I think that’s the point, that according to audiophile “lore” higher quality materials enhance the sound, thus mud should sound bad under that assumption, but they (apparently) can’t tell the difference.
I'm not sure it's a really great experiment though?
Outside of the hyper-crazies, no one is really stating that a 6-12 inches of conductor is going to make a giant difference in audio quality. Yes, I'm aware of the super-premium-gold-plated-platinum-encrusted 12" audio patch cords available. But almost no one really makes serious arguments those do anything.
I don't think running a 50ft banana is going to have similar performance to a 50ft properly-sized copper conductor though.
Where you get into the "debate" is the difference between buying a spool of 12ga stranded copper wiring from Home Depot, or buying the same thing only with de-oxygenated or whatever silliness some audiophile brand is selling for 10x the cost.
There are levels to things. I imagine copper speaker wire to be essentially fungible. Just size it to your length of run and max power needs. Calculate the total resistance for your wire run and done/done. All professional level sound installations for venues and what-have-you do this already.
This sort of test just seems to prove nothing in either direction other than provide bait for folks to point and laugh (or defend) in comment sections. Consider me baited, I suppose!
It depends on the experiment done… You need every intermediate point between the wires to be low distortion too. As in, audiophiles cannot distinguish between distortion and distortion+distortion is not really an interesting result.
You need source, digital to analog conversion, pre-amp, amp, speakers to have low distortion too, and you need the room to be appropriately treated too. I didn’t look at whether they did all that but I seriously doubt they did.
Did you really mean to say that audiophiles can distinguish between no distortion and some distortion, but cannot distinguish between more distortion and less distortion?
I think it was Teller who said the secret to a good magic trick was to put in so much effort that no reasonable person would assume that’s what you’d done.
Flimsy? No. I mean they won't survive a tornado, but homes aren't usually built with surviving a direct tornado hit in mind.
Sure it's not as strong as brick or concrete blocks, but it's strong enough for normal, every day use.
Where it does pale in comparison is hanging heavy objects on the wall. You do need to secure heavy loads to a stud, instead of just drilling and anchoring anywhere in the wall. However what it lacks there it more than makes up for in ease of routing low-voltage cables in an existing home.
Also, if I really wanted it, I could knock out almost all of my interior walls and completely change the layout of my home. Not something you do on a whim, but you can absolutely do so when renovating a home.
It's not really a drywall problem, but a drawback of the usual construction method. If you insulate the interior walls then noise isn't really a problem. Of course, most builders are not insulating or noise-proofing interior walls, so there you have it. I suppose with other building materials (bricks, concrete blocks) you get the solution "for free", so to speak.
It's a problem because with stick frame and drywall, the builder has to take special effort to noise-isolate a house, which in effects ensures that not even 0.1% of housing has those properties. European regulations make for a much higher noise isolation by default.
Everything costs money. It's not like drywall doesn't allow you to soundproof, 2x layers of 5/8" is a common method as well as staggering 2x4's in a 2x6 wall.
Noise barriers are incredibly cheap. They're a tiny fraction of the cost of putting up a drywall or plaster wall. Codes say how far apart the studs should be, so you just buy a roll of batting, and unroll it into the gap between the two walls. You have to cut it to fit, but that's not a big deal.
It costs a few thousand bucks to do a whole house (during construction), even in areas with high labor costs. You can usually tack it on to the cost of insulating the exterior walls (which is basically the same process, but with a more expensive material).
Nobody does it. Not even supposedly "luxury condos". And that's assuming it's really that cheap, which it isn't because to be effective, one needs to stop all sound transmission, not just for walls, but floors too, as well as interrupting the noise transmitted through the house's wooden structure. It's quite expensive.
Why wouldn't I want to stop the noise of my neighbour's lawn mower, or the garbage truck very slowly passing by at 7:30 when I should be sound asleep, or the washing machine furiously spinning, or my visiting inlaws cooking in the kitchen when I want to get an afternoon nap ? These sh*tty houses let all noises through.
My house is plastered, and it is substantially more soundproofed than drywalled houses in the neighborhood. It is not a function of the construction method, since my house is stick framed just like my neighbors.
From the perspective that models are trained by people with a lot of skin in the "game" of competent models, they do.
Not expressing an opinion when/how AI should contribute to legal proceedings. I certainly believe that judges need to respond both to the law and the specific nuances that the law can never code for.
Judges should have some amount of biases. A cold, calculating, unbiased judge in a world where laws are written by fallible humans would be terrible.
Judges should be able to apply judgement, not be merely automatons that sentence according to only the exact letter of the law.
Laws are not perfect, we need human judges.
Finally, if we are to submit ourselves to judgement by others, I gives me some comfort to know that the being judging me is equally mortal and can be deposed if necessary, as they are flesh and blood like me.
Not really. Ultimately it's just a job and a job without any tangible benefit to doing well.
Most regular folk that end up in front of a judge would do well to have a quick and predictable decision. It's months to years before things happen in court and are usually gated behind 10s of thousands in legal fees or a ton of effort. To have a judge bot available for a decision immediately is enormously beneficial.
Used to be that people had phones at the desk at work and a voicemail inbox. In a business situation I would expect most people to be reachable by phone.
This reminds me: when people insist on having a real phone call in an email, it could be something that they don't like to put in writing. So it's a good practice to ask what the topic of the phone call will be so that you can join it prepared.
If it indeed is something that you feel might be fishy, I further recommend the following: write a summary of what was discussed and send your summary to the people on the call as "meeting minutes -- 2026-02-11" (make this a habit, and always say "I do this routinely to remember what was agreed"). This can easily avoid you being trapped by dubious propsals or being unwittingly on the wrong side of the law.
I record my phone calls for personal records. Often I won't hear or remember details, so the recording helps.
Are there legal or other situations in which meeting minutes would be admissible in evidence, but a recording would not be? Obviously this is jurisdiction dependent.
if you make a recording, transcribe it, the delete the recording, it's probably hard to prove you made a recording. better yet with todays technology you can probably make a transcription live. i don't know if feeding he audio into a transcription tool counts as recording.
but the example was to use a recording in court. if you do that then everyone knows.
Samsung S24 Ultra with the stock dialer. I use DW Contacts to manage my address books, but stick with the stock dialer specifically for the recording feature. I understand this is CSC dependent.
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