liotier

The brave comment I was looking for... I feel the same: Silicon Valley used to be holy Mecca to this French person; since I started having Internet access in the early 90's, all daily online activity was turned towards it - and some of that remains, as I log on here. To me, the financial success of the companies was a minor side-effect of the technological utopia which was the main point. But those who found financial success turned Silicon Valley into a toxic brand... They managed to make quietly progressive European companies look cool in comparison !

As a Canon user since the mid-80's, I found this fascinating reading.

Edit: Wow - there's a whole collection of Canon lens technology articles there: https://exclusivearchitecture.com/03-technical-articles-CLT-...

Please, I would be delighted if you published that code... Just yesterday I was thinking that a two-faced Samba share/USB Mass Storage dongle Pi would save me a lot of shuttling audio samples between my desktop and my Akai MPC.

old.reddit is nice but it feels like having a conversation while on death row - still a couple of appeals pending but the endgame is not really in doubt.

The end of RedditIsFun (https://www.reddit.com/r/redditisfun/) was the end of my Reddit era - I'm still on r/askHistorians, r/askScience and a couple of niche leftovers, but I stopped moderating - the interests of the platform and its users have obviously diverged.

Yes - my point was about identifier strings such as UUID

> We need to do end to end text recognition. Not "character recognition", it's not the characters we care about.

Arbitrary nonsensical text require character recognition. Sure, even a license plate bears some semantics bounding expectations of what text it contains, but text that has no coherence might remain an application domain for character rather than text recognition.

Right - how could I forget Amarok ? And I too was pushed to Clementine by Amarok 2.0

> Strawberry is better for me but still kind of janky

Strawberry isn't the most solid program (a few times a year, its search hiccups and gets stuck for a few seconds), but it carries the torch of Clementine's UX - which is my ideal music listening experience.

The About page says "We’re both in the forever business" but doesn't back up the claim with any financial information to even credibly argue that they are in the ten years business.

What similar devices don't fight their own users wanting to access their own data ?

"S.M.A.R.T" goals - applicable to strikes too... The sort of detail that separates competent labor organizers from mere agitators.

> I couldn't use my Canon SLR to record more than 30 minutes of video continuously

Large sensors optimized for still photography overheat when operating continuously for video, so they feature safety limits. Sensor heat dissipation is a big problem and a major differentiating feature of top end cinema cameras.

I guess I should jump back in and clarify what I left unexplained when starting the thread.

Contrary to "couilles", which are indeed "bollocks", "couillon" has no exact english synonym. Closest I can imagine, in spirit, would be "bollocks-brained", or "nutcase" which also carries the anatomical undertone.

So, "un détrompe-couillon" could directly translate as "a foolproofer" - though that translation is tamer than the original for lack of testicles.

The mainstream French word for poka yoke is "détrompeur" but I prefer its obscure and vulgar vernacular "détrompe couillon" ("couillon" has no exact English equivalent, but you might know its Italian cousin "coglione").

Whichever name one prefers, hurray for simple interlocks that save the lives and limbs or tired inattentive operators. Dioxygen and nitrous oxide in surgical operating rooms using different connectors is a great example.

Even moderate experience with martial arts goes a long way in instinctively managing falls - probably saved my bones a number of times in MTB and skating... The scars always in the same locations and on the same axis show it is a reproducible technique !

Material proof of bravery (from the point of views of the scarred) or temerity (from everybody else's point of view)... And, less abusive but no less idiotic: the same idea but with broken hardware - a broken frame means limits were properly being pushed. I'm thankful I survived my teenage years... Thirty years later I make a point of keeping my wheels in permanent contact with the ground.

> Anyone on the fence about keeping Windows around just for games: unless you play online multiplayer that uses kernel anti-cheat, just make the jump. I promise you, almost every game in your library will just work, and almost all of the rest will work after you set them to run with a specific Proton version.

Same applies to Steam on Linux: Proton has opened to us a gaming library of a size we would not have dreamed of a few years before.

> be ok with what you want to learn (some think everybody must be an orchestral pianist)

I relate to that: I was inflicted a couple years of piano lessons as a kid, and hated every minute of it - because I detested the music that my teacher and my family considered appropriate.

40 years later, I stumble on electronic musics and realize I would enjoy making some - and I joyfully (and incompetently) began on that path, lately becoming ripe for some dry theory because I now value it.

Each person is different though: my daughter always enjoyed the technical exercises for their own sake !

As a lazy synthdad, father of a piano virtuoso who makes fun of my musical clumsiness, I concur: listen to music, watch music being played and read about music all you want... It won't get you very far: music requires practice, practice and practice daily, even if just a little - and memorizing some scales and chords goes a long way too.

> If you are good at doing something, you might find the new tool's output to be sub-par over what you can achieve yourself, but often the lower quality output comes much faster than you can generate. That causes the people who are deliberate & precise about their process to hate the new tool completely

Wow, I've been there ! Years ago we dragged a GIS system kicking and screaming from its nascent era of a dozen ultrasharp dudes with the whole national fiber optics network in their head full of clever optimizations, to three thousand mostly clueless users churning out industrial scale spaghetti... The old hands wanted a dumb fast tool that does their bidding - they hated the slower wizard-assisted handholding, that turned out to be essential to the new population's productivity.

Command line vs. GUI again... Expressivity vs. discoverability, all the choices vs. don't make me think. Know your users !

Roland using less SysEx ? Here is a 26 pages PDF full of unofficial TB-3 SysEx documented by Dope Robot: https://www.doperobot.com/TB-3%20Sysex%20Implementation%20v1... - Roland's official documentation just scratches the surface.

> I wish it was somehow possible to perform a piece of music that would cause remote code execution

Cue Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Relax" triggering Derek Zoolander to kill the Malaysian leader during fashion week

Of course it is SysEx. SysEx is to standard MIDI what inline assembler is to Python. A world of undocumented proprietary stuff lurks within just about every MIDI device !

Yes, not much progress since - apart from Russia, China and the USA increasing pressure... I suppose they support our federalist project and try to motivate us !

> while traveling, I consider using money to be like cheating

And even on the cheap, let's keep in mind that money is central to the luxury that any tourism is. In my 90's youth, I figuratively littered the map with pushpins in countries off the path beaten by Westerners, impressing family and friends. But really, I just happened to have the privilege of taking a few months for clueless wandering with no worries about means and the knowledge that if the affair turned sour I could at any point arrange a safety net. Sure, I was a fairly cheap backpacker, but still there was no glory in such adventuring - just money. I still recommend it to anyone who can, and that experience has shaped a large part of my later life in unforeseen ways, but I have long stopped gloating about it.

> The problem is that many decisions in the EU require exactly 100% support of member states

We have long known that unanimity holds us back internationally, and that the switch to majority vote is way overdue - but leading European Union member states to accept that is going to be a long slog. We'll get there and we have started on the path: trade policy for example is already qualified majority voting.

In a conversation (conversation and attached pictures at https://bsky.app/profile/liotier.bsky.social/post/3ldxvutf76...), I delete a spurious "de" ("Produce de two-dimensional chart [..]" to "Produce two-dimensional [..]") and ChatGPT generates a new version of the graph, illustrating a different function although nothing else has changed and there was a whole conversation to suggest that ChatGPT held a firm model of the problem. Confirmed my current doctrine: use LLM to give me concepts from a huge messy corpus, then check those against sources from said corpus.

Follow @auonsson.bsky.social for cutting edge Russian Baltic cable vandalism. Their analysis of AIS trajectories and speeds correlated with cable positions offer great insight: https://bsky.app/profile/auonsson.bsky.social/post/3le754kjl...

> mathematic notation rendered to vector graphics/bitmaps are typically rendered from such text-based notation

What everyone was impatiently waiting for: LaTeX microblogging !

But seriously, a specialized Bluesky client could easily do that for scientific communities - no need to reinvent the whole stack.

Bluetooth MIDI keyboard + Bluetooth headset = audio glitches. Disappointing.