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Folks might not understand the context of this milestone. I worked as a web developer at newspapers from 2006-2014. As the industry collapsed and publications scrambled to make use of the new social web, everybody was trying to figure out what to do. Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, Vice, and the NYT web team were closely watched as the future of the industry. David Carr was a thought leader back then and wrote a lot about Buzzfeed, especially on Twitter. The very idea of clickbait aggregation that polluted the journalism sites you see now came from that era. Buzzfeed in particular perfected the recipe of blending garbage posts with actual news to increase pageviews and fund the journalism. I think the reason the story is getting so much attention is that Buzzfeed was really arrogant about it all. They had regular features pointing out how great they were and how the rest of journalism was doomed. Same with Vice. Mainstream outlets are probably enjoying a little schadenfreude right now.

"What's the nature of your excellence?"

I don't use it very often, but when I do I always get a great response.

I released a couple of full length albums that got a fair amount of college radio play. I made them while working dead end tech contracts in Silicon Valley. Although I do have a few nice bits of kit and some DAW plugins, most of my setup is DIY. I resist the urge to buy gear by building my own for a fraction of the cost. Using Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Teensy 4.1, and more.

https://lucidbeaming.com/music/

Here are repos with some of my code projects for music:

Camel, an Arduino based synth and noise box https://github.com/lucidbeaming/Camel

vid2midi, a Python utility to generate music notes from video signals https://github.com/lucidbeaming/vid2midi

For me, the killer feature of search has always been "never". Never show me a result from that source or any like it again. Never show me Pinterest, Ebay, or any of the thousands of Stack Overflow scrapers. I still search for websites, art resources, technical specifications, model numbers, book excerpts, and many of the other things the internet offered in the before times. Let me use filters and negative operators, as well as domain blocklists.

I was trying to learn bankable React, but ended up learning much more. Udacity for the first Typescript and React courses, but they weren't made very well. I started (gasp) reading the documentation for many libraries and followed a few rabbit holes. A couple of months completing official tutorials I got lost and frustrated.

What put me over the top was a Frontend Masters subscription. By far the best value and flat monthly rate for all. Superior video courses for React/Typescript, but also advanced courses lower in the stack for Node, MongoDb, and an advanced javascript course. They have others I want to go back to, like web audio. I also took the dev interview and algorithm testing courses, which were super helpful.

Yes. I turned my life around at 43. Single, obsolete tech skills, lots of debt, personal issues. Began with taking a genuine inventory of my life and how I function, not just how I felt. I picked a constructive and structured approach to that, which looked a lot like CBT therapy but was something else.

It was a life reset, clearing out all the baggage. It was very difficult but incremental and genuine over time.

After the personal part, I levelled up my tech with some commercial online courses. When I began the career pivot, there was a lot of ageism and ghosting. Eventually I got a foothold and was on my way.

As for the family and relationships, I can tell you that I got a lot of attention from women once I made all those changes. There are so many looking for someone who is at least trying to handle their lives. I hear it all the time. Even being older, I get curious early 30s women who want families.

Now in my early 50s, my life is so much better. In no way do I feel my best days are behind me.

This trend is already in motion. I have been interviewing in Berlin for the past 2 months and most are using automated assessment now. The initial video interviews (if any) are 15 minutes or less with very young recruiters who have no idea what they are interviewing about. They all funnel into either Metaview video recordings or Test Gorilla. I'm not even talking about the tech assessments. Personality assessments are done on Test Gorilla and other services. Assessment links are the new Calendly links. Later video interviews usually involve people looking off-screen at a script or website. They also try to circumvent negotiations with these things. "Your offer will be based on our grading system from these test results so no desired pay range is required." These are modern startups doing this, not the giant megacorps.

This most recent job search has been really impersonal and lame. Things have gotten much worse than just 5 years ago. I've been in the industry about 15 years now.

When Trump was elected there were some protests for a few days near a local college. I went to check them out and noticed the students struggling to find political music to play over loudspeakers. They had nothing in their playlists for it. RATM got played over and over because that's all they could find. Songs from 28 years earlier.

A similar experience happened near the same area after George Floyd. They couldn't find any hip hop or trap that had current political themes. So, they played NWA F** da Police over and over. A song from 32 years earlier.

I sincerely believed both of those events would spawn a new generation of protest/political music. Didn't happen. Or, if it did I can't find it. I look sometimes in Reddit forums.

I worked in Haiti for 4 years. Very few Haitians had a desktop computer. Some had laptops, but they were uncommon. But, everybody has a cellphone. The last time I went, I saw Andriod internet capable phones all over the place. I believe it's the same in many other parts of the world. This could be hugely useful and popular for people outside the typical tech industry pipelines. Commenters are underestimating the ingenuity of folks in those areas.

Based on my "anecdata" of driving through many of those areas, I would say the problem is much worse than the map shows. Also, it is one of the few maps that showed meth activity by county, in a national context. Recent DEA and CDC reports are all PDFs filled with statistics and not mapped out as well. But, the numbers are only climbing and these areas are still centers of the consumption.

I spent a month driving around the country last year. Be warned that entire counties have been decimated by meth and fentanyl. Low income doesn't always translate to violent crime and theft, but meth absolutely does. When looking at crime maps, always filter by overdose response and not posession arrests. https://money.cnn.com/interactive/news/meth-lab-map/ Absolutely stay away from Tulsa, OK. Greenville, SC is very nice though.

For 6th grade in 1983, I moved to the California suburbs with family. The kids were a lot more mature than where I came from; fighting, light drug use, sex, etc. I got bullied pretty bad. One day a kid picked on me before lunch and I had enough. I punched him and we got into a fight in front of the whole grade. I won that fight and the principal punished me because of it, not the kid that started it.

My punishment was to tutor kids in a grade lower on the only TRS-80 in the school. I figured out the flashcard games were written in BASIC and could ctrl-C out of them. The correct answers were in an array at the end of the program. I rewrote it so that it skipped the array check and always returned correct. The kids I was tutoring got all correct answers and thought I was a god.

Accessibility is about much more than aria tags. When done well it is a holistic approach that benefits any user. It really shines when included in the design process because it can depend on how information is organized. Having a rational flow to the sections of content pages helps anyone. For example, modals are often a cheat to escape good content design. Also, every site that I have made an effort to implement accessibility had SEO benefits.

The phrase "defund the police" appeared a month or so after the first protests. There was an existing niche movement to abolish police and prisons that was small but organized in Portland and Oakland and online. At first there was no message or cohesive platform, just anger. The abolition movement had plenty of slogans and content for young folks frantically searching "social justice" on their phones.

Also, police departments were flush with military surplus from excess war supplies and Homeland Security grants. So they showed up to the protests with tanks, full body armor, and automatic weapons. There was shock at those images that fed an older liberal response to "demilitarize the police". That was used to soften "abolish" to "defund". Coupled with some civic movements to shift budgets to mental health response instead of armed force, "defund the police" became a thing.

Very few cities ever actually defunded their police. Minneapolis itself voted it down.

For anyone interested in the language and vocabulary used by art critics, this site used a Google Colab notebook to train a NLP model with 50+ years of art reviews from ArtForum. Novel art reviews are generated with Tensorflow and served with a Flask app.

https://artreviewgenerator.com/

I recently made a Twitter bot that posts a daily random photo from my 13+ year archive of phone photos. A novel feature is auto generation of hashtags using the Imagga image recognition API to analyze the image. The hashtags are not always accurate but building the bot was an interesting learning experience.

https://mobile.twitter.com/phonefotos

I had the same experience when I moved back to the Bay Area. I made a serious effort to find meetups and connect with hacker spaces, etc. Most of them were veiled product pitches or fishing for developers to hire. Also, some of the meetups had people obviously looking for ideas to take. Really turned off by all of it and quit going out. When even TechShop went bankrupt I realized that the "scene" was long gone.

All the eccentrics and wizards seem to be gone. It's all just crass transactional factory workers. Last contract I was surrounded by people who talked about the entire line of Audi and BMW sedans, but had zero interest in any ideas.

Some the comments here are disheartening. So much crass dismissal of anything not monetized. A lot of what we use on regular basis got started with simple ideas for things with limited usefulness at the time. I remember when there was much more creative energy in this industry. Obviously, tech is a major economic force now. But, that pretense of creativity and exploration is still being exploited. That's why we are funneling entire generations into coding classes, maker spaces, and youth empowering tech initiatives. They are being told, "learn to love coding. explore your dreams". Very quickly they get redirected into conformist production paths so they become tools. What a shame.

Long live creativity and self-determination.

> Is just telling people to be loyal to each other enough?

Uh, no. This industry is obsessed with individually optimized paths to success. In other words, everybody is looking out for themselves. I have been on teams where there was camaraderie, mostly because of shared struggle. But, the idea that people are suddenly interested in the common good is laughable.

I'll trade his "trust" for accountability and consequences any day, especially for management. Without visible accountability, appeals to loyalty are meaningless. Also, I have seen manipulators and liars game these altruistic arrangements.

One particular gig had a co-worker that was given a sudden lift into power. That person had trouble after a month and tried to cover some misleading stats and results. Then they came after their co-workers, manipulating public chat while being fairly nasty in DM. On the surface they were all about the common good, but to us individually the person was toxic.

Screenshots. Documentation. That's what saved my job in that particular instance. I showed how the public Slack was different than DM, which was different than direct email. Multiple contradictory threads. I saw what was happening and covered my ass with documentation.

Management tried to handle the initial problems with appeals to shared goals and teamwork, which are noble. This person was very good during those calls. We went to bosses individually and said there were problems and that this person was getting toxic. Response was "we'll look into it." Nothing happened.

In the end, problems got undeniable and we ended up in a series of one-on-ones with managers. My screenshots worked. That person was given a soft exit. The mid-level managers that ignored it got no consequences. The people that were left absorbed that person's leftover mess and nobody trusted anybody and management lost credibility. To this day, I document DMs out of habit.

I pre-order food to protect the people that work there from infection, as recommended by a variety of agencies and retail policies. It's not out of convenience, it's consideration. If I was lazy, I would have it delivered instead of walking down there.

I'm sorry you saw this as complaining. I work in tech and considered it a thought exercise. It's the kind of thing that Wired used to write about to illustrate the impact of modern technologies. I genuinely thought others would have contributions about what kinds of systems support these services.

Since this is the first personal attack I've gotten on HN, I'm not even sure how else to respond.

This is now 240 seconds on a Google Cloud N2D instance. I successfully recreated my inference worker on a Google preemptible instance. My monthly cost went from $40 on Digital Ocean to ~$16. It's much slower though.

65 seconds

I swear I saw something in the terms about charges from sustained uptime, which is related. A popular resource would trigger that. It starts and stops on demand so that automation is what I am leery of. I will look into it again though, maybe I misinterpreted the fine print.

I rolled my own version of this for a side project. I ended up on a Digital Ocean droplet with RAM upgrades.

https://lucidbeaming.com/blog/fine-tuning-a-gpt-2-language-m...

The extra monthly $40 for a novelty project has me searching for cheaper alternatives. Google preemptibles scared me off because they can scale dynamically and generate runaway costs if my project suddenly got popular on Reddit or something.

Adafruit’s goal is the success of Adafruit. They built an increasingly closed ecosystem on the shoulders of a constellation of open source projects. Success is no sin, but I’m tired of their branded bloatware being touted as groundbreaking. Their development choices are commercially expedient and designed to capture market share instead of contributing to the greater success of the open source maker movement that enables their existence.

Easy ditherpunk video treatment:

ffmpeg -i video-input.mp4 -i palette.png -lavfi "paletteuse=dither=sierra2" video-output.mp4

You'll need to create a 16px by 16px PNG with only black and white pixels. Also, there are other dithering algos that paletteuse offers.

To celebrate this, the Internet Archive recently held a video contest to use public domain film and audio material from 1925. My piece won 1st place. https://archive.org/details/danse-de-alienes

I use my iPhone 7 for a wide variety of creative video and audio projects. It's getting harder now though, because UI funnels that arrive with updates sometimes strip custom workflows I come up with. App developers seem to be moving to in-app purchases of preset packs instead of creative controls.

Here is a gallery of ~1 minute abstract videos with custom soundtracks. The apps I used were LumaFusion, Synthscaper, Fieldscaper, Defekt, FilterStack, Fragment, Kino Glitch, 8mm, Hyperspektiv, Plotagraph, and Virtual ANS.

https://lucidbeaming.com/glitch/

Here is a music video for U.K. metal band DAMIM that was made entirely on my phone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6OZVXYamOQ

I have also used the phone as a movement based MIDI controller with AC Sabre and arpeggiator with Fugue Machine.

An old code project was to make a phone based web app to control Zynaddsubfx (synthesizer) running on a Raspberry Pi. Fun learning project for Node.

https://github.com/lucidbeaming/ZynAddSubFX-WebApp

Important to note that her own cousins helped set up the kidnapping and there is no drug transaction or service mentioned. Was done purely for money. Also, this isn’t a story about just one event. A much broader story is laid out. A quick search shows ~1300 confirmed kidnappings per year with 70000 reported missing. A kidnapping ending in death may just get reported as a murder. These numbers indicate a systemic problem. So much that it is a consumer industry now: “To pay the first ransom, Mrs. Rodríguez’s family took out a loan from a bank that offered lines of credit for such payments.”