SoleilAbsolu

Let's commission Alan Smithee to make the documentary! ;-)

I've definitely noticed a huge increase in tangential slop when I've made the mistake of searching for books on Amazon in the last year.

I experience the same, I feel like it has something to do with the content of a book having a permanent spatial configuration.

Wow, this is very cool, I have been looking for the Phish show at Lounge Ax from November 1990 (opening for Alex Chilton of Big Star) for ages. It was first time I saw them live, and next time they came around they graduated from a 300 person club to a 3000 person ballroom!

Me too, as soon as I saw this I put on my Anker Soundcore noise-cancelling earbuds and fired up my AAS Multiphonics CV-3 software synthesizer. Sweeping a sine oscillator, there was zero difference in perceived volume in the 750-780 Hz range.

Actually appears to be 2 concentric whole-tone rings, not chromatic.

A couple of other user-hostile Adobe practices I've encountered:

- About 5 years ago I pretty much shat a brick as the person in charge of IT at a healthcare org when I discovered that by default Creative Cloud stored copies of any documents edited within an Adobe cloud account - with no opt-in, and the only way to override on Windows was with a registry hack that IIRC we couldn't automate via Group Policy. Basically "HIPAA Breach As A Service"

- If you want to free yourself from the tyranny of Adobe products and subscriptions, good on you, but: be sure (on Windows at least several years ago) to not uninstall from "Windows Add & Remove Programs"...go through the Adobe un/installers...if you don't you can still remove the apps but they phoned home and we got charged until I re-installed the programs and used the Adobe uninstallers.

If

MINASWAN...

WTFIDHHSAFA???

This was part of the plot of an Elementary (modern-day Sherlock Holmes in NYC with Jonny Lee Miller & Lucy Liu) episode called Sand Trap.

https://cbselementary.fandom.com/wiki/Sand_Trap#Plot

I will have to check that out! I also recommend reading pretty much anything by Richard Hamming, who worked closely with Shannon at Bell Labs, "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering" is especially good.

Agreed regarding the audibility of (data-) compressed audio, just put on some classic jazz with trumpets and lots of cymbals and the artifacts are immediately apparent.

Not going to argue with you regarding dynamic compression, but after backing away from the worst excesses of the volume wars by mastering engineers in the mid '00s, things are sounding better to my ears. Dynamic compression can sound good (even in the extreme) if done for artistic effect. Like here's Beck's Ramona where the drums & cymbals have the tar squashed out of them with serious limiting, which to my ears nicely tames the sonics of Joey Waronker's spirited performance, while fitting well dynamically into the rest of the song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3yZ9OVjzbE

That said, maybe the engineers responsible for some of the worst dynamic squashing could be pressed into TV/film audio service where in 2026, there are still extreme volume imbalances between on-screen dialogue and everything else (hint the dialogue isn't loud enough and the everything else, especially crashes and explosions, are wayyy too loud).

FWIW, my experience doing this process for a ~130 person org last year was pretty painless compared to other Domain Claims I've initiated for other SAAS vendors (Docusign in particular), and MDM nightmares (expired JAMF certificates, I'm looking at you).

We had to do it as ppl had made personal Apple accounts using our domain, meaning if they logged in with such an account and left, their iPhone magically transformed into an expensive, elegant paperweight. Due to a setting in our previous MDM we were unable to migrate data cleanly using Apple Biz Manager without committing to use ABM as our MDM (we couldn't) so we told people to "move it yourself following these detailed instructions, otherwise it can't be migrated." Regarding personal data like health on company-managed devices, I certainly don't share that type of info with my employer, and make it clear to staff that it's not our responsibility to migrate such data.

I'm in publicly funded mental health...federal cuts are starting to cause states & counties to either immediately slash what CBOs thought was solid funding for essential services, or to let us/them know to expect significant cuts starting in the next fiscal year.

Great points - a Little Library near me has become more of a dumping ground than it used to be because when they re-did it, they replaced the clear plastic window with a frosted/corrugated plastic (you can't see what's in it without opening the door), and they replaced the hook latch with a chain one that lets rain get in.

???

Hendrix was a working musician who paid his dues on the chitlin' circuit with artists like The Isley Brothers, Little Richard, Ike & Tina Turner, and Sam Cooke before making it on his own. AFAIK those are pretty high-pressure assignments, and count as real work...

I run IT for a nonprofit and have 120 "real users" doing "real work" on "low-end machines "providing "real mental health, foster care, and social services" to "real communities".

These workers complain about performance on the machines we can afford. 16GB RAM and 256GB SSDs are the standard, as is 500MB/sec. internet for offices with 40 people, and my plans to upgrade RAM this year were axed by the insane AI chip boondoggle.

People on HN need to understand that not everyone works for a well-funded startup, or big tech company that is in the process of destroying democracy and the environment in the name of this quarter's profits!

BTW Teams has moved away from Electron, before it did I had to advise people to use the browser app instead of the desktop for performance reasons.

If this runs on the CLI, the system prompt should be "What do you want me to do?"

I'm in the middle of reading "All and Everything" and had the exact same thought!

Well there is Brian May, guitarist from Queen, who finished his astrophysics PhD in 2007 but he is probably an outlier!

He's kind of on the 3rd or 4th act of his career...I think he started on sports, really made his name in music/pop culture, moved on to be New York Times Ethicist for a while (!) and is back to sports. IMO he asked good occasionally hard questions of pop stars. One thing I love about him is at heart he is a true superfan of the disciplines he covers so is not a "critic" per se, but that may steer things more toward the positive because of that. He helped me realize many things about music I loved growing up in the '80s that I couldn't quite articulate at the time.

I'm sure piracy has an impact, but they are already targeting hobby musicians with all the soundpacks that can run on Kontakt Player or Reaktor Player and lite versions of Traktor.

I think it's more due to things like - the brilliant founders are no longer there...folks like Stephan Schmitt used Reaktor (node-based audio DSP environment) to prototype so many products over the years, hard to find a bigger product evangelist than founder/COO/CTO types who eat their own dogfood.

When they released Massive X it was way too early, clearly a cash grab and IDK if they ever added back basic UI features like "navigate menus with arrow keys" that worked in all previous versions. Then there are clearly decades of technical debt that still need to be addressed - I stopped using Reaktor and Kontakt several years ago because the tiny anti-aliased fonts still used in various key places are literally too painful to look at.

Once they're done, shouldn't they be called "stopdowns"?

Erlang fault-tolerance FTW! ;-)

Fare thee well Bob! What a life in music.

I felt that Textile was the superior Sony Betamax to Markdown's VHS. Also, IME any no-coders I've known get freaked out by Markdown and always chose to use a rich text editor instead.

Elton John wrote a song about that!

Yeah I've been playing 40 years and did a stint in music school. Other than fat-fingered note entry errors my ear nailed all the ones I did. IMO this seems to start from a pretty advanced level off the bat.

Read Geddy Lee's "My Effin' Life" autobio...the amount of coke Rush used for quite some time came as a big, big surprise to me! And Alex Lifeson has been a huge stoner since forever.

Yeah, if I hung a sign on my door saying "Answers generated by this person may be incorrect" my boss and HR would quickly put me on a PIP, or worse. If a physical product didn't do what it claimed to do, it would be recalled and the maker would get sued. Why does AI get a pass just pooping out plausible but incorrect, and sometimes very dangerous, answers?

Well, Bose has a long history of continually hyping whatever they're selling as the complete & utter pinnacle of sound reproduction technology, whether or not that's actually the case. Before the internet it was through their print media ads, starting with their Direct/Reflecting home speaker tech, continued through the 800 series PA speakers, Acoustic Wave tabletop radio, etc. Not to say there were not benefits, but that the choices they made -- single driver size, requiring certain room boundaries/geometry for optimal sound, need for active EQ/processing to get full-range response before the tech was really there to do so optimally -- did not always equal great trouble-free sound as advertised.

That said their implementation of noise-cancelling headphones/earbuds was a legit game-changer. And good on them for open-sourcing these speakers!

Thanks for "Temba, his arms open wide"-ing me a chuckle!