CDs improved over LPs in dynamic range, frequency response, error correction, replayability, stereo separation, and noise floor. They also, at scale, became much cheaper to manufacture and distribute.
But if the engineers, producers and marketers insist on not using the technical capabilities, or deliberately degrading them to chase perceived loudness, there's nothing the purchaser can do except complain.
On the contrary, this line of argument proves nothing. Rather, it is a caution that people telling you stories tells you a lot about what they want to portray, not so much about whether what they did was a generally good decision.
As to your second point: "European" is an arbitrary social concept. Cartographers could have decided that Eurasia is obviously a single landmass, or that nothing is more important than river systems, or that the most important directionality is the path of the sun. Thousands of years later, the decisions made have consequences, but there is nothing divinely ordained about what those decisions were.
I suppose if a hundred years from now the common, generic word for "hotel" is "airbean", that might be a significant effect. But it's a little more likely to be "marriott" or "hilton", I think.
Remember that there is an alternate universe in which AirBnB is the way that 70% of all corporate short-term housing gets booked, and they are telling the story of how they nearly didn't pivot correctly.
And a zillion alternate universes in which they never got big. Survivor bias is real, and everyone has just-so stories. The ones they choose to tell are partially an artifact of organizational culture, and partially of self-aggrandizement.
At $8500, I could justify having a 77 mile range electric car with a top speed of 30ish mph. That would take care of every in-town trip, but I couldn't do a full commute to work with it because the most sensible way of doing that involves a highway. If it could manage 50mph for 15 minutes, it could go on the highway and I could recharge at or near the office.
The cheapest EV currently available in the US is the Chevy Bolt, at $29000, about three times the price. A Bolt has four times the range, but still not quite enough to go one way on my most frequent "long drive".
The Concorde was cramped. JFK to Heathrow took five hours (3 in the air, an hour in each airport) plus the time for first and last miles. JFK to Heathrow today is 7 to 8 hours with the same provisos.
If you're going to spend a quarter of the day travelling, why not spend a third of the day and do it more comfortably?
The F-35 isn't the fastest jet; fighter jets aren't business jets; apples are not rutabagas.
Programming is the reification of decision-making processes. If you don't understand the decision-making process that you want, you get a different one, which at best approximates the one you want but couldn't articulate.
If you do this with COBOL or Python, at least you get consistent operation and errors when you're wrong. If you do this with any LLM, consistency is dropped in favor of obsequiousness.
The base problem is that people aren't equipped naturally to think about all the details of their problems.
If I use the web interface to my self-hosted library, each book's cover is shown along with a progress bar if it has ever been opened in the web interface.
If I use the OPDS interface, that doesn't happen; I suppose it would be nice to push some reading information back. Sync between reading devices is handled by koreader-sync, so I can pick up any device running koreader and be on the page where I left off.
I asked Claude to explain how the lyrics of "Birdhouse in Your Soul" by They Might Be Giants should guide investment strategy. It promptly produced five paragraphs of bullshit that read just like a persuasive essay on the Net.
If you don't firmly hold in your mind "this is a bullshit generator", you can get in real trouble fast.
Every recruiter I have dealt with (on the hiring side) has had a provision in the contract: if they have a documented exchange with a candidate whom we hire during or within (a month, two months...) of the contract end, the recruiter is deemed to have done the work. Contrarily, if we have a documented exchange with a candidate before the recruiter does, the recruiter is not owed anything.
So: the recruiter has an incentive to mention the hiring company as soon as they get a response from you.
If they don't do that, they are either bad at writing contracts or don't actually have authority to recruit. Mostly the second: you would not be surprised at the number of cold emails I get saying that they represent a candidate (or a pool of candidates) who are exactly right for the position that we filled last month.
In a roughly 50 person company with refresh every 3 years, we send a macbook back for repair/replacement roughly three times a year. I would estimate that as a 2% hardware problem rate, 200x higher than what you quote.
Guatemala, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Afghanistan (that's deliberate), Kuwait, Ukraine, Georgia, Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam (also deliberate)... all of these countries and more have been invaded by nuclear powers.
Pascal of the famously backpedaling and unsupportable Wager?
Lewis the apologist?
Bach the "who pays for music around here? OK, I'll get them to pay me" pop songwriter?
All of these folks living so far apart from each other in time and place that some of them would vitriolically deny being of the same religion as some of the others?
(Bach was an awesome composer, but he needed the money and catered to his audience.)
CDs improved over LPs in dynamic range, frequency response, error correction, replayability, stereo separation, and noise floor. They also, at scale, became much cheaper to manufacture and distribute.
But if the engineers, producers and marketers insist on not using the technical capabilities, or deliberately degrading them to chase perceived loudness, there's nothing the purchaser can do except complain.