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braindongle

349 karma · joined November 17, 2017

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braindongle··on Programmers generate every possible melody in MIDI to prevent lawsuits
Love the spirit of this work, but nobody is an authority on what a melody is. How many different tuning systems were used? Why 8 notes? Why not 0..n notes? [0] Is a given melody, realized at 10ms per beat a melody? How about a 17-month pause before the first note? [1] Absurd? Sure. But who decides where the boundaries are? Lest one think that there is only an appeal to extremes here, check out Polansky's beautiful Lonesome Road, and put boundaries around melodies [2].

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Larry-Polansky-Worlds-Longest-Melody/...

[1] https://universes.art/en/specials/john-cage-organ-project-ha...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0aIifUv1Tmk

braindongle··on Do I Need a VPC?
Yes. Also, if you're not serverless but are containerized, ECS/Fargate has a simple workflow through the console that in turn runs Cloudformation and sets things up (VPC, gateway, load balancer, security groups...) with sensible defaults. You do still need to learn how to lock things down, inbound/outbound rules especially. For pros, the console is simply not the way, but for your first Spiffy Dockerized App, this is great.

Also, the new Amazon-managed firewall rules for web-apps are killer for app developers who are not security pros![0]

Lest this sound like Fanboyism, our long-term strategy is Firebase, calling AWS APIs when necessary :)

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/announcing-aws-managed-rule...

braindongle··on Guessing smart phone PINs by monitoring the accelerometer
By locked down, do you mean requiring justification to get through the app store or accessing the data at all? The latter is no problem for iOS-only [0] or Flutter [1]. I've been spending much time with cross-platform sensor access in Flutter. It works.

[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coremotion/getting...

[1] https://pub.dev/packages/sensors

braindongle··on Show HN: Build your own Vim emulation for VS Code
Yeah, I was thinking I may have been a bit aggro there. It's just a coincidence that I only recently embraced IDE life (finally!), and it's in no small part because of this extension. Cheers.
braindongle··on Show HN: Build your own Vim emulation for VS Code
Let us not disparage VSCodeVim in the least. #1: .vimrc support. Simply huge. Not everything is there, but a lot is.

Also, they are responsive. The big outstanding thing for me is Code's behavior with respect to opening a new file/buffer. Tabs are owned by splits whereas it's the other way around in Vim, and that's fine, but the Vim default of replacing the active file/buffer must be!

I figured out a workaround [0] just this week with a little help, but more importantly, after suggesting that this feature make it into the extension, I received a prompt reply [1]. These people are doing great work that really matters for me professionally.

Good luck implementing the 8,000,000 Vim features that you use and don't even think about by starting with nothing but a context for mode-switching.

[0] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/60216168/vscode-open-fil...

[1] https://github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim/issues/4559

braindongle··on Signs you’re working in a feature factory (2016)
Disagree. This is an endorsement of accepting the fact that your work, your professional work, done by most of us at a job, makes you feel like a cog, a unit of production. It is better called a surrender than a compromise.

Surely it's often case that life has people in this sort of scenario and there is no realistic way to a new path. In that case, sure, take care of your loved ones and yourself, stay put, and make the most of it. This scenario arises from the messy mix of circumstances and decisions. There is no blame.

But! "Change jobs if you must", must, be changed to "Change jobs if you can.", especially for younger people. It's not mature to accept an unfulfilling job. It's a life-scale bummer. Tenaciously go after fulfilling work. Don't write off 1/3 of your remaining life. An approach that worked for me: distance yourself from the profit motive. It's not that hard.

braindongle··on SoundCloud raises $75M from SiriusXM
https://soundcloud.com/willhaslett

Will check out your stuff! Incidentally, I've toyed with the idea of "usefulmoose" for an artist name. [adjective-that-people-like][animal-that-people-like]. Good formula.

braindongle··on SoundCloud raises $75M from SiriusXM
Do you create music independently? Have you tried to distribute it? If not, from where is your expertise? If so, maybe your music isn't that good? That's the responsibility that I take.

I have just over 8,000 listens on Soundcloud. I have good reason to believe that the great majority of those are real. It's quite satisfying. My hobby has perhaps connected with some people, in the magical way that music does. If I were better at it, it wouldn't just be a hobby. :)

braindongle··on SoundCloud raises $75M from SiriusXM
Yes! Soundcloud, to me, is meritocracy in music today. Are they, will they, be as evil as everyone else in sneakily selling personal data? Sure, that's beside the point; a society-wide problem. Soundcloud provides a direct connection between fully independent music creators and an audience, large or small. If my music were that good, I would blow up on Soundcloud, at some scale. Disagree? Ask Billie Eilish what she thinks of Soundcloud.
braindongle··on Firefox 73
Did a little more reading and, my bad. For both Android and iOS the LastPass app works within browsers. No extension needed. Was maybe trying to justify not switching my life to FF from Chrome because PITA. Oughtta just do it.
braindongle··on Firefox 73
Still no LastPass on Android. Why is this so?
braindongle··on Scientists Sue FCC for Ignoring Cell Phone Radiation Risk
Publication bias is rampant. Bad science is everywhere. You have to read the papers. The last reference is indeed worth noting. But even there, look at the main finding.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3907669/ This is a correlational study with multiple comparisons and no statistically significant results. In the only outcome reported between cases and controls, cell phone use was (insignificantly) protective for tumor incidence. As for the case-case comparisons, in the best case those are highly susceptible to confounding, and, contrary to the implication in the abstract, they didn't find anything.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29530389 This is a rat model study wherein rats were exposed to cell-range RF from before birth to death, for 19 hours per day. The positive finding was at 50 v/m , 40% higher than the highest measured value (during an outgoing call)[1] that I could find offhand. So yeah, if you strap your phone to your head and have an outgoing call going all day every day, and your phone's field strength is crazy high, and you're a rat, you might have a problem.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28472042 "No association between mobile phone use and glioma risk was observed across the total population (OR 0.98; 95% CI = 0.88–1.10)..., there was an association between long-term mobile phone use and glioma. However, the analysis was limited by significant heterogeneity between trials and the paucity of data on long term use (10 years)." The funnel plot, an indication of publication bias, does not look good. This is in a reputable journal and appears to be a legit systematic review. Their positive finding can't be dismissed offhand.

[1] https://thescipub.com/pdf/10.3844/ajeassp.2009.771.774

braindongle··on Loudness war
Thanks for mentioning those other plugins. I'm not serious about mastering (it's about the tune!), but now I'm curious, and the FabFilter mastering bundle may have to go on the wish list.
braindongle··on Loudness war
Well, perceived loudness is a tough nut to crack for sure, but that's what's in question, and my evidence is here: https://soundcloud.com/willhaslett Enjoy! Same "league", "planet", whatever. My work is plenty loud when I want it to be :)
braindongle··on Loudness war
It's an interesting thing. When you participate in this war as a creator of recorded music, as I do, you're sacrificing dynamic range so that your track fits in with everyone else's. For some types of music, it's a trade-off worth making, for others, not so much. Getting close to what the pros do is pretty straightforward if you have experience and a real mastering tool. Those tools are getting smart about analyzing your track and building an eq/compressor/limiter/maximizer stack that rocks, but the gods of top-40, for example, can make real magic happen when it comes to loud-but-not-distorted.
braindongle··on Flutter vs. Other Mobile Development Frameworks: A UI and Performance Experiment
<fanboy>Looking at Flutter vs React Native, the only comparison of interest for, perhaps most of us, Flutter for the win! Lower dev resources and way lower cpu usage. Dart is lovely, the docs are great, wide array of great UI widgets, and easy animation. As for hot reloading, well, you just have to experience the difference.</fanboy>
braindongle··on Thoughts On a Year of Exercise
Indeed. If you find something that involves both exertion and fun, you are golden. If not, it's a constant struggle. For me it's bikes. Those of us who find that enthusiasm are lucky.
braindongle··on Go through your family's phone settings and turn on all the privacy features
A way that we technologists can help people understand the ming-boggling degree to which Surveillance Capitalism™ [1] is running things is to use code to pull back the veil. Some are trying to help you to see what's really going on [2]. Also, I'm thinking of things like automated NLP on terms of use/service. Phone settings will not fix anything. The genie got out when Larry and Sergey, in the wake of the bubble burst, said "fuck it, we're an ad company".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_capitalism

[2] https://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/icsi/projects/networking/hayst...

braindongle··on Eat This Much – Automatic Meal Planner
This is a good idea well implemented. There is much bemoaning the state of web experiences these days. Visiting this site and poking around, trying out their onboarding workflow, and seeing initial results, provides a welcome counterpoint. I'm in for the free plan. Now, to do the thing is another matter, of course.
braindongle··on JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised
Update: Curious, I took Vscode for a spin again and installed the latest Vim plugin. Although .vimrc keybinding support is supposed to be there, I'm getting no love. So new ticket for the maintainers [1]. The thing is Vscode is SO snappy and slick, I'm going to switch anyway :)

[1] https://github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim/issues/4384

braindongle··on JetBrains: $270M revenue, 405K paying users, $0 raised
Can anyone comment on the state of Vim emulation in Vscode? I'm in Android Studio largely because of its support for my .vimrc, without which I can not live. But I see[1] that there have been recent commits related to this in Vscode. How good is it? Other thoughtful comparisons between life in JetBrains world vs Vscode welcome as well.

[1] https://github.com/VSCodeVim/Vim/commit/3158194561fa2fba921b...

braindongle··on Android’s Commitment to Kotlin
In this context of disparaging the state of Android development, I must plead: take a hard look at Flutter/Dart. There are quite a few wins with it, including a pleasant developer experience. Declarative, composable, JIT compilation in dev, AOT compilation in production. The list goes on.
braindongle··on Mental Mountains
Hi Malp. What is the reason for your inquiry?
braindongle··on Mental Mountains
For the HN-reading 22-year-old out there who is trying to climb out of that first unspeakably horrible episode of mental illness, and as part of that, trying to grok what psychiatry really is: at this point in history, models (theoretical or other) are great and can drive progress in psychiatry, but don't for one minute believe any hype like this, from the reviewed book's Amazon page:

"Ticic and Hulley equip readers to carry out focused, empathic therapy using the process found by researchers to induce memory reconsolidation, the recently discovered and only known process for actually unlocking emotional memory at the synaptic level."

Just, no. It's not even worth refuting. What happens at the synaptic level, and what happens at the emotional level, the experience of emotions? We are not meaningfully closer to bridging that gap than we ever have been. Despite great advances in brain science, that sort of talk still belongs in philosophy, not science or medicine.

This is not to say that UTeB or EIEIO or whatever model doesn't hold promise for those of us with lived experience of mental illness. The evidence base for talk therapy continues to evolve. Just ignore any kind of "unlocking secrets" talk. We aren't there yet. We aren't close. But on the web pages that sell books, we are always on the verge of...

braindongle··on Gödel, Escher, Bach
As an introduction to formal systems[1], it's great. For a musician, it totally falls apart in the "Bach" section. The idea that the circle of fifths[2] (or any progression that ends where it started) is a "strange loop" is just silly. There's nothing strange about it. Traverse a sequence of (usually 12) integers that slice up the octave by using any integer for step size and bang! You eventually land back at the beginning of the sequence.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_system

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_of_fifths

braindongle··on Joplin – a note taking and to-do application with synchronization capabilities
I checked out the CLI for Joplin and it's a multi-pane environment with a command line at the bottom. This is also true of Vim, especially if you like panes, or "splits". For those of us hooked on Vim (I am silent on its merits), there is a state of flow that is quite pleasant, and you find that you want that flow wherever you can get it. The arrow keys just are j,k,l,; for example, and just lifting a hand from the home row position feels awkward if you're in deep enough. :)
braindongle··on Joplin – a note taking and to-do application with synchronization capabilities
Is there anything like this that is Vim-centric? Pretty please?
braindongle··on Musical Chord Progression Arpeggiator
Great work, Jake Albaugh. Needs one critical revision, though: I, V, VI, IV in major MUST NOT be allowed!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOlDewpCfZQ

braindongle··on Rob Pike on the reasons for Go’s success
Suggest: "Things Rob Pike Attributes Go's Success to". Dangling preposition, but what we're actually talking about.
braindongle··on Western firms kowtow to China's increasing economic clout
The Great and Wise Randy Marsh has said all that needs to be said about this.

https://www.facebook.com/southpark/photos/a.412559132004/101...

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