yes. cassette tape was a shit format. the longer the cassette, the thinner the tape itself was. the type of tape formulation also played into this. the more brown the tape was, the lower quality. higher end tapes were much darker nearly black.
tapes could also stretch which would give you some of that wow. the tape duplicators motors/belts could wear out so that even if the original tape used to make the dubs was solid, the dubs would have that wow when played back in other cassette players that turned at a more consistent speed than the recorder. dirty heads on the dubbers would also lower the overall sound quality.
I used to make cassette dubs with professional dubbers for years. We'd clean the heads after every X number of passes. The value of X changed depending on the length of the tapes used. I'd check for loose belts at the beginning of any dub order. For primarily talking content, we'd use the more brown colored tape. For music content, we'd use the darker tapes. At least that's what we'd recommend, but plenty of people would choose the cheaper tape regardless.
A once common sight lost to time is the cassette tape that got eaten by someone's car stereo and thrown out the window (presumably in anger). In later years, broken CDs sometimes made an appearance but nowhere near as frequently as strung out cassettes.
I couldn’t afford too many cassettes growing up. I managed to save a few roadside discards and add them to my collection. I distinctly remember being introduced to Whodini that way while living in the farmlands of Michigan.
we used to collect the AOL CDs and make different art projects with them. from simple hanging mobiles to catch/reflect light to melting them with torches and other ways of using them in random ways.
can't forget the tying cassette tape to your antenna as a streamer. kids today look at cars and ask what's an antenna. no, i don't mean the sharkfin for XM radio.
> The monthly tapes are very, very, worn and rippled. That's becuase they ran for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week on auto-reverse. If you do the math assuming that each tape is 30 minutes per side, that's over 800 passes over a tape head each month.
Not surprised at all that Russian meddling that essentially targets both extremes of the spectrum resonates with them; Putin's regime always believed that international politics are a zero-sum game. Such a nihilist take.
With the possibility of bypassing JTAG lock and reading firmware at least this one has practical uses compared to the ESP32 ""backdoor"". Thankfully still not quite exploitable in typical IoT use cases. Doing the same to a secure microprocessor (think smart cards, eSIM) on the other hand would be notable.
I want to make a simple solution where data is parsed by a vision model and "engineer for the unhappy path" is my assumption from the get-go. Changing the prompt or swapping the model is cheap.
vision models are also faulty, and some times all paths are unhappy paths, so there's really no viable solution. Most of the times, swapping the model completely randomizes the problem space (unless you measure every single corner case, it's impossible to tell if everything got better or if some things got worse...
Isn't it that models themselves are public (like BSIM) but what you get in a PDK is a macromodel wrapping BSIM with another zillion of fudge factors, or at least binned by device size? That's what I understood by peeking into various PDK models.
Not every fab use BSIM models. Philips (now NXP) use PSP models for their own fabs and implement them as verilog-a code. This is a physics based model instead of fitted model like BSIM.
TSMC has their own C-library on top of BSIM models for FinFETs because BSIM isn't covering what they need. I don't know what will they use for GAA stuff.
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