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muxator

2,203 karma · joined September 28, 2017

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muxator··on Google Declaring War on the Web
Google pre 2010 was perfectly functional. No realtime search suggestions, advanced search parameters that were actually working, possibility of doing an exact string search if needed.

The technology for indexing the web was mature enough by then, already then.

I agree that much of the downward spiral was caused by google itself, tho.

muxator··on NFS at 40 – Remembering the Sun Microsystems Network File System
Hi, could you give some pointers about this? Thanks!
muxator··on The Theatre of Pull Requests and Code Review
> - nobody reads intermediate commit messages one by one on a PR, period [...] > > - “every commit must compile” - again, unnecessary overzealousness. [...]

In my part of the world both of these are true, and proudly so. We keep catching a myriad of errors, big and small. The history is easy to read, and helps anyone catching up with how a certain project evolved.

I understand it might not be true for everyone, every team, in every line of business; but this sort of discipline pays off in quality oboth of the code _and_ the team members' abilities.

muxator··on Just let me select text
Hi, fellow compulsive selectors! Thanks, I am no longer feeling alone!
muxator··on 3D-printed device splits white noise into an acoustic rainbow without power
Neat method. However, the frequency range for the device is 7600-13600 Hz: less than an octave.
muxator··on International Workers' Day
Kudos for mentioning the second season of The Wire. At first, when watching the season, the theme felt misplaced, but it ended up being a very well done sociological exploration on deindustrialization. Given the current geopolitical issues it seems relevant even in contemporary times.
muxator··on TI expands internal manufacturing for gallium nitride (GAN) semiconductors
With all its present and past limitations, Brazil is a democracy. I do not know India enough, but it is not a regime either.
muxator··on The tiny chip that powers Montreal subway tickets
Agreed! In Rome for some time now one can top up his paper NFC ticket; there is no reason to throw it away.
muxator··on AMD Unveils Ryzen 9000 CPUs for Desktop, Zen 5
How come is a 15% IPC increase generation for generation a disappointing result? There might be greener pastures, I agree, but a 15% increase year over year for the quality factor of a product is nothing to be disappointed of. It's good execution, even more so in a mature and competitive sector such as microelectronics.
muxator··on What We're Working on in Firefox
> Firefox was bad when Chrome came out

Funny how different people's experiences can be. When Chrome came out in 2008 I remember trying it just for fun (more than once), and it never clicked with me, so I stayed with Firefox.

What was harder for me was keeping with all the unnecessary redesigns, empty eye candy, dumbing down, the Fennec debacle (exensions used to work, then they suddenly stopped for a bunch of years; plus, no keyword search for no reason).

By that time staying away from Google had become a goal in itself, but I understand who migrated to chrome.

Anyway, I am firmly convinced Chrome won because of Google's abuse of its web search monopoly. The innovations that its team introduced were groundbreaking from a technical point of view, but Firefox was a perfectly capable browser.

muxator··on Stack Overflow users deleting answers after OpenAI partnership
Just a single data point, but when I copy & paste a snippet from Stack Overflow, I always add a comment "// source: https://stack overflow.com/questions/xxx#yyy".

I both find it respectful of who wrote the answer in the first place and useful for future users of the code: the Stack Overflow answer often provides context and explanation for what would otherwise be an obscure piece of code.

Pretty darn useful if you ask me: those who want to have more information can follow the link, casual readers can skip it, and the whole process if fair to the author.

muxator··on Everyone has JavaScript, right?
> if the user installs an extension that breaks the web

It does not break the web. It may break single sites that were written on naive assumptions; I see a lot of sites break because my extensions do not allow loading analytics libraries. This means their js was dependent on this libraries being actually active.

I'd say this is case a case of _unbreaking_ the web.

muxator··on Everything we can't describe in music
The way a sound evolves in time contains a lot of timbrical information.

Different harmonics have different ADSR curves (Attack, Decay, Sustain, Release).

Above all, one cannot overstress the importance of the attack transient. There are famous experiments in psychoacoustics that show that, when deprived of their attack transient, the sounds of two different instruments may become hard to tell apart.

Personal anecdote: as a classic guitarist, it took me three years of experimentation to find the right way to cut my fingernails in order to have a better sound. The Electronic Engineer in me says that those were three years spent to look for how to improve 0.1 seconds of noise at the start of each of my notes.

muxator··on AI-generated sad girl with piano performs the text of the MIT License
That's probably true. Maybe there is a point to trade computational/energetic efficiency for attainability of a result. Let's see how this unfolds.
muxator··on AI-generated sad girl with piano performs the text of the MIT License
I'll try to give a serious answer, even if I suppose yours was a nice joke :)

Music is a language, even if with no semantic. It has conventions, dialects, a syntax, a grammar. There are multiple dimensions a musician uses to convey what he wants/feels: just like an actor has to control at the same time its voice, posture, interplay with other actors, so a good musician is aware of the structure of the piece he is composing/executing, the relations between the various subparts, how the musical discourse progresses in time, besides agogic, dynamics, sound color.

All of those aspects are continually perpetually compared against the conventions of the genre, mixed, evolved, strictly followed or balatantly negated.

This is something that normally a professional musician takes decades to master (apart from musical geniuses).

A listener takes less time to educate himself to appreciate those nuances (but not too little: let's say ~years). Once you develop a taste, it becomes very obvious to see through the spectrum that goes from bad quality tunes to musical artistry.

I see nothing musically interesting in this (wonderful) PoC of speech synthesis.

Just to be clear: I did not see anything particularly stunning even in Google's Bach Doodle from some years ago https://doodles.google/doodle/celebrating-johann-sebastian-b...

muxator··on AI-generated sad girl with piano performs the text of the MIT License
I suppose the focus was on voice synthesis here. I won't add anything about it since other commenters have already said significant things about this wonderful feat.

Musically, however, I can't help but notice that these models are still very far from being able to generate something interesting: from harmony, to tempo, to musical structure, to dynamics, everything is muddled and without structure. I guess there is still very much to work on, and I am not sure that purely generative models can attain higher levels. Maybe a mixed rule-based and generative approach would do?

The progress is really fast in this field, I really do not know.

muxator··on IrfanView
And now decoding a jpeg takes the blink of an eye, but we wait five seconds for a widget to render. When it does, we click somewhere else, because in that exact moment the layout was reflown.
muxator··on Waking My Computer from Afar
No big deal, but instead of running "wakeonlan" as a subprocess:

    import subprocess
    [...]
    result = subprocess.run(["wakeonlan", "MY:MA:CA:DD:RE:SS"], capture_output=True)

The magic packet could be built and broadcast in pure python, without introducing a dependency on an external binary.

For example, one could take inspiration from the code at https://github.com/remcohaszing/pywakeonlan/blob/main/wakeon...

muxator··on Show HN: Beeper Mini – iMessage client for Android
> Signal is the same, [...], the only official clients are the CLI and the ones they release

Is there an officially supported CLI for Signal? Please tell me it's true, that would mean so much for small scale automation!

muxator··on Sorry you feel that way: why passive aggression took over the world
The article ends with:

> In a fiercely hierarchical world of bosses and middle managers and underlings, is the very idea of such openness a naive pipe dream?

A habdbook case of a final that is a bit too open. There are no hints at all about how to attain this, even partially.

muxator··on I kind of killed Mercurial at Mozilla
I think Matt Harbison takes care of Windows builds. They are bundled with the official TortoiseHg download:

https://tortoisehg.bitbucket.io/download/

I did not use them because I am on linux only, but I see that Matt is active and responsive, both on the mailing list and chasing bugs on the issue tracker on heptapod ( https://foss.heptapod.net/mercurial/tortoisehg/thg )

muxator··on I kind of killed Mercurial at Mozilla
> Aside: I prefer Mercurial myself, and I hope to keep using it for personal projects until I die (: ... > you could! let me show you TortoiseHg...

Same here. I use TortoiseHg daily and propose the occasional contribution when something breaks/can be improved. It is really a project that has been chugging away for more than 15 years now.

muxator··on 280M e-bikes and mopeds are cutting demand for oil far more than electric cars
The turistic center has big pedonal areas.

However, the rest of the city is as full of cars as it may get.

I have to say, it mostly remains walkable. It just would be so much nicer with more efficient public transportation and less private cars.

muxator··on One Revolution per Minute [video]
Actually it would have been sqrt(2) revolutions per minute :)
muxator··on Device offers long-distance, low-power underwater communication
Now this is really really cool (technologically; let's not talk about the implications for people's freedom).

Do you happen to have some pointer were read more about this? Thanks

muxator··on Can LLMs learn from a single example?
It's interesting that this conclusion is the exact opposite of a sibling comment, which proposes that a small, human-curated corpus may be more effective than big, synthetic datasets.
muxator··on Why does the USA use 110V and UK use 230-240V? (2014)
Only those that consume 3 kW max :)

Jokes aside, I think that this ends up incentivizing an efficient use of energy. That's not so bad after all.

muxator··on Why does the USA use 110V and UK use 230-240V? (2014)
Yep. You can obviously upgrade to 4.5 and 6 kW (still single phase, I think), or go three phase. Single house probably do that. But I'd be surprised if the apartments had more than 3 kW installed.

This results in a big payoff for efficiency, however: high efficiency AC and heat pumps for water go a long way in increasing how much you can do on so much little power.

muxator··on Why does the USA use 110V and UK use 230-240V? (2014)
> 60amp draw at 220V

You are very luky! The standard installed power for residential use in Italy is 220 V, 3.3 kW.

muxator··on How Modern SQL Databases Are Changing Web Development: Part 1
There are simpler (maybe not easier) solutions for that.
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