Optimal_Persona
Optimal_Persona on Hacker News
It's not ALL bad, when I recently replaced my 2012 MacBook Pro with a 2024 Air M3, I was pleased to see that Apple FINALLY allows tabbing in system pop menus for things like Save, Delete, Close and selecting those options with the Space bar. Not sure when that was added as default behaviour, but I always found this frustrating coming from Windows. The interesting thing is that precisely one app I used on the 2012 MBP - Ableton Live Digital Audio Workstation - always allowed keying through popups flawlessly - so the underlying capability was there.
I'm in a similar situation but a decade older. My "aha" moment came with Ivan Savov's "No Bullshit Guide to Math & Physics". For some reason working through this book "sticks" in a way that Khan Academy and similar online tools haven't. That, combined with randomly reading entries in "Mathematics 1001" have gotten me to where I can read through audio acoustics/DSP and information theory papers (my main area of interest) and understand what's going on.
https://minireference.com/
https://books.google.com/books/about/Mathematics_1001.html?i...
Professional, so I will get paid and own the copyright, AWESOME! Thanks for fixing the broken music economy.
Curious if anyone here is also familiar with loudspeakers built on the acoustic transmission line (TL) principle? It comes and goes in hi-fi circles, I have a bass instrument cabinet produced by the now-defunct Euphonic Audio. It's an interesting TL design featuring a whizzer cone on a 12" speaker. While it isn't the deepest-sounding bass cabinet I've heard, it is very balanced & detailed throughout its range with great projection, and no phase cancellation in the mid/high ranges due to the whizzer/no crossover design. Thanks!
TIL that Harvey Fletcher (who I knew from his acoustic/audio work, particularly the Fletcher-Munson loudness curve) contributed to the Millikan oildrop experiment. Thanks!
Another great resource for understanding what went on at Bell Labs is Richard Hamming's "The Art of Doing Engineering: Learning to Learn"
The Fred Dibnah stuff is some of the most impressive stuff I've seen, not just the scaling heights but the logistics of building the ladders as he went, and the demolition of large brick structures with a minimum of tools.
By pushing new lines on you even if you don't need them, creating very low expectations for technical service, and automating away customer service at every turn.
I feel like there is a shadow cartel where all telcos agree to suck as much as possible so there's no real incentive to switch. Also aggregators love re-bills where you pay them for another provider's invoice but they can't do anything service-wise on it.
At my work (in charge of 140 Windows laptops/iPhones) the only way T-Mobile would give me a deal on 30 new iPhones was by selling me 50 new SIMs for lines I told them I absolutely didn't need. I'm turning those off now. Don't even get me started on Granite or Telepacific, each of which make Comcast and AT&T look like shining examples of greatness.
Well to be fair, the rest of the billboards in SF off the 80/101 are generally bland and corporate AF. Gee, another HR/payment processing platform. Wow, a new iPhone! Anyone unfamiliar with the SF Bay Area's rich cultural history who was just passing thru would think it's a company town filled with docile, well-scrubbed tech serfs.
Funny, AT&T says they couldn't offer fiber to my address at my old house, or the one I moved to across the street. Of course I can get Sonic fiber at both addresses...which uses...drumroll...AT&T's fiber infrastructure.
It pains me especially that this is the company that way back in the day gave us Claude Shannon, Richard Hamming, and the transistor.
I don't know why they want to get out of the copper business...after 2022 FTC change, copper lines increased like 10X in cost and the provider has literally no legal obligation to provide uptime guarantee/support, sounds like a telecom's wet dream!
I still have a couple digicams, between the fact that they don't ping cell towers, and let me manually and quickly adjust exposures between shots, they still have a lot of value for me.
Besides his solo album "The Drop" and perhaps his production of Coldplay, not really!
Please tell me you don't have an army of chainsaw cat-bots at the ready to serve the cause!
Ooh those must sound glorious! I've never played through one, but have been close to Vox AC30 guitar amps cranked up loud!
For non-musician HN'ers, if you've heard Brian May with Queen, that's the sound of overdriven Class A EL84s!
From down the tubes to a much more solid state of existence...bravo!
Eek! The only time I've been bitten by a rodent was close to where this happened - sleeping overnight on the floor at a Merced punk venue my band played at, I was awoken by something nibbling on my hand. Not good, it was a rat.
I had to buy a laptop on 24 hour notice for a consulting gig I had. I really regret getting an Acer. Cheap construction, no discernible thermal management, and the screen would regularly go completely blank with the IBM MDM/corporate spyware the customer required, I had to do a paperclip reboot several times each time I used it. Also terrible IRQ latenecy for audio.
Besides that, any wireless speakers using Bluetooth - it's a garbage consumer technology that I can't believe became a standard. Curious if there was a superior "Betamax" to its "VHS".
Coming next - Microsoft CPO Lionel iPad tenders his resignation...something to do with intangible not-quite-right "fit" with the org.
Car drivers potentially face consequences in terms of loss of license, and should be carrying insurance if something happens. No equivalence for cyclists and honestly the Netherlands is the least safe I've felt as a pedestrian in regards to hostile cyclists.
I was going to say the same - does this follow 1V/octave standard, and is this available in Eurorack format? ;-)
As a musician recording ideas on a handheld Zoom recorder so I don't forget them, I switched from WAV to 320 MP3 a few years ago to save on file space and don't regret it.
I honestly didn't know that was a matter of contention at this point...it's very common for pro (or smart amateur) audio engineers to actually listen to the effect of different digital compression algorithms and adapt accordingly. Things like Sonnox Fraunhofer plugin let you do this.
https://sonnox.com/products/oxford-fraunhofer-pro-codec- In this month's TapeOp magazine, Jeff Jones mentions he always monitors through such a codec so he can adjust accordingly for the best sound regardless of final format https://tapeop.com/interviews/163/jeff-jones/
- IMO Rush's Moving Pictures is one of the best (and best-sounding) albums from the '80s despite the fact that it was mastered to a Sony digital device that's renowned as terrible sounding, with only 14 bits of usable resolution. How/Why? The production team monitored through the Sony system while mastering and made tweaks as they went to account for its limitations.
- I've had my own music professionally mastered at high resolution, and discovered that converting hi-res to MP3 (even at highest bitrate) caused digital peaks over 0.0 dB, I fixed by normalizing to -0.3 dB.
TBH if the resulting file is going to be transmitted over BlueTooth it's going to be further degraded. And yet people can still make a strong emotional connection to the underlying music and artist...
Please please please make it more informative about his production process than Marc Weidenbaum's 33-1/3 book on Selected Ambient Works Vol. II.
That's by far the most disappointing book I've read in that series (esp. given the author's history) - with all the anorak trainspotting detail about online album ID databases and song glyphs, but precisely zero insight into how/why RDJ did what he did sonically.
Well, 3600 billionths of a meter IS kinda close...just sayin'
I honestly thought this would be about retouching photos of buff men!
The French would claim it’s a feline word ;-)
IMO the visual wire/node paradigm of Max/MSP and Pure Data makes a lot of sense because it builds upon the "plug one box into another" interface that electronic music hardware follows, and because it can mirror electronic circuit layouts. I find it far easier to follow complex signal flows (especially with animated realtime diagrams showing numeric values in real time) in a visual layout vs. static text blocks.
Also more recent versions of Max/MSP have "mc" (multi-channel connections so you don't have to create separate wires/nodes for multiple identical signals) and text-based programming nodes with "~gen" and JavaScript.
Yes, and the fact that Tape Op subscriptions are free (at least for the US) is mind-boggling.