It can become political, like anything else. But isn't inherently. It does not attempt to answer some political or ideological question.
The question is "do you want to teach the tool and its use or do you want to teach thinking manually". The west is under the impression that if you don't teach the tool then people will be unemployable.
Copyright is broken and needs major reform, but copyright must exist in some form as long as we are operating under the current economic system. If we want a society where some people have the job of creating art, then they must be compensated for their art. The leverage that artists have to demand compensation is controlling who access to their art. Said another way, the artist owns the right to make copies of their art. That is protected by law.
I think copyright as it exists is abused by large companies and stifles culture. Broadly speaking, I think copyright should be a much shorter term, lasting more like 20 years rather than the 100+ years that is typical (life of the author + 70 years). The exact term is debateable, but the purpose should be to allow the artist sufficient time to monetize their creation for themselves, and then allowing the art to belong to the broader culture. There should be a worthwhile financial incentive to create art.
My utopian dream would be a radically restructured society where we do not expect people to have "artist" as a career. Instead, people would work 15 hours a week doing the work that must be done to contributue to society. The compensation from that 15 hours of work guarantees all their needs to live in modest comfort. People then have more leisure time to pursue whatever they find self-actualizing, which for many will mean creating art and sharing it with the world.
The artist still owns their right to distribute their videos. If someone copies their videos and uploads them to a place with no ads or no patreon subscription that eats into the profit the creator of the art could be making, because someone else is essentially giving it away for free. Only the artist has the right to copy their art.
Ad revenue is also subverted by seeing the original video with uBlock, which I think is fair, because I think ads are harmful and unsustainable - like copyright, only a small minority of indie creators get sustainable revenue from ads, and I'd be surprised if the number wasn't decreasing.
Not linking the author's name and patreon is a problem, but I don't think it needs laws and definitely not copyright; if somebody gets the video on the other place to link the original author's patreon, even if they're not who uploaded it, it benefits them and I don't see any serious issue.
If they are in the public domain, they could publish them. How many books are in the public domain but have never been digitized and shared in a public archive?
And if the books are not in the public domain, then they should not be allowed to train their AI models with the material without some kind of license or agreement with the owner of the copyright.
> If they are in the public domain, they could publish them.
That'd be an easy fix with new law -- if you are an AI company with book data, you have a burden to make openly available (or require your suppliers to) all public domain book scans.
I don't see this happening, but I really wish that the Mastodon model centered on joining your city's local Mastodon server. Your server is centered on local people and local conversations. Maybe one would find this local community sort of annoying, but it would be at relevant, at least some of the time.
From there, you can connect with other individuals on other servers with similar interests or whatever. But your online identity would be rooted to where you actually live.
Time to move to a new city? You just migrate to a new Mastodon server. Makes sense.
As it stands now, Mastodon servers are primarily centered on some kind of shared interest, but I don't think that makes much sense. I am a person with many interests, so which do I pick? Over time, I might gradually lose interest in a subject, or simply prioritize something else. Do I leave that old server? It seems like a hassle to move, but it seems weird to stay. The result is that Mastodon servers seem so arbitrary, when they should be really important.
Other servers could still exist for the misfits or for people who otherwise find their city's server objectionable. But I think a city being the "default" option would make a lot of sense.
What makes sense about selecting instances based on one's own location?
Using local infrastructure leaks your location and simplifies law enforcement against the user. For example: Living in Saudi Arabia for work would absolutely not inspire me to seek out a hypothetical Saudi Social.
If local reddit communities are any tell, you would see competition real fast, e.g. Littletown Social, realLittleTown, LittleTown Online ...
Instead, one should probably use the server that aligns best with ones idea of moderation and appears somewhat trustworthy not to go down tomorrow.
Does anyone here handwrite a blog? I've been thinking about doing that, but I'd be interested in how people accomplish it. Personally, I'd like this to be a hobby that gets me away from screens, so I'm looking to focus more on handwriting and minimize how much I'd need to interact with a digital device.
Not a blog, but I handwrite presentation slides sometimes. And, of course, pages of notes. I use my ReMarkable 2 for that, so it's pretty easy to import to desktop and run scripts.
If you want to hear the difference between an audio file recorded at 44.1 and 88.2kHZ, then you need slow the audio playback down. Otherwise, a trained ear cannot physically hear the difference.
44.1 is "enough" only in theory. This assumes a physically impossible steep filter. Realistically, frequencies around 20 kHz will create audible artifacts (aliasing). So yes, a trained ear can tell the diffrenece between 44.1 and even 48 kHz. Like many other commenters in this thread, you are mixing up math theory with physical limitations of AD/DA converters. Oversampling is a common way to address this limitation, but strictly speaking 44.1 kHz is not as obviously "enough" as it seems.
> Realistically, frequencies around 20 kHz will create audible artifacts (aliasing)
The energy of the signal components above the Nyquist is generally very low, and very few double blind tests have given any indication that humans can detect the resulting aliasing (even though many people claim to be able to do, almost always in non-double-blind environments).
Badly written digital synthesis can generate high energy signal components above 22kHz, but that's because they're badly written, not because the theory is wrong.
Genereally very low for a single track? What about 200 tracks? Badly written synthesis, or badly recorded live instruments, or bounced and re-bounced dozens of times... we are not talking about the quality-defining aspect here. You can produce an excellent mix on KRKs connected directly to a MacBook.
This space is not driven by a single precise formula. 48/96 kHz helps some engineers to produce better sounding mixes. Can everyone hear the extended range of Adam tweeters? Probably not. But some can, and they benefit from that. Even if there is no double-blind study to prove this in absolute terms.
If you recorded 200 tracks of the same instrument, so that the partials above Nyquist were all broadly the same, then sure, summing the tracks would include summing 200 copies of the aliasing results too.
But very little music is like that, and the energy profile above Nyquist will differ dramatically. Consequently, you're not summing a set of identical aliasing results, and in general, the results will still be undetectable to almost everyone.
Jacob Collier routinely works with 300+ tracks in Logic. He doesn't worry about this sort of thing, and neither do the Grammy voters who love what he does.
Got it. Grammy voters love Collier's mixes. What about Tony Maserati? He can clearly tell the difference between 44.1 and 88.2. If your argument is that these engineers can't hear the difference - you are going to be disappointed. They can. Even Dave Pensado who mixes at 16/44.1, does that because he rejects the idea, he can hear the difference according to him.
I can find no evidence that Maserati (or 99% of any other mix or mastering engineers) has ever tested his "appreciation" of the "crunch" at 44.1 in a double blind environment.
It is always amazing how much that is claimed about what people can hear fails to show up when tested in this, the only acceptable scientific way.
Perhaps Maserati has done this, and could still tell the difference. In which case, he should carry on! But he should carry on anyway! People should do what brings them joy, and if he likes working at 44.1kHz or whatever, he should absolutely do that.
What people should not do is lecture about stuff that isn't true and/or isn't demonstrable in proper test settings, and most (not all, but most) of the SR stuff fits into one or other or both of those categories.
Just to wrap this up. Is your professional opinion that techniques like antialiasing/oversampling/etc and any sample rate above 44.1 kHz are essentially an industry-wide scam and the perceived benefits are not true?
And since there are no double-blind studies supporting this tech, both using and adding any of these features to your software would only be propagating this scam further? I.e. far more than just lecturing "about stuff that isn't true" this actually physically implements features that are not true?.. OK, at least you are staying consistent.
(Also, looking forward to you discovering that there are not many double-blind studies supporting the "delusion" that the effect of a low pass filter is real and not just something we can measure but can't hear.)
No need to add any features to Ardour - it already supports any sample rate that your hardware supports.
There are places where (a) double precision (or better) floating point math benefits DSP, but that's nowhere in Ardour (and likely, if one is clear about the definition, in any other DAW either) - certain types of plugins can benefit from this, but they should not impose that cost on the rest of the processing infrastructure (i.e. they should convert internally and then back again, rather than require that the whole host uses 64 or 80 bit floating point.
There is a reasonably good argument for 96kHz because of the possible characteristics of the brickwall filter and its impact on aliasing. This argument gets a lot weaker for even high SRs.
However, both of these are largely theoretical in the sense that very few people, if any, can reliably hear the results in actual produced music or soundtracks. So while it might be a good idea to use higher SRs, whether that actually results in something that can truly be said to "sound better" is much more questionable.
At the highest level, I think that all of this is pretty irrelevant. Most of the music that people consider "great" was recorded with equipment far below the quality levels achievable with mid-priced pro-sumer gear today (mics perhaps being the sole exception). Great music/great sound is, I think, appreciated largely independently of its audio "fidelity". There is a huge difference between an amazingly well-recorded ensemble and a poorly recorded one, but for most people, if the well-recorded ensemble is playing stuff they don't like and the poorly recorded one is playing some stuff they love, all the "fidelity" in the world won't improve the former and the lack of it won't stop them loving the latter.
In addition, with the rise of deeply impressive sample libraries and better and better synthesizers running as plugins, the AD/DA elements of music during "recording"/composition are becoming less and less important for more and more music. That amazing patch someone uses in Onmisphere doesn't get better or worse by using a higher SR, and that incredible string library (e.g. New Albion) is what it is regardless of what your converters can do.
So, in short, I would say: do what you want, but if you're going to try to justify it with science, make sure the science is right and if you're going to try to justify it with "sound", then be aware that for most people the differences won't matter (or even exist at all).
Do you have citations for this claim? The "golden ears" argument is often employed by audiophiles, but even the cheapest converters oversample by up to several hundred times as well as employ antialiasing filters.
