93 karma · joined September 5, 2014
It starts with a choir of ambient vocals singing "it's a sunshine", there's some bird noises and traffic sounds, a snippet of organ synth flourishes.
Then it all gets started - guitar, sitar, horns, strings a vocal duet singing "Shine your sweet loving down on me"
There's actually a ton going on, every few bars it changes things up, there's clever little harpsichord.
Then a male singer starts proclaiming "It's a sunshine daaaayyy", backed up by a chorus of "yeah, yeah, yeah"s. Honestly it's kind of catchy
The last 30 seconds or so are truly cursed, there's a voice in the right speaker moaning "wide eyed retina. mostly logical", which gets delayed, bitcrushed, and pingponged between the speakers.
Wow! I wonder why this specific track has so much going on compared to the others.
So far I've only read the first few chapters of the book, and the exercises often feel too difficult to me. But I think he does a great job of easing into mathematical notation, pausing to reflect on what a seasoned mathematician might be thinking when they come across that notation. He also makes a lot of analogies to programming, and has example programs that are easy to follow. It's helpful to have that angle to understand things from.
I think my favorite keyboard shortcut in IntelliJ is double-tapping shift to get a really smart search to pop up.
SuperCollider is much more general - you have a server that can build and execute graphs of unit generators, and a language that has a ton of convenience features for interacting with the server, and abstractions for scheduling events. (sidenote, I'm starting to build an audio patching environment using SuperCollider. It doesn't do anything yet but I'm hoping to have something soon https://github.com/YottaSecond/Triggerfish)
SuperCollider also has a great community - questions on the mailing list are usually answered within a couple of hours, and there's a team of people furiously working on the upcoming 3.7 release.
I love Pure Data to death, it has an amazing community and is actively being developed, but I have some trouble recommending it because of the aging Tcl/Tk interface.
ChucK looks really interesting. In most environments you need to write unit generators in C/C++ to actually do low-level audio processing. ChucK uses a "strongly-timed" programming model, where you can actually use the same language to process sound sample-by-sample and schedule things at real musical intervals.
Extempore is also worth looking into if you aren't afraid of lisp.
So yeah, it depends largely on what you want to do. The live-coding languages like SonicPi are probably the best for getting music going quickly, but the others all have unique things to offer.
Apart from that, I love the service, and I'm sad to see it go!
Antergos and Manjaro are both distros that try to streamline the process of Arch linux installation. I have yet to try either one, I wonder how well they work.
I keep hearing (mostly negative) things about the Common Core program in the US, I wonder what it's really like. Creative new ways of teaching always sound good on paper, but I hear so many parents complain about the way their kids are being taught. I wonder if most of those complaints are warranted, or if the new style of questions just take getting used to.
I've only found mathematics really interesting within the past few years, realizing how useful it is for creative things, like making music and art, or understanding programming at a higher level. If I had learned about functions in a more interactive way, maybe being able to create art on a computer screen, or write up physics systems in games, I think I would have been fascinated, and maybe the concepts would have stuck.
Especially if you're a lone developer - it's one thing to learn the intricacies of one platform (like web), but learning the ecosystems for Android, iOS (maybe you don't even own a mac to develop with), and native desktop apps... it's just too much work for one person. But if you could just write it once and have a good experience on each platform, wouldn't that be amazing? I guess that's what React Native is trying to solve, too.
I'd imagine the friction lawsuit had something to do with that.
The diffing operation is linear according to React documentation: https://facebook.github.io/react/docs/reconciliation.html
Is Array.prototype.concat linear, too? What about the ImmutableJS equivalent? I don't know a whole lot about algorithms, my intuition is that there would be a way to add an item to the end of the array without traversing the entire thing, but I guess it all depends on how the data structure is implemented.
I'm wondering if it will have lasting appeal, though, because ES7 should introduce async/await to javascript, which will probably replace the coroutine style.
Compare that to IEM's like the Sennheiser cx 300 - 5% of max volume at my computer might be too loud.
And it would surprise me if headphone usage at reasonable volumes is worse than going to loud concerts, even if you use headphones for long periods of time. If I'm at a concert or a loud bar for an hour or two, my ears feel really fatigued afterwards, everything seems quieter. I've never turned up headphones loud enough to experience that.
AoE looks pretty good. Some of then intro material I've looked at before doesn't go into much technical detail, and I feel like I'm missing the fundamentals.
But if I want to actually start experimenting with my own circuits, what should I buy? Should I order components one-by-one off of Digi-key when I think I need them? Or is there a nice starter kit of components that would get me started?
Newspaper ads don't animate and distract me from what I'm reading. When I flip to a different page in the paper I don't have to "wait ten seconds" to start reading. I've never had an ad spontaneously appear in front of the newspaper article I'm reading.
Newspaper ads don't track me, and no matter how sketchy the ad is, it doesn't put me a couple of clicks away from installing malware on my computer.