MomsAVoxell

Same year, 78'ish, my Dad takes me to his associates new office, where his assistant has just unpacked the brand new Commodore Pet. "We have no idea what to do with it, we just know we need it", says the associate.

I spend the afternoon unattended making pictures with PETSCII and poking around the user interface, which I remember as being difficult, and the very first time I encountered BASIC.

Been programming ever since. Literally still got almost every machine I ever hacked on in between now and then, also. ;)

I added Lua binding support for anyone looking for it, just got merged upstream ..

Same. Over and over again. Every time, learning new things. And then trying to port things from one system to another is how I became a disciplined cross-platform systems software developer. And then, when C was kind of new, I bought a compiler instead of drugs and booze, like my peers at the time. Oh, what a world that has wrought!

When I was 10 years old, way back in 1980, I got my first 5.25" diskette from the salesman of a COMPUTER AGE shop. He got tired of watching me type in the same old BASIC listings after school and spared me the damage of it by giving me the diskette, on the provision that I let other customers use the demo APPLE II's.

Sitting here now in 2026 I have a box containing almost 3000 3.5" FHD floppy disks.

Each about 1.544 Megabytes, unless you cut the notch.

I literally dumpster dived this resource after being invited in to do so at a local electronics shop closure, some years ago now, on the proviso that I did not leave empty handed.

There are about 12 devices in my living room that can use these things, but I'll never use more than 30.

Some day, I'll see the last one go. That'll be weird.

Presumably such a confident assertion is based on sufficient actual experience with slower safety protocols such that you can state, positively, that faster-moving processes produce safer, human-life critical, systems... ?

More like a “why not both” situation, imho. I have apps I could port to use this immediately.

Yes indeed, the Chameleon has been sitting in the rack for just this moment! :)

No doubt the MPC is a powerful machine - the comparison isn’t quite apt in that sense.

When there’s an open source ecosystem for MPC like the one for Zynthian, it’ll be an interesting time indeed …

I’d send you a t-shirt.

Zynthian is a Swiss-army knife of audio tools .. it is a pretty great synth host, but its also an amazing effects processor, audio/midi router, USB hub for other synths, mini-DAW - every usb audio class device you plug into it can be perpetually recorded, and so on. I’m not sure its in the same class as the MPC as an instrument, but it is definitely in its own class as a studio tool.

ContikiOS!

The fact that M-VAVE capitalized on a F/OSS synthesizer that has been well lauded as a great implementation of FM for a while should not be overlooked.

Other manufacturers could’ve done this. There are amazing F/OSS synth engines out there.

See also, the Zynthian hardware and the ZynAddSubFX synth.

And it has to be said, the Deluge has gotten pretty freakin’ amazing as a result of it.

SoundArt Chameleon?

Still got mine. That project produced some very nice effects and synthesizers ..

>M-VAVE

Lest we not forget about Monome NORNS and Zynthians too ..

NextStep, GEOS, Quarterdesk/X come to mind ..

Modern languages .. or more specifically .. modern compilers for those languages .. can surely sustain a pointer, capacity and length wrap to pointer until null ..

I’ve been into the retro scene for decades (Oric-1/Atmos!) and also am quite a synthesizer nerd, so I’ve been kind of keeping my eye on how AI slop is effecting these subjects with kind of a keen interest .. and let me tell you, things are getting wild and woolly, indeed.

There are folks who are taking 40–year old games developed for their favourite systems, packaging them into an emulator with AI slop, and bringing them into the app stores for a new generation to enjoy - and yes, this is great. Nothing quite like seeing Jet Set Willy on an Android phone, attribute clash galore… or seeing folks take the firmware for their expensive German DSP synths and running them, directly and simply, in a VST plugin built for the purpose.

This is all great and fun.

But it is getting exhausting for users - who rapidly experience a kind of personal fatigue of the infinite novelty.

The abundance can feel exhausting.

For example, in the past few months, there has been a revolution going on in the digital-synth scene in the form of the M-VAVE FM1 synth - a cheap ($60) little digital FM synth clone from a relatively unknown Chinese manufacturer, which had its firmware reversed and is now a veritable hive of new, user-generated firmwares.

Every day I log on to the firmware distribution hubs (which, themselves, are getting forked and AI slopped into oblivion) and see brand new firmwares doing wild and woolly things - and to be frank, its getting really exhausting trying them all. Almost to the point I might just give up synthesis as a first-class activity and just have AI write my tracks for me.

One solution to this dilemma is to just buy another FM1 dedicated to each firmware that might be of interest, of course its cheap so why not - but what an interesting phenomenon!

I have two predictions out of this:

1. Hardware will be more important than it ever was. The ones making money in the age of AI slop are those building hosts for it.

2. Traditional Software is irrelevant now - the Prompt Is God. Instead of downloading the firmware blobs and installing them, I’m at the point where I’d rather just have access to the original prompt which generated the firmware, run it through my own local LLM (running on my own private AI slop host), and get my own special firmware out of it. After all, the developer/user line which used to exist, has simply been obliterated. Every rock star can write their own firmware now.

Another thing I’ve noticed, which I’m less inclined to think is positive, is that folks are not playing with each other any more - forming community, contributing PR’s back to each other, improving the beach-head projects which got things started - but instead, going on this kind of insane mega-fork approach of taking something, running it through an LLM, slapping their brand on it, and disassociating themselves from the originator. Perhaps syndication is the solution, maybe the era of AI Guilds™ is on the horizon - but right now, it seems like an Ayn Rand’ian clusterfuck of epic proportions is going to kill the software industry.

I guess this is a form of #2, but I really don’t see much hope for the software industry any more. It was like all the doom and gloom that traditional commercial software folks were grumbling about when F/OSS started to gain traction, on steroids. On one hand, Windows didn’t die the spectacular death that folks in various F/OSS camps predicted/desired - but on the other hand, maybe the sad state of Windows today is a result of its designers kind of getting apathetic about things in the face of the major advances that Linux and co., have made since it was just a twinkle in Linus’ eye… The AI era just seems to be an extension of the F/OSS ideology that information wants to be free. And oh, how information is free now!

In any case, another thing that I think is going to happen as a result of all of this, is that older, retro hardware, is becoming way more valuable.

Heck, folks are doing insane things with old hardware now - and there is for sure a hardware revival going on in the retro- scene. Old platforms are being dug out of history and being made to do new, astonishing things - at an incredible rate. Want a multi-tasking, window-based OS for a machine that simply wasn’t designed for it - easy, LLM. Fetch! That alternative-timeline, you know the one where SGI made the tiBook and rose to the 21st Century position that Apple now occupy - why not just throw an LLM at the problem and produce that very SGiBook design?! Oh, you want your C64 to function as the interface to your DGX Spark9000? Sure, why not, LOL…

Tl;dr - Everything old is new again, and nobody is paying for any of it. Everyone wants to be a rockstar, nobody wants to be a roadie or light guy - including the audience, who are also now rock stars... so I’m just gonna ‘make guitars’ now, I think ..

Still got my BeBox, boot it up every year just to make sure its still okay. I have wondered about that paint job over the years ..

I look forward to being able to plug my iPad into my non-touch MacBook, though, and using its touch screen as an external MacOS-touch enabled peripheral.

That’ll hold me over until the next generation of touchscreen MBP’s, or at least until touch is just a normal feature in the Apple world, whichever comes first ..

You issued nothing but falsehoods about the cause of the suffering of the children of Gaza, actually. Apropos errors of ones ways…

Just because you get “anti-American slop” doesn’t mean your “pro-American slop” is accurate, nor productive in the context of world affairs.

Americans are among the most propagandized because they are taught theirs is the greatest among all nations from birth, even though it really, really isn’t.

Cool. Now do extremist Likud party members and their frothy-mouthed children-hating warmonger allies in the US Congress.

Think they give a shit about civil rights?

Carefully side-stepping the responsibilities of the nation in the region with undeclared nukes, which was literally founded by active terrorist groups, does not help your argument...

The children of Gaza are being murdered by American bombs, dropped by Americas allies, with permission, in full view of the rest of the world. Because Americans and their allies have deemed those children inferior.

Claims of superiority on the issue of civil rights are, therefore, null and void.

Not to mention the criminal omission in their argument of the US' support for the willful, daily murder of children every single day for the past few years in Gaza.

Contemptible.

>Most terrorism in the last 60ish years is associated with some Arabs and also some Islamists, and with or in cooperation with, anarcho-Marxists like Bader-Meinhof, Brigate Rosse/Red Brigades, antifa, etc.

That is blatantly false and you are indeed manifesting the very example of the ideology I find utterly contemptible.

37 million refugees from America's heinously vile wars, this century alone, beg to differ. The two million dead Iraqi's - and the children born to their descendants, daily, with congenital birth defects as a result of the widespread distribution of depleted uranium, certainly have had their human rights utterly abrogated from a distance by America's overtly racist ruling class, also.

And then, there's Gaza.

I have no respect for a nation that justifies the constant, daily murder of children. A nation that has dropped one bomb, on average, every 15 minutes for the past 25 years - on mostly innocent people - deserves a lot less respect than you seem to imply. It is certainly no shining example of civil rights.

Your in-group is not my out-group, but it's not my in-group, either. I prefer to participate in cultures which protect human rights - at the level of children - above all else. America is not one of them.

If your state has to murder children - or supports states willfully murdering children - in "self defense", then it is a failed state.

Period.

As for Booker T Washington, that was over a century ago. His work nevertheless had to be continued via Martin Luther King and company.

Try to keep up to present time. The US is the worlds #1 funder and supporter of terrorism this century, bar none.

Yes, the frothy-mouthed ideation of the US cultural identity is just as frustrating to have to contend with as any other ideology. I've met great Iranian folks and great American folks, and great Russians too - and what they all have in common is the ability to reflect on the limits of their own cultures.

Give it some time - its good that we have such alternatives, because they'll still be there the day Sony decides not to support your particular OS incantation.

Yeah, its pretty much turtles all the way down to the "Trusted" Secure Enclave, too, isn't it .. I mean, does anyone really know what is running on that thing. (FreeRTOS, usually.)

See, I happen to think that racists get some kind of perverse self-actualization from manifesting degradation of cultures they consider inferior - that there is a real 'buzz' to be had from such fallacious elevation as required to justify bombing another culture into oblivion. The murder is its own reward in such circles.

The "terrorism" tranche of this hate culture is particularly jarring, since the ones claiming moral altitude over 'terrorists' are delivering far, far more terrorism than their supposed enemies. It's just been homogenized.

The similarities with the Gwion Gwion artwork of Australia are really fascinating:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwion_Gwion_rock_paintings

I truly hope to witness some questions being answered about these artworks in the years to come .. maybe some AI/ML archeology will reveal more details as the time ticks by ..