jyrkesh

First few lines of the tutorial linked above the fold:

> Welcome to Sonic Pi. Hopefully you’re as excited to get started making your own sounds as I am to show you. It’s going to be a really fun ride where you’ll learn all about music, synthesis, programming, composition, performance and more.

> But wait, how rude of me! Let me introduce myself - I’m Sam Aaron - the chap that created Sonic Pi. You can find me at @samaaron on Twitter and I’d be more than happy to say hello to you. You might also be interested in finding out more about my Live Coding Performances where I code with Sonic Pi live in front of audiences.

> If you have any thoughts, or ideas for improving Sonic Pi - please pass them on - feedback is so helpful. You never know, your idea might be the next big feature!

In an older age, I might have thought this overly flowery or indulgent, but it's SO refreshing to see technical prose that's so clearly written by a real human with an individualized voice, tone, writing style, etc. I'm by no means anti-LLM, but I'm becoming incredibly fatigued at seeing the same style of marketing speak as the intro text to nearly all the new software I come across. Kudos to being a human and injecting your voice into an increasingly impersonal space.

The rest of the tutorial that I read below that doesn't disappoint, I intend to run through it despite my not so Copious Spare Time. I've really been looking to get into programmed music and this seems as good as a time and tool as any.

Cheers!

Would you be comfortable sharing some of the recruitment firms that you worked with? I'm a Real Live Human gearing up to reenter the job market, and I've been getting pitches for these via email and LinkedIn but my difficulty has been in knowing which of THOSE are Real Live Humans and not just vivecoded bots spamming employers with my resume on my behalf (which feels ineffective, but also more importantly, like an unprofessional faux pas that I'd rather not be associated with)

Malware was absolutely used to sell botnet access in the 90s, millions of Windows machines were used for DDoS and as anonymous proxies

"Unlimited" has always been a lie. There is no free lunch. There are always limits.

I've had to unwind "unlimited" within startups that oversold. I've been bit by ISPs, storage providers, music streamers, fuckin _Ubers_, now AI subscription services, that all dealt in "unlimited". None of them delivered in the long run.

I'd be mad at Anthropic if it weren't for the fact that my experience now can see this sort of thing from a mile away. There are a lot folks, even on HN, that haven't been around for as long. I understand the outrage. I've been there. But these computers cost money to run, and companies don't operate at a loss in the fullness of time.

Once you know that unlimited trends towards limited, the real question is whether we're equipped as a society to deal with the fact that the capital-L Labor input to the economic equation is about to be replaced with a Capital input for which only a handful of companies have a non-zero value.

I know this snarky, I'm sorry ahead of time. But I don't know how else to make this point...

The fact that the people running r/progamming don't know not to wait until April 2 to publish this tells me that they don't have real-world experience in shipping software in a business environment.

We are SO past the point of software being developed without LLMs at _all_, the trend line is never going to reverse. I don't understand the people digging in as zero LLM absolutists.

GitLab is about to tank in quality hard. Completely new leadership team in the last 6 months, IYKYK

Give it 1-2 years, feature quantity will take precedence over feature quality

> Devex for 3 people is so much more important than ux for the 30M users.

I think they were being sarcastic, and you might agree more than you realize.

Microsoft is now largely a public cloud company, also supporting a very healthy suite of B2B productivity tools.

Which makes the B2C ad stuff they shove into Windows all the more infuriating: it's a drop in the bucket relative to their other product verticals.

One thing I was found interesting about Dreamcast piracy was that everyone was burning them onto 700 MB CD-Rs. But the retail games were actually pressed onto 1GB GD-ROMs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GD-ROM

For a lot of games, it totally didn't matter (shoutout Ikaruga, 38 MBs! https://www.thedreamcastjunkyard.co.uk/2023/03/the-worlds-sm...)

But for games that took advantage of the extra 300 MBs, pirates had to use all these tricks to get the game down to a CD-R size. They'd compress assets, compress or sometimes rip out the FMVs...I think they might have even split some games across multiple CDs.

That's why DRM cracks me up, the pirates will always figure a way around it one way or the other. (Especially in today's day and age where the live service model is so effective. I'd weep for the AAA single-player game, but I can't remember the last one I played and enjoyed. They've been dead for a long time. Long live the indie single-player game.)

For pirating games: PS1, PS2, Dreamcast, for sure

For straight up modding: definitely the Xbox. The 007 and Mechwarrior bugs blew everything wide open, and the fact that it was just a PC with real (upgradeable!) storage spawned projects like XBMC, now known as Kodi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodi_(software)

And also piracy was rampant, but not the Swapmagic or Modchip kind. You could just upgrade the drive, _backup_ your games on there, and play 'em all of the drive.

The Wii and 3DS are also suuuuper open and hackable though. The homebrew scenes on both are incredibly impressive, not to mention the whole ecosystem of full blown launchers and shells and stuff. (Which, now that I think about it, was also a big deal on Xbox.)

Just recently dealt with this for a big Ticketmaster event. The Apple ID has to match the email address on the Ticketmaster account, or the ticket will show as Void in the Apple Wallet.

But it does solve the offline issue that the blog author was experiencing.

It's up for "pre-registration".

But I'll gladly give this a shot with a sideload.

I had a lot of _ideas_ in my 20s.

I fully spec'd out "On the Way" with a buddy of mine. Picking up beer close to your destination? Gas close to your departure point? The inverse? We would have you covered.

We had a path with Google Maps API, and I was convinced that monetization was at least possible enough to get Real Life VC funding.

In any case...this looks like a couple features. Sorry... :(

It was a feature. Google Maps had it implemented to 75% of what we'd spec'd within 9-12 months.

It's not like we'd actually tried, of course. We had full time jobs, for God's sake! But it became abundantly clear to me in that timeframe that FEATURE-sized ideas weren't gonna be viable. The Big Boy Ad Companies were gonna be burning those down for the next few months/years/forevers.

Honestly, I'm shocked you got OpenBSD running on a laptop at all. I've tried running it both on bare metal x86 hardware and in a Hyper-V VM on two different boxes, and spent hours failing to get it to recognize my network adapter or get an IP. Gave up....

I should caveat: OpenBSD is INCREDIBLE, and we owe it the world (honestly, for OpenSSH alone, but the rest of it is an absolute gold standard too). And I know I could've gotten there.

BUT, FreeBSD just worked for me out of the box on both.

Haven't run NetBSD, but with the native Wireguard support in there now, I might have to throw a NetBSD gateway into my homelab.

Anyone have any good recs on prosumer routers / switches that run NetBSD well?

Upside though? I was helping a more software-oriented buddy get a PC build up and running that'd been half-finished by some kid he paid to put it together. The GUI on the EFI config was so intense, it was slowing down and completely locking up.

Got into the temps, realized that the CPU fan had been plugged into an AUX fan header instead of the CPU header.

Fan was spinning, wouldn't have thought to check if the EFI wasn't crashing.

I'm completely joking of course. I completely agree with you, I miss text-only mode. The modern Dell one stinks, the Asus one stinks...I have no data, but I'd be shocked if Gigabyte or ASRock were any good... :(

I'm actually mostly in your camp here. But it's complicated with AI.

What if someone gave you a binary and the source code, but not a compiler? Maybe not even a language spec?

Or what if they gave you a binary and the source code and a fully documented language spec, and both of 'em all the way down to the compiler? BUT it only runs on special proprietary silicon? Or maybe even the silicon is fully documented, but producing that silicon is effectively out of reach to all but F100 companies?

It's turtles all the way down...

+1 for the HUZBZB-1. I waxed more poetically about my setup already[1], but I've had that little guy for over 4 years, it was plug-and-play on day 1, and I've never had a single issue with a Zigbee or Z-Wave device. (Wi-Fi? don't even get me started...)

And yeah, it'll be another year or two before Matter/Threads really starts picking up steam. I'll just pick up a new dongle when there's 10 of 'em in that same timeframe.

(Disclaimer: my house is 800 sqft and I don't share any walls with neighbors. Zigbee is SUPPOSED to be mesh and Just Work assuming you have enough devices, but I can't speak from experience on that front.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37667266

I put HAOS on an RPi4, plugged in a Zigbee/Z-Wave adapter, and never looked back. It runs 15ish Sengled RGB bulbs wonderfully, I've got all sorts of lights macro'd and timer'd (e.g. porch light comes on at sunset, turns off at midnight). Reliability is crazy, the UI is wonderful, I can access it from all sorts of devices and native apps...and there's a few other devices it sucks in too (air filter, Chromecasts, my NAS health, etc.) Now I haven't done any of the other actually useful projects I have in my backlog (thermostat, motion sensors, security cameras), but I'm extremely confident that HA can handle any that I throw at it.

All that being said, I find it a little odd that this article is somehow decrying HAOS as a worse alternative to a proprietary, anti-user black box developed by companies trying to squeeze more profit, just because they played fast-and-loose with some shell scripts at some point. (Aside: I just installed Homebrew on a new Mac today, and it's still just a curl | sh)

Most of the major consumer IoT vendors have had major security incidents (Wyze, Hue, Nest, Arlo, many others), and if nothing else, my little HAOS Rpi gets a little obscurity compared to the big names getting hit by script kiddies. Not to mention it's easy for me to keep it local-only and just join it to my Tailscale network.

But given all the allusions to HomeKit, I suspect the author has total faith in Apple to do it right (not a wholly misplaced assumption) and wants everything to just talk HomeKit.

Which we might actually get (in practice) as Matter makes inroads! Hell, I'd love for everything to talk HomeKit because HA can emulate a HomeKit Controller, and that means less cloud APIs. Win for everyone!

> It’s unmatched on Android.

I have great respect for the iOS security model. Seriously a marvel and best-in-class accomplishment.

But this is flatly not true. If you really care, you have Graphene et al, and even without that stock Android has plenty of well-tested features that enable you to lock down the device further than at stock. And rooting as a pathway to undermine security is a well understood aspect of the threat model

I factually agree with what you're saying, but I don't think it really changes the practical outcome of the situation: a private organization is available for-hire to arbitrarily root and snoop on fully patched iOS devices at state-level actor scale. If they get the exploits from in-house or elsewhere, the outcome is basically the same.

Whether there's "Pegasus" attribution or not, the reality of the contemporary internet is: if you're targeted hard enough, you're probably screwed. (....but you're probably not actually targeted that hard, so practice good practices)

That being said, I agree with others that it's probably a good technical, PR, and long-term "marketability to regimes" approach for Apple to just double down and spend millions instead of thousands on competing with the black market to buy 0-days.

Honestly, there's plenty of tools out there that can do the same thing.

The important crux of the counterpoint to this article is "if you ship your database, it's now the API" and everything that comes along with that.

All the problems you _think_ you're sidestepping by not building an API, you're actually just compounding further down the line when you need to do things to do your database other than simply "adding columns to a table". :\

Edit: re-reading, the point I didn't make is that having your database be your API _is_ viable, so long as you actually treat it as an API instead of an internal data structure.

Yeah, I've been getting regular therapy for years, that's all a part of it. I allude to it in the links, but I've gone hard on going into the gym, building better routines, etc.

I've also taken plenty of steps backwards, but I'd like to hope that's part of the process...

I've shared my experience in being diagnosed as ADHD as an adult already[1][2], but in this context, the net is that I fought even the concept of going on any kind of medication for a long time. I wanted to go hard on lifestyle interventions and all kinds of different "tricks" for working around my constant reshifting to different priorities.

Ironically, while I love my therapist still, my psych has been an absolute pill pusher. I've routinely told her that I'm not interested in _also_ being prescribed Xanax because I'm having some anxiety after a long, shitty breakup. That discomfort is part of the human experience. But she is SO eager to throw more Rx at me...it's been kind of eye opening how easy it could be to abuse prescription meds.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33806988

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33807050

I'm not OP, but when someone is a repeat offender of some petty crimes, and they're assessed to be mentally ill and/or addicted to drugs, they should be given a choice: help or jail.

(Ideally, jail would just _be_ help, but unfortunately that's not the case. And there's a long tail of criminals who _aren't_ mentally ill or addicts, so let's assume jail still exists.)

I am a _staunch_ supporter of liberty, but I reject the notion that you can repeatedly pollute, steal, and commit violent acts on the streets without any recourse from the rest of society. And I absolutely support compassion as the first step of that recourse! Housing, counselors, harm reduction, and other treatments for addiction (esp opiate blockers) should all be on the table for people that need it.

But the alternative to that choice has to be jail. Because the status quo is not cutting it, and you're not "free" to infringe on people, their homes, and their businesses.

I assume you're talking about near (fka byuu)? Heartbreaking...such an unbelievably intelligent and insightful person.

I had the pleasure of getting a couple direct replies from them once on an obscure subreddit under my own realname account. That turned into a few DMs, and despite the fact that I was publicly working on tech completely antithetical to their technical views, they were so gracious and thoughtful and engaged...it was truly humbling.

I have my own thoughts on KF too...I wish the individuals responsible for their targeted and direct harassment had been held accountable. But I'll try to preserve some tact in their memory and leave it at that.

I used to use DupeGuru which has some photo-specific dupe detection where you can fuzzy match image dupes based on content: https://dupeguru.voltaicideas.net/

But I switched over to czkawka, which has a better interface for comparing files, and seems to be a bit faster: https://github.com/qarmin/czkawka

Unfortunately, neither of these are integrated into Photoprism, so you still have to do some file management outside the database before importing.

I also haven't used Photoprism extensively yet (I think it's running on one of my boxes, but I haven't gotten around to setting it up), but I did find that it wasn't really built for file-based libraries. It's a little more heavyweight, but my research shows that Nextcloud Memories might be a better choice for me (it's not the first-party Nextcloud photos app, but another one put together by the community): https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/memories

Because I don't see anyone downstream agreeing with you, I just wanted to hop in and +1 that I think you're REALLY making good points throughout this thread. I think a lot of folks are having trouble imagining a world beyond "EU laws" and "US laws". If every national or even state/provincial government has its own data laws (we already have 5 states in the US with GDPR-like legislation, and more likely on the way), then we're just accelerating towards a fragmented internet __with no opt-out mechanism for the individual__. When (especially smaller) companies get weighed down by legal interpretations and the fear of violations, they're just gonna start blocking more and more clients from everywhere outside their jurisdiction. (Apologies to the world, but I literally work on software that makes it easier to resolve geolocation for web devs and, among some other reasons, one of the top ones is to block certain georegions.)

Separately, while I'm all for internet privacy and am generally aligned with the _intent_ of GDPR, having had to meet its requirements at the highest level of scale, I have no qualms saying that it's truly a _terrible_ piece of legislation. Clearly whole sections were written without any regard for technical accuracy, and it leaves a number of ambiguities and contradictions within its language that continue to go without clarification. I don't feel like getting in the weeds here, but if you ever want to see people getting in the mud about how to actually comply with it, just go take a peek at the higher-comment threads in /r/GDPR.

Personally, I'd much prefer a cascading set of standards coming from a technically oriented consortium of (ideally OSS) folks that could be enforced from the client side as much as possible, and then independently audited on the server side (like a UL certification, but for your server architecture). Most of us here are probably already using a ton of client extensions to enforce as much privacy as we can without breaking things, and if an OSS auditing standard came along for servers, it'd be sweet if I could e.g. set my browser to "EU data servers only" and have my browser give me an option to explicitly override it if I really need to (like we do today with bad SSL certs).

As for the data export and deletion controls...I get the argument that's only enforceable via regulation and government enforcement. But given the ease of data replication and laundering (made even easier in a post-ML world), I'm not optimistic that you can actually "catch" people violating it except against the absolute largest corps ("yeah, we totallyyyyyy deleted all your data, for sureeee"). Feels like it's enforceable at about the order-of-magnitude of insider trading in the US.

You seem to imply that none of the EU member countries are violating their citizens' internet privacy on a regular basis. I recognize that there are certain countries with _much_ stronger privacy protections in place, and that might not have something on the scale of FISA (from some of the compliance work I've done in the past, Germany comes to mind, but I'm sure there are a strong set of others).

But I'm curious if you explicitly believe that EU/EEA member countries unilaterally _don't_ spy on their citizens. Because I'd be inclined to say that's unlikely (at best) given what we know about the nature of intelligence organizations, namely that they're basically data lake vacuums in the 21st century.

If I buy a front door lock that has a systemic manufacturing problem and someone breaks into my house, I might want to sue the manufacturer.

But if someone breaks into my house--regardless of whether it was unlocked, the lock was defective, or they broke a window--and the police are negligent or incompetent in investigating or prosecuting the perpetrators, in what world is that a) not the police's fault? and b) an opportunity for the _police_ to sue the _manufacturer_?

If I start a cultural movement to get rid of front door locks and it gains traction, and then B&Es spike, can the police sue _me_ too?

I'm in a similar boat. I use MacOS with the work-issued laptop, and due to a longstanding effort from Apple to make inroads in education, I used Macs at school since OS8. But for everything else--gaming, web, Telegram, remote admin--I think Win 11 is fine.

I ran Gentoo exclusively on multiple boxes for years. I still use NixOS to host a few workloads for friends and family. But if I want to just __do stuff__, Windows is still the easiest way to just plug anything in, run any program, sync any thing, whatever...and now it has a bunch of trapdoors to more native Cygwin-type things...and I just don't want to reboot or keep two systems up to date anymore.

But yes, there's sketchy telemetry and phone home, and I'd _rather_ run something where the code's at least _theoretically_ been reviewed by someone who's not in the state's pocket. But I'm just tired, and it's good enough...