I don't think any IT infrastructure is doing it, it's all by a national single-sign on system.

I haven't followed this closely the past few years, but it used to be pretty obvious you were listening to a VST compared to a real instrument in actual playing. When you compare recordings, sample based ones sound awesome as long as you just try a single note, but they were obviously missing something in the sympathetic resonances (sounding worse than my upright piano which is perhaps a 20th percentile piano), and the more physics based ones had not so great tones.

I've actually been hoping that someone would try to apply deep learning to piano VSTs, even emailed a few researchers, but no reply. If something new has come up I'm not aware of, I apologize.

The specialization goes both ways, though, I'm much better playing Alberti bass with my left hand compared to the right.

Some years ago we ported some code from querying out the data and tallying in Python (how many are in each bucket) to using SQL to do that. It didn't speed up the execution. I was surprised by that, but I guess the Postgres interpreter is roughly the same speed as Python, which when you think about it perhaps isn't that surprising.

But Python is truly general purpose while the core query stuff in SQL is really specialized (we were not using stored procedures). So if Pypy can get 5x speedup, it seems to me that it should be possible to get the same kind of speed up in Postgres. I guess it needs funding and someone as smart as the Pypy people.

I once had to deal with many million data points for an application. I ended up mip-mapping them client-side.

But regarding sampling, if it's a line chart, you can sample adaptively by checking whether the next point makes a meaningfully visible difference measured in pixels compared to its neighbours. When you tune it correctly, you can drop most points without the difference being noticeable.

I didn't find any else doing that at the time, and some people seemed to have trouble accepting it as a viable solution, but if you think about it, it doesn't actually make sense to plot say 1 million points in a line chart 1000 pixels wide. On average that would make 1000 points per pixel.

I eventually installed Red Hat, started at university and lost most of my free time to study projects.

One of them was about building a habit. You find a small meaningless thing to do, it must have no purpose at all, and then you do it once every day for as long as it takes to become a habit, probably a month or two. E.g. you could fill a glass with water and throw it out.

I did the exercise (I would kneel for a few seconds when taking a bath) for a couple of months, and I think it worked for me. I've recently used the same tactic to build a useful habit.

Now building a new habit is not necessarily the same as changing an old habit.

I also found out that kneeling changed my perspective. I could think about a situation with some level of tension, kneel, and then my perspective on the same situation would be more humble and appreciative. YMMV.