It's not just technology that's eating away at console sales, it's also the fact that 1) nearly everything is available on PC these days (save Nintendo with its massive IP), 2) mobile gaming, and 3) there's a limitless amount of retro games and hacks or mods of retro games to play and dedicated retro handhelds are a rapidly growing market. Nothing will ever come close to PS2 level sales again. Will be interesting to see how the video game industry evolves over the next decade or two. I suspect subscriptions (sigh) will start to make up for lost console sales.
"Nothing will ever come close to PS2 level sales again."
ps2 sales number is iffy at very least, also ps2 sales has been dethrone "few times"
quotation mark since when nintendo sales is creeping up, sony announced there are "few millions sales" added while they already didnt produce them years ago
I like these types of interview problems. I did one in Python once. We also had it so that persistence to Postgres indicated that the DB was in a very de-normalized state, so they could comment on that for bonus points.
I was wondering what TTS voices you use? I've heard from other blind people that they tend to prefer the classic, robotic voices rather than modern ML-enhanced voices. Is that true in your experience, too?
That was my initial thought, too - "I bet they can use a nicer voice now!"
Sounds like the robotic voice is more important than we give it credit for, though - from the article's "Do You Really Understand What It’s Saying?" section:
> Unlike human speech, a screen reader’s synthetic voice reads a word in the same way every time. This makes it possible to get used to how it speaks. With years of practice, comprehension becomes automatic. This is just like learning a new language.
When I listened to the voice sample in that section of the article, it sounds very choppy and almost like every phoneme isn't captured. Now, maybe they (the phonemes) are all captured, or maybe they actually aren't - but the fact that the sound per word is _exactly_ the same, every time, possibly means that each sound is a precise substitute for the 'full' or 'slow' word, meaning that any introduced variation from a "natural" voice could actually make the 8x speech unintelligible.
Hope the author can shed a bit of light, it's so neat! I remember ~20 years ago the Sidekick (or a similar phone) seemed to be popular in blind communities because it also had settings to significantly speed up TTS, which someone let me listen to once, and it sounded just as foreign as the recording in TFA.
Yeah, that bit about each phoneme sounding exactly the same everytime really made a lot of sense. Even if the TTS phoneme sounds nothing like a human would say it, once you've heard it enough times, you just memorize it.
I guess sounding "natural" really just amounts to adding variation across the sentence, which destroys phoneme-level accuracy.
There's a section in the article titled, "WHAT DOES GOOGLE TAG MANAGER DO?":
> Whilst Google would love the general public to believe that Tag Manager covers a wide range of general purpose duties, it's almost exclusively used for one thing: surveillance.
I think you're right. A specific example would be chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is green, not because green was selected for. Instead, it's just a side effect of the biochemistry needed to absorb energy from sunlight.
It’s not impossible that the mechanism was selected for maximizing energy absorption within the sunlight’s spectral distribution, depending on which of these curves is most relevant (e.g. incidentally the green curve): https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Spectral_Distributio...
Leaves aren't even very green, if you look at the full spectrum of sunlight. They only reflect around 10% of green light, while they are more like 90% reflective in the infrared. So you could say that leaves are infrared. It's only our eyes' receptors that see them as green, since they are not sensitive to infrared. (And they are, for most plants, not a very bright green.)
Green is what is reflected, not absorbed. And green is higher-energy than red, so naively one would expect that plants should rather reflect red than green. However, I tried to point out with the link that things might not be that simple; though I really don’t know.
I wouldn't call that a side effect, because it is most likely a must-have feature and plants were selectively pressured on that (although I know some plants or trees have red to dark red leaves).
But yes. Logically, things have a natural color. Then animals progressively acquired the ability to distinguish colors because it was advantageous - for instance to spot a naturally brown yummy insect on a naturally green leaf.
From there, one can imagine an amplification or reinforcement process induced by co-evolution: plants take advantage of the fact that animals can see colors, animals take advantage of the fact that healthy plant produce fruits of a specific color. It eventually turned into an armed race at times: TFA opens with the example of a blue belly lizard, but one cannot help but think about chameleons.
It was probably unavoidable as soon as something like a photo-sensitive cell appeared. And it is also probably the same thing with perceptions that are less obvious to us, such as odors, sounds, or vibrations (other than of air or water - although I wouldn't be surprised if hearing evolved from that point).
Why? I can imagine other chemical compounds with different colors that perform the same function just with a greatly reduced efficiency.
If there isn't any evolutionary competition then there could have been a long period of time before plants with chlorophyll started being produced and then dominating the landscape.
Yes, organisms don't have to be optimal in everything - for instance the peacock's tail is probably a bit detrimental for various things other than signaling.
When there's no environmental pressure, genetics can do whatever it wants (to a certain extent), which leads to a diversification which in turn is very valuable when a constrain suddenly appears in the environment, or to conquer new biomes. This remembered me of the "Cambrian explosion" [1] and coincidentally this article refers to the evolution of the eye.
With regard to green chlorophyll, it is safe to say that a very common environmental pressure is present that makes it green, judging from how dominant it is. I guess that it doesn't apply to species that have red/dark red/purple foliage due to their specific ecosystem niche, or maybe an even greater constrain is at play ?
Animals with camouflage coloration don't need to be able to see that color themselves. They can find each other with chemical signals and sound while hiding from their predators.
"To be clear, there was color in the world before color vision. Plant leaves, for example, reflect green light even if there are no eyes to see it."
But also keep in mind that green plants are just the ones that won, there are other chemistries with colors that work nearly as well (particularly purple, which is still present on some plants).
So to recap, you're saying, "don't worry about what's going on in the US right now, because you still have it better than most of the world"
Just because something could be worse does not mean that 1. It's nothing to be concerned about 2. That we shouldn't take steps to improve the situation.
Things can always be worse, so this "logic" is always applicable. It's a vacuous argument. Even if you lived in the country with the worst homo/transphobia in the world, you could tell the person, "well, at least your alive."
Moreover, there's nothing constructive about this line of thinking. If people actually lived by this logic, we would live in a static world, because "it could be worse."
