Aesthetics, plus the seductive appeal that pre-modern, pre-liberal-democratic societies (when the governments were authoritarian, the women were submissive, and the men “were men”) have for reactionaries, incels, and cryptofacists.

An irony that 100% of Christian Nationalists will never appreciate.

Yup. Decades of Cold War propaganda, an incompetent news media, and a binary, two-party duopoly that positions itself as “the right” versus “the left” have all worked together on this one.

Musk sycophants coming to his defense in the comments by quoting “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” 🤦‍♂️

As if there were any doubt about the Israeli government’s disregard for human rights, you have members of the Likud party openly saying that anyone held in detention (without trial) in the Sde Teiman concentration camp is a terrorist and therefore “anything can be done to them”, including torture and rape.

Twitter Link to Video

I assume the US State Department will surely note this as evidence of war crimes and take appropriate action…

Yeah, that was pretty much my point.

Epistemology isn’t the determining factor when it comes to human beings doing terrible things to each other on the rationale that it is for “the greater good” or the “natural order”.

Nazi Germany, the Khmer Rouge, the Cultural Revolution, European colonialism, etc saw millions dead because one group of people though they had the right to control society and shape it in the way they saw fit.

Agreed, but this isn’t unique to religion – the same can be said of political ideologies.

True. There’s something to be said for pleasuring any passing bats who might be in the vicinity.

It’s a fair question. Human hearing ability is a spectrum like anything else, however when it comes to discerning the difference in audio quality, the vast, vast majority of people cannot reliably tell the difference between high-bitrate lossy and lossless when they do a double blinded test. And that includes audiophiles with equipment worth thousands of dollars.

Of that tiny minority who can consistently distinguish between the two, they generally can only tell by listening very closely for the very particular characteristics of the encoder format, which takes a highly trained ear and a lot of practice.

The blind aspect is important because side-by-side comparisons (be they different audio formats, or 60fps vs 120fps video) are highly unreliable because people will generally subconsciously prefer the one they know is supposed to be better.

Yeah they do, although CBR performs noticeably worse than VBR with Lame MP3. As I mentioned elsewhere, MP3 @ V0 or V1 VBR sounds just as good as the above. I just personally haven’t used MP3 for years because the newer codecs are more efficient.

Oh yeah. 128k rips from back then were rough. MP3 has gotten somewhat better since then, to be fair. V0/V1 VBR is still perfectly fine to listen to; it’s just not as efficient as the newer codecs.

Up to a certain point, yes. >192k AAC / OGG / Opus sounds just as good as FLAC in a blind test, though. Even with good equipment.

This is true, especially if you are storing files locally. However, even compared to “CD quality” FLAC, a 24/192 album is still going to be around three times larger (around 1GB per album) to download. If everyone switched over to streaming hi-res audio tomorrow, there would be a noticeable jump in worldwide Internet traffic.

I’m personally not ok with the idea of bandwidth usage jumping up over 3x (and even more compared to lossy streaming) for no discernable benefit.

Hi-resolution audio, especially for streaming. The general idea is that listening to digital audio files that have a greater bit depth and sample rate than CD (24-bit/192Khz vs 16-bit/44.1 KHz) translates to better-sounding audio, but in practice that isn’t the case.

For a detailed breakdown as to why, there’s a great explanation here. But in summary, the format for CDs was so chosen because it covers enough depth and range to cover the full spectrum of human hearing.

So while “hi-res” audio does contain a lot more information (which, incidentally, means it uses up significantly more data/storage space and costs more money), our ears aren’t capable of hearing it in the first place. Certain people may try to argue otherwise based on their own subjective experience, but to that I say “the placebo effect is a helluva drug.”

There’s a good chance that the 2003 Iraq war wouldn’t have happened, though. That was very much a Neo-Con project of the Bush administration.

I still find it quite baffling that for a distro that pitches itself as an everyday Linux distro for newer and intermediate users, Fedora doesn’t come with snapshots preconfigured out of the box or any obvious way of handling a system restore.

42 Dems voted for this nonsense.

Mastodon has a major engagement problem and I’m not sure why.

It has significantly more users than Lemmy but also manages to feel a lot less social, somehow.