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_kb

3,654 karma · joined March 3, 2013

Signals and systems enthusiast. Appreciator of determinism. Technoplebeian.

https://simple.industries/about.html

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_kb··on Show HN: I reverse engineered Apple's video wallpapers
What do you mean Windows Vista "nostalgia"? That makes me feel a little long in the horn.
_kb··on Unusual uses of OEIS sequences on GitHub
For the music application, Max Cooper uses items that appear in the OEIS catalogue pretty heavily. IMO, his works sound amazing. Tracks like Aleph 2 (https://vimeo.com/367747083) or Fibonacci Sequence (https://vimeo.com/991635293) stand out as immediate examples.

For something more mainstream even Tool lean into the Fibonacci sequence theme with Lateralus, almost to a meme level.

_kb··on Introduction to Computer Music (2009) [pdf]
> Is thinking about music as applied mathematics a good way to create good music? Or is it just the most easily digestible model of music for the crowd on this site?

It's a great way to analyse music (e.g. to categorise, understand, and communicate detail), but that does not mean it's a good way to create it. There's a lot of beauty in finding those abstractions and I think that representation appeals to a lot of people here.

Discussions about timbre, instrumentation, and stylistic influence are often symmetric to those about math. When you have 90 minutes to spare, highly recommend strapping in for a listen to https://malwebb.com/notnoi.html.

There's a lot of really incredible musicians, composers, producers, and educators that go deep on the math. There's also plenty that don't. People build mental models in different ways. That's a good thing and a big part of what makes most art interesting.

_kb··on My Journey to a reliable and enjoyable locally hosted voice assistant (2025)
Like a light switch?

Or do you mean a button that activates chunked recording, passes it to a speech-to-text model, forwards to an LLM to infer intent, which triggers HA to issue a command, over a wireless network, to the computer with the light attached, to tell the light to turn on.

_kb··on Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
And if you'd like to get a little meta: https://clackernews.com/item/690.
_kb··on Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans
Or https://clackernews.com/.
_kb··on Anthropic officially bans using subscription auth for third party use
Unfortunately, and “Attention Is All You Need”.
_kb··on Covering electricity price increases from our data centers
Turn them into biogas to create more energy for DCs.
_kb··on Exploring a Modern SMTPE 2110 Broadcast Truck
That's certainly true to an extent. Other commenters have already highlighted necessary complexities. There is absolutely a lot of very entrenched "ways-of-working" that add unnecessary complexity, as with every domain. Not everything is a technical problem though and the social / process side of this sort of setup is what can make it work at all.

The approach that you're hinting mostly describes the general direction of remote production (https://video.matrox.com/en/media/guides-articles/what-is-re...). The big traditional players are already across that (https://www.grassvalley.com/ampp/, https://www.rossvideo.com/use-cases/remote-production/), AWS also has a plethora of services to lock you into their stack (https://aws.amazon.com/media-services/), and there's interesting new players too (https://www.tryiris.ai). There's a heap of different workflows out there, and OB trucks like the one highlighted here are just one of those.

_kb··on Exploring a Modern SMTPE 2110 Broadcast Truck
ST 2110-22 is codec agnostic. It just standardises CBR compression, for which JPEG-XS is a good fit today.

For plug-and-play IPMX (https://ipmx.io/about/) is looking to be a pretty promising approach that combines ST 2110 with NMOS, auth, encryption and other useful features. It's targetted at the ProAV market but IMO should be mostly suitable for consumer use.

_kb··on Claude Opus 4.6
Platypus on a penny farthing.
_kb··on Contracts in Nix
This is a really good take.

I think the core caution is this is not type-level checks. Anything this validates still needs to be eval'd. It's not a guarantee of correctness for all inputs but does look to be a fairly light (and useful) tool to make unexpected states easier for you and others to identify.

_kb··on Antirender: remove the glossy shine on architectural renderings
Predicated 90% humidity at 3am this evening does not fill me with a great amount of joy.

I think the above commenter may be referring to the rather more unfortunate UK climate though.

_kb··on Antirender: remove the glossy shine on architectural renderings
Hard disagree. This is what brutalism looks like in sunny, subtropical Brisbane, Australia: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:QPAC_Exterior.jpg

If the straight concrete isn’t your thing, they’re also currently extending it with a glasshouse: https://www.snohetta.com/projects/queensland-performing-arts...

_kb··on Prism
For images surely this is the next pivot for hot dog / not hot dog.
_kb··on People who know the formula for WD-40
https://smellslikewd40.com
_kb··on Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms
If so, one benefit is you can quickly and safely mix up your set of agents (a la Inverse Conway Manoeuvre) without the downsides that normally entails (people being forced to move teams or change how they work).
_kb··on Draig, a Welsh Programming Language
It's already been linked in comments here but there's been a bit of exploration in that area with Hedy. There's some good references to prior work and comments of relevance in this paper https://hedy.org/research/A_Framework_for_the_Localization_o....
_kb··on Qwen3-TTS family is now open sourced: Voice design, clone, and generation
In a live conversation context you can mention the term NFTs/web3 and if the far end is human they'll wince a little.
_kb··on Qwen3-TTS family is now open sourced: Voice design, clone, and generation
It's a good thing governments (https://www.ato.gov.au/online-services/voice-authentication) and banks (https://www.anz.com.au/security/how-we-protect-you/voice-id/) haven't gone all in on using voice as an authentication mechanism.
_kb··on Tree-sitter vs. Language Servers
> It is possible to use the language server for syntax highlighting. I am not aware of any particularly strong reasons why one would want to (or not want to) do this.

This is an area where TS excels. It also supports nesting of different languages so a query can inject other languages [0] and compose different parsers.

As an example, this can be a straight forward as a simple comment parser [1], jsdoc [2], regex [3] etc. Or in more complex cases various DSLs. Each of these can then define their own injections too. When working with CI pipelines in particular it transforms an opaque wall of YAML into slightly more manageable CST which is incredible useful for both humans (syntax highlighting) and any machine parsing you may want to do.

[0]: https://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/3-syntax-highlight...

[1]: https://github.com/stsewd/tree-sitter-comment

[2]: https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-jsdoc

[3]: https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-regex

_kb··on List of individual trees
And here I was excited to see disjoint subtrees of Wikipedia's articles.
_kb··on The insecure evangelism of LLM maximalists
That is not novel - see language/framework choice, OS (or even distro) preferences, editor wars, indentation. People develop strong opinions about tools, technology, and techniques regardless of domain. LLM maximalists just have the unfortunate capability to generate infinite content about their specific shiny thing.
_kb··on Code and Let Live
Check out LXC and the wider Incus set of projects: https://linuxcontainers.org/incus/.

Running IncusOS on some local hardware with ZFS underneath is a phenomenally powerful sandbox.

_kb··on Ask HN: How can I get better at using AI for programming?
AIstrology is a term I can get behind.

I think that really captures what I find most irksome about the fanaticism. It's not prompt engineering, it's a statistical 8-ball being shaken until useful output appears.

Just as with any pseudoscience, it can offer a glimmer of usefulness by framing problems in a different way. Just be cautious of who's offering that enlightenment and how much money you may be paying for it.

_kb··on Turtletoy
https://tixy.land/ is another where the constraints encourage creativity. A lot of these tools are a little like tiny demoscene.
_kb··on Ask HN: How many people got VPNs in response to laws like UK Online Safety Act?
Setting this up through your router / network infra is one possible path.

Another AU citizen here. I've been beefing up our home in prep for these laws too.

You can use policy based routing to send traffic through a few VPN egress points depending on either domain, or IP based country lookup. Most providers will let you keep simultaneous connections up. This then applies to all devices so streaming apps works well (e.g. for my partner to access her home country's public broadcaster) and any complexity remains hidden from others you live with. From there, a wireguard tunnel for personal devices back through home means you can keep these same paths active when mobile.

I'm looking forward to the level of networking and systems knowledge these laws will encourage across future generations.

_kb··on UK Government plans new powers to label dissenting movements as 'subversion'
…and UK population plans to continue labelling policy makers as a bunch of gits.
_kb··on Search tool that only returns content created before ChatGPT's public release
The secret is you then have to heat up that goo. When the temperature gets high enough things get interesting again.
_kb··on Making Crash Bandicoot (2011)
There was a great conversation with Matt Godbolt on CoRecursive recently [1]. It was a bit of a dive into how some of those abstractions are a lie and, particularly in early game dev, how you can create magic by realising that then exploit how the hardware actually works. Highly recommend a listen.

[1]: https://corecursive.com/godbolt-rule-matt-godbolt/

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