> Consciousness, which nobody really ever defines clearly
"An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism -— something it is like for the organism." [1]
My setups are pretty cheap as I did not want to put much money in it.
As for DACs, I have a €24 Hifiberry DAC+ and an inexpensive raspberry compatible DAC out of Aliexpress (around €12) on my two different setups (kitchen and living room).
Both work well and deliver good enough signal (I am not by anyway an "audiophile") I prefer the no-brand one from AE though as it has an IR receiver I am using to control media playing.
As for amplifiers, any stereo amplifier would work, so I choose a Lepai lp-2020a (€30 on amazon) in the kitchen. I have an old Marantz branded amplifier for the living room.
One thing developers of products like this can do is offer an accessibly priced license for individual users in a corporation. If it's an indispensable tool for me that I use at work, and the bureaucracy for obtaining even $0.01 USD from the company is not going to happen, the individual license can be a nice middle ground. I can write it off at tax season too.
I saw the Black Triangle UFO [1] in Duluth, MN about 10 years go. It went from a low altitude hover to a slow glide across the night sky. I was standing almost directly under it in a parking lot. I thought it was a strange pattern of new streetlights for a few moments until it started gliding. Always wondered what that was.
QT is more accessible than you might assume. The QT Designer comes with a number of templates to get you running quickly. Connecting UI elements to backend code is fairly straightforward as well, and you can do much of it using the designer UI itself. Documentation is also pretty great.
"An organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism -— something it is like for the organism." [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F