ZephrC

Have you seen a map of population centers? That’s not what they look like.

Yes, my “only” point is that analog has less maintenance. If you want anything to last more than a decade, maintenance is the only thing that matters. How long will something last is the same question as how hard is it to maintain. They are the same thing.

You cannot possibly be this stupid. I refuse to believe it. If you stuff a vinyl record in a cabinet for a century, you’ll still have a mostly functional recording. If you stuff an SSD in a cabinet for a decade you’ll probably just have a paperweight at the end, and that’s comparing 70 year old analog storage technology to the current standard of digital storage. This is a consistent pattern throughout all of history. Analog storage is just far, far more robust to data loss. All the error-correction in the world doesn’t help if you aren’t actually running that error-correction constantly forever. That is the entire point I’ve been trying to make this whole time that everyone just keeps ignoring to spout non sequiturs about how digital data transmission works at me.

Okay, it’s not really the point I’m trying to make here, but since you bring it up, actually it does matter that we lose the ability to decipher the meaning of digital storage. That is a problem that has only gotten worse.

More importantly, there is meaning in handwriting. We can learn things from how different people wrote the same thing. And people do try to convey subtleties of meaning through drawing the same letter in different ways, and of course, most importantly, you completely ignored the actual point I was trying to make, that even if we ignore that and assume every B is always the same we aren’t talking about content. We are talking about storage media. Smearing ink on paper isn’t a digital process even if you’re literally just writing 1s and 0s. There have been digital ways of storing information for as long as there have been analog ones. Things like beads or knots in ropes. The reason you never hear about them isn’t because they didn’t exist. It’s because all the information they contain has decayed to nonsense. Digital is very binary that way. It’s perfectly retrievable until it’s perfectly gone. We have a lot of techniques now to help extend that useful life, but they still all require active maintenance, and most digital storage media has an average lifespan in single digit years. Even for digital information, the oldest stuff we still have around was stored in analog ways.

What makes you think we are perfectly copying the knowledge contained in texts from thousands of years ago? That is… a bold claim. Even if I were to accept that text is always inherently digital for the sake of argument, the storage medium is absolutely analog. You can use analog storage to store digital data just as much as you can use digital storage to store analog data like sound waves.

How do you think that is in any way even remotely relevant to what I said? If the drive your file is on dies and you didn’t copy it to another one a checksum won’t help you.

Digital storage devices have way shorter lifespans than analog ones. Digital information can be more reliably copied, but we are constantly losing massive amounts of information to digital storage loses when it falls out of public consciousness. If no one is actively copying it, it is doomed in the digital age. We still have analog storage that’s good enough to be useful from thousands of years ago.

You know that vinyl is not the only way of recording analog information, right?

True. I wasn’t trying to argue that there are no advantages to digital, or even that we should go back to analog. Just that the argument in the post doesn’t make sense.

That is an actual fair criticism. Well, part of it. All of our current digital media technology actually degrades over time faster than analog ones, but they’re so easy to copy that it’s not really a problem for things that people like to make copies of. It is a problem for archiving though. I wasn’t trying to argue that digital has no advantages. Just that it’s not magically better in every way.

Sure, and there’s nothing wrong with that. They’re both plenty good enough, and digital is cheaper to copy accurately. It’s also actually possible to make a copy of a copy of a copy digitally and have it still be accurate. I wasn’t attempting to say we shouldn’t use digital, or that it has no advantages, just that the argument in the original post makes no sense.

The only meaningful difference between them is that digital is cheaper to copy. Your ears are analog though, so everything you’ve ever heard in your entire life is 100% pure analog, and I explicitly said in the post you seem to think that you’re disagreeing with that they’re both orders of magnitude better than they need to be.

Your speakers are analog. They sound different when they are dusty. Your ears are analog. Things sound different when you have dirty ears. Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem only applies when there are no frequencies outside of the sample range, which doesn’t happen in real life. None of this matters, because like I said it’s trivial to have orders of magnitude more accuracy than you need. Digital is just way cheaper to copy accurately, so that’s why it has become dominant, and that’s fine, but the idea that it’s inherently more representative of reality is just gibberish.

Most musical instruments are analog. Digitizing them is inherently lossy. I mean, it doesn’t matter, you can get both digital and analog recordings that are orders of magnitude more accurate than human hearing, but claiming that analog is more inherently lossy than digital is just factually incorrect, unless the music is produced purely digitally. Including no human voices, because those are analog.

Do not take dietary advice from randos on the internet, yes, but also unless it’s in relation to a medical condition or you are talking to a professional nutritionist don’t take dietary advice from your doctor either. Med school teaches basically nothing about nutrition, and it’s pretty sad how often you can figure out when a doctor went to med school by which fad diet they recommend.

Heck, sign me up. That’s basically time travel to a future where presumably humanity has gotten its shit together if they’re still around inventing better ships. I see no downsides.

I’m pretty sure there’s someone, somewhere at Nintendo who knows how google works. I would be shocked if they don’t know more about Switch emulators than I do, and Yuzu wasn’t even my first choice. Yuzu didn’t get sued because it’s popular. They got sued because they ran a profitable company in a country that enforces IP laws pretty strictly and tends to side with large corporations over people.

Not with all the preservatives we pump into them.

That’s not an argument against him being evil though. If you want an example where the immense damage done to the world was more incompetence than malice that’d be Dubya, and even he was realistically pretty aware of a lot of what he did.

If Trump was smarter and less manipulated by the vultures around him he would have done even more damage, not less. His incompetence does not excuse his evil.

Well, sadly neither of them will be over by Christmas… next year… or probably the year after that. Palestine may be going for generations still in the worst case scenario. It is kinda funny in a sad sort of way how many people don’t understand how difficult it is to occupy a country full of people who hate you though. Neither Russia nor Israel have even succeeded at the easy part yet, and I don’t think Russia is even capable of doing that.