bonestormii_

lol, yes, sure. But why don't you sound horrified?

Version control at least is essential for something of any size with any number of people working on it. You must be able to "revert" a set of changes quickly and reliably if the application has any importance at all.

Awesome, thanks for running the test!

I can't help but feel it is heavily impacted by ambience of the recording as well. The midi is of course a very rigid and literal interpretation of what the model is hearing as pitches over time, but of course it lacks the subtlety of realizing a pitch is sustaining because of an ambient effect, or that the attach is is actually a little bit before the beginning of the pitch, etc.

If it could be enhanced to consider such things, I bet you would get much cleaner, more machine-like midis, which are generally preferable.

Yeah, articulation should be standardized in the midi specification. It's always a custom mapping to control it even when proper articulations are available. "Oh cool, custom mapping?!", you might say. Wrong. It sucks, because it tends to make old old scores utilizing articulation unusable because the mapping was stored in some obscure plugin configurations divided amongst many plugins.

It would be great if articulation messages were standardized, and then you could just expect them to be there, and if they are absent, the soundfont can simply fall back to the closest thing available. That kind of helpful logic is not possible with custom mappings.

I wish more people thought this way about computing.

I think you are right in many respects. I would not consider myself one of the accused luddites, but in their defense, this ethos isn't baseless.

First and foremost, the luddites you speak of are programmers or sys admins. They have been using terminals and are still using terminals daily, and they see the benefits that those tools have to offer. Namely, they see composable, interoperable programs that abide by the philosophy that programs "should do one thing well" as the bench mark for real progress. I would say I agree with the merits of this perspective. But I still use VSCode in addition to vim, because I'm not a zealot and there are times when I want to edit something in a very flexible way that VS Code better facilitates.

Both ways of doing things have their merits I suppose. It just hurts a bit to see something simple and powerful be wrapped and rewrapped in progressively less helpful proprietary systems and given a JS front end that lacks all of the focus and freedom that charmed us with the systems to begin with.

I think it is perhaps a function of the way we train ourselves to be workers that passively accept tasks to occupy our attention. Much of school and many jobs provide anywhere from a drip to a torrent of regular units of work for us to focus on, and this occupies a huge part of time and training.

In the past, we used to criticize television for its passive, zombifying effect on the viewer. Games are more engaging. In truth, people like being actively engaged, and they are very accustomed to being actively engaged without the cumbersome work of directing their own activity.

Completing complicated tasks is, in a way, relatively easy. Defining tasks, reflecting on priorities, and allocating time to work on them--and importantly, suffering the emotional consequences of real world success or failure--is sometimes less pleasant. Games are maximally engaging and minimally taxing. That is their magic.

LoL @ "Perhaps Apple can't afford..."

It's all really stupid, actually.

The competition for the best schooling so that you can get the best job can indeed yield significant benefits for the winners. The private sector judges prestigious universities to be high-value; those universities use SATs to judge which students are high-value; and students judge universities as high-value based on their perception of what the private sector values.

All of this is apparently a filtration system designed to find the best and brightest candidates. Presumably, as many have mentioned, these are people with high IQ. And indeed, high IQ people are extremely noticeable when you are around them. They are frequently faster, more incisive, and have a knowledge base that is both deep and wide.

...And many of them are unproductive, valueless fuck-ups with poor temperaments for almost any work requiring a social component (i.e. almost all work). They have substance abuse problems. They have personality disorders. They lie. And many of them are also wonderful people.

I'll take a medium-bright, tenacious, responsible worker with a degree from a state school or community college any day of the week over some moneyed primadonna who is too busy trying to display their own cleverness to focus on the task at hand.

All of this judgement is stupid because it discounts character. Medium aptitude coupled with hard work can and does produce excellence. Focus, care, and attention to detail are at least as important as intelligence. The filtration process closes doors for these people.

Lastly, though this only an anecdote, anyone who's worked in the professional world has had the pleasure of running into idiot attorneys from prestigious schools. People who send e-mails full of misspellings, careless factual errors, and incorrect legal assertions beyond their specific scope of legal knowledge. Trust me, these people exist, and it's extremely difficult to explain how they exist if the filtration system is really the meritocracy it claims to be. It is frequently hacked as a vehicle for privilege.

The problem is that our legislators famously do not write or even read the legislation that they vote on. Sometimes it's strategic and intentional that a party will try to hold a vote on some 1000+ page piece of legislation with 24 hour notice. Other times, they simply don't care to read it, so they do not.

Actual lobbyists write actual legislation, in fact. And our politicians vote on them without having read it. It's a really stupid system.

It's easy to say that, but what do you expect the platform to provide? If the platform makes operating your business so trivial that they provide all functionality baked into the product, I would suggest that your business may lack novelty, and therefore it may also lack competitiveness.

"No code" doesn't mean you don't have to implement things yourself. You are simply limited to the platform's baked in abstractions in exchange for "not having to write code".

Your services may eventually not map well to the capabilities of the platform, and it may cause problems. In such cases, the easiest and likely best solution is to offload functionality to a private server running custom code that interacts with the interfaces to the existing platform.

The whole "no code" thing is spun as "empowering entrepreneurs", but there is a philosophy underlying it that implementation details don't matter, and programmers aren't needed. It may be true for some businesses who are in non-technical sectors, but if you are selling digital services themselves "no code" will only take you so far.

ooOOOOoooo

Why? This is not a completely novel concept, and a daemon is not a particularly complicated thing. You can use shell scripts to easily "daemonize" small programs. It's both fun and effective to do so.

Eh, I don't find this argument compelling. Insurance companies already have significant influence in the government, and the line from sugar consumption to health care costs has already been established. So if this is the concern, well... guess what... it's already the case.

Also, while there are examples of behavioral engineering taxes (tobacco, etc.), this can't really be applied so easily to a basic food item like sugar, which is in practically everything in varying degrees. People have revolted over taxes on tea, mind you. A coffee tax, sugar tax, etc. is nearly unthinkable.

Furthermore, this type of taxation is not correlated with already existing examples of socialized medical systems, and this concern over pleasure taxes is not typically expressed by opponents to socialized medicine. Rather, the issue I hear expressed is that people who have good insurance already are scared they will wind up with something worse, and will have no other options at that point. This belief seems to be related and magnified by the xenophobic tendencies of the American political right (the more vocal opponents of socialized medicine; though so-called moderate liberals don't really entertain it either). They believe that if we let marginalized groups have equal access to good medical care, it will dilute their own access, creating scarcity and resulting in longer wait times to get treatment. These people also generally fear 'big government', and characterize anything run by the government as inefficient and costly. Therefore, they essentially believe they will pay more in taxes than the cost of their existing insurance; that they will be subsidizing the cost of care for peoples they generally contempt (HIV meds for homosexuals; abortions for women); and will have worse care for themselves. That's pretty much the argument in a nutshell. It's extremely petty and self-serving.

But, it's not so much that their belief is fully incorrect. While it is likely that health care would cost much much less overall for everyone, it could reduce their presently-VIP access to essential medical treatment in some instances. They believe their money entitles them to better access to medical treatment.

In conclusion, the more realistic (and actual) good faith argument is that insurance companies already do lobby the government to prevent any legislation that would pose an existential threat to their industry, which has vast wealth and power. Socializing medicine is good for medicine, and bad for medical insurers. So, they pay politicians who perpetuate the beliefs I described above and resist meaningful regulation and reform of the medical industry.

This is simply a fact. No need to construct unrealistically contrived stories about pleasure taxes. Ask these people in private what they believe. They will certainly tell you!

Yeah you are right. There is no standardization to the way you interact with such things.

It's crazy. I started writing why I disagreed based on my visceral reaction to the topic. But as I constructed my arguments, they were not sound. So I suppose I agree? Hm.

The above paragraph is sincere--that did happen. And interestingly, it shows the power of consuming the opposing view point. We all know that the government is currently spewing lies, and it is indeed a disgusting and corrosive thing. I want to silence it, but it's easy enough to contempt it from a distance. Let the truth and the lies be heard so that we as a people will grow wise to it all.

This isn't really vendor lock-in, though. It's simply a technical/design lock-in. Going from unstructured to structured data presents problems, and if you do that, it's rightfully up to you to fix.

It is different from the vendor lock-in that prevents one from migrating from AWS to Google Cloud because all of your code uses their APIs and libraries specifically.

However, the effect is the same, of course. You are locked in! It's not necessarily a bad thing, but this is why you must choose your poison carefully.

That's crazy, IMO. This view supposes that the workers simply extract wealth from the company, rather than exchanging wealth for their time, which also has innate value to the worker.

Per this view, if a worker worked 100% of their time, they would have achieved their optimum goal of extracting the most wealth possible. But nearly all people who have made that trade would tell you they are depressed, feel run down, and probably think about blowing their brains out on a regular basis.

At some point, the plumber wants to go home, too. Now, maybe it's true that they'll take 1 hour to complete a job at a comfortable rate rather than the fastest-possible rate of 45 minutes, and maybe 4 jobs get completed that day instead of 5 as a result. But it is also true that the 4 jobs may be done with a greater attention to detail. Ever have a maintenance worker track filth into your residence with reckless abandon? What is the value of a more rested, present, and thoughtful worker?

You may argue that for a plumber, there is no value added in that. But I would argue that the value is there, even though the business owner can't extract it as revenue. It is there in the quality of the work, the happiness of the worker, and the happiness of the customer. It makes for a better world, and if you value your employees and customers as people, you'll see that interests are aligned.

All of that said, the economy is a thing. If your business is in a highly competitive market, it's easy to wind up with thin margins in a race to the bottom. But if that's the case, is it not the responsibility of the business management/ownership to either find a way to be competitive short of exploiting workers, or otherwise exit the market and pursue another venture?

At the lowest level, workers will be trained for and work the jobs that are available to them, and the jobs available will be dictated as a function of the the local demand for that service or product. If a small, poorly run, exploitative plumbing company can't find the margins to operate because they are competing with better services, they should cease to exist. The demand will remain the same, and their exit from the market place will result in growth for their competitors, and the jobs will be recreated.

If you are a plumber by trade and run your own plumbing company and can't find a way to exist without exploiting your workers, you should exit the market as a business owner and work for another company. Otherwise, your business isn't plumbing, but exploitation itself.

The "confidence" of senior people to push back is greatly enhanced by the fact that they won't be expediently fired for doing so. And even so, plenty of senior positions suffer from this situation as well. I'm living this hell right now.

Maybe! I've only ever glanced at it, but something between awk and python does sound useful.

For scripts requiring any degree of complexity regarding data structures or architecture, for sure, use Python.

But like, you can't just use Python to interact with your system. It will be such a pain in the ass.

Piping and redirection in Bash is a million times more concise and expressive. Working with streams like this is what it excels at. But if you need to to populate some data structure and access data by key... python is better.

Python's import system requires multiple lines. Python's spacing requirements require multiple lines and awkward spacing when typing directly in the shell. Sometimes you are writing a script, and sometimes you just want to do ${action} to ${file}_${i} in the directory.

You owe it to yourself to be proficient in bash if you are working a lot in a unix-like environment.

The interesting property is embedded in the parent's use of the word "emerge" I think. It is the property of emergence that takes swarms of ants and forms an organized colony, or a network of nerves that creates intelligence.

I think it's something along the lines of.... randomized interactions of entities, constrained only by the attributes of the entities.

Ha. I like you.

You see nationalization of industry as a pathway to revenue growth? I guess it makes sense, but somehow I always think about industries like healthcare being nationalized as a means of providing service, which is likely to cost the government more money

What industry would be profitable and appropriate for nationalization?

I'm skeptical that no level of taxation can support the government. Bill Clinton was able to balance the budget, and that wasn't so long ago.

The government collects trillions of dollars a year in taxes as it is. A significant percentage increase to the level of taxation against top earners would make a huge difference, and it is difficult to fathom what operation the government could run to remotely approach that level of increased revenue generation. What do you have in mind?

What would an appropriate revenue source be? I don't really think generating revenue should be the focus of the government as much as facilitating the growth of private industry through smart regulation, and then taxing them. The government is not a company. It shouldn't generally compete with private industry where it can be avoided. It's a meta organization that should focus on gluing the country together. It represents the people; the people should fund it; and it should support the people in doing so. It is an ancient model, and being a facilitator of private growth is not really all that passive.

I mean, there is a growing consensus that corporations need to pay more taxes, yes. I don't know if the public generally "vilifies anyone who understands taxes". Some certainly do. But I would point out that those two things are separate and distinct from one another.

I think there are greater obstacles for the collective of ordinary people being able to effectively change the law than reading comprehension, and one of those things is the nearly limitless capacity of large corporations to lobby government. The more they lobby, the less they pay, the more they earn, the more they lobby, the less they pay, the more they earn, the more they lobby, the less they pay, the more they earn.

You could add into that cycle "...the less money is available to fund the government, the less money is available for education, the dumber the people get, the less capable they become at managing their own government, etc...". Never minding of course that schools are largely funded by property taxes (stupid IMO), it still affects the overall availability of public funding.

Corporations should pay more because the tax code should be written to require it, not out of dumbness or virtuousness. The cycle of wealth inequality must be broken, and it's not a simple thing to actually implement a solution.

I'm sorry, but if being an expert in art, engineering, acting, AND directing doesn't make you a polymath, then precisely what does?

The author severely underestimates the universal genius of diCaprio.

Totally valid. I do like a vanilla vim though. It took some getting used to but I do find myself editing things in vim over ssh quite frequently and it is much easier for doing things like search/replace, etc.

Nano probably works too but I'm not nearly as proficient in it, so... vim!

Lol. I want to type full words, and feel that doing so is near frictionless. I access around 70 environments regularly, many of which are frequently re-imaged during testing, and I appreciate the fact that typing works the same on all of them. My co-workers also appreciate that I am not installing weird typing macros on our devices.

Efficiency for me is not the same as efficiency for you. Deal with it.

I'll also add that something like vim is specialized and very useful. It is easier to use vim in a mouseless environment, which is sometimes a necessity. I use it fairly well, and it has paid dividends on the time invested. I can appreciate the value of a good tool.

But typing speed is not the same as efficiency because standards are efficient in their own way. I'm sure you'll say "oh, you don't value words and have nothing important to say", but that's a ridiculous argument. It is simply that, in my opinion, this type of thing is not worth the overhead it creates, much like extremely customized vim configs. Time is invested in the pursuit of efficiency, and it is never returned. One day the config ceases to function correctly, or your friend/coworker/family member tries to use the keyboard and can't use it effectively, so it gets disabled.

Words are already extremely cheap and effortless though, and saying that they have a higher value than I appraise them for doesn't address some of the issues I addressed, such as the very real problem on non-universal configurations.

If you want to spend your time that way, that's cool with me. I like vim. Such things have their place. Personally, I suspect this doesn't solve any problems I have.

Right, but it's the vim effect.

For vim to become worth your time to learn to use effectively, you have to have a purpose to use it quite a lot. But it takes quite a lot of time, and causes quite a lot of errors in the mean time. Eventually, you are left with a skill and a tool that are a pleasure to use, but you literally must spend time actively learning how to use it. You cannot just pick it up, because you need to first memorize key combinations and the behavior of various modes. Then, you need to actually practice them.

And this proposed solution is even worse, because it suffers not only from the "vim effect", but from the "vim config effect", where you not only need to memorize, and practice, but actively configure your custom solution, which can take tons of time; is subject to loss/deletion; and is not universally available.

And god help me, what about programming? I honestly do not want to even think about multi-layered completions wreaking their havoc on everything I write, and the only alternative is different completions for different types of environments--even more cognitive load.

This seeks efficiency as represented by speed, but ignores efficiency as represented by ubiquity, generality, and low cognitive load.

If I want to get from point A to point B as quickly as possible, it is more efficient to run. If I want to get from point A to point B with the minimum energy expenditure, it is more efficient to walk. To be truly efficient, you need smart, balanced goals.