Look at the table of contents.
55,260 karma · joined January 9, 2011
Back and forth in startups, megacorps and everything in between.
Not much of a coder anymore, more of a management drone. But I think I've gotten some good ideas pulled together over the last few decades.
(get me at banehn [at symbol] gmail.com)
To become good at something you have to work through the lower rungs and acquire skill. AI does all those lower level jobs, puts the people who need those jobs for experience on the street, and robs us of future experts.
The people who benefit the most are those who are already up on top of the ladder investing billions to make the ladder raise faster and faster.
Instead it goes down the midi path, which of course ultimately is the dominant commercial technology today. But I've always thought that the complexity and expense of a good midi setup is more of a prosumer-type thing.
Tracking gets you quick entry from chiptunes through extraordinarily expressive sampling to VSTs and even into midi at the edges, and there's trackers for pretty much every kind of computer that can make music.
You can very cheap/free/easily explore the main musical concepts presented here from synthesis to digital audio.
Bonus, most classical tracker files are a kind of "open source" music in that you can see all the note data, the techniques the composers used, and have access to all of their instruments. You get to "see" both composition and performance details down to the note.
I really wish that the academic computer arts educators would catch on to these core pieces of the demoscene -- which is now UNESCO recognized by now six countries as intangible cultural heritage for all of humanity -- and were developed to both challenge and wow the audience and make production by literally penniless children possible.
When you home-base, you're producing more in terms of text, longer form emails, documents, spreadsheets, presentations etc. So having a keyboard+monitor+mouse is important.
When you are on the road, you really just need to make calls, text, get driving directions, send short emails, etc. Occasionally make a presentation, which is doable off of the phone without any external devices.
I've done this workflow in short spurts and it's frankly really fantastic, modern productivity tools usually have an Android app version that's fine, or a web-app version that's also fine. I was often also making calls from the same phone that was driving my KVM.
Pretty much the only thing preventing me doing it permanently is multi-monitor support at "homebase", and sometimes being able to print sanely on a corporate printer setup.
I started mine with a spare NUC and some portable USB drives and its grown into a beast with over 100TB spread across a high performance SSD backed ZFS pool and an unRAID array, 24 cores, running about 20 containers and a few VMs without breaking a sweat and so far (knock on wood) zero data loss.
All at a couple hundred dollars every so often over the years.
One performance trick it supports is also letting you overlay fast SSD storage over the array, which is periodically moved onto the slower underlying disk. It's transparent, so when you write to the array you can easily get several hundred MB/sec which will automatically get moved onto warm storage periodically. I have two fast SSDs RAIDed there and easily saturate the network link when writing.
The server basically maintains itself, I only go in every so often and bump the docker containers at this point. But I also know that I can add another disk to it in a about 10 minutes and a couple hundred bucks.
What Java really offered was allowing companies where software development is a cost-center minimize costs and reliably automate business processes with lower-skilled (and paid) software developers. Reliability is probably the number of one destroyer of value with software, and requires more development time, better developers, and the worst-case threat of downtime.
It "eliminated" most of the things that make software hard by simply getting rid of memory management as a problem. Doubling down on OOP and services everywhere let's companies divide and conquer software in ways that better align with business units. Many runtimes (VMs) had various types of sandboxing which boosted security in a very immature infosec world. Being slow (at the time) wasn't a problem as companies could just buy more hardware and still get the reliability that they needed.
Java has to be looked at as the entire ecosystem, and the TCO for an all Java world is generally lower than with an all C++ or C world, or an all Perl or Python world. Being the new COBOL is also why Java so rapidly took on "enterprise" cruft as a big part of its identity.
If you can get past all of that and are just looking for a nice, batteries included, language to work in, with a great cross-platformm highly performant, VM, Java is a great language. Its added a lot of nicer things in the last few years as its starting to shed a lot of dead weight that accumulated during the worst of the enterprise software ClassFactoryFactory years.
There are reasons it took off so well, and designing around the intended user community is one of them.
There was one employee who brought his own desktop publishing setup. It was a souped up desktop PC and some other kit, but it had the latest MS-DOS, Windows 2.x, Windows 3.x, and GEM - plus a bunch of art and desktop publishing software (I believe Pagemaker).
It wasn't entirely clear at the time what the future was, so it was perfectly reasonable to have all this in one place. I remember at some point noting how similar GEM was to GEOS on my friend's Commodore 64, but how much snappier it felt and how much crisper it looked.
I remember Computer Chronicles being on the air at that time, but never connected the dots that what I was looking at on the computer had anything to do with the co-host. It was a bit dry of a show for a kid, but consistent with the day. But even then I remember Gary clearly being an expert, and I identified much more with him than with Stewart.
A few years later when my family finally bought a PC compatible the only offering for operating system and desktop environment came from Microsoft. They had simply annihilated everything else on the market. By then all the software I knew from the desktop publishing suite and my friends ran in either MS-DOS or Windows 3.1 -- or it ran on an entirely different system (C64, Macintosh, etc.). So we just sort of accepted it.
I remember at some point getting a modem, dialing into BBSs and coming across GEM on a warez board. I downloaded it, had some memories, then moved on. It never evolved the software ecosystem around it that Microsoft managed to create.
Anecdata: My paternal side has some kind of innate preference for walking on your toes. I prefer it, my father's mother was well known to have done it, I have a couple cousins like that. While I can't speak for other family, I did go through a massive battery of aptitude and psych tests when I was young as part of the agonizing initiation into the curse of childhood giftedness. No autism.
I've become very concerned in the last few years how our society produces diagnoses that turn into self-inhibiting labels that restrict personal development. Developing ones-self, as much as you are able, is an ancient and treasured tradition. Modernity seems to be leading us to the reverse and to shackle ourselves with the weight of imposed limitations.
For those not familiar, trackers are a type of music composition software that's been around in one form or another since maybe the mid-80s. [1]
Used very heavily in the demoscene, chiptune, and adjacent parts of game development scenes.
The power of trackers is in the workflow, which provides an incredibly fast interface for writing music compare to other interfaces like piano rolls, staves and notes, multi-track DAWs and so forth. They take a bit to get to used to, but allow you to compose basically as fast as you can type notes. This speeds up iteration in testing musical ideas substantially. The interface concept also lends itself to a very compact representation of multiple tracks allowing a composer to see what's happening elsewhere in their composition.
It can feel a lot like programming in many ways, and like you are working a level "below" almost all other composition software and closer to the music and instruments.
The format lends itself very well to compositions in 4/4 time, but most tracker software lets you change the time signature, tempo, and other things so that very complex compositions with weird rhythmic patterns are not too hard to pull off.
There are dedicated tracker software for all kinds of musical workflows: sample-based, chiptune, NES, MIDI, VST, modular synths, etc. and tracker software exists on pretty much every platform and targeting nearly every output audio device you could possibly imagine.
There are literally millions of tracked pieces of music in the world, covering an innumerable number of genres.
Best of all, most tracking software is free, or incredibly cheap, well documented with videos showing you how to do things and thousands to hundreds of thousands of examples you can open to see how a particular musician accomplished something.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_tracker
2 - Here's a tracker I particularly like who works in a lot of styles, especially tracks "Living, again and again" (both mixes), "Accidental Ray of Sun (Piano Mix)", "Aurielis (lf box mix)", and "Transitory"
https://soundcloud.com/elblanco5
According to a comment, he did most of this in a tracker called "Impulse Tracker" which is now replicated for modern systems as "Schism Tracker" - a completely sample based tool.
However, this is the culmination of the construction of a cathedral to science. Every stone laid one atop another from our first comprehension of the cosmos to our emergence from our long dream as the center of a deity constructed universe has resulted in a discipline that can not only conceive of other spheres we can stand on, to entire other systems of spheres we can now see.
This is magnificent.
The path to figuring it can be long and sometimes improbably. For example, somebody I know was watching a youtube channel they like, and one of the creators put out a side-video about a short informational cartoon they made about their own journey discovering they had endometriosis -- which also echoed this same diagnostic pattern.
My friend saw something in the cartoon that seemed familiar, decided to go get a biopsy, and voila - a lifetime of pain was finally answered. She was in her late 40s, and decided to just go get surgery and now a few years and a hysterectomy later lives pain free.
Pay it forward, don't pay it back. I don't even want gratitude in most cases and never expect loyalty, I'm satisfied if they turned out successful. I just want them to help others and keep the karma moving forward.
When I do connect again with my helpers and/or those people I've helped, we're suddenly part of a greater family and lineage of helpers than would ever be possible if it was just paid back.
As somebody who's setup a lot of little retroboxes, the idea of doing it once and having my collection served off of my homelab to all my other devices is incredibly appealing. Web-based emulation has come a very long way. Still I prefer to play off of my individual devices many of which don't have good browser support.
Setting those systems up can take hours each, but being able to point something like a Batocera instance or an ES-DE setup at a server and have it self populate with roms, bios files, screenshots, etc, would be a dream. It sounds like this might be the future of the emulation ecosystem and it sounds amazing!
The last few times we visited Europe, the car rental places basically defaulted to either electric or automatics, but all three options were virtually the same price, or the manual is only a few Euros cheaper.
This last time we went to Spain, picked a manual, got to pickup where they told us they didn't have a manual and would we mind a free upgrade. Sure! They offered us an electric. We needed to do a lot of driving so we asked if they had something else, we ended up with a Toyota crossover Hybrid (CR-Z maybe) which was a CVT.
Merp.
I don't know the stats but it seems even Europe is starting to shed manuals. I don't know if its the popularity of electrics that has finally busted through or some other cause.
Another anecdote, we sometimes ended up a taking taxis while in Spain and Portugal, not a manual in sight, which was notable enough that I remembered it.
It's a bit of work, but I suspect you can arithmetic your way through the problem. Supposing they wanted 60 Hz on the display and a framebuffer you need 196,608 bits/24,576 bytes/24 kbytes [below] on a 1-bit display at 512x384.
The Mac 128k shipped with a Motorola 68k at 7.8336 Mhz giving it 130560 Hz per frame @ 60 fps.
IIR the word length of the 68k is 32bits, so imagining a scenario where the screen was plotted in words, it's something like 20 cycles per fetch [1], you can get about 6528 fetches per frame. At 32-bits a fetch, you need 6144 or so fetches from memory to fill the screen. You need a moment for horizontal refresh so you lose time waiting for that, thus 6528-6144 = (drumroll) 384, the number of horizontal lines on a display.
I'm obviously hitting the wavetops here, and missing lots of details. But my point is that it's calculable with enough information, which is how engineers of yor used to spec things out.
1 - https://wiki.neogeodev.org/index.php?title=68k_instructions_...
below - why bits? The original Mac used 1-bit display, meaning each pixel used 1-bit to set it as either on or off. Because it didn't need 3 subpixels to produce color, the display was tighter and sharper than color displays, and even at the lower resolution appeared somewhat paperlike. The article is correct that the DPI was around 72. Another way to think about it, and what the Mac was targeting was pre-press desktop publishing. Many printing houses could print at around 150-200 lines per inch. Houses with very good equipment could hit 300 or more. Different measures, but the Mac, being positioned as a WYSISWYG tool, did a good job of approximating analog printing equipment of the time. (source: grew up in a family printing business)
The equivalent for a real world person would have been to
1) know what a brokerage was
2) find one
3) drive there and fill out some paperwork to make the account
4) deposit a paper check or cash at the location
5) get a phone # with a specific broker at the brokerage
6) subscribe to a local paper with the stock section
7) watch one of several thousand stocks, and write down by hand the movement of the stocks to see if you could set a strategy
8) maybe buy subscriptions for some investment magazines, a few hundred dollars per year
9) decide the time is right, call your broker, leave a message with his secretary to get back to you
10) wait for that to happen, then place your order. your broker would then charge you a percentage (up to 3% of your trade!) as their fee
11) Angry men in a pit in NYC would yell at each other for hours to make the trade. The trade would be communicated on scraps of paper with hastily written numbers, then shouted over a phone on the trading floor
12) wait for your broker to send you physical mail with your certificates or a record of ownership showing that the trade closed several days after you placed it with him
13) go through a similar process to sell your stock certificates, but then have to self track capital gains for your taxes
Can you name a single reason why you think a poor person living paycheck-to-meal would even know about or wish to participate in this?
Things got better with the internet, which didn't exist for most people until I was an adult (I know because I helped start an ISP), it still cost $30 trade electronically and settlement still didn't happen for days. So somebody making hundreds of dollars a month would have to lose $30, just to make a bet of whatever they were able to scrimp together over months, in the hope it would turn into more than $30 so they could sell it and make money above the trading fee.
Again, why would a poor person, who may not even have a bank account, be a participant in this?
So, to help with your incredulity, why would somebody, who is from a poor family, with not a single person around them trading stocks, most without full-time employment, take a brief class when they were 10, retain those precious handful of classroom hours, until they get lucky enough to have disposable income decades later and suddenly decide "I'm going to trade ETFs" <insert rich yacht buying cat meme picture>
Most people don't work in companies with a 401k, or even with any benefits at all. Why would they be familiar with managing one? Next time you eat out, trade some tips with your waiter on how they diversify their retirement investments. Ask them which ETFs they like, and if any have especially low fees, or do they pursue a market segment strategy. What's their opinion on I-bonds? Maybe they have a prediction if Cathie Wood is a cook or not?
> All the things you lists are things I personally associate with familial education.
I absolutely agree. Or some good mentor. If your entire family runs paycheck to mouth, the likelihood of somebody able to guide you towards a low fee brokerage that provides you with the financial advice to differentiate between different investment instruments is vanishingly small. Even people who make it into white-collar jobs with 401ks are likely to only vaguely understand that it's something more than a weird savings account they can't touch.
Investment takes a certain kind of stomach and can be a very expensive training exercise. Lots of people don't do it well, even highly sophisticated and educated investors.
I remember we spent a couple weeks on stocks and bonds in a class in middle school, but basically zero time on personal finance, how loans work, how to read legal paperwork, run a ledger, etc. Those have almost always been a "learn on the job" thing since I've been alive.
- how to buy stocks, what ETFs are, what a 401(k) is, etc.
- hiring people to clean your house, do yard work, etc.
- traveling out of the country, or in many cases, how to take a plane to a part of the country that's too far to drive
- how financing works, ranges from personal credit cards to mortgages, and thus what TCO means. The number of people I grew up with who were fine with 12% on a car loan and what that meant to the final cost of the car is flabbergasting
- how to buy high-quality (expensive) stuff vs brand recognition (expensive) stuff
some anecdotes:
- a friend of mine recently did retire after 30 years in the government, wanted to buy stocks, had no idea what a brokerage was
- another guy I know, an airline pilot who grew up in a broken home and ended up with a business degree, figured out how to buy stocks, but didn't know what index funds were or that they exist outside of his 401(k)
- perfectly middle class people who will spend all weekend cleaning their house and doing yard work, and hate it, who thought hiring a cleaning person and lawn mowing guy would be too expensive ($35k-50k/yr)
- a lot of people I know are afraid to travel to non-English speaking countries even if they've been outside of the U.S., they can't fathom that you can get by in most places with English, a translate app, and pointing and smiling. Even tourist friendly places with plenty of English signage and English speaking help like France or Japan are unfathomably exotic
I'm flagging you both.
The both of you,stop making things up.