Should have just quoted what Hooke said... not sure what we're supposed to take away from this.
Readit Newsprvc commented on Robert Hooke's "Cyberpunk” Letter to Gottfried Leibniz mynamelowercase.com/blog/... · Posted by u/Gormisdomai
prvc commented on TextEdit and the relief of simple software newyorker.com/culture/inf... · Posted by u/gaws
>The best way to reclaim our digital experiences, though, might be to stick with the likes of TextEdit, software that is unable to do anything except follow our commands.
Man, if he only knew...
prvc commented on What happened to Apple's legendary attention to detail? blog.johnozbay.com/what-h... · Posted by u/Bogdanp
I've been a Mac user on and off since the 80s and I think one of the biggest changes is how separate the Mac ecosystem once was.
It reminds me of stories I've heard about the Cold War and how Soviet scientists and engineers had very little exchange or trade with the West, but made wristwatches and cameras and manned rockets, almost in a parallel universe. These things coexisted in time with the Western stuff, but little to nothing in the supply chain was shared; these artifacts were essentially from a separate world.
That's how it felt as a Mac user in the 80s and 90s. In the early days you couldn't swap a mouse between a Mac and an IBM PC, much less a hard drive or printer. And most software was written pretty much from the ground up for a single platform as well.
And I remember often thinking how much that sucked. My sister had that cool game that ran on her DOS machine at college, or heck, she just had a file on a floppy disk but I couldn't read it on my Mac.
Now so much has been standardized - everything is USB or Wifi or Bluetooth or HTML or REST. Chrom(ium|e) or Firefox render pages the same on Mac or Windows or Linux. Connect any keyboard or webcam or whatever via USB. Share files between platforms with no issues. Electron apps run anywhere.
These days it feels like Mac developers (even inside of Apple) are no longer a continent away from other developers. Coding skills are probably more transferable these days, so there's probably more turnover in the Apple development ranks. There's certainly more influence from web design and mobile design rather than a small number of very opinionated people saying "this is how a Macintosh application should work".
And I guess that's ok. As a positive I don't have the cross-platform woes anymore. And perhaps the price to be paid is that the Mac platform is less cohesive and more cosmopolitan (in the sense that it draws influence, sometimes messily, from all over).
This situation persists: for instance, try to write to an external disk formatted with NTFS using the GUI tools alone. Baffling why Apple doesn't simply obtain a license in order to gain this capability. Big unnecessary inconvenience, primarily for their own users.
prvc commented on Bertrand Russell to Oswald Mosley (1962) lettersofnote.com/2016/02... · Posted by u/giraffe_lady
Anyone wondering what might have prompted his evident change of attitude after already having engaged in a "correspondence" with Mosley should note that this letter was written during Ralph Schoenman's infamous tenure as Russell's secretary.
Dead Comment
An interesting prospective project for a technically minded musician would be would be to find an automated way to "correct" the surviving corpus of Welte-Mignon[1] recordings. They were designed to capture the small nuances of performances (such as dynamics), and a large number of historically important musicians made recorded performances in this medium before the era of sound recording. In my strongly-held opinion, the rolls were marked in an uneven and imprecise way, making direct playback on anything but the original recording apparatus inaccurate. A common trait of modern renderings of these rolls as sound recordings (as found on CD or on Youtube) is an unevenness of tempo and a seeming lack of synchronization of voices (really piano keys). However, the mechanical quirks and imprecision in the recording apparatus must be regular enough to allow for a more accurate version of the performances to be reconstructed, without relying on unduly many aesthetic assumptions.
None of the examples shown in the video are passable hoaxes. They are all obvious burlesque-style parodies, albeit made in bad taste. They all also have clear and prominent hallmarks of AI generation. Anyone fooled by these has got bigger, prior problems than any potential belief instilled by these videos.
prvc commented on The Death of the Middle-Class Musician thewalrus.ca/the-death-of... · Posted by u/pseudolus
I assumed the article would be about orchestral musicians (for whom there is a high, and increasing skill threshold) or session musicians (whose work is increasingly being replaced by computer synthesis). Instead, we get a very long narrative about a rapper who is still struggling to "make it" as a recording artist. In the era of sound recordings (which began well over a century ago) there is little incentive for the consumer to choose one with middling appeal over the most popular options. This makes the task of becoming a star, but on a small scale, a difficult one. Instead, a prospective "middle-class musician" must find a niche of some kind, perhaps by focusing on the local market. For example, a busker could potentially make more (than his cited $250k in recording revenue) over a period of 9 years with sufficient dedication.
prvc commented on YouTuber claims to have received an offer to buy the Commodore brand amiga-news.de/en/news/AN-... · Posted by u/daledavies
I didn’t have a NES growing up; my father didn’t allow “game-only” machines in his house. Instead we had a PET > Vic20 > C64 > PC over the years. Being I write code for a living, it seems his plan paid off for me?
That said, why can’t there be nostalgic 80s/90s consoles AND same-era computers?
>NES
No, I meant, if you want to provide video games, just provide whatever is current and popular. Also, they should research whether there is actually a need for this. One suspects that such a thing already exists.
For comparison, from 2.5 Pro ($1.25 / $10) to 3 Pro ($2 / $12), there was 60% increase in input tokens and 20% increase in output tokens pricing.