not nyquist-limited first.

Yeah, I was oversimplifying a blit, the raw waveforms are usually okay, but I distinctly remember old-school VSTs where you couldn't achieve a nice saw lead at 44.1.

32-bit float has become popular in filmmaking/field recording equipment lately because, with a microphone preamp that supports it, you can capture the entire dynamic range of the microphone--there's no accidental clipping if you drive the gain stage too hard.

It's a bit redundant for a skilled technician, they're already used to setting the gain staging, inbound compression, and feathering the mics to avoid this in 24-bit, but if you're handing a boom mic to a novice and have a scene where e.g. someone's whispering and another person's screaming, it can be nice to not have to worry about it.

24/192 is also great for digital synthesizers--if you're generating a waveform like a sawtooth that has theoretically instantaneous transitions, they can eat as much frequency as you can give them. Running at 44khz loses noticeable high-end content.

Most modern digital synths have already caught onto this and run internally at much higher sampling rates even if their output gets downsampled, but sometimes you run across a vintage plugin that runs at the host audio rate and working in a higher sampling rate is audible.

Could be this (from the article): "Another scenario I can think of is that the financial model for the building requires spaces to be filled by “credit tenants,” meaning name-brand businesses of a certain caliber and creditworthiness."

Might not be available unless your name ends in 'tarbucks'.

Would it make sense to frame this as a Baumol's Cost Disease problem? E.g., the labor of child rearing has been historically offset by the inherent emotional surplus of the task, but the march of productivity in other sectors gradually increases that imputed loss until we reach a breaking point.

I wonder if this is a nuclear proliferation risk--could it be used for AVLIS/SILEX?

Can’t wait til someone makes a Gemini prompt to find these public keys and launch a copy of itself using them.

I wish them the best, but to my knowledge most metal laser sintering setups involve powders so fine as to be both a fairly serious health concern and (depending on the metal) a plausible fuel-air explosive if there's sufficient concentration in the air.

It's not something that instills me with confidence when they self-describe as "scrappy", I'd like to see extra vigilance into the safety concerns.

One of the big use cases for Genlock these days is when you're doing virtual production with LED walls; you want to make sure the screen refresh of the wall is locked to the shutter of the camera. It's almost like 'vsync' in video game video settings, without it you risk seeing tearing in the backdrops.

Another way I like to think about this is finding 'closeable' contexts to work in; that is, abstractions that are compact and logically consistent enough that you can close them out and take them on their external interface without always knowing the inner details. Metaphorically, your system can be a bunch of closed boxes that you can then treat as boxes, rather than a bunch of open boxes whose contents are spilling out and into each other. Think 'shipping containers' instead of longshoremen throwing loose cargo into your boat.

If you can do this regularly, you can keep the _effective_ cognitive size of the system small even as each closed box might be quite complex internally.

Yeah, I think that’s traditionally the route when you’re not running with near-real-time constraints. I’m out of practice with DSP/filter math but I think there’s a constraint such that any theoretical filter that doesn’t impact phase must be symmetrical around the time axis such that it requires “knowledge from the future” that’s not available in real time.

EDIT: And I think with the two-pass approach you need to calculate the filter such that you get the desired effect after two applications instead of one.

I imagine the lossy encoding process could use a bunch of stacked filters to cut away imperceptible frequencies, but filters in the general case are implemented by summing delayed copies of the input and can smear the output in the phase domain. (There’s a branch of filters that avoid this but require computing the introduced delay and shifting the output to compensate.)

It’s a noticeable problem in audio production if e.g. a filtered kick drum goes out of phase and sucks amplitude when mixed with the original.

I feel like the thrust-to-weight dynamics on multicopter drones don’t really lend themselves to heavy payloads like water bombing in the quantities needed. An additional issue is that, due to wanting to maximize power density for the high amperage motors, you often end up using lithium-polymer battery formulations that are less than adequately shielded for the possible impacts the drone might incur. I would be concerned that the risk of a drone failure itself igniting a new fire in a remote area would outweigh the potential.