flats

As opposed to using JavaScript on the front end & back end? That benefit of JS has always seemed a bit overrated to me—the context for front-end & server-side JS is pretty darn different, too.

Anyway, Ruby & Rails are such a joy to use that, at least for me, the fact that it’s written in a different language than the one we need in the browser is a non-issue.

Feel you on the entry-level features making people worried that Apple is prosumer-izing their baby. I worry about that sometimes.

Yes, Max is amazing. Thanks for sharing your instruments! Sidewinder looks particularly cool.

I also got into building in there for a while (& still do sometimes), though not specifically M4L: https://github.com/flats/max-instruments. Even wrote a couple of externals back in the day.

What I _really_ want is some sort of a hybrid between a DAW and something like Csound—fully graphical but also fully scriptable/automatable. Live w/ M4L is _kinda_ close, but we’re not quite there yet…

I think we both have a lot of room for being wrong! There seem to be no reliable sources for DAW market share, and I imagine all of these companies consider it in their interests to keep the number of active users of their software to themselves. So anything I have to say here is purely anecdotal.

From my vantage point (Brooklyn-based creative music-maker regularly recording & performing), it’s a growing market and both Ableton _and_ Logic are doing pretty well. Ableton has some obvious strengths—its scene-based workflow & M4L in particular—but it’s also got a very opinionated UI & is a bit less intuitive/fluid for editing (at least from my perspective as a Logic user!). I know many people who use Logic to make creative music that involves both live recording and electronic instruments, and a lot of those people have switched away from Pro Tools because of its hideous UI, the subscription pricing, & the annoyance of iLok. I even know several professional, touring musicians who perform with MainStage & swear by it.

In other words, I think that Logic has found a pretty broad audience of creative musicians who straddle the songwriting & electronic music worlds (which is more & more people every day).

What makes you think that Ableton is eating everyone’s lunch in electronic music? I mean, I don’t think you’re wrong, honestly, & I’d in particular point to their purchase of Cycling ‘74 & successful hardware products like Push & Move, but I’m curious to hear details from your perspective.

Definitely hoping that Gruber is wrong here & Logic stays the fantastic loss-leader it’s been for the last decade or so.

What leads you to believe that Logic has been shedding users? What little information I can find on this suggests that Logic has in fact been growing slightly & has significant market share. I also think it’s a huge driver of Mac sales.

I work with Ruby every day at work & have always been curious about Crystal. This was a very helpful dive into some overarching concepts & small details. Thanks for sharing!

They're already very good at it—I myself have been using OR-Tools's CP-SAT solver for a large bin packing problem at work (via https://github.com/ankane/or-tools-ruby) & Chat-GPT was a big help working out the details of some of the constraints and objectives.

It really was

Pretty cool! FWIW, this is a glockenspiel or bells (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glockenspiel), not a xylophone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xylophone).

RBS (https://github.com/ruby/rbs) + Sorbet (https://sorbet.org) in Ruby 3!

This is just a list of Sevish’s tools (the Scale Workshop is really useful for things like building scales for use in Max, _way_ easier to work with than Scala). Thank you for sharing the MTS-ESP Suite, though! I love the idea of a single piece of software that can handle tuning across plugins and MIDI devices.

Yes to this! For many purposes, Csound is hard to beat. It has some truly incredible sounding opcodes, and it’s capable of sample-accurate performance in a way that Pd or Max can’t really achieve, even with the Max scheduler in overdrive.

On top of all that, there are externals for Max and Pd to run Csound within those environments. You can get the best of both worlds! Csound is still very relevant and useful.

I have been working on a Rails app at a rapidly growing organization for the past 6 years and I consider myself very lucky to be able to do so. Shopify, GitHub, and Stripe (to name some of the more prominent companies) all regularly contribute to the Ruby and/or Rails ecosystem, and there have been loads of wonderful improvements to both over the last several years: vastly improved performance in Ruby 3, support for static typing using RBS and Sorbet, Hotwire in Rails 7 for super low-lift client-side interactivity, and many, many more.

It’s a great time to start using Ruby for web projects.

Yeah, agreed that this I s an insane price point given that (unless I’m missing something) there’s only one preamp and it only works for an inline headphone mic.

This is not a serious attempt to understand or appreciate this music in any way. Four hours is not “a lot” of listening by any stretch of the imagination, and the author does not delve into any of the aspects of this music that make it unique.

I’m disappointed that this has ended up on HN.

Thanks so much for your work on Postico. I use it every day and recommend it highly. It’s fast, stable, and a Mac app through and through (increasingly a rarity).

Apple Music’s best feature for me is its real focus on building up your own library. On top of that, it integrates seamlessly with iTunes in the Cloud. Using the same app, I can stream anything from my iTunes library, which includes a decent amount of music not available on any DSP.

Yep, same here (except replace “cup of chai” with “glass of wine”).

I strongly agree with this. I would, however, like to call out one TV program here in the U.S. that I think comes much closer to approximating the experience of “reading a 5,000-word article”: PBS NewsHour. It’s great, completely free and available to watch online, and you can even get most of what you need from their podcast alone (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/feeds/rss/podcasts/segments).

It consists of fairly in-depth, thoughtful coverage of both domestic and worldwide news topics, as well as a tiny bit of political analysis on Mondays and Fridays. It almost never devolves into the breathless, “the world is about to end”-type coverage found on basically all cable news programs. Judy Woodruff and her team are really great. I dearly miss Gwen Ifill and Jim Lehrer.

The Economist is also a great resource, as has been pointed out by other commenters here. They publish an audio edition of each week’s newspaper, too.

I have a decent amount of first-hand experience myself, and while I agree with you (there are definitely benefits!), the sort of creativity that cannabis can induce is of a particular variety.

Specifically, cannabis-induced creativity for me, while tons of fun, tends to be very myopic. I focus more on minutiae and more immediately rewarding things like satisfying textures than on a overall composition and development. How appropriate that is for any given creative task and whether it’s worth the downside described in this paper (which are pretty obvious and also very real) are difficult questions if you enjoy it.

Personally, the output of cannabis-induced creativity often ends up being less rewarding for me in the long run.

There’s no question that Apple has not extended iMessage support to Android because it’s in their business interest. However, it is a bit rich for Hiroshi Lockheimer, who is obviously massively biased, to claim the Apple could “just adopt RCS” as a replacement for iMessage (and also for the author to let that comment stand without challenging it at all).

It has taken _years_ to get carriers on board with RCS (and RCS requires their involvement) and it doesn’t support all of iMessage’s features (e.g. only supports end-to-end encryption in one-to-one chats, and that after a near Herculean effort from Google). Moreover, the fact that it’s an open standard means that it will likely take quite some time for the protocol to support new features that OS vendors like Apple might like to add, and that that process will be fraught with compromises. It seems completely reasonable to me for Apple to not want to tie themselves to the whims of carriers (who, let’s recall, were charging _absurd_ amounts for text messages before proprietary systems forced their hand) or Google (look at what’s happened to web standards under their stewardship) when it comes to managing their messaging service.

That said, as an iPhone user, I _would_ love to see RCS support _alongside_ iMessage to improve the experience of communicating with Android users, and that actually might happen someday.

Yes, agreed. I was in almost the same boat, mostly building small websites as a freelancer and wanting to learn more and work on more interesting problems.

I went a 3-month programming bootcamp, got hired as a junior software engineer at a non-profit with a small engineering team (~10 people), and learned a _ton_ about the sorts of things you’re talking about (automated testing and deployment, container technology, JS pipelines, etc.). I also became a much better programmer through years of code reviews and pair programming. If you can find a place that’s big enough to have several people far more experienced than yourself and at least one of them is willing to help you out when you need it, you’ll probably get where you’re trying to go!

Can you share more details about that work? Curious as someone who works with Max and Csound regularly for personal musical projects but not in any sort of professional capacity.

As a web developer, I, too, have had moments fixing a Safari bug that reminded me of dealing with IE in the past. But only passing moments, and I don’t blame Safari.

Supporting multiple browsers is a uniquely annoying aspect of web development, and almost every developer uses Chrome for development (I’m a Safari user and it’s kind of a running gag at work). This means that for most developers, Safari is the main browser they have to support that isn’t the one they use for development, which is a recipe for resentment.

Also, I bristle at this comparison a bit because Safari is wayyyyy better than IE ever was about adopting (and helping to draft) standards. They’re slower than the Chrome team and adopting new standards, but that’s because Alphabet and Apple’s business models are different, not because it’s an inherently good idea to adopt every new standard immediately (especially when many are focused on turning the web into a crappy replacement for native app platforms).

The BBC & the CBC produce a lot of dramatic radio with full casts & music & sound effects, but not all that much science fiction - see BBC Radio 4 Extra, for example. CBC’s Vanishing Point is the most recent dedicated speculative fiction show I’m aware of with that level of production values.

X Minus One was the best of the full-cast science fiction radio shows of the 50s (episodes like “Star Bright”, “The Parade”, and “Field Study” are forever etched in my memory) but there were several others - I recommend the Relic Radio Science Fiction podcast (https://www.relicradio.com/otr/home-2/science-fiction/) for a sampling of them.

My favorite science fiction radio, though, is Michael Hanson’s Mind Webs. You can listen to all of the episodes at the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/MindWebs_201410) & I compiled a list of my favorite episodes to guide you on your journey at https://blog.robador.com/2015/04/the-best-of-mind-webs/. Not full cast, but great stories told well with good music. They even made some new episodes a couple years ago before Michael Hanson died.

I’ve been working as a software engineer at a non-profit for a little over four years. I started at 40 hours per week, went down to 32 after a couple of years, and now am at 24 because they were looking to cut costs and I was happy to oblige.

When I brought it up to my manager, I told her very specifically _why_ I wanted to reduce my hours - I wanted to spend more time on other projects (specifically musical projects) - and she was totally open to it. If you really feel like you need more time for other pursuits, and you are lucky enough to work at a good company where your manager has your best interests at heart, it shouldn’t be an issue.

Plus, hiring and training new employees is an expensive pain in the ass.

Long-time user of Csound, Max, and Pd (& have spent a little time with ChucK & Supercollider).

Max & Pd are fantastic for incorporating sensors & other physical interfaces, real-time interactivity, routing signals, creating visualizations, & all that. Supercollider is fantastic for generative music & using control flow compositionally.

Csound, on the other hand, is really, really great for creating beautiful & nuanced electronic compositions. The sound quality is unrivaled (emphasis on accuracy over interactivity), the interface is great (plain text, which, as a programmer, I prefer), and GEN routines plus the myriad opcodes allow you to do some heavy, intricate aural spelunking.

As a bonus (& as mentioned by others), it’s highly performant & fairly easy to integrate with other languages & environments (including Max & Pd!).

The syntax is a bit strange, but once you get over that, Csound is an amazing piece of software.

Yes.

We switched over from a Bourbon-based SASS framework at my work to Tailwind several months ago & it has been fantastic. I was very negative about it at first - “isn’t this just a crappier version of inline styles?” - but I’m a convert. It’s customizable, it enforces consistency, and it dramatically reduces the amount of CSS you have to write, which is a good thing on several levels. Give it a try.