3,995 karma · joined July 17, 2016
One could have balanced RGB in a hexagonal grid. That's harder to build and slower to process.
He would have considered a hex grid, but our rectilinear cognitive bias was pretty entrenched. Before this work, he programmed an entire image processing system in the "ed" PDP editor, manipulating character arrays. That experience influenced both the Bayer filter and Bayer dithering. And it taught me to look for simple ways to do things.
My father devised the "Bayer filter" for digital photography, and favored green for practical reasons that have stood the test of time. There is some theory that applies here, it's just not the same as harmonics and sound.
I'd love to code up a machine learning project that showed the user many color combinations, responding to feedback. Willem de Kooning for example painted with an extraordinarily original palette. Could we tailor our own color palettes, with an AI assist?
I also love the scene where Dave takes Hal apart. We've always called the first computation the Macaulay computer algebra system completed "Hal's Song".
Coding intricate data structures is like teaching the computer chess. It helps if you understand chess. I can't imagine understanding what I want my code to do, without an involved process of drawing everything repeatedly in many variations.
Someday there will be an iPad drawing editor like Emacs, arbitrarily scriptable using further drawings, never putting down the Apple Pencil. We're still at the earliest stages of "word processing" technical art; this evolution is still to come.
I found the list years later. Last entry: "Forgot to eat. Got sick."
There are have long been musicians in the digital realm who develop their own tools. Visual arts should be ripe to similarly explode, with interactive content for VR headsets an emerging genre.
We could accelerate this evolution, by teaching artists the tools that are ready now.
That says something about privacy in the era. I felt that what I did was entirely in the spirit of the default file permissions. Various people were nevertheless horrified when they learned that this search was even possible.
I recovered from a deep dive into mechanical keyboards by trying Topre switches, the obsession killer. I now have four Leopold FC660C keyboards with Hasu FC660C controllers, with custom QMK firmware.
After many experiments, I've been won over by making every key near home row a "tap / hold" key. Tap for usual keystroke, hold as a modifier to access a custom keyboard layer with the other hand.
This is an empirical question. I've learned chording keyboards. I had the original FingerWorks TouchStream multitouch keyboard, tech which Apple turned into the iPhone. I've owned various ergonomic and small keyboards. I've tried many versions of my own firmware. I learned Dvorak on a one-handed half keyboard, and experienced the miracle of knowing how to type Dvorak both hands with no practice. Brain plasticity is very important to me; I've tried everything I can.
"One finger each hand, near home row" is stripped down chording that wins hands down over any other typing system I've ever tried. Taking advantage of the quadratic address space (versus a linear multiple using a fixed set of modifier keys), I control every aspect of my computer this way.
"Control-Xylophone" has kept me from ever accepting Emacs. I should write a two finger chording interface to Emacs, in the spirit of Devil Mode.
Leopold FC660C Mechanical Keyboard https://mechanicalkeyboards.com/shop/index.php?l=product_det...
Hasu FC660C Controller https://1upkeyboards.com/shop/controllers/fc660c-controller/
It is possible to set up Apple devices so they're bricks in anyone else's hands. If you're not satisfied with your level of security for travel, why are you comfortable taking your device out of a locked safe?
Long ago, a current mirror to charge a 12v battery bank from a "12v" iPod charger, evading the usual regulator voltage drop.
More recently, a circuit to trip a solenoid when a bit of hot dog goes missing from two leads.
I needed two op amps for sensitivity, because over a day or so the hot dog dries up to nearly an open circuit. Still, only a handful of parts, on the smallest breadboard made.
Yes, I'm a walking cliche, a better rat trap. My only excuse is this was during the pandemic. I excelled at an electronics segment of shop class back in 1968 junior high school, and I never asked my parents for a kit to go on from there.
I ended up lecturing on Gröbner Bases and Faugère's algorithm to an audience that included Buchberger and Faugère. Faugère appreciated my efforts. Buchberger was like a shook up soda bottle; he made a twenty minute speech during the question period.
I coauthored the computer algebra system Macaulay, that first introduced Gröbner Bases to algebraic geometry, opening up the field to applications. At the time there was a separate community in France studying "standard bases", from which I learned a lot. Their focus was on power series not polynomials, but the translation is easy.
Algebraic geometry is a great subject, and computerizing it was a noble cause, but it thrust me into a backwater where the difference between polynomials and power series is considering significant. I got out.
https://github.com/bcpierce00/unison
I'd love to see Darke Files get everything right that Unison gets right, that nearly all commercial projects get wrong, through the usual blend of arrogance and ignorance:
* Meta data. It takes a lot to insure that two copies of a MacOS file appear identical to a user. There used to be a test suite on the web that embarrassed everybody.
* Atomic folders such as ".git" or an application bundle. A prototypical example is a MacOS sparse disk bundle, supported by a folder of many small files. This makes incremental backup and transfer more efficient, assuming a single source. Unison lets you specify the conflict resolution at the folder level, all-or-nothing decide which copy or fix it.
* Symbolic links. This is wildly complicated by users, sure they're right, who want special handling to hack features into sync software that aren't there. A symbolic link is just a file, with correct use the responsibility of the user. You wouldn't want sync software stopping to view your porn, right? They're just files, not the sync software's business.
I use Dropbox for various purposes because I need to, but they bungle more of this than one would expect. For example, a typical MacOS application bundle can have internal symbolic links a typical user never notices, pointing the "current" version of resources to a versioned folder. Last I checked, Dropbox expands the symbolic link into a redundant copy, wasting space without kneecapping the app.
One could go on... I've given up on reporting these issues, though the responses would make a hilarious blog post.
Is ninja not expressive enough for your needs?
"Perhaps, wiser. And at least you can go more than forty seconds without thinking about sex."
We're all different.
This so reminded me of that wolf-to-dog "What could go wrong" meme.
This is my system for my work apartment. My wife rejects it at home, for reasons I don't understand well enough to relay. I go along, I want to stay married.
On that theme, why is this post about emptying a dishwasher? The crucial issue in most good marriages is how to load the dishwasher. Emptying is pretty obvious.
So where's the BMI table that asks height and "how wide are your shoulders?"
For some of us, "big boned" isn't a euphemism.
Late in the decision process, I couldn't resist, I blurted out the joke that had been on my mind for days,
"I can't believe it's not data!"
("Not butter", if you're young for the margarine commercial reference.)
This did not go over well, and probably cost math a grant.
I was briefly a commercial APL programmer, after APL blew my mind in college. (An IBM 1130 running Fortran punched cards was the competition.) How much mileage one can get from "Every problem as an array problem" was APL's singular lesson for me, to this day.
In the same idea box for me: Monadic parsers in Haskell can be mind-blowing, but every problem isn't a string problem. Every problem is a algebraic data structure problem. They can be parsed and transformed as a natural generalization of strings. And, I love Lisps but they are as stuck in the past as APL, I truly believe that in 1,000 runs of the simulation our world would come out bottom 10% on how naturally we manipulate macros. Macros look strapped on; we're living in a first draft.
The goal of any advanced programming language should be to expose the thought process as a form of algebra, so we can learn to fly. APL did this well for its time. This is the appeal of languages like Haskell. We have barely scratched the surface of the algebra of parsing combinators, as a potential backbone for programming.
My imagined successor to APL is in spirit only: It is so agile at implementing macros as monadic parsing of algebraic data types that all other problems become easy.
A temperament that I share with everyone on HN is a suspicion of convention. So many common practices are dumb that it's hard to see each one coming in advance. One is always on edge waiting for the next shoe to drop. I'm supposed to spend days clearing my apartment, so the bottom rung of the construction trades can come in using paint that only lasts four years, dabbing hanging peels back in place with their brushes? Why did I actually have to go through this once to see this is the poster child for "stupid"?
I've also never understood the fashion choice of "off white". Titanium white is brighter, a better lit room day or night. It can become a color mirror, where a corner looks red because a red object is nearby.
For anyone tempted to try this, the student grades have less pigment, and the most expensive brands have the most pigment. It would also appear in an art supply store that there's only one kind of primer, and mediums vary only by gloss. Going to the manufacturer's sites, there are variations intended to survive the outside wall of a building. One could probably wind up someone on a phone call, and get excellent advice on which products to use. On the other hand, I used what I found at Pearl Paint in NYC, and it held up fine.
I have to go to work shortly, I'll try to update this if you check back.
My heat source is a Cadet Com-Pak 1500-Watt 120-Volt Fan Heater, suspended by metal angle irons in a cradle underneath the unit, intake filtered by a generic 12" air filter. I convinced myself that the wood never got hot because of the gap and airflow, but the auto shutoff in the heater itself was too sensitive for me to drive the dehydrator hard. I shorted its thermostat and added my own from Digikey. This allows me to aim for temps up to 145 F without the heater cutting out.
I regulate the temperature using a Ranco Electronic Temperature Control from a beer making supply company.
I regulate airflow using a AIRTITAN T8-N, CRAWL SPACE AND BASEMENT VENTILATOR FAN. Expensive but slick.
The dehydrator operates very effectively if one has outdoor barbecue experience. While I managed to weave the airflow tray to tray, one needs to tend the trays every few hours, and there can be front or back edge effects from a leaky airflow. This is nothing new to anyone comfortable with fires, but frustrating if one expects a perfect abstraction. Believe me, I've thought about redesigns with perfect air mixing, and they all double the size of the unit, which already looks like a washing machine.
The Italian grandmothers making estrattu on tables in the Sicilian sun have to worry about which tables first get afternoon shade. Nothing new here, the issues just take a different form.
This relates to your temperature measurement question. I choose middle locations for both thermostat probes, and I also have two TelTrue analog thermometers. Like BBQ, the idea of a single temperature is misleading. One flies this ship somehow, with better results than I know how to obtain any other way.
We skin, slice, spread onto oiled silpat, salt, and partially dry tomatoes till "gooshy", about 25% of original wet weight. We then vacuum pack 220g or so to a pouch, and store in a chest freezer till needed.
This equipment also makes great southern Italian concentrated tomato paste, "estrattu". My favorite tomatoes for these are dry-farmed Santa Cruz Early Girls, which I'm put up in a blind taste test against any tomato grown in Italy.
Cleanup is pretty easy, on the lawn with an electric pressure washer. This is a good time to give one's molcajete a cleaning too, if the coarse stone has been trapping food.
I can't eat canned tomatoes; I have to avoid tomato dishes in even the fanciest Italian restaurants. It baffles me why no one is doing what I do on a commercial scale to supply their restaurants, selling the extra through Eataly.
If all buyers checked that the activation lock was disabled before sale, we wouldn't be having this discussion. I prefer the reduction in crime that activation lock promises.