moosedev

> The pun about "8088 MPH" is the "Intel 8088" was used an "MPH" obviously stands for "miles per hour", a rather fast pace.

It’s also a Back To The Future (1985) reference! (The Delorean had to reach 88mph in order to time travel.) It captures the “new demo for a 1980s computer” situation on several levels.

This. Spending a productive, rewarding half a day pair programming with a receptive junior engineer who isn't sure how to approach a complex task nets them 1+ commits and you 0 commits. Spending half a day chasing after a "loose cannon" engineer who hastily committed bad code nets them 3 commits (the original bad commit, a rollback commit, and the fixed commit) and you 0 commits.

How do the individual stats look at the end of the month/quarter/Musk Layoff Review Period when these kinds of days are relatively common?

Thanks!

Please update the post title to add “(2019)”.

This. I often share random music snippets and other fragments of creative output with my friends in various group chats. I think it scratches the itch of “being seen” while sidestepping hang-ups about posting creative work publicly.

Edit: and my friends generally do not suggest I monetize my creative hobbies :)

Although it’s made of countries, it is also a country, so the headline isn’t wrong to refer to it as “one” country, in case that’s what you were implying.

Source: am British

I actually feel the same :) Just trying to help OP navigate tone and context a bit better here.

> Oops, if you could make a quick PR to fix that it'd be great!

You might get some seemingly strange or flippant reactions to this, and since you wrote it, I figured you might benefit from some insight into why some people might react negatively.

GP pointed out a tiny bug in good faith. Your reply asking them to fix the bug they found in your code comes across (to me, I'm sure not everyone sees it this way!) as a little presumptuous or entitled, I think because there's no expectation in this context that GP was signing up to "do work" (check out the repo, make a change, submit a PR to you) for your project.

A less... feather-ruffling response might have thanked GP for the bug report and maybe also mentioned the repo link in case GP or anyone would like to contribute, vs. straight-up asking GP to do the work.

Maybe someone else can weigh in with more detail. Or disagree vehemently with the vibes I'm trying to illuminate :)

> To program my Amstrad CPC646

Now I wonder if you meant CPC464 or CPC664 :)

(Probably the former, as the 664 was relatively rare, at least in my experience. I’m not sure I ever saw one.)

> if someone uses a woman emoji she is definitely a woman unless there's a specific reason to do so.

I'm a man, and I sometimes use woman emojis because I like the look, or because it's fun. Do either of those count as "a specific reason to do so" in your framing? If not, consider how well your observations actually generalize to the world, and thus the universality of your statements.

I also spent some of my formative technical years on the Amiga. The Amiga Hardware Reference Manual is available on archive.org for posterity: https://archive.org/details/amiga-hardware-reference-manual-...

I support not throwing out a real, original copy, though :-)

As I get older I enjoy reading 30+ year old technical books and learning more about how those old systems worked, more than I do learning the latest framework or language features. It's intrinsically satisfying, but not so great for the career...

And the PS/1, which was a line of IBM PCs for the home (contemporary with the PS/2, and predecessor to the Aptiva range).

Or the PSOne, which was a cost-reduced late model PlayStation (1) :-)

I think it was appropriated, if you’ll pardon the pun, from African American accents, but I’m only an amateur linguist noticing things and making connections, so in the cold light of science, my “think” is no better than your “almost definitely” :-)

I’ve noticed this shift too in my decade+ in the US. It’s actually really nice to learn someone else noticed it too, because no one I’ve mentioned it to has known what the hell I'm talking about.

I think I only heard in it in some African American English accents when I first came here, but now it’s common among younger Americans more generally. I’ve also heard it applied to other consonants - you can replace quite a few of them with a glottal stop and still be understood :D

Earlier submission of the NYT article linked in the tweet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32860728

I’d enjoy reading more in this very thread, if you don’t feel up to writing the whole book right now :)

Edit: Fan of Borland products in the 90s!

I used it for several years inside Google, and TBH it was often painful in the ways external users have described in this thread. When I was doing something very "normal" from the point of view of Google's monolithic codebase, i.e. targeting a C++ binary intended to run on Google's distributed computing platform, I found it smooth enough, if awfully verbose. When I was doing something less vanilla, but not necessarily uncommon, e.g. targeting Android, iOS, Windows, it was painful, and I spent a lot of time working around it or understanding the chains/mountains of clever things others had built to work around it.

I understood some of the design decisions and tradeoffs for why it works the way it does, but I didn't like it. I certainly wouldn't reach for it for a personal project. Possibly I still just didn't "get it". I've used dozens* of build systems at this point, but hey.

* possibly exaggerating

This is a low-effort invocation of an ethnic stereotype, based on the actions of a few long-dead elites. It doesn't add anything interesting or insightful to the discussion of the article or the topic.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't know, but it's quite entertaining when the output occasionally has a corrupted, but recognizable, Getty Images watermark: https://imgur.com/SmibVME

(Prompt: "A horse delivering mail in New York City, 1870")

Working in WSL (Windows 10) Ubuntu on Ryzen 5600X; uses ~11GB of RAM and takes 2m04s with the default settings.

This is the first time I've played with a text-to-image model. I was aware that so-called "prompt engineering" can be tricky, but it's wild to see it for myself. A single space character can be the difference between garbage (or nightmare-fuel) output and output that captures the spirit of the prompt pretty well.

Your F, defined on line 26 [0], is 3Hz off according to this reference table[1]. 346.23 should be 349.23. Just a typo?

All credit to @issa's ear. And yes, while you'd be unlikely to have encountered this bug if you were just telling a good existing synth to play an F, it's cool that you implemented the synth from scratch! Whether it's a good choice depends on the project goals.

[0] https://github.com/JNKKKK/pianochord.io/blob/master/src/libs...

[1] https://pages.mtu.edu/~suits/notefreqs.html

You have a better ear than you think! I tried it again (and actually tried all the notes this time...) and the F is definitely flat. It's particularly noticeable in the 5th octave (i.e. if you play C5 D5 E5 F5), but all the F's appear to have the issue. I verified (by ear) against Pianoteq set to equal temperament.

The other notes sound OK. The A and B might be a tiny bit flat too but my ear isn't good enough, and if they're flat they're nowhere near as far off as the F. OP, how are you specifying notes/pitches to the synthesizer?

I still stumble over the "-7" version sometimes. I grew up on "Gm7" :)

Example from Google image search: https://www.musikalessons.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/0... . At least this one uses maj7 for major 7, rather than M7 or △7 :)

Nit: G7 denotes a G dominant 7 (i.e. natural 3rd, flat 7th), not a G minor 7. G minor 7 (flat 3rd, flat 7th) is abbreviated Gm7 or G-7. (In my experience, the "Gm7" form is common in "official" printed guitar & piano songbooks, while G-7 is common in jazz lead sheets and fakebooks.)

Sure thing! BTW I am using Chrome on Windows 10.

Taking a guess at what you're noticing but might not have a framework/vocabulary for...

It sounds like FM synthesis[0] to me (so either an embedded FM software synthesizer or simply replaying samples of FM synthesis), so the timbre is quite unlike a "real" piano or PCM samples of a real piano. Timbre is a kind of "color" of "quality" of a sound - in my head it's similar to how different materials feel different to the touch. A violin and a trumpet can play the same "note" but their sounds have very different timbres. An apple and a ball might both appear red but have different surface textures.

The "piano" in the app sounds like the piano patches (presets) on FM-based synthesizers from the 1980s[1], where the designers tried to approximate the timbre of a piano using the limited (but fun!) possibilities of FM, while the transients and harmonics produced by a real acoustic piano are more complex.

The pitches and temperament sound OK to me, so I think what you are are hearing is the timbre. That is, the app is playing the "right" notes, but it's as if you're hearing a "different instrument", albeit one that is an early digital approximation of a piano sound.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_modulation_synthesis

[1] e.g. the Yamaha DX7; here's one of its "piano" sounds for comparison: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3rrjQtQe5A&t=214s

Nice! Couple of minor (haha) issues:

* The label "Rising octave" on the octave-up button doesn't make sense. Maybe you meant "Higher octave", assuming the "Lower" in the "Lower octave" button is the adjective form of "lower". If "Lower" is acting as a verb, however, then "Raise octave" would be consistent, but I don't think it sounds very natural. "Octave up" and "Octave down" might be more natural based on my recollection of music software and hardware I've used.

* As another poster noted, the (FM?) synthesizer is clipping badly when it plays chords. It's noticeable on basic 3-note triads, but it's much worse on chords with many extension tones, like a C13.

Thanks for sharing.

And how about SDRAM?

Since you mentioned latch writes, check out Michael Abrash’s Graphics Programming Black Book[0], chapter 23 onwards, if you feel like immersing yourself further in well-written VGA lore.

Not recommended for your present-day productivity (unless you’re making retro games!)

[0] https://www.jagregory.com/abrash-black-book/

Do you have any sources or additional info on the latter? How did you determine that aromatase is the culprit? Thanks.