deusofnull

VCV Rack is a titan in the FOSS eurorack modular world. nothing else comes close. I have a physical eurorack as well but i use Rack all the time to sketch out ideas and to explore new kinds of modules before i buy something physical.

protip. small piece of scotch tape and a small piece of paper. when you need camera, just fold the paper open. when it gets worn out, new paper and scotch tape.

tbh it seems like the distinction being made by the stuff about 'alt-lit twitter' and 'weird-facebook' from a few years back

https://stayhipp.com/media/tiktok/what-is-alt-elite-tiktok/

TipTop is a bad actor / goes against the ethos of many others in the eurorack space IMO. I have their mantis case, was my first eurorack case, and while it's good I do dislike that i use theirs.

the modularity and interoperability (and the implied open source culture) of eurorack philosophy should extend to the companies that make these products. so often they dont. makes me think of unix philosophy and how tech companies dont follow that philosophy either.

Not tryna be flippant here but probably not. See comment history for other arguments ive made on this.

I am incredibly skeptical that the engineering ethics / practices of any organization currently in existence adequately surpass the requirement for large scale genetic editing.

Im not against the idea in the abstract, but we live in a world full of fragile, profit-motivated institutions that are oft to skimp on engineering best practice and ethics in the pursuit of profit.

Something like NASA circa 1970 maybe could but they arguably had their own problems with ethics re: Wernher von Braun, aerospace engineer responsible for great contributions to the US Atlas V rocket system and the Nazi V2.

In regards to all that and the content of the article using malaria and mosquito editing as a potential argument to do this, consider also that mosqutios are a critical base source of food for many species. Unintended long term consequences are the name of the game when it comes to thinking about if we should do this.

your anecdote seems to support the case for stronger more populated unions with better negotiation outcomes.

Im curious about that too. If you were a skilled programmer who studied common bugs, you could introduce those bugs intentionally but with plausible deniability if caught. Then again, in a smaller system that would be easier to detect. But in a multi page web app or something with a big back end, def could slip those in

fascinating, thanks for this post.

> I do think there will be a crash similar to 2008, but this is not evidence that it is coming.

i agree but i lack a specific metric or analysis that supports my thinking. do you have one?

if i'm getting my shit done at work, then im going to get my shit done at work.

Lowering meat consumption writ large, even just more people only having one meat meal a day, would be huge too. Meat production is super resource intensive. Have to grow grain for them to eat, water that grain, transport it, provide water for the livestock, etc.

> According to calculations of the United Nations Environment Programme, the calories that are lost by feeding cereals to animals, instead of using them directly as human food, could theoretically feed an extra 3.5 billion people.

> Feed conversion rates from plant-based calories into animal-based calories vary; in the ideal case it takes two kilograms of grain to produce one kilo of chicken, four kilos for one kilogram of pork and seven kilos for one kilogram of beef.

- Global Agriculture[1]

Your point re: human living space density in cities is totally spot on. Urbanism is much more efficient than suburban sprawl. Rigorous public transit makes having a car optional / disadvantageous if you live in a city. It's no wonder the automobile industry has always sought to stifle transit.

Look at the successes of the Houston light rail system METRORail. Opened in 2004 and has cut back traffic and lead to high-density apartments, shops, and offices near stations.

All that is evidence of why population growth isn't a real root issue. It could be problematic, depending on what other systems are at play to mitigate increasing resource needs of people. Even so, our current food production is enough to feed the projected 2050 population of 9.7 billion[2].

[1]https://www.globalagriculture.org/report-topics/meat-and-ani... [2]https://www.elementascience.org/article/10.1525/elementa.310...

if i paid a 5 dollars per much subscription to tap would you offer me an "ad free" version where you use NFC or bluetooth or GPS to turn off the ad playing on the fountain? im half joking / half curious if this ever came up as a possible revenue stream during development.

Does anyone happen to know if there's a name for the "theme" that this site seems to be emulating in its terminal-esque design? It looks sorta like Monokai but with a really nice dark teal background.

you could probably figure out some cool insights about tech people's beliefs and opinions in aggregate with some clever NLP and sentiment analysis and some.... ahh, not asking for user's consent to use their data for that! classic.

"in Jersey[1] everythings legal as long as you dont get caught[2]" - bob dylan in 'tweeter and the monkey man' by the traveling willburys.

[1] replace jersey with ukraine [2] replace caught with extradited

funny, i build a basic little script that did this back in like 2015 so i could give my GF at the time a copy of all her instagram, which she was trying to do via scrolling + screenshots. I was thinking about expanding it but didnt. Thought it would be cool if you could order a literal physical book with all your IG photos in it. Kinda a gag gift but probably worth the cost of a modest gift (im thinkin like 20-100 bucks). Never got to the book part. Def would have run into legal troubles, but I guess if youre abroad (Ukraine?) then the US judicial system is not too much a concern.

yeah i mean honestly you're probably right. But in reality, the whole point of advocating for something that skeptics call "utopian" isn't to achieve that specific utopia per se. IT is to make improvements towards that "utopia". Like for example, if this social media interoperability and open standard world is our utopia, that would rely on having at least a framework for inter-network communication and migration from one to another.

What im saying is you probably never get to the utopia, but maybe building some of the requirements for that utopia will be beneficial in an ever imperfect world.

Frankly i agree about gov intervention in such matters because how can you really, honestly take a company at its word that its self-appointed accountability board is actually independent? Or has power to make decisions that would hurt Facebook. And companies shouldnt really be expected to do that, or at least we shouldnt expect that over a government solution. Something like this is exaccccctly what governments is designed to handle vs what business can be expected to do on its own.

Reminds me of yesterday's hn frontpager, the paper about a "programble programming language". they were talking about how domain specific languages within a single language become super distinct and ungrokable to people who are otherwise fluent in the parent language. Think like, an angular dev reading nest.js node backend stuff. With javascript this is sorta everywhere. JS DSLs arent like explicitly uninterpretable to otherwise-experienced JS devs but there is a context shift cost for sure.

Ive not worked with c# much, but is that not as much of a problem with it? Like, is there more of a standardized way of doing things? Python is kinda like that i guess.

from the article,

> While Facebook will select the first 11 members of the board, the eleven will choose the remaining board members, with terms lasting three years.

facebook picks the first 11 board members and then those 11 staff new appointments for 3 year terms, but not sure if the first 11 also control staffing throughout the org.

if this is a "facebook supreme court" then its kinda fishy if the stakeholders get to appoint the first 11 judges...

edit: also, tsk tsk wallstreet journal. if you use numerals (11) in a piece of writing, dont switch to the written number (eleven)!

well it would solve problems for all the people who really do want to use a different / better social network or chat app but cant get their friends to switch too, killing the idea on arrival. that would change perception of social media, because it'd allow every host-site could be distinct to their targeted users' qualities as a group, but maintain connections to everyone in their lives.

i mean, you arent really saying that you dont believe a massively-confederated social networking infrastructure would change the political perception of social media? i think it necessarily would, and change every individuals relationship to social media too. its like that marshall mcLuhan quote 'the medium is the message', ie the medium defines what it contains and what those contents mean.

i feel like the function of success would be pushed into other areas like the actual value of the feature being made available to competitors. or speed of competitors adoption of said feature. basically, sharing a foundational open standard could make everything thats distinct about a feature's implementation, or that companies policies / mission, the decider about what differentiates success.

now, current leaders probably wouldnt want to adopt a system like this because it would be a test of their value on all those metrics, but i wouldnt say that makes the notion doomed from the start. i get what you mean though.

i mean, where would be right now without the open standards of 30 years ago?

Dunno, but all kinds of things could happen with novel co-dependent alleles with devistating effects when the express. Imagine theres a cool gene edit in 100 years that lets you live to 200 easy and it becomes normal for most people to get it. But, it just so happens that thers an early gene edit that was available 20 years from now, less ethically created and expensive. but hundreds of thousands of people get that first life extender.

Then, turns out the better / safer one 70 years from now has a co-expression with the decendents of the people who got it 20 years from now that makes you infertile, senile, or whatever.

thats the danger. If these edits become available broadly, youre not only worrying about co-expressions of edit genes developed at the same time, but edit genes developed at any time in the past (oh and also the rest of the human genome, which we still dont understand fully, and is a base concern for any gene editing whatsoever)

Look again lots of people here are saying that the research can continue but must be held to not only ethical but engineering standards of the highest order. If youre willing to compromise on those to achieve strategic goals between nation states, than thats a political or moral distinction and ill let it weigh on your conscience if you create a generation of infertile children 80 years from now.

Ok Dr. Mengele

>A good chunk of harmful mutations will prevent people from procreating, either by killing them first, or making it unlikely for them to find a mate.

well, what about a recessive allele that doesnt cause problems in the first generation but does in subsequent? What about co-dependent deadly / devastating gene expressions between newly added genes that pop up after 2 people with these co-active genes expressing like a hundred years from now? look, given what i studied and why, i would never say we should forever abstain from gene editing technology. BUT, we have to hold those who conduct genetic modification experiments to the absolute highest ethical and engineering standards. It is akin to the level of power given by atomic science, maybe even more. one can be sure that the powers of a God would include the power of the atom and the power of the gene near the top of the list.

I agree it is resilient, but that resilience has been tested by a slow, small increment evolution over millions of years. And even given that, genetic disorders with novel expressions exist that confound modern science. if we start making very fast changes, the resilience of the genetic system shouldn't be expected to hold up against a far faster change rate. And more to my point about the complexity of it all, there are huge regions of our genome that we thought were "unrelated" to human phenotypes (physical expression of genetic code) until very recently when we discovered some of this "junk" DNA actually is critical for certain types of RNA transcription / repair.

GMOs are a different issue. My underlying concern about the influx of new genes introduce to the wild quickly being potentially dangerous aside, the genetic modification have mostly been to make plants resilient to various herbicides/fungicides/pesticides to allow large scale monoculture farming. That's one solution, but not the only. And we have seen invasive forms of GMO crops spread out of containment, thus entering the wild population, and we wont know the consequence of that for a long time, if any.

takeaway being, its probably worth being conservative about even moderate scale genetic manipulation of any species we rely on, and especially our own genome. Not saying dont do any genetic modification, just that it really has to be air tight, you might say NASA level standards of engineering. Now, you tell me if you think Monsanto's engineering standards are at NASA level, or that the Chinese Governments ethical standards are without problems.

it would be really really hard to figure that out at this point, most likely. again, like the article says, they cant investigate the embryo too fully without "destroying it". Same sorta goes for a kid. But if the unintended mutations manifest in a bad expression, you might be able to start researching in situ in labs with cell cultures with and without the gene present / expressing.

Back in my genetics class in Uni, unitended mutations from gene editing struck me as a concern almost immediately. and its scary to think about. these unknown mutations could be benign, harmful, or even helpful, but if they entered the population through procreation... i mean i had an anxiety that the whole human genome could be damaged at a fundamental level.

the complexity of the biological machinery that occurs during gene transcription and replication and translation is maddening. yes, its sort of like a zipper in some ways, but remember that the geometry of a zipper is 2 dimensional, teeth and grooves. DNA is "zipped" by a protein that will fit with the geometry of hundreds or thousands of nucleotide pairs, and even that is a really basic way of putting it. and that natural system of transcription, translation, and protein synthesis at the core of DNA still makes mistakes.

You think index mismatch by 1 in an array can be a bit tricky, imagine how with DNA you have a long array, sort of, with millions of discrete parts that have start and end segments sort like how memory is managed in ram. CRISPR is in some ways, like trying to write perfect memory safe code in a non mem-managed language. crude metaphor but it was how i thought about it during university learning about both compsci and genetics.

I spent hours going through this list on wiki of chess variants. are there any on there that sound compelling to you or less nerve racking? there are even historical variants I've heard of, like one from the mongolian empire where there were "fortress" squares that were immune from attack. theres also a gimick version that sounds fun called "atomic chess" where when a piece dies, it takes out surrounding squares. and another called monster chess where white plays with only 4 pawns and their king, black has all their pieces, but white moves twice per turn.