sramsay

For me, it's the library problem. I read the guide and think, "Wow, this is really great!" Then I read the cookbook, and it mostly says that things (like database connectivity, regex, options parsing, even HTTP GET) are not quite ready for prime time, and I should just call out to C.

Obviously, it takes time for a language to get there; I don't really mean this as a criticism. But I'm just not interested in wrapping C libraries while I wait for a zig version. I'd rather just write C. Or work in a language that is there with these kinds of things.

Prostrations are part of every Orthodox tradition, to my knowledge. You will even see people making prostrations publicly in church especially during Great Lent, but you will generally not see people doing it at a Sunday liturgy since (in most traditions) prostrations are forbidden on Sundays.

I'm aware of the verse. I'm not aware of any scholar taking that meaning literally and concluding that 1 Peter (the author of which is unknown) is referring to Peter's biological son and further concluding that this son is the author of the Gospel of Mark (the author of which is also unknown).

I guess at this point, I'm legitimately asking who holds this view such that one can say "It is thought that . . ."

> The two things I learned from my experience at the Christian "University" are . . .

You also seem to have become a bit of anti-intellectual yourself. Dismissing a fundamental question in textual criticism (about one of the most influential texts of all time) to a mere "interesting puzzle" and "fodder" for academic journals strikes me as openly hostile to scholarship as such.

But even leaving that aside: Do you really think it would make no difference to our understanding of early Christianity were it conclusively demonstrated that a collection of Christian logia were circulating prior to the writing of the canonical gospels? Or, conversely, that no such collection existed?

People have devoted their scholarly lives to this, because the question is so rich. Did Paul have any knowledge of this collection (and if he did, why doesn't he appear to quote it)? Did only Mark have access to it, or is it the source of sayings in more than one gospel? What is its relation to the Gospel of Thomas (and is the GoT itself a "sayings gospel" akin to Q?) If Q existed, why wasn't it preserved? What if (and this isn't a mainstream view) some kind of "proto-Matthew" existed in, say, Aramaic? Could Mark -- again, a minority view -- be, as some ancient commentators seemed to have believed, a condensation of Matthew?

It just goes on and on. I fail to see why the idea that "most Christians" (an already problematic generalization) are bored by the subject has any bearing on whether this is important work. It's like saying, "theoretical computer science has no bearing on the lives of working programming. So who is it actually for?"

The answer is, other scholars trying to understand the the subject at hand more deeply.

I'm pretty well read in this area, and I have never come across the theory that the Gospel of Mark was written by Peter's son (or even that Peter had a son, never mind his name). Where are you getting all of this?

Most of the associations between Mark and Peter come from Papias (whom we possess only in fragments). He makes no suggestion of a filial relationship between the author of the second gospel and Peter.

Stephen King: A character wonders if, given all the suffering recently endured over the last few hundred pages, life is nonetheless still worth living. This character is killed by an entity which, despite all appearance and reputation, is permanently and inexplicably murderous.

Everyone in this thread is talking about coding, but this is, perhaps more significantly, a word processor. “Change reading level: Adjusts the reading level, from Kindergarten to Graduate School.” “Adjust the length: Edits the document length to be shorter or longer.” “Suggest edits: ChatGPT offers inline suggestions and feedback.”

Hear, hear! I absolutely love FM-OP from Bogaudio. In fact, I'd say I use that more than any other FM softsynth mentioned in this thread.

Yeah, my first reaction is that this list is more-or-less the philosophy an American lit. scholar would be expected to know. Heavy on continental philosophy, hermeneutics, recastings of traditional metaphysics, neo-Marxism . . . way less Anglo-American analytical stuff, but some.

"We cannot effectively study, understand, debug, or improve, the underlying operating system if it is non-free. We actively work with the source code for the systems on which we depend, and we are not interested in supporting any platforms for which this is not possible."

I understand that you don't like it, but how do you come to regard a statement like this as "arbitrary?" It's exclusive, for sure. "Purity test" is one way to characterize it. But do you really think that statements like this are just the product of individual caprice? That it's not someone's attempt at a principled intervention, but just an "attitude?"

I believe some researchers have come to the conclusion that "the earliest extant program for a stored program digital computer" was not written by John von Neumann, but by his wife: Klára Dán von Neumann.

Knuth references a letter "in the possession of Dr. Herman H. Goldstein," but scholars making the case for Klara are usually referencing the archival materials at the LoC:

http://rs5.loc.gov/service/mss/eadxmlmss/eadpdfmss/1996/ms99...

I'm doing some research that involves this issue, and I'd be grateful to anyone who has any insight on this. There's a book called Klara and the Bomb, which is quite fascinating (and makes the claim for Klara), but that book leans more toward art than research scholarship.

I am aware that "firsts" are often hard to identify when it comes to the history of science and technology; I'm personally more interested in what these very early programs were being used for than who wrote them, per se. But I'd still like to know if Knuth is actually correct in his assumption.

Forgive me, I think I read you wrong. It sounds like you meant, "the millennials in my family". Which, yes: I see what you're saying.

> All I know is that the boomers of the family ate fat and sugar like it was going out of style, and lived in decent health to a ripe old age

That's a data point.

> while the fair-trade free-range organic millennials seem to be falling apart at the seams.

That's not a data point. That's a broad statement that generalizes about a population, and yes: It would be a good to see a source that indicates that an entire generation is "falling apart at the seams" either as a result of their preference for "fair trade free range organic" food or their avoidance of fat and sugar -- if, indeed, that is even true of the population in question.

Whenever I say, "I probably have the worst sense of direction of anyone you will ever meet," people invariably say, "Oh, me too!"

And I say, "Really? So you are never surprised by what you see when you walk out of the building you've been working in for 20 years (you know where the exits are, you just can't figure out which exit leads to which side)? When you're sitting in a room in your house you can determine -- within, say, ten or fifteen minutes -- what room is above/below you? You routinely get lost going to places you've been to hundreds of times in your own city? There are perhaps only two or three places you can get to in said city without a GPS receiver, but that's about it. You are never, ever without a compass? Anywhere?"

Really, folks. I've been like this my whole life (I'm 53), and I have no other cognitive deficiencies that I know of. But when people talk about "mental maps," I'm not entirely sure what they're talking about. When someone says, "Oh, I know a shortcut" it's always an absolute revelation. Navigating anywhere is like being asked to memorize a 19-digit number.

Whenever I hear about greater or lesser abilities with navigation -- and how one might go from lesser to greater -- I always assume they are not talking about people like me. I really feel like I'm truly impaired when it comes to this, and I'd love to know why!

I absolutely understand what you're saying. And you might be right in this particular case. But there's a difference between the "you" you have in mind here and figures of literally world-historical significance.

I doubt the "morbid curiosity of the general public" could ever succeed as a justification on ethical grounds, but as a literature scholar, I can say that there are usually other purposes in view. At some point, the work of an author like García Márquez becomes an important part of the world-wide human record and historians who study that record are not doing so out of morbid anything. In this case, we're trying to understand the evolution of one of the most important authors (and associated literary movements) in the twentieth century.

I've seen these kinds of decisions being made on the scholarly side (opening archives, publishing letters, etc.). I can tell you they aren't made lightly, and one of the ways we tend to adjudicate these dilemmas is by weighing the "privacy and last wishes" of an individual against the desire of the broader culture to understand itself and its history. Sometimes that latter claim isn't strong enough. But sometimes it really is.

This is the most lucid explanation of aliasing I think I've ever read.

I mostly deal with this stuff in the realm of audio where the matter of analog vs digital rages regularly. The reason one hears "Nyquist says" so often from people defending digital audio is that the pro-analog people are imagining stair-stepped signals in which the information that is "lost" results in a noticeable degradation in sound quality. This (11-year-old) video is the gold standard for addressing this concern:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM

Curiously, no one ever seems to mention the actual problems (like aliasing).

Just got done mastering a track (a soundtrack for video with voice over). Getting to the appropriate LUFS level with a limiter seems to me something that is easily automated, and I'm not sure you need AI to do it. But as usual, most of the moves I made with EQ, compression, saturation, and so on were creative choices where I was picking from among dozens of different possible tones and vibes (some in my head, some from reference tracks). I guess I don't doubt that AI can master a track if you say "make it sound like a Beyoncé record," and some of the automated tools give you vague choices about how you want it to sound.

But for this to really work, I feel like I'd have to sit there going: "Okay, same thing but bring the lower mids up a couple of dB. Try it with a little more air in the top end. Compress those drums, but try not smear the transients on the snares. No wait, go back. Try smearing those transients a bit more."

At that point, I'm not sure "mastering as prompt engineering" is worth it. Though I totally agree that things like LANDR and Ozone are great for quick-and-dirty work.

Read it in grad school (for an English PhD). And honestly, that's the only context in which I'd recommend doing so. It's a dreary slog of a book; we were reading it more for its historical importance than for any particular literary quality.

But I don't recall anyone at the time (mid 90s) doubting that the book was a forgery -- a somewhat inept mish-mash of Celtic literary figures and motifs. The interesting part was that people went absolutely wild for it. To the point that one can now speak of "Ossianism" as a significant literary movement.

LOL. Requesting permission to use the phrase "the goal is not to win the war against bias" in future, highly relevant situations. ;)

Also a die-hard Gentoo fan (daily driver for 20+ years).

I tried Arch and what astounded me the most is that the docs didn't seem as good as Gentoo's. That surprised me because I end up looking at Arch's docs all the time and it's all of a very high quality.

But the Gentoo Handbook is really a masterpiece. I've never read a clearer explanation of how to go from unformatted disks to a working system.

Making synthesizers emulate the sound of real instruments was once a major goal of synthesis, but that has mostly faded outside of the rarefied world of physical modeling. Electronic musicians remain interested in sounding "warm" and "organic" (or the opposite), but it's rare to find someone who is really interested in making a synthesizer sound exactly like a guitar or a clarinet.

But when I was learning FM synthesis (one of the harder ones), I found it incredibly useful to go through the exercise of trying to make a synthesizer sound like a convincing gong, or reed instrument, or guitar string. In fact, I don't think FM really clicked until I did that.

Orca is explicitly mentioned in the comment to which you are responding.

I'm not suggesting that we banish numbers from the entire stack. I'm asking why they are absolutely necessary for a textual interface in this domain -- to the point that, as someone says below, it is a "contradiction" to suggest otherwise. As if there's some sort of impassable gulf between csound and VCV Rack.

Let's talk about LaTeX this way. Suppose LaTeX required everything to be specified in explicitly numeric terms. I find this sort of tedious, and I start asking why we can't just express the idea that things be "centered," or "justified," or "kerned" or "Large(r)," or "ragged right."

Would you really say that I am speaking in terms of contradictions? That what I really need is Word, that I must not understand the difference between a textual language and a gestural one, and that the only reason to use a textual language is precisely so that I can have precise control over these matters?

What I'm really asking here is whether we are really talking about the hard limits of programming languages, or if we are instead talking about a certain lack of imagination among programming language designers in this space?

Doesn't what? Doesn't use numbers?

  scale(scales)
  .scaleTranspose("[0 <2 4>]*2")
  .struct("x*4")
  .velocity("<.8 .5>\*4")
  .velocity(0.8)
  .slow(2)
  )
  .fast(1)
  .note()
  .clip("<.4 .8 1 1.2 1.4 1.6 1.8 2>/8")

What I really want to see is a music programming language that does not require elementary knowledge of trig. In fact, I don't want it to use any numbers at all.

They all do: Faust, Impromptu, ChuCK, csound, SuperCollider, etc., etc. I suppose that by itself should convince me that there's no other way (there are things like Orca, but I'm thinking of things that look more like conventional programming languages).

I seldom think about numbers when I'm programming a synthesizer -- I just turn this knob more this way or this slider down a bit. Why can't a music programming language be more . . . gestural? Not sure what the right word is. I want the benefits of a textual programming language, but I don't really want to have to start thinking about sound waves in terms of literal numeric frequencies, particular since I really don't do that while doing sound design.

I don't meant to pick on your project in particular; it looks really cool. But since you're writing one of these, perhaps you can answer my question. Why do these languages ask synth programmers to think in terms of precise numbers when programming an "actual" synth isn't really like that at all?

Csound is extremely powerful, but my favorite thing in this vein these days is Faust:

https://faust.grame.fr/

It's a functional language with a nice way of generating diagrams of DSP algorithms, but its big killer feature for me is its language bindings, which include C, C++, Cmajor, Codebox, CSharp, DLang, Java, JAX, Julia, JSFX, "old" C++, Rust, VHDL, and WebAssembly (wast/wasm) out of the box.

I suggest nano to my students in classes where everyone is a beginner and we're learning programming on the command line.

The greatest advantage of nano for these users is that all the commands are listed along the bottom of the screen. I was shocked to see that this is not true of micro.

Absolutely. I've written everything in Vim for almost as long as Vim has been around -- three books, dozens of talks and papers, who knows how many lines of code . . .

I had been joking on social media a few weeks ago that Vim must be "done" since patches stopped appearing about a month ago. Can't believe that the guy who created maybe the most important tool in my entire arsenal is gone.

This is really cool!

Honestly, I just thought it was hilarious -- a sort of parodic counterpoint to the Story of Mel.