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adamsilkey

40 karma · joined April 8, 2023

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adamsilkey··on Rare concert recordings are landing on the Internet Archive
I think it's a little more nuanced than "bands/producers don't care" and a bit more complex than "exporting the audio (that already exists!)".

Directly exporting the audio straight from the mixer would not necessarily produce quality recordings because the audio there is tuned for the purposes of sound reinforcement. To properly record a live concert requires an entirely separate setup with their own microphones and then some direct output from the mixer on a per channel basis to allow for post-production editing.

And a lot of people don't care about that! Lots of people are happy with the quality you'd get straight from a cell phone microphone.

But the people on stage and the people in the industry ... they're the ones actually involved in producing the sound, and many care very deeply about the quality that gets recorded and then shared. That's not to say that all musicians are like that, but many are!

adamsilkey··on New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
No, there are actually four different punctuation marks, all which look remarkably similar to the untrained eye.

1. We have the hyphen, which is most commonly used to create multi-part words, such as one-and-one-thousand.

2. We have the EN-DASH, which is most commonly used to denote spans of ranges. As an example, Barack Obama was President 2009–2017.

3. Then we have the recently maligned EM-DASH, which can be used in place of a variety of other punctuation marks, such as commas, colons, and parentheses. Very frequently, AI will use the em-dash as a way to separate two clauses and provide forward motion. AI uses it for the same reason that writers do: the em-dash is just a nicer punctuation mark compared to the colon.

4. Lastly, we have the minus sign, which is slightly different than the hyphen, though on most keyboards they're combined into the hyphen-minus.

By the by, they're called the em-dash and the en-dash because they match the length of an uppercase M or N, respectively.

adamsilkey··on New accounts on HN more likely to use em-dashes
I feel the same way. I've used em-dashes in my writing forever, and I was always particular about making sure they were used properly (from a typography standpoint with no surrounding spaces).

But now, I have to be so picky about when I use them, even when I think it's the perfect punctuation mark. I'll often just resort to a single hyphen with spaces around. It's wrong, but it doesn't signal someone to go "AI AI AI!!"

adamsilkey··on The End of Handwriting
Any suggestions on how to get into fountain pens? I handwrite a lot, but fountain pens have always intimidated me.
adamsilkey··on A receipt printer cured my procrastination
I loved your article! Thank you so much for sharing. Fellow procrastinator struggler here.

What's been working for me lately is carrying a Field Notes notebook everywhere with me combined with some of the ideas you talk about here (breaking down tasks into smaller and smaller pieces). It's the perfect size for me to carry around every day.

It's also been helpful as I've been defaulting to opening up my notebook as my basic distraction device as opposed to opening up my phone.

adamsilkey··on Isaac Asimov describes how AI will liberate humans and their creativity (1992)
How so? Even in a perfectly egalitarian world, where no one had to compete for food or resources, in art, there would still be a competition for attention and time.
adamsilkey··on uBlock Origin is no longer available on the Chrome Store
> [I probably shouldn't mention that I personally think adblockers are unethical :) ]

Okay, I’ll bite. How are adblockers unethical?

adamsilkey··on Building a Medieval Castle from Scratch
> most were lucky to make it to their mid forties

This is a common misconception. Life expectancy at birth being low reflects high mortality for infants and children. If you can make it into adulthood, most people lived for a relatively long time.

https://sc.edu/uofsc/posts/2022/08/conversation-old-age-is-n....

adamsilkey··on The Mere Presence of One's Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity (2017)
> Because the same finite pool of attentional resources supports both attentional control and other cognitive processes, resources recruited to inhibit automatic attention to one’s phone are made unavailable for other tasks, and performance on these tasks will suffer.

This to me, seems the key insight of the article. The phone represents a constant drain on our attention as we try to _not_ focus on it, like a slow battery drain.

adamsilkey··on Python's many command-line utilities
On Windows, you can do this from the run dialogue!

[WIN]+R -> https://google.com

adamsilkey··on Ask HN: Can anyone recommend a Windows Systems programming book?
This is the best answer.

Windows Internals is a great book/reference for understanding how Windows work, but it won't teach you how to actually program Windows.

The Fifth Edition of Petzold's book will actually take you through the Win32 API, which is still usable even on modern Windows platforms.

adamsilkey··on Git cheat sheet [pdf]
Maybe my favorite option is missing here.

`git commit -v`

This will put the diff of the commit into your commit message as comments. Makes it easy to remember what you're doing/committing without having to jump back to the terminal/someplace else to look at the diff.

adamsilkey··on Apple apologizes for iPad 'Crush' ad that 'missed the mark'
> There's a real element of media literacy (or lack thereof) that we have to consider in this issue. What was the intent of the media?

You cannot ignore the impact of artistic decisions and processes when considering a piece of work, and calling that a "lack of media literacy" is grossly oversimplifying artistic analysis. Intent is important, but so is the impact on the audience. Art is a conversation between artist and audience, and as pointed out by the article and the other comments here in the thread, the message missed for a significant percentage of the audience.

adamsilkey··on Increasing, Not Diminishing: Investigating Returns of Highly Maintainable Code
Most everyone agrees that technical debt is a real thing, but I don’t think we’ve landed on a widely accepted formal definition of what it is. Tech debt is so often used as a qualitative health term with no quantitative metrics behind it.

This paper establishes what it defines as tech debt, but it’s certainly not universal.

adamsilkey··on Eclipse viewing at 30k feet: Delta to offer path-of-totality flight
Can you describe what it was like? What made it so cool?
adamsilkey··on Eclipse viewing at 30k feet: Delta to offer path-of-totality flight
Can you describe what that was like?
adamsilkey··on Internal tools often make bad startup ideas
I think the point is that engineers are capable of rebuilding internal tools, so internal tools as a product to sell to other companies may not be a great startup idea.

It'd be different if you were building internal tools for a group that couldn't replicate your work, like accountants or HR.

At least, that's what I got from it. (And I'm not saying I agree with the thesis.)

adamsilkey··on My favourite Git commit (2019)
Squashes and rebaseses, used properly, are done prior to committing work into a shared major branch (like trunk or develop or whatever). The goal of the squash is to make the resulting commit atomic.
adamsilkey··on Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source
Does Zed have vim keybindings?
adamsilkey··on I regret selling my startup
Money doesn't buy you happiness, but it _does_ eliminate a set of problems that can impede one's happiness.

Which is not to say that the person with money can't then find additional problems, or use the money such that they reintroduce a class of problems.

adamsilkey··on Is A.I. The Death of I.P.?
> The truth is, intellectual property should be protected by those creating it.

The whole point of government and laws and societal norms is that not everyone has to be deeply involved and specialized in protecting their rights. We default to people doing the right thing and seek out specialists (e.g. lawyers) when we're wronged.

adamsilkey··on Git Branches Have No Rules
Merge isn't superior to rebase; they're both tools with different purposes.

Have you ever squashed down a branch before merging back into main? Then you've used rebase.

The purpose of source control (not just git) is to keep a useful version history of your project. If you don't need to know where/when a commit originally branched off from, rebase can keep a cleaner history than merge.

Even rebasing a branch off the latest commit just to merge back in can be useful.