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J_McQuade

745 karma · joined April 26, 2009

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J_McQuade··on Eleven Music
I am not sure if this will be any help to you at all, but the technical skill of music - especially in (from your comment) heavy metal - has only ever been a tiny part of it. You probably know a guy in a local pub band who can note-for-note play every singly thing that Toni Iommi ever recorded, for instance.

There are hundreds of bands who play three-chord doom or mindless-shredding grind who just learned one thing and do it well, and who play to hundreds of people multiple times a week (often including me). We go to see these bands not to see what they can play, but to see what they are saying with what they play.

This is why I feel that I can never describe LLM-generated content as 'art'. Art is about the story. People will go and see a punk band who only know three chords if they play songs about things that resonate with them. Bit of a tangent, but this is the same reason that I genuinely believe that if you could bio-engineer a steak that tastes exactly like one from a well-looked-after cow from a notable breed and a good farm, most people would still prefer the cow. The story matters - the fact that a person put effort and experience into something really is important.

"This solo is sick" is a fun plus-point, but it doesn't matter if the song doesn't mean anything to you. If proficiency was the only thing that mattered then we'd all be listening to the worst kind of prog.

J_McQuade··on Google has dropped more than 50 DEI-related orgs from one of its funding lists
> activists or the companies they infiltrated

Name them. Please. Why do you all refuse to tell me who's doing all the bad things you're so worried about?

J_McQuade··on Google has dropped more than 50 DEI-related orgs from one of its funding lists
I agree that all of those things would be bad! But I repeat - 'citation needed'. And when I say that, I do not mean "it happened once somewhere", I mean - I need you to prove that this is a systemic thing that requires changes in legislation, because that is what a bunch of tiny scaredbois are asking for.
J_McQuade··on Google has dropped more than 50 DEI-related orgs from one of its funding lists
> Especially the “E” in DEI (equity), which means equality of outcomes, and is a rebrand of discrimination.

Do we still do 'citation needed' around here? Find me one serious person who has ever argued for equality of outcomes. Even fucking Lenin said "He who does not work shall not eat".

J_McQuade··on Ask HN: What are your current programming pet peeves?
Having used Scala and TypeScript a lot for work over the last ~5 years, I think I'm going to say static typing. It's lunacy. Computers mostly don't work in types, my brain usually doesn't work in types, and only a small subset of the problems I work on really work in types.

The amount of modern languages that think they can solve everything in the type system boggles my mind.

J_McQuade··on How I Use Kagi
Also, the company is based in a country that has 'fueled' more wars in my lifetime than any other country has in the last 100 years. Definitely avoid.
J_McQuade··on How I Use Kagi
I always feel really grotty about evangelising for products, but I switched to Kagi about six months ago and it really is a better experience. In almost all cases, the search results are as good as or better than Google, and I don't have to scroll through an increasing number of misleading ads to see them. I'm a happy customer.

When I first switched, I would often click the button to run the search on google for queries that weren't immediately giving me what I wanted (rather than go through the next few pages of results), but invariably I wouldn't find it there either. I think that's what gave me confidence that Kagi's results were at least as trustworthy as anything else. (to compare, I did the same thing in my multiple abortive attempts to switch to DDG and it always came up wanting).

J_McQuade··on Tin Can – The landline, reinvented for kids
I kinda get why they think they don't want to enable this, but when I was a kid I once called 999 (in the UK) as a joke and let me tell you it was only once. My friends and I were there in the room watching films that we shouldn't and the uniformed and kitted-out Constables turned up and gave us an incredibly stern dressing-down about 30 minutes later.

Luckily, I am in the UK where a bunch of 12 year olds who've just watched Scream calling the police about shadows doesn't result in something getting shot, but still - I think I learned something about actions and consequences that day.

J_McQuade··on Google Pixels are no longer the AOSP reference device
[flagged]
J_McQuade··on The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela
"here is how to to translate this query from T-SQL to PL-SQL... ..."

"... but if you used our VC's latest beau, BozoDB, it could be written like THIS! ... ..."

9 months, max. I give it 9 months.

J_McQuade··on Android 16 is here
Not gonna lie, I've been using (and programming) GUIs since the Amiga and even I get thrown askew by "click here to enter your name" (expecting a subsequent GUI element to focus, or worse - a popup) vs. "click here to enter your name" (haha! the prompt text disappears now and this is just where you write it I guess!).

You'd think this is just a little thing, but it can really mess with you if you need to change focus and - of course - every application will 'haha!' you in a different way.

It has nothing to do with skeuomorphism really, but at least skeuomorphism seemed to give everyone an idea of what they were shooting for at least.

J_McQuade··on Small Programs and Languages
Off topic, but this is the first I've heard of Antilisp and I love the idea - seems aimed at the sort of problems that I've definitely solved with a tangle of unmaintainable elisp before. Now I just need to forget about the whole thing before I talk myself into writing a Helm module for it... or an HCL one... or... NO.
J_McQuade··on Postgres IDE in VS Code
Easily VSCode, if we're talking about developer reach. I'm not big into Microsoft stuff, but almost every 'serious' .Net developer I personally know is using Rider, so I can only assume that Visual Studio is retreating to the same space occupied by Eclipse and Netbeans, i.e. still used, but mostly only in places where change is hard.

I'm an emacs user and even I keep a copy of VSCode installed just because I occasionally have to interact with SQL Server and it's really the best way to do that on non-windows systems now that they're winding down ADS.

J_McQuade··on Show HN: Aberdeen – An elegant approach to reactive UIs
Also with a prohibitively expensive license fee.
J_McQuade··on Graphics livecoding in Common Lisp
Oh wow, just had to log in and give you a high-five for livelove because this is the first I've heard of it and it sounds like the sort of thing I absolutely need to try out.

I remember giving Love2D a go a couple of years ago with Fennel and the lack of such a thing sent me grumbling back to Common Lisp. I'd never even have thought of building that functionality in Love/Lua myself - assuming it's something that the runtime just didn't support - and it absolutely would never have occurred to me to use LSP to set it up. I've not even used it yet and it's already doing things to my brain, so thanks!

J_McQuade··on East Asian personality may stem from Ice Age Siberia 20000 yrs ago
As a Brit, I thought "are they just describing the 'stiff upper lip' or something?".

Which is doubly odd, because here that is more associated with upper-middle-classes. That cold stoicism that causes people to act 'gentlemanly' regardless of circumstance, or parents to pressure their children to be upwardly mobile, generals to describe an unwinnable position as "a bit of a pickle" etc. etc.

In Britain this is definitely seen as a class characteristic rather than a climatic one (we all live in a similarly temperate environment).

J_McQuade··on 20 years working on the same software product
Yeah, but I'd hope that I can understand my users.
J_McQuade··on Suckless.org: software that sucks less
> I said I don't understand it, not that I couldn't.

When your main goal to just get on with solving your actual problems, these are the same thing.

J_McQuade··on The Greenland Shark, the Longest-Living Vertebrate on Earth (2017)
I have also had it and it tastes like drain cleaner with the texture of angry spam. Only a third of a bottle of Brennivin made the whole experience even remotely enjoyable.
J_McQuade··on Sweden brings more books and handwriting practice back to its schools (2023)
I re-taught myself joined-up writing in my early-mid 20s, mainly because it looks nice. Get yourself a pack of Uni Jetstreams - they are not too expensive and glide about as well as any pen I've ever used.
J_McQuade··on The Origins of Wokeness
"The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them."

- Julius Nyerere

J_McQuade··on Why are UK electricity bills so expensive?
3100 kWh is the figure set by the regulator as the representative annual usage used to calculate prices for e.g. tariff comparison between suppliers. It makes sense to use it here.
J_McQuade··on Consider Rexx for Scripting (2022)
I only ever used ARexx on the Amiga back when I was a kid and it was amazingly powerful, though I'm not sure how much I'd consider this a function of the language itself rather than the ecosystem you got when all of your favourite software was built with it in mind.

Unfortunately, an ecosystem like that doesn't really exist on the desktop any more, so a lot of the utility is missing. Every now and then I feel an urge to try to mimic the sort of thing that you could do in ARexx easily, only on a modern desktop, and end up having to cobble together some D-Bus monstrosity that is not nearly as fun.

J_McQuade··on Why America's economy is soaring ahead of its rivals
The last terror attacks in my country were part of an organised campaign to try and burn down mosques explicitly because of unhinged propaganda on TV and online. The fact that these attacks were not called "terrorist attacks" on any single news station tells you all you need to know about propaganda here.
J_McQuade··on Amiga runs Michigan schools' heating and air conditioning systems (2015)
I think I picked up a bootleg of this at a car boot sale in the early 2000s. Couldn't get it to work with my EU boiler, but it had a great cracktro.
J_McQuade··on C++ Asynchronous Framework
You're entirely right. I'll try and remember that next time I encounter dehumanising rhetoric and will consider all the good it can do.
J_McQuade··on A web video company that is most likely a hoax
You'd want to contact the City of London Police over here.
J_McQuade··on The Art of Assembly Language Programming
I'd hate to be in the passenger seat when you break down.
J_McQuade··on Learning eLisp
But dude - that might take more than 21 days.
J_McQuade··on Ask HN: Good Reading/Immersion in Mathematics
In my view, the best place to start for a good grounding in rigorous mathematics is Velleman's 'How to Prove It'

As for a good broad overview of many areas, the title that springs to mind is 'the nature of mathematical modelling' by Gershenfeld, though you'd better have some decent maths experience before tackling that one - it can be tough-going, but is refreshing in its breadth and clarity.

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