With pro analog tape recordings (e.g. 2-inch 24 track, half-inch 2-track), you record alignment tones onto the tapes to capture the state of the recording device, and then later calibrate the playback device to the particular tape so that playback alignment matches recording alignment. But this is essentially never done with cassettes, so you have to earball it.

Cassette players for mastering studios actually have alignment options (e.g. adjustable azimuth) that aren't present on consumer devices. But without the tones, you have to guess.

The problem with starting from a digitized source is that it may have been digitized from non-aligned playback. Ideally you want to go back to the analog originals - but old cassettes are rarely in perfect condition.

Elsethread, you mention that "some people really got upset.". In some sense, the more upset they get, the more successful the troll and the funnier it gets, right? At least, it feels funny to me, at the same time as it also feels bad to imagine upset kids, at the same time as feeling that upset kids learning that other humans are cruel is a necessary part of growing up.

Pricing mistakes which make the supermarket money are unfortunate but low priority. Pricing mistakes which cost the supermarket money must be fixed immediately.

What makes Giant Steps so amazing is the sheer speed at which those changes go past — if you slow it down, it's not that different from other Jazz tunes. It took took years of practice for Coltrane to acquire the specialized skillset for improvising over Giant Steps.

If the intelligence community is going to nab the first team that has a quantum computing breakthrough, does it actually help the public to speed up research?

It seems like an arms race the public is destined to lose because the winning team will be subsumed no matter what.

Thanks for that list of levels, it's helpful to understand how these things are playing out and where I'm at in relation to other engineers utilizing LLM agents.

I can say that I feel comfortable at approximately AI level 5, with occasional forays to AI level 6 when I completely understand the interface and can test it but don't fully understand the implementation. It's not really that different from working on a team, with the agent as a team member.

One of the hardest things to do is to put yourself in the place of those you see as villains and recognize that they generally see themselves as heroes. The human capacity for self-justification is extremely powerful.

Best-sellers don't sell that many copies in the absolute sense. From what I can tell Careless People has sold around 200,000. Moving the needle just a bit is worth it.

But I can also see why someone might wish for there to be a reason behind suffering.

Such feckless news organizations are destined to become tools of the state; perhaps that is in fact the smartest play for the profits of their ownership. Certainly Bezos seems to be taking WaPo down the path of collaborator, as are the Ellisons with CBS.

The illusion-of-impartiality model has its loyalists, but this article is about the young news audiences who have have been lost. At least some of them have been lost, not to YouTube and influencers, but to other news outlets (left and right) who have embraced their own biases and adversarial perspectives. You call that a "performance of authenticity", but in the marketplace it has beaten a performance of impartiality which is at least as inauthentic.

In order to produce articles which generate large clickthrough rates for comparatively low cost, news organizations rely on interviews with people in power. But as a price of access, the people in power require a certain level of deference that compromises the news channel in the eyes of young audiences, when there are lots of other competing sources that don't observe the same deference.

Reuters is less guilty of this than the NY Times, but it's a problem that afflicts all traditional news organizations.