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Now do Brian Orr's clouds.mid for Windows 95.

https://www.brianorr.com/blog/2010/01/14/windows-95-easter-e...

Cool idea. Sounds like AAS Chromaphone on steroids.

Like most human endeavors where a technology is coming of age, there was a full aviation industry of hobbyists and nascent entrepreneurs. Most of them were little known by outsiders and on occasion some of them were put in the public spotlight because they had an interesting success or a whimsical failure.

Just take a look at the L'Aerophile gazette that started on the late 1800s. Similarly to computers, it's like reading the early editions of Byte magazine. There was a profuse number of people and small businesses from all over the world looking for collaboration with different goals in mind, selling their products and exchanging, stealing and improving on ideas of each other:

https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb344143803/date https://archive.org/details/larophile08besa

And us poor C folks had to be grateful for Ron Cain's small C compiler that was published in Dr Dobbs, along all its derivatives.

Unless this was not a Honeywell 1750 but a variant from another vendor (pretty common), the 1750 had only 2 hardware timers with just dedicated interrupts and no true watchdog functionality like a kicking key or handshake. The CPU has a "trigger-go" counter that cannot be disabled that was meant as a monitor for software resets, but not a real watchdog implementation.

Algebraically, and also in group theory, it's exactly that. A complex plane is re-interpreted as a half-way mirror operation on an orthogonal axis or quadrature plane (eg the imaginary axis in the case of the 2D Argand plane). Which is what you you get when you multiply by i in complex numbers or i/j/k in quaternions - a 90 degree rotation. The correct way to do arbitrary rotations in this case is to use an exponential process, and then you get Euler's equation, the quaternion symmetry operation or, in general, the exponential map of an infinitesimal transformation in a Lie group.

In higher dimensions you get other type of (sometimes weird) operations, related to the Cartan–Dieudonné theorem.

You can certainly use quaternions (as Hamilton demonstrated) or a Clifford algebra to recover the spherical trigonometry laws, but plain vectors work too in a short derivation. It is actually one of the simple exercises introducing reciprocal bases in Louis Brand's book Vector and Tensor Analysis (https://archive.org/details/vectortensoranal00branrich) or its abridged version, Vector Calculus.

When you are close to a low frequency radio station anything is possible I guess. I used to live less than one mile away from an AM radio station antenna. That doesn't mix up well if you want to become an electronic engineer or compose your own electronic music. ;-)

The Telecaster guitar and bass used would be my #1 culprit on introducing noise since pickups are virtually antennas. Mike Oldfield even had added an extra high gain single coil BL pickup to his '66 Tele. If you don't gain stage or ground properly the mics that were used for the acoustic instruments, they could have also captured RF noise easily, even if they had a heavy metal housing that acted like shielding. Some Farfisa organs are also noticeable noisy, although I don't know about their EMI or how banged up was the one used for the album that belonged to David Bedford. The electric piano used was a Rhodes, and those were built like a tank. Finally the tracks were overdubbed over and over. This would in all likelihood have attenuated both the audio and noise, but using a mixer or a tape that is susceptible to interference means that you have more chances of capturing noise at some point in the recording. I guess we will never know for sure.

Anyway, it adds to the mystique of the record.

Mike Oldfield has stated that the conditions at the Manor were so precarious at the time, he had to learn to use the tape recorder and mixer almost by himself because the engineer was never there. Since there were so many instruments on the recordings and the mixer was not automated, it took several people doing acrobatics to operate the faders and dials real-time to mix down the tracks for the album. Therefore possibly those Morse code signals were picked up because an instrument was not properly gain staged before being recorded.

I said "tried" because in fact 3M filed lawsuit in China against Huawei (which manufactured the 3N products). Surprisingly, the Chinese court found them guilty of infringement and even awarded damages to 3M.

When I visited China some years ago "3N" was also popular. Same logo font and color, but at least they tried to avoid blatantly infringing the genuine brand.

This was pure gold. I've certainly met many Julii trough my career. The universe spawns and churns them abundantly. It must be fond of them.

MQTTv5 now has RPC. You can specify a response topic in the request message, and also add 'correlation' data to track the context of the call.

Yes! Enjoyable and I have learned a lot about how car engines work and are built watching it. And how some companies (cough - Audi - cough) intentionally overengineer their designs so much to boost service and repair cash flows.

I think those of us who use the REAPER DAW and its customizable themes are the main beneficiaries of that functionality.

Interesting. I really enjoyed the books by Penrose and Cohen.

A human certainly cannot solve a non-computable problem by "playing" computer. However the insight that is created by trying to solve (or invent, in Post's case) something like the PCP, and then the ability to intuit and then prove there cannot be a solution by a non-human, is still an open question. Penrose has his quantic processes inside microtubules explanation which seems a very up your sleeve answer. I don't know if that would be too different to a massively parallel machine with true stochastic non-determinism.

In any case attempting to compare the brain to a computer and calculating the maximum number of states in terms of bits for me is not fair. There are certainly hard physical limits but that pertains the question of consciousness tangentially.

Unless the author is attempting to redefine GOFAI, ML and NN were very much techniques of "old" AI. The perceptron was invented in 1949 and there was already plenty of prior art.

Large scale models prove computers are very good interpolators. They also make evident they lack common sense.

Every time there is a new release of ChatGPT, Copilot, Bard/Gemini, etc. I challenge them with a simple non-computable problem like an example of the PCP. Every time they fail trying to nail down a correct solution. And worse, they try to convince me they can solve the problem and their answer is correct, showing that a computer is still behind pulling the strings.

My personal opinion: overengineering. Most of the original BT stack design lifted the framework from the infrared (IrDA) protocols. IrDA's original intention was a "simplified" OSI model, but as design by committee goes, it derived in a blown out spec that was very difficult to implement even in capable hardware at the time. As usual it had a very ambitious plan of being a protocol for everything, including devices that were not invented yet.

I once worked in a project that allowed truck drivers to print invoices with a Palm device to printers that needed an IrDA transceiver dongle. What would have been a no-more-than-a-week project in any other sane embedded system turned into a 3 month ordeal. Time was mostly spent troubleshooting and debugging the several layers of the system, from the physical up to the application. Many years after that I worked in BT and BTLE devices and, although I had better tools and software stacks, my experience was exactly the same. Just browse the issues in the BlueZ forum developers face even when attempting to do silly and simple stuff. Imagine trying to use BT hardware and software to do more sophisticated things like synchronizing the audio stream of multiple BT speakers.

In the last years many of the new BT features that are continuously being added to the spec feel like an afterthought. Specially in critical areas like security. Contrast that to a technology like WiFi that was always intended as a typical network communication ecosystem. Things have improved a bit since there is undoubtedly more experience due to all the devices out there with more performant hardware. However the fact that you need to deal with an onion of multiple hardware and software components, each with its own intricacies as a result of the engineer's interpretation of a complex specification - and therefore very difficult to verify and test, explains for me the current situation we are in.

I honestly thought this was a joke since the key icon seemed like a female menstruation pad to me. Oh, how times have changed.

I like what traditional Japanese homes have been doing for centuries. If possible they have a sunny garden on one side of the house and a shaded garden at the opposite side. Besides being aesthetically pleasant, controlling the opening of windows and doors to those areas during the day creates an air flow through the house that will regulate room temperatures accordingly, just by using thermal physics.

And Port had said: "Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don't know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It's that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don't know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that's so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless." - The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles (1949).

This. It is impressive to realize how distant the lifestyle of people living in cities and rural towns has become. I was raised in a rural area (30+ years ago, not in the US) and was direct witness of kids my age or younger doing things that only "adults" should do to survive and maintain their families. They didn't know better and considered their situation a totally natural and common thing for the lack of a comparison point. If they were lucky, their environment was supportive and it was not rare to see people in charge stretching the law for them if needed. The unlucky ones were abused with responsibilities and labor that no child should be exposed to.

I cannot attest about this particular case, but I can believe that in a similar situation today with all the access to resources through technology we have, the things that capable kids under these conditions could do would be far more reaching than ever.

Not a silly question. One of the things I always miss from these studies is comparison with more classical inference models. In particular, back in the days we had to train against outputs for PCA models (linear and non-linear) in order to get a feasible production version with the best reduced parameters and justify equivalent performance. Today we have so much computing power that nobody cares.

Audio is a particular good application of this. For example, the old ADPCM algorithms have evolved naturally into their ML counterparts. Some have even less parameters and thus are more computationally efficient because of the advantages of flexible feedback of the training or production models (e.g. RNNs).

Yes, better models and more refinement, and yet they still lack common sense. Computers (computational statistical models, ML included) are very good interpolators, even moreso in higher dimensions which are difficult or impossible to grasp for humans, to find linear or non-linear correlations. However when it comes to extrapolation most models fail miserably.

It can be argued, since we don't know the ultimate cause of the laws of our universe, that we also rely in abductive reasoning and guide ourselves through models created by correlations based in our experience. But that has happened through millions of years of evolution and we still don't know how to build AI supervisors that can challenge that.

Whenever I need to use JSON in my projects I always check if I can use JSON5 instead. It really makes a difference to have a more user friendly format. My only gripe is when I use Python, the official JSON5 module is much, much slower than Python's JSON parser. I frequently end up translating the development JSON5 files to JSON files that go into the final runtime because of this.

The main problem I see with (occidental) "music theory" is its historical baggage. Most of it is useful, beautiful by its own merits but, specially if you have a scientific/logic way of looking things, much of its structure and nomenclature really gets in the way. After many years of doing false starts I sat one day, started from scratch, looked at just the facts (= math), and then everything fell together:

- The Pythagoreans dealt for centuries with the known conundrum of figuring out irrational numbers. I had a computer so I just run a script for measuring the total error with different bisecting rational quantizations (up to 256 IIRC) of note frequencies in the equal-tempered scale within one octave (2^(1/N) splits). Oh, peaks at 12, 19 at 24 on the low side of the counter. That is why they settled on 12 notes, middle eastern has 24 (just double the resolution) and why 19 also sounds good [1]. 12 seems like the minimum acceptable then. Ok, 10 minutes, move on.

- Since we know we can only approximate to irrationals and our brain tries to makes things even, moving through scales with increasing intervals (2^(n/12)) will normally accumulate "tension". Half notes sound spooky. Whole notes are a bit better. Too bad sound perception is logarithmic (= tempered scale) and has non-linear compression on both amplitude and frequency (Fletcher-Munson, etc). Double the frequency is an octave. Perfect fit, brain happy (2^(12/12)). Try to split an octave in half? Again, fitting a peg in the only wrong hole available when using half-note resolution. Welcome to accidentals and the Circle of Fifths. "Try", because of course you can't: 2^(7/12) = 1.498307.... Close to 150%, but no cigar. Close enough for a crippled monkey brain that can only hear up to 20kHz or so. They even named it "Perfect". Moving up: F to C, G to D, A to E...

- Music would be very dull and inadequate if we cannot shift notes up or down. However our brain still recognizes the patterns. We can even play those patterns at the same time, even on different instruments. So that pattern with the same scale on a G sounds good with the other guy playing C (harmonies). What if the guy playing the C wants to play like the guy on the G? Enter modes... Oh yeah, cool Myxolydian tunes. And minor scale too - don't forget that looks THE SAME as an Aeolian.

- Your new singer cannot hit that low notes. What about now moving everything up then? Transpose. We have "physical instruments" like a guitar. Easy, just play the same pattern some frets up. Done. Poor piano player who has a "logical instrument" with notes separated nicely in two different kinds based on half notes and that ugly 1.498307 fraction. Good that he is also good at math. So that C scale becomes a D. He just replaces on the fly some white keys with black keys... F# and C#. But wait a sec. Didn't the Circle of Fifths also moved F to C too? Does it continue like that for all notes? Yes it does! Transposing has the same structure as modes the other way around! So what if instead of moving up we move down, or play the same pattern in the original C scale? For every raised (sharp) accidental we get it's complement lowered (flat) one. Of course, since 7 + 5 = 12! The Circle of Fifth is complete. B to E, A to D, G to C... That G pattern moved down to C? G major scale (aka Ionian) has one accidental: F#. The first flat is Bb. C scale with B lowered to Bb... Yep, Myxolydian indeed!

- We can also use those interval numbers to name chords when we play notes together. We can also name the scales when adding and removing notes, maybe borrowing from other scales. Sounds pentatonic or exotic. The sky is the limit.

- Piano player now teases the guitar player. Now it's her turn to do the math. Looks like "physical" and "logical" instruments are also complementary. What is easy on one needs thinking on the other, and vice-versa. Win-win.

Honestly, that covers like 95% of practical music note theory. Of course there is much more to it (note, rhythm, history, etc). If they have just started explaining it like that without all the mumbo-jumbo it would have made sense since day #1 and I would have saved many years of my life hitting my head in the wall and trying to learn things I forgot within a week. Perhaps the main issue is that not many music teachers are good at math or they would think their students would get scared if they told them it's all math underneath?

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19_equal_temperament