Strong nope on pretty much all points, and its rude and presumptuous to tell me what my job should be or what other work it entails.
We’re going to just have to disagree here.
1,557 karma · joined December 12, 2014
- the transactional part of setting up interview loops, coordinating schedules, etc is extremely tedious for a field of 3-5 serious candidates for a given role. Internal recruiter takes all of this away from a hiring manager who has other duties.
- an internal recruiter can plow through LinkedIn to find solid candidates, identifying ones for the hiring manager to review and, if qualified, reach out to. Again, tedious work for a hiring manager with other responsibilities.
Lets not forget the most significant stakeholder from many business's perspectives, investors. Many of these "bullshit jobs" enable businesses to operate at the scale required for continual economic growth. Except for very tiny businesses, execs are generally going to be too busy to answer the company phone line or greet guests.
Graeber sees these as inefficiencies, leaning on his experience as an academic lifer, but academia is a very different, if adjacent, market to the capital-driven industrial world. He seems to miss his own point that so many of these jobs are in the service of ever-increasing economic expectations.
The thesis behind Moth Minds seems to be that there is a lot of interesting/valuable* work that could be done that doesn't fit any of the typical funding models (VC, small business loan, burn through personal savings, Patreon, tips, etc.). Like Xerox PARC type projects or PhD research without the gatekeeping. This kind of work doesn't exactly require a singular brilliant visionary, but it helps to provide a financial incentive to lure someone with a unique vision from a comfortable tech salary.
*for flexible interpretations of value
But its refreshing to hear of notable exceptions to this! In my field of music tech, Ableton is one of these, for instance, having semi-famously refused significant outside investment to be able to focus on making a great product: https://www.billboard.com/pro/ableton-founder-gerhard-behles...
Even for an almost fully digital synth like the DX7 a bit-accurate emulation is difficult (there is a rich discussion of this in one of the other threads here). For analog synthesizers, there is a lot of character and nuance in the individual circuits that are difficult to capture in a digital model, across all possible configurations. In the mix of a full song though, its not often that people can notice the difference.
Aliasing--the introduction of extra unwanted and generally non-harmonic frequencies--is also really hard to avoid in digital systems. For more esoteric instruments like Eurorack modules or Moog modular synthesizers, the physical interface is an integral part of the instrument--software versions of these exist but are obviously very different to interact with using a mouse or touchscreen.
> Why aren’t all new keyboards (or those other things DJs have on stage) simply software, maybe with a custom input device for easier live use?
For live use this is very common nowadays, though physical single purpose keyboards (even fully digital ones) still are used widely. In a fast moving stage show you may not want to mess around with the complexity of a full personal computer setup. In modern operating systems, even with 100s of processes competing for CPU time, real-time audio may rarely drop out (the result of which is audible clicks and pops), but even this is too risky for a big professional live show.
That said, it seems like music manufacturers were searching for a musically useful, cost-effective digital synthesizer around this time. Early digital synths like the Synclavier and Fairlight CMI were prodigiously expensive, while analog synths in the DX7's price range were saddled with few/no polyphonic voices and/or limited single oscillator designs. The DX7, with a varied tonal palette and 16 voices, must have seemed luxurious at the time.
This is in fact underway! Jack Atherton has been working on this though I am not certain of its current progress. Its certainly a lot more practical now with AudioWorklet now being available in all major browsers.
> OxyContin, introduced in 1995, was Purdue Pharma's breakthrough palliative for chronic pain. Under a marketing strategy that Arthur Sackler had pioneered decades earlier, the company aggressively pressed doctors to prescribe the drug, wooing them with free trips to pain-management seminars and paid speaking engagements. Sales soared.[26] The drug was marketed as "smooth and sustained pain control all day and all night" when taken on a 12-hour schedule and as having lower abuse potential than immediate-release oxycodone because of its time-release properties, even though there was no scientific evidence backing that conclusion and the addictive nature of opiates had been known for thousands of years.
> In August 2019, Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family were in negotiations to settle the claims for a payment of $10-$12 billion. [55] The settlement would include a Chapter 11 filing by Purdue Pharma, which would be restructured as public beneficiary trust and the Sackler Family would give up any ownership in the company. Addiction treatment drugs currently developed by the company would be given to the public cost-free. All profits of Purdue would henceforth go to the plaintiffs in the case. On top of that, the Sackler family would contribute $3 billion in cash. The family would also sell Mundipharma and contribute another $1.5 billion from the sales proceeds to the settlement. However, the Sackler family would remain a billionaire family and would not be criminally charged for contributing to the opioid crisis.
"They" are literally the ones attacking and threatening the seat of American government. This isn't a thought experiment at this point.
> Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.
This is because the "naive" approach to e.g. a digital square wave is to sample a logically continuous function defined as:
if (less than halfway through the cycle period) -1
else 1
Secondly, the sharp rising edge of the square wave, from a "sum of sines" perspective, requires sinusoid components that are not part of a conventional square wave to represent them digitally. If you were to digitally sample an analog square wave through an ADC it would look quite different from the result of this function.
The naive digital sawtooth wave suffers from similar issues due to its discontinuity.