ogou

Who says magicians are artists? I have never heard anyone say that. But, I guess if we're calling people "prompt engineers" then these superlatives don't mean much anymore.

Lots of people happily surrender the cold unknown of self-determination for the warm embrace of conformity. Conformity simplifies, affirms, and diffuses accountability. It's easy to understand the temptation.

Bottom of this blog post: https://lucidbeaming.com/blog/mmxxii-berlin/

Building lo-fi synthesizers with Teensy or Arduino. They are becoming more like interactive sculptures than instruments now. The sound is important, but the visual aesthetic is just as interesting to me.

Nobody who lives in Berlin is saying this. The people who go to clubs are much more concerned about A100. It's a local highway that is set to be expanded through the districts that clubs are located. Many clubs will have to close if it proceeds as planned.

Berghain has become kind of a tourist stunt. Visitors don't know any other clubs and they read about it online. So, they show up and try to get in just so they can say they got in. They get turned away and you see all the accusations of elitism, racism, etc.

I've been a paid member of 3 hacker spaces and a couple of niche creative communities over 20 years or so. There was a time when people were actually interested in experimenting, tinkering, and holding workshops. I think that has been replaced by hustle culture. I saw a lot of shops turn into laser cutter and C & C focussed fabrication shops. People were using the equipment to run under the table sign shops and Etsy production lines. They would book the equipment for 6-8 hour blocks and pay a premium. Indie users could never get a slot and learners were even more frustrated. There was rarely a density of users in there at the same time because everything was booked. The actual community just faded away. The infrastructure of shared resource communities got exploited by people who are purely motivated by money.

Another challenge is governance. Managing a volunteer organisation can be tricky, especially if a few get paid for various things. Passionate people burn out and leave. That leaves a management vacuum that is easily exploited by people with an agenda. I watched one shop get completely taken over by political issues and the original mission was left behind for identity focus. It was a real bummer.

The only ones that seem to survive have a strong professional management core and strict monetary oversight.

SV was never interested in news. It always considered it content. Journalists were labelled content producers. The holy grail was internally produced free content that reinforced circular engagement. They have that now. Lots of people happy to produce TikTok style videos for internet points. The idea of emphasising any content that led off-platform has always been something they wanted to get rid of. This was inevitable.

Pygame is a good library to generate multimedia. I'm sure you could come up with some exercises with it.

Also, convert data in a PDF to a CSV file. I have needed to do that many times over the years and learned a lot of Python by improving my approaches.

I've stopped all institutional donations. Never again in this political climate. Only specific projects, events, or Substack/Patreon support for individuals.

None of those groups were New Wave. It was a synth-pop dance genre defined by the Human League, Gary Numan, Flock of Seagulls, The Normal, OMD, Ultravox, and Devo. The British press dubbed it New Wave as the inheritors of Disco, not rock. It was hated when it started charting, in the same way Disco was. People were just getting used to prog-rock and Pink Floyd imitators. The drum machines and synths made it worse. Punk was actually a descendent of NYC/LA youth movements, not the art rock diversions of NYC proto-rock. The Sex Pistols were mostly a marketing gimmick by Malcolm McClaren. But, people heard that album and started their own band. Punk as a movement came from the people inspired by the Pistols rather than the band itself. Nobody covered Sex Pistols songs.

The Talking Heads are a white funk rock group that appeal to 80s college kids. There was rarely any taste crossover into synth-pop, new wave or punk. More like Bob Marley, David Bowie, Tom Waits, REM, and Red Hot Chili Peppers. Most of the big Talking Heads fans I know stopped listening to new music after 1990.

This is cool. The real trick is getting a Bürgeramt appointment to submit this form. The official portal for that is a punishing exercise in bad UX. Basically, there are very few appointments available, so you have to keep refreshing the calendar page and hope that one of the dates is linked. It took me 2 weeks of opening that page multiple times a day and refreshing over and over. It gets hammered by bots as well and if you don't click the link fast enough it will disappear. There are multiple bots available on Github and I think there is also a Chrome extension now. But, they all do the same thing (refresh the page) and will get your IP banned if you run them without long timers. I tried all of it and the only thing that worked was having a Favorite in mobile Safari that I opened whenever I had idle time. I finally got one in a coffee shop and nearly knocked the table over because I was so happy.

A good example of form over function. It's very pretty and I enjoyed skimming through the pages. I would never use it as a reference though. I rarely have access to a large desktop display when I'm prototyping at a bench. More common to look up the pins on my phone and have it nearby. It's also cumbersome to unpack a zip file and get the resulting pdf into a mobile context. Also, the forced aspect ratio of that pdf and type size make it mobile hostile.

When I saw the title, I thought it might be cool to print it out for a maker lab for common use. Then I actually looked through it. Pretty sure this is a graphic design project and not something made by actual users.

The author didn't mention anything about the actual company, BIS. Most of this article is cribbed from general sources and other tech reporting. What makes them notable? Why were they picked? How deep is the catalog? How many recordings do they represent? Even the Wikipedia entry is better than this.

Intersectional trauma is the new exceptionalism.

Someone gifted an old blade server to me a few years ago. Very slow, but 16 cores and 24 gig of RAM. At the time I was making a lot of video art with ffmpeg, without a GPU. That version of ffmpeg wasn't optimized for multiple cores so rendering was really slow and sequential. I discovered Parallel and set the server to process large videos with most of the cores in parallel. Voila, it chewed through a massive amount of media fairly quickly. Faster than the hard drives actually.

You're conflating attribution and accuracy. They found in you someone to attribute the statements to, but didn't do it accurately. Quoting someone is a special kind of deflection of responsibility. Same if it's a verbal quote or a tweet.

Journalists are addicted to attribution. Before Twitter, they had to call people for quotes verifying or denying something. The tradition was 2 sources to verify. There was even a time that anonymous sources were frowned on. If they couldn't get them on the phone, they had to track them down and ask in person. That's why there are multiple scenes in "All the President's Men" where the reporters are knocking on doors at people's houses at night.

All that is old school now and replaced by the quick drug-like hit of posting "so-and-so tweeted". It's enough to write about a post of some kind and not actually get comments or context from anybody else, because there always posts for "opponents say" or "advocates say".

I was a web developer for a newspaper and knew they were doomed when they started writing articles about their own comments section.

Implication and notoriety rule the day.

In Berlin, Google Maps shows bike share and scooter clusters on the same layer as public transport. Searching for a bus or tram stop with all that noise is punishing. Also the icons for the bus and bike are very similar at the default zoom level. You have to zoom in constantly to differentiate and inevitably it's a marker for Donkey Republic or nextbike, instead of the bus. They don't even mark actual docking stations. It's just sidewalk areas. I assume those companies had access to a bulk map update API and just claimed spots all over the city. The result is a mess.

In high school I worked in a Fotomat booth in the parking lot of a grocery store. It was at the end of that era when people would still drop off film to get developed and pick it up a few days later. So, it was not busy at all and I was in the little booth by myself for my shift. I did my homework, read a lot of books, listened to music, and skateboarded around the booth. It was great.

As for your specific question, I would suggest any company involved in energy infrastructure or food production/agriculture. They are hiring across the board and you would probably have a strong impact. I would avoid any frontend development, social media, or AI. AI may hot right now but I predict the turnover will be very high and the companies unstable. If you are genuinely invested in a new career, pick an industry outside of the normal tech channels.

The Canberra antenna they will use is one of the last of its kind. Apparently many of the original dishes were made specifically for tracking the Apollo missions and then repurposed or retired after. Interesting tidbit: "The antenna weighs more than 3000 tonnes and rotates on a film of oil approximately 0.17mm thick."

Anybody remember President Elect for the Apple II? As kids, my cousin and I were obsessed with that game during one Christmas break. Turn based campaign finance simulator. I have no idea why we thought it was so fun. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_Elect_(video_game)

I've been reading for 10+ years and it seems to come in waves. Usually it clears up after a few posters push back. I rarely complain about it, but the past few months seemed to be especially high volume. I posted a few comments to signal that awareness. To me, that's participating in my community.

I've read the guidelines many times. The second paragraph seems to indicate this post would be off-topic.

"Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic."

There are parallels between the speculative art world and VC capital approaches to tech companies. In some ways, the art and ideas don't matter when it comes to potential value. Because of that, art dealers and VC funds don't seek quality. They invest in notability and novelty, in many directions at the same time. An interesting book about the history of art dealers is Rogues' Gallery by Philip Hook. When I read about the financial angles of the 1875-1935 modern art world, I saw many similarities to 2005-2015 Silicon Valley VC culture.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32489013-rogues-gallery

I post a wide variety of comments. I noticed a wave of general news and Reddit style topics. I made 3 comments questioning that. I am participating in my community by pushing back against a change in content and tone. Many others have agreed with me and were also voted down. There are so many places for this kind of topical discussion, but very few have qualitative online technology discussion. I hope HN continues to be a place for exploring tools and ideas related to tech. This current trend is degrading the quality of posts and comments.

This is an important topic, but why post it here on HN? More and more posts are general news now. There are so many places for these discussions other than a technology oriented message board.

Not every midlife assessment leads to a crisis.

"this first draft is probably not solid enough to be cited in Wikipedia"

You are internet savvy enough to find Hacker News and post this question. Why can't you make use of platforms or sources other than video-centric YouTube that are specifically designed to provide what you are asking for? It's surprising that you don't know what a podcast is. I run into this paradox more and more often these days. I assumed it was generational, but admit that it comes from many groups now.

A revelation for me happened back in 2010. I was working on a mobile app for a festival and trying to research the best UI. I saw the quote "A cheeseburger is an intuitive interface. It shows you how to eat it with the wrapper and arrangement." I started to watch people use every day interfaces. Gas pumps, self-checkout kiosks, ATMs, signage and number taking at the DMV, Facebook on phones, car radios, drink dispensers, restaurant menus, bus ticket terminals. Even the simplest interface can cause complete confusion. Adding any kind of advertising or screen motion makes it worse. That's not a specific book or website recommendation, but my whole process changed because of that new approach. I still observe these things, especially with al ubiquity of touchscreens in modern life. Way more helpful and practical than what I read.

Engineers (or anybody involved in a botched product launch) may be interested in the story of the Vasa. It was a Swedish warship launched in 1627. At the time it was the most powerful warship in the world. It took many years to build at a shipyard in Stockholm within sight of the King's palace. The ship was launched at a public ceremony and made it 1300m out into the harbor. To fire a celebratory salute, its gunports were open. A strong wind came and tilted it over, letting water rush in through the gunports. It sank in minutes. The cause was poor design and a lack of appropriate ballast, rushed into production despite flaws. It sat at the bottom of the harbor for 300 years, perfectly preserved. In the 1970s, the Swedes decided to recover the ship by refloating it. It was a huge effort, but it worked. It has been completely restored and sits in a multi-story museum built around it. I saw it last month and was awestruck by the size and craftmanship. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasa_(ship)