alisonatwork

I remember back in the 90s there was somewhat of a backlash against the 303, which presumably was part of what Norman Cook was getting at with the name of the song mentioned on the top of this thread. Ironically - or perhaps deliberately - that track was peak unimaginative/tedious usage of the instrument, which is funny because he had also done some much more elegant takes in his Pizzaman project.

For me it never felt like the 303 ever got really overdone in mainstream electronic music. Certainly there was the riff from Pump Panel's Confusion remix showing up all over the place, and there were a few tracks that got a high rotation on MTV like Daft Punk's Da Funk and Josh Wink's Higher State, but I don't think it was ever really ubiquitous outside of acid music, which is already a niche genre. Like, we never got 808s & Heartbreak for the 303.

It was definitely controversial inside the synth community, though, where hardcore analog and modular synth nerds scoffed at it being so limited and toy-like, and everybody - young and old - resented it becoming so expensive and sought-after, which in turn raised the prices of other vintage synths that according to the rumor mill could do a decent approximation if you programmed them just right.

Rebirth busted that market by making the basic essence of the sound available to everyone, and there were plenty of bad acid tracks that came out during that period, but I think that's also when the opportunity was there for it to really break through as a serious instrument. Later VSTs like Phoscyon took inspiration from mods like Devilfish and more elaborate clones like the FR-777, building on the 303 base to create the kinds of sounds that in the old days might have required a lot hacking/patching up of different instruments to construct. But by that point it was clear that the mainstream didn't really care.

I'm at work right now so don't have access to my music library to share specific favorite tracks, but there is still so much great music featuring the 303 coming out - it never stopped. There is stuff for people of every taste. If the more unsubtle stuff doesn't work for you, you might want to check out Mighty Force label, which has been putting out a bunch of IDM/braindance and pleasant electro music recently that sometimes has delightful uses of the 303. Also in the back of my mind for more IDM-ish and electro stuff are Analogical Force, Virtual Urban Records, HC Records, Nocta Numerica... There's a bunch more in that vein, plus all the usual suspects doing big room techno, hard party acid, all-hardware synth jams etc etc, but you probably need to dig in any case. I tend to find even the best albums only have one or two tracks that are to my taste, but everyone is different so it's great that there is so much out there.

Unfortunately it really is a niche thing that only appears to speak to certain people.

As someone who feels like the sound of the 303 touches me deep in my soul, it's constantly disappointing to be reminded that other people don't hear it the same way I do. You can even see it in comments on this post where expressing a love or appreciation for the actual sound of the silver box is dismissed as elitist or something because lol whatever, any old synth sounds just as good. Most people either can't hear or don't care about what makes it special, which perhaps explains why it never became respected as a mainstream instrument like the 808 did.

Fortunately the clones these days are very cheap and very good and music has become so easy to obtain that you can visit Bandcamp every week and still find new tracks featuring the 303 and its descendants. Every now and then you might hear a 303 in a mainstream tune and it's a treat, but if you just love the sound and don't mind listening to music that few others get, I don't think there's ever been a better time.

The first UNIX account I ever got was on a BSD, and the first thing I saw in the first file I learned how to open was:

  # A righteous umask
  umask 22

I'll never forget those lines because they seemed so mysterious and cool. And they informed my philosophy on how the internet should be. People should be able to see other people's stuff by default. It's nice for us to be able to learn from one another. It's harder to rely on the honor system for privacy nowadays, but I still think "share by default" is a noble ideal.

That said, I also am unsure how best to overlap aliases and configs that are sensitive to my workplace with my everywhere config. Maybe I should have a .employer file that I source if it's there, but something about including that into my everywhere config feels decidedly not righteous.

I agree that it's neat to have software synths that can run in the browser nowadays, but this isn't really a good TB-303 emulation. The accent doesn't have a slow enough attack to create the "wow" effect, which is a fundamental aspect of getting any random acid line to sound properly 303ish. Not to take away from what it is, but for a synth that has been cloned and emulated as often as the TB-303, your description is overselling it a bit.

This is a weird quirk of history. I feel like open source, and especially free software, was at least left-adjacent when I was coming up in the 90s. The bad guys were the megacorps. Open source was the counter-culture. I guess it changed around the dotcom boom.

Netscape feels like a big part of the story - a company staffed with hackers coming out of a public-funded research institute who rewrote a closed-source version of their browser that quickly killed off the predecessor and helped the company to a massive IPO. Then, only when threatened by a more established player, they finally open-sourced it. From the outside that came across more as a Hail Mary than an authentic expression of principles. Around then we also had the Red Hat IPO, the Slashdot/Andover/VA Linux thing etc. It was clear by then that open source had become another gimmick that capitalists could leverage to compound their wealth, rather than a fundamental belief that users of a piece of software should have the right to modify and reconstruct it as they see fit.

Nowadays capitalists love open source because their startups and big tech investments are the users - open source provides free labor whose products these companies can repackage and sell as a platform. Meanwhile a lot of that "free" labor is no longer done by hobbyists or researchers, but by workers at other for-profit companies looking to boost their personal brand or the company's profile, so the whole motivation to contribute has changed too.

My mother worked in academia on the teaching and administrative side and said it was pretty much the same there too. In her experience even at public universities, it was all about the money. In order for the department or faculty to justify itself, it needs to bring in revenue, and the number one way to do that (along with those research grants) is international students. But the most reliable source of international students who can afford the fees are not necessarily the world's best and brightest, they're the kids of wealthy elites who see education as a business transaction - we pay, you pass our kids. So the syllabus is adjusted to suit, and the teaching methods are adjusted to suit, and in the end everybody suffers because the system becomes structured around keeping the money train coming in. The education still happens, just like the research still happens, but it's happening in a suboptimal fashion, or as a side-effect rather than as the primary focus.

Sometimes I think about tapping out of private industry and getting into academia because in my imagination at least the work would be more pure, but then I think back to the stories my mother told me and realize most likely it isn't.

I agree that the only answer seems to be serious change at the highest levels of government, i.e. revolution. Aside from advocating for that, it seems the best we can do is try exist within these systems and find niches where we can create value for society without feeling too much like our morals are being compromised in the process. It's not easy.

It's not just a way for landing a job either. It's also a ticket for white collar immigration on "specialist" visas that have a much shorter waiting list, higher quota or better perks than regular work-based visas. I was blown away the first time I heard people talking openly about this in my field - it was considered totally normal for them to pay money to have an academic portfolio constructed on their behalf specifically for the purpose of having these "published papers" and "unique research" on their record so they could qualify for "specialist" visas. It adds a whole nother layer to the warped idea of good immigrants vs bad immigrants.

I understand what you are trying to say, but I also feel like these kinds of statements don't really add to the discussion. In fact, they distract from it.

If someone says "government A has a bad policy on issue X" and then the response is "yes but government A also lifted people out of poverty", it's not addressing the original point about the failings of government A's policy on X. We know that governments are capable of lifting people out of poverty in the abstract because governments B, C and D also succeeded in doing so. And we know that the ability to lift people out of poverty is not directly connected to their policy on X because B, C and D each had varying policies on X and still lifted people out of poverty. So why even bring it up?

The discussion is not about which governments are capable of lifting people out of poverty, it's about whether it's a good idea to have laws that mandate communication providers scan all channels for CSAM, even those that are ostensibly encrypted. If you know something about the incidence of CSAM in China and how it compares to countries with less invasive internet surveillance, that would be something pertinent to share. Even a comparison of general violent crime statistics or terror incidents versus other East Asian countries with a similar culture could be interesting. Unfortunately it's hard to get trustworthy statistics from China on these topics precisely because the government is authoritarian and its censorship apparatus actively hampers this kind of social research and independent reporting.

I was surprised when it happened to me too, but it seems to be an anti-feature that has been rolling out for some time now[0]. The ability to use a password has vanished completely.

The thing that makes it particularly egregious is that Booking.com is literally designed to be used on the road, from any location anywhere, on any weird device you might have access to at the time. There's no guarantee that whatever janky airport wifi allows IMAP, or that your phone can receive SMS in whatever country you're in. Forcing 2FA - or now apparently just the "1FA" of magic link/OTP - has made the service useless for its primary purpose.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/Bookingcom/comments/1hl055b/cannot_...

When I lived in China a common way of "logging in" was to enter an OTP sent to your phone via SMS. By the time I left a few years back it seemed increasingly that signup and login flows were on the way out in favor of simply using your phone number anywhere and everywhere as a personal identifier and OTP or in-app notifications for authentication.

This recently happened to me on Booking.com and... I ended up not using Booking.com to book a hotel. So long, genius status, or whatever.

It absolutely drives me nuts that the western world is moving to "as seen in China" login-via-callback flow. Aside from the privacy issue of forcing people to attach an email or phone number or third-party auth provider to their every account, it's just a waste of time and energy to delete our passwords and force us through this weird multi-app flow just to log in to a service we spent years logging into without ever getting hacked. Imagine if every time you wanted to get into your house you had to press the doorbell and then wait for someone to call you back to decide whether you should be allowed in. It's absurd.

I'm mostly backend but have been fullstack in a few positions and remember expending a bunch of political capital advocating for moving to React when it first came out because it seemed to solve a lot of problems we were having with projects that used Angular or a jQuery patchwork. I still think that it was the right decision at the time, but what React has become today is so much more esoteric and spaghetti-like that I'm not sure having it "win" was the best thing for frontend.

Now I actively go out of my way to avoid doing any fullstack because I spend more time trying to fight against the various fragile towers of incantation-like hooks than just implementing the business logic in a way that feels readable and maintainable. I'm not sure there is a way to remove the complexity either, but so much of modern programming with React just feels unintuitive and convoluted, which is exactly the opposite of how it used to feel when it first came out. I'm not sure how to solve it.

I'm not sure what the parent poster is getting at about information on Chinese business, politics and culture being hard to find because that stuff is widely written about in the global media, and there are plenty of English language sources. It almost seems counterproductive to provide links to resources because it's artificially limiting what you will be exposed to, but here we go anyway...

China Media Project (media analysis) - https://chinamediaproject.org/

China Leadership Monitor (political analysis) - https://www.prcleader.org/

Made in China Journal (social analysis) - https://madeinchinajournal.com/

What's on Weibo (pop culture reporting) - https://www.whatsonweibo.com/

The China Project (formerly SupChina, general reporting) - https://thechinaproject.com/

* edit to add: seems like The China Project shut down end of 2023, but leaving the link for context

Sixth Tone (state-owned media specializing in human interest stories) - https://www.sixthtone.com/

On the state-owned media tip there are also more blatant propaganda outlets like Global Times, People's Daily etc, plus private-owned media that largely toe the party line like South China Morning Post.

There are also a set of mostly US-based thinktanks that do solid macro-level reporting on geopolitical and economic issues, guys like Jamestown, CSIS, German Marshall Fund etc.

Then there are countless blogs and newsletters and influencers who report on specific niches, everything from economic analysis to boyslove fandom... You can jump on Bilibili to watch shows and see all the "bullet chat" jargon and memes, you can rub shoulders with the upper middle class on Xiaohongshu, read millions of Steam reviews or check out the forums of games popular in China, follow ABC or expat channels on YouTube etc. I find it very hard to believe that people in 2025 can't find any information about what's going on in China.

All that said, I do share the sense that there is a bit a trough between Chinese tech workers and foreign tech workers, and it's because most Chinese tech workers don't tend to prioritize learning English to the same degree that tech workers around the rest of the world do. There are lots of publications that report on the Chinese tech industry from an investor or economic perspective, probably written by all those MBAs who went to study overseas, but nerd-to-nerd level exchange is lacking imo. I suppose you could ask an LLM to summarize content from v2ex.com (HN-ish Reddit), tieba.baidu.com (Reddit-ish Reddit), segmentfault.com (StackOverflow) etc, but that doesn't really do much to engage in a social way so I'm not sure if it's what you're looking for. Chinese-language Github projects are one place you could explore, if you specifically want to interact with developers over there.

This latter piece is something I am struggling with.

I have spent 10+ years working on teams that are primarily composed of people whose first language is not English in workplaces where English is the mandated business language. Ever since the earliest LLMs started appearing, the written communication of non-native speakers has become a lot clearer from a grammatical point of view, but also a lot more florid and pretentious than they actually intended to be. This is really annoying to read because you need to mentally decode the LLM-ness of their comments/messages/etc back into normal English, which ends up costing more cognitive overhead than it used to reading their more blunt and/or broken English. But, from their perspective, I also understand that it saves them cognitive effort to just type a vague notion into an LLM and ask for a block of well-formed English.

So, in some way, this fantastic tool for translation is resulting in worse communication than we had before. It's strange and I'm not sure how to solve it. I suppose we could use an LLM on the receiving end to decode the rambling mess the LLM on the sending end produced? This future sucks.

You can kind of extrapolate this meta layer if you switch languages on the same topic, because different languages tend to encode different cultural viewpoints and emphasize different things. Also languages that are less frequently updated can capture older information or may retain a more dogmatic framing that has not been refined to the same degree.

The edit history or talk pages certainly provide additional context that in some cases could prove useful, but in terms of bang for the buck I suspect sourcing from different language snapshots would be a more economical choice.

FreeTube and PipePipe largely solve this problem for me. I just subscribe to people I am interested in and watch their videos. If they link or recommend another creator I have a quick browse and subscribe there too, or not. When I get bored, I unsubscribe. Everything is chronological. It's like the good old days of mailing lists/usenet/blogs/RSS except with video.

The only downside is that it's still centralized behind the scenes so you still get the weird algorithm gimmickry inside the content like people superstitiously saying or not saying certain words in the first few minutes, nonsense like "nothing to add, just commenting for the algorithm", that weird tendency to dopily repeat the same sentences around what I guess would be an ad break if I ever saw ads etc. I try to mitigate this by sending money to specific creators, showing that an alternative income source to YouTube could be possible, but of course that's still funneled through Patreon which is another centralized for-profit service that has a vested interest in getting creators to provide membership tiers and value-adds that chip away at their motivation to put out meaningful content that enriches broader society.

I've come to think that centralization is a bigger problem than "the algorithm". I don't remember having these issues anywhere near as much when people shared their stuff independently. To be fair, though, back then most people were doing it as a hobby outside of their day job.

It's not worth getting upset about. I am sure there are leftists who read HN, but the popular tone of the political commentary here tends to slant pro-capitalism, libertarian, anti-woke, meritocracy, dark enlightenment etc. It makes sense if you understand the website as a market research slash hype incubator for an American venture capital firm. Many of the people posting here are actively employed in the get rich quick startup scene and even those who aren't are still likely to be amongst the wealthiest segment of society due to their work. Almost certainly the vast majority are men. It is what it is.

The comments here are not representative of broader society, but they can sometimes be interesting to gain a sense of where an influential chunk of the global tech elite is at. I have heard HN political or social talking points echoed in the mouths of leadership at company all-hands, and non-HN reading friends at other tech companies have mentioned similar themes at theirs, so there is some value in having this window into the culture as an early warning system.

Every country has the talent, software development isn't some esoteric knowledge. But even if you imagine that only people in developed countries are capable of writing software, there is Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Taiwan for starters.

I don't think it makes sense to focus on the US when three of the five companies in the article are from Germany, Netherlands and China. The problem is not America per se, it's the pattern of large and often (but not always) foreign companies extracting wealth from what used to be hyper-local operations.

Now imagine you live in one of the other 190 countries of the world who do not or no longer have significant players in the industry because they were crushed by those five foreign companies. It's not competition when the wealth and power is so disproportionately held by the same people in the same places.

Basically, this. I already spend all the energy I have available for socializing just going to work five days a week. The idea of people socializing outside of work for the sake of work is supremely depressing to me. It's like, so now I need to do something I find utterly exhausting in order to succeed better at this other thing that already completely destroyed me because... capitalism?

I can at least understand on an intellectual level that there could be personal benefits to socializing with people outside of work, but when work already sucks everything out of you then it just feels like a cruel joke to suggest an introvert get into "networking" and here's a list of weird, creepy, manipulative tricks to do it better. Surely the article must be a parody?

To me the core purpose of code review is clear - knowledge sharing. If the only person who knows about a particular change is the person who wrote it, then you have a critical point of failure. If there is an issue in a subsystem whose owner is away or who has moved on, that issue is likely to take much longer to resolve if the person on the case is looking at the code for the very first time.

An AI maximalist might say that code review is no longer necessary because in the case that there is an issue in a subsystem nobody is familiar with, you can simply ask the AI to read that source code and come back with a report of where the bug is and a proposal of how to fix it. And, since code review is useless anyway, might as well take the human out of the loop entirely - just have AI immediately commit the change and push it to production and iterate if or when another issue emerges.

This is the dream of autonomous, self-managing systems! Of course this dream is decades old at this point, and despite developing ever more complex systems it turns out that we were never quite able to do away with humans altogether. Thus, code review still appears to be useful. But it's only useful if everybody goes into it with the mindset that the goal is knowledge sharing. If the outcome of a review is not that everyone comes out of it with a good understanding of the purpose and function of the code being committed, then imo it was a waste of time.

In theory this makes sense, but in practice now that LLMs are writing the PR summaries we just have even more slop to wade through to figure out exactly what the change is trying to achieve. I think the slide in this direction already started with exhaustive PR templates that required developers to fill in a whole bunch of fluff just to open their PR. The templates didn't make bad developers good, it just caused them to produce more bad content for review.

My experience with LLM-generated summaries is the same as it was with the templates: many complete them in a way that is entirely self-referential and lacking in context. I don't need a comment or a summary to describe to me exactly the same thing I could have already understood by reading the code. The reason for adding English-language annotations to source code is to explain how a particular change solves a complex business problem, or how it fits into a long-term architectural plan, that sort of thing. But the kinds of people who already did not care about that high level stuff don't have the context to write useful summaries, and LLMs don't either.

The worst thing I've seen recently is when you push for more clarity and context on the reasons behind a change, and then that request gets piped into an LLM. The AI subsequently invents a business problem or architectural goal that in reality doesn't exist and then you get a summary that looks plausible in the abstract, and may even support the code changes it is describing, but it still doesn't link back to anything the team or company is actually trying to achieve, and that costs the reviewer even more time to check. AI proponents might say "well they should have fed the team OKRs and company mission/vision/values into the LLM for context" but then that defeats the point of having the code review in the first place. If the output is performative and not instructive, then the whole process is a waste of time.

I am not sure what the solution is, although I do think that this is not a problem that started with LLMs, it's just an evolution of a challenge we have always faced - how to deal with colleagues who are not really engaged.

I had this experience even before LLMs, in particular when working with developers who came up in a non-western educational environment. There was a mindset that the only thing that matters is making the boss happy, and in a code review context the reviewer plays the role of boss, so the mindset is "do whatever is required for the boss to stop complaining", not "how can I learn from the knowledge this person is sharing". It's a fundamental difference in how people relate to one another professionally, and I think LLMs have spread this kind of attitude into broader cultural contexts - the devaluation of critical thinking and learning as a necessary part of the job and a more mercenary focus on uncritically churning out whatever the boss asked for.

The doomer perspective would be that people are getting dumber and more complacent and that this will unravel society, but that might not actually be the case if we consider that the mindset already existed in other societies that still thrive. Perhaps the people who never really gave a crap about the quality of their work were right all along? After all, despite the fact most of us are in the top 20% of earners in our countries and easily the top 10% or an even more elite minority globally, end of the day we are still "code peasants" who build whatever our boss told us to build so that an ultra-wealthy investor class can compound their wealth. Why should we waste our time caring about that? Why not get an AI to grind out garbage on our behalf? Why not focus our energies on more rewarding pursuits in our personal lives?

Of course I am playing devil's advocate here, because for me personally being forced to show up for work every day thanks to capitalism and then doing a half-assed job makes me more depressed than trying to excel at something I never wanted to do in the first place. But there is a part of me that understands the mindset and wonders if my life might be easier if I shared it.

Anyway, prior to LLMs I dealt with this phenomenon by reluctantly accepting that most people don't care anywhere near as much about the quality of their work as I do, and that it was hopeless trying to change them. Find the few who do care and prioritize actually-productive knowledge exchanges with them. Drop your standards for people who clearly don't care. If the code doesn't meet your standards but it's still more-or-less functional, just let it go. You might imagine it'll reflect poorly on you, except in reality management doesn't care anyway - the push to AI all the things right now is the "mask off" moment. Every now and then you'll still find a motivated junior who really is passionate about getting better and then being a part of their growth is still rewarding.

Not really, because the security of letters is guaranteed by the state. The security of Discord is guaranteed by some private citizens based in the US. At least on paper the state exists for the benefit of the people. Discord exists for the benefit of investors who primarily seem to operate out of China and the US - foreign countries to me.

This is basically what Microsoft wants to do with Recall and they got slammed for it. Which drives me nuts because it's the only feature from the recent AI hype wave that excites me because it's the only thing so far that sounds like it will actually make my life better. But then I thought about it a bit more and I realized that what I really want is not AI, I just want my computer to have a detailed local history and search functionality.

My computer should remember everything I did on it, period. It should remember every website I visited, exactly how far down I scrolled on each page, every thought I typed and subsequently deleted before posting... And it should have total recall! I should be able to rewind back to any point in time and track exactly what happened, because it's a computer. I already have a lossy memory of stuff that happened yesterday and that's inside my head. The whole point of having my computer remember stuff for me is that it's supposed to do it better than me.

And I want the search to be deterministic. I want to be able to input precise timestamps and include boolean operators. Yes, it would be helpful to have fuzzy matches, recommendations and a natural language processing layer too, but Lucene et al already did that acceptably well for local datasets 20+ years ago. It's great we have a common corpus, but I don't care about getting tokenized prose from the corpus, I care about the stuff I did on my own computer!

From my perspective LLMs don't bring much value on the personalized search front. The way I understand it, the nature of their encoding makes it impossible to get back the data you were actually looking for unless that data was also stored and indexed the traditional way, in which case you could have just skipped the layer of indirection and queried the source data in the first place.

I am also curious to see how all of this develops. I get a sense that the current trend of injecting LLMs everywhere is a temporary stop-gap measure used to give people the illusion of a computer that knows everything because researchers haven't yet figured out how to actually index "everything" in a performant way. But for the use case of personalized search, the computer doesn't actually need to know "everything", it only needs to know about text that was visible on-screen, plus a bit of metadata (time period, cursor position, clipboard, URL etc). If we currently still need an LLM to index that because snapshotting the actual text and throwing it into a traditional index requires too much disk space, okay, but then what's next? Because just being able to have a vague conversation about a thing I kindasorta maybe was doing yesterday is not it. Total recall is it.

On podman this is built in as native command podman-image-scp[0], which perhaps could be more efficient with SSH compression.

[0] https://docs.podman.io/en/stable/markdown/podman-image-scp.1...

This is a cool idea that seems like it would integrate well with systems already using push deploy tooling like Ansible. It also seems like it would work as a good hotfix deployment mechanism at companies where the Docker registry doesn't have 24/7 support.

Does it integrate cleanly with OCI tooling like buildah etc, or if you need to have a full-blown Docker install on both ends? I haven't dug deeply into this yet because it's related to some upcoming work, but it seems like bootstrapping a mini registry on the remote server is the missing piece for skopeo to be able to work for this kind of setup.

This is basically it. When I started programming in C, I used a debugger all the time. Even a bit later doing Java monoliths I could spin up the whole app on my local and debug in the IDE. But nowadays running a dozen processes and containers and whatnot, it's just hopeless. The individual developer experience has gone very much backwards in the microservice era so the best thing to do is embrace observability, feature toggles etc and test in prod or a staging environment somewhere outside of your local machine.

I think it's the same reason why phones killed cameras and portable music players. It's neat to have dedicated devices that do one thing well. It's even neater to have one device that can do all the things. It's easier to transport, easier to store, easier to clean and so on. From a sustainability perspective it's probably also generating less waste, although I don't have enough knowledge in materials science to confirm that notion.

I sometimes wonder if this impulse is part of the appeal of LLMs for the people who use them for everything - not that they're actually better at anything, but just that they're kinda good enough at all of the things to make it easier to consult them than to consult dedicated sources of information.

We already have that and it's Wikipedia.