It really hasn't though. Fossil fuels kill or disable more people every year than nuclear power has, ever.
Even in terms of radiation accidents, nuclear power generation pales in comparison to orphan sources from medical equipment. Yet you don't see people clamoring on about fewer x-ray or radiological machines.
> made large swaths of land uninhabitable for ~forever.
Are you talking about places besides the Chernobyl exclusion zone?
And why compare the small amount of area made dangerous by nuclear accidents to the entire planet being destroyed by fossil fuels?
There's a bimodal distribution of software developers where one set never touches the problems that the others deal with. The attitude of "nobody has to implement X" is one set of the distribution being wholly ignorant that the other set exists.
> "show me the incentives and I will predict the outcome" thing
There are supposed to be two stopgaps here.
First, the fear of going to jail for committing crimes. Secondly, the social reprisal for committing crimes that hurt people.
Like seriously these CEOs shouldn't be welcome at anyone's table or gathering in polite society as a result of their actions, bare minimum. The government should also put them in prison.
I wouldn't call archiving a consumer application but I understand the point. Really it gets back to the word: fidelity. Some say it means "truth" but really it's latin for faithful or in the context of audio, perceptually identical (a faithful representation). Even among highly trained and skilled listeners, lossy codecs are faithful and imperceptible.
The unit of a block size is samples (frames, technically), not seconds. When configuring audio devices for playback you tune both sample rate and block size for latency. It used to be far more common to tune sample rate than block size alone for tracking. This is getting into the weeds of actual devices though.
Also to your point, this is why compliant peak meters use a mandatory 4x upsampling at 48k.
This is a stupid question but I'm a stupid EE/SWE who knows very little about physical objects.
In the all these animations of the pistons I see linear motion translated into rotary motion using the crank shaft - but how do you design the pison/crank to always turn clockwise or counter clockwise (based on how you view it, obviously)? Is it possible for the crank shaft to lock up if it's perfectly oriented at 0 degrees?
Higher sample rates are lower latency for the same block size and resampling is not "free" (pick 2: performance, aliasing, latency) so there can be advantages to working with audio archived at higher sample rates.
But all the advantages come down to professional or editing use cases. There's next to zero advantage to using it as a storage format for listening. Just like 24 bit audio (do you have an amp with 96dB SNR?).
Just personally, I have seen little evidence (personally, professionally, or academically) that there is any advantage for lossless audio for consumer applications. For professional applications there are plenty, and it's endlessly tiring to convince people that "no, actually I need 96kHz for my use case."
Where the audiophiles have _some_ argument here is the design of reconstruction filters which I've heard alleged can perform better in the audible frequency range if the stop band is outside of it. But I have never personally tested this, nor cared enough to. But the theory is sound.
Whether or not it's perceptible depends on what you're measuring, though. In theory, there should be perceptual differences in sound localization if your DAC's reconstruction filter is at 24kHz vs 48kHz since it will change the group delay in a critical frequency region, where you'll get sound at >~2kHz arriving later at the lower sample rate. I think it would be extremely hard to test this though, because humans are really shitty at sound localization to begin with, and practically speaking most recorded material is processed to shit in that frequency range to intentionally decorrelate the channels for the perception of "width."
> Higher sample rates than 48kHz only needed when you want to pitch down ultrasonic recordings (of whales, bats and other such animals for example).
There are numerous use cases for higher sample rates that go beyond this but it's hard to talk about it without starting flame wars filled with junk science.
> that will instantly 10x or 100x current capabilities.
In the 1920s we had legions of very smart, highly trained (arguably better trained in mathematics) basically chucking relays and vacuum tubes together with reckless abandon to build the most valuable and complicated systems mankind had ever come up with (telephony, radio, radar, etc). They had no idea how they worked and only ad-hoc rules of thumb to construct them.
It took the insight of a handful of these people both in and outside of industry to formalize the theory of operation of most of what people were already building and then use that theory to establish formal design practices.
The people before these theories were realized were exceptionally smart and good at what they did, it's just they didn't have better design tools to reason about the things they were building.
And once they had those tools they didn't 10x or 100x overnight.
Firstly, standards compliance is bad when the standard is bad.
Secondly nothing precludes defining '3' as the lowest file descriptor for open(), since stdin/stdout/stderr cannot be opened (they are opened before the process starts).
Large asset managers aren't buying up significant amounts of property, this is basically an imagined problem that wants to demonize corporations/financiers for a problem created by local land use policy.
[0] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2201.02179