tigeba

I have two cats that I have clicker trained. They can: shake, high-five, fist bump, stand up, and will "go here" and come and touch your finger. They won't do any of the tricks without treats :)

One of the cats had seemed interested in fetch for several years but it never quite worked. I tried a bunch of different toys and finally found a plastic spring that she will fetch very well.

Just here to say that you can order small samples of natural Uranium on Amazon.

Just to be clear I'm talking about digital audio, not MIDI. I ran Cakewalk on my 386/486 as well, it worked great including SMPTE sync over to an analog tape machine

As a practical matter, the CPU has to deal with IO as well, I don't believe any 486 systems could handle this.

DSP based systems struggled a lot with IO in the late 90s until faster SATA drives became ubiquitous. Lots of them used SCSI or exotic hardware cards to deal with large track counts.

Just going to add this RE: reliability. Today CPUs are so powerful you don't need DSP systems anymore to do things like low latency tracking. It is still up to the user to manage latency by carefully selecting plugins, etc. With DSP based systems, the latency is generally fixed and extremely stable. I still use a very old PTHD system because it works great for recording audio :)

Music is very latency sensitive. If you are recording any source you generally want to have overall latency < 5ms. Input and monitoring latency is usually either handled by using fancy DSP systems or a "hack" where input audio bypasses any internal processing and gets routed directly back for monitoring.

I feel I must point out that education buildings in Missouri do not share designs with prisons as a norm. Maybe this is true somewhere in the state but not here.

We have something that has been dubbed a "divergeabout" which is a hybrid diverging diamond intersection with roundabouts chucked on both ends. I'm pretty sure these work based entirely on fear and confusion. Fortunately this particular intersection is not really in a pedestrian area. We have roundabouts in our neighborhood and I had the same concerns about crossing when my kids were younger and walking to school.

I had a chademo fast charging station clamp on my car and refuse to let go, along with not actually doing any charging. They tried resetting the charger but nothing worked. It eventually timed out and gave up after 12 hours or so. No harm done to the car but quite annoying.

The authors of the paper do make a few concrete points about the problems with using AI to perform assessments on candidates. For example they mentioned that an AI designed to perform a Big Five assessment on a candidate might be meaningfully impacted by the candidate wearing glasses or having a bunch of books in the background.

The vast majority of the critique is that to the extent anonymization works, it does not produce the outcome the authors desire. They explicitly ask for group based discrimination to be pre-baked into any sort of AI system to produce equity, not equality.

"First, industry practitioners developing hiring AI technologies must shift from trying to correct individualized instances of “bias” to considering the broader inequalities that shape recruitment processes. Pratyusha Kalluri argues that AI experts should not focus on whether or not their technologies are technically fair but whether they are “shifting power” towards the marginalized (Kalluri, 2020). This requires aban- doning the “veneer of objectivity” that is grafted onto AI systems (Benjamin, 2019a, 2019b) so that technologists can better understand their implication—and that of the corporations within which they work—in the hiring process. For example, practitioners should engage with how the categories being used to sort, process, and categorize candidates may have historically harmed the individuals captured within them. They can then begin to problematize the assumptions about “gender” and “race” they are building into AI hiring tools even as they intend to strip racial and gender attributes out of recruitment."

My experience is that spacers or not, using these with glasses is uncomfortable. Adding prescription inserts are more comfortable and provide a better visual experience. I bought some very cheap glasses and 3d printed the inserts. They have magnetic mounts and you can remove them easily.

The district where my kids attend have suggested this on a few occasions. Frequently advanced math is the target. The district has hired a consultant that is charged with professional development for educators in the district. Among other things, the consultant makes claims that tracking is "... a racialized system of exclusion.” and compares it to Apartheid on multiple occasions. The rationale is explicit: "The biggest problem with tracking–by a million miles — is the equity issue." In my opinion combatting inequity in this way, by eliminating a resource that students need to succeed, is an example of “leveling down” or "Harrison Bergeroning" the situation if you will.

The Scouts who responded to this incident were passengers on the train that derailed. They were returning from Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. It is traditional for Scouts to take the trip to and from Philmont on a train.

My sons recently completed the Nuclear Science merit badge, and one of the experiments involves the creation of a cloud chamber. The 'old school' method for obtaining a radioactive source is using a lantern mantle, which is a practical item that a scout might be able to access. I did not previously realize that old school mantles were dipped in Thorium. Alas, these are somewhat difficult to obtain today as you might expect. It was pretty fun to discover that the modern solution is to just order some Uranium ore from Amazon.

This is not really enough gain for most dynamic mics. Probably passable for many condenser mics, but they would also need phantom.

Missouri

Just as an interesting note, our school district has switched the entire fleet (around 150) to CNG. This has supposedly reduced opex substantially over diesel. Also a huge reduction in particulates. Probably not as clean as EV but an improvement . Our district owns all their vehicles, but I believe this is not common.

I write and record music and this seems pretty useful as a tool for songwriting. I can think of some cases where the notes and photo notes for gear and the markers are useful. The instrument detection is I guess neat, but I can tell what I'm playing by listening. Stereo is also not really particularly appealing or interesting, especially if it has weird ML processing on it. One pain point I frequently hit when doing actual recording is saving settings from external analog devices if I want to recall them in a future session via notes. This seems like this could be close to covering this scenario as well. Congrats on launching.

Yes it is true that you can deal with that amount of latency, but 10-20ms is way up in the 'very sloppy' range especially when it comes to recording.

FWIW, I have been using the Captor X as a quick tracking and editing tool. I will record the DI + Captor track. It can be a bit easier to comp the DI parts. Then later I go back and re-amp them thru my amps and speakers. I do have the benefit of a few nice amp and cabinet options and decent soundproofing, but it helps keep the ear-bleeding levels down to a minimum. That has kind of helped me avoid fiddling with Captor settings endlessly.

I could see using something like this on a pedalboard in pedal form if you had the latency around <5ms or so for sure. I use a combination of analog and digital effects combined with analog amplifiers. I still prefer the actual amps quite a bit compared to simulations, but the simulations are a lot less of a pain. Recently I have been using a combination load box / cabinet simulator and I think those types of devices can really deliver in terms of tone and convenience.

It only takes a small amount of latency (5 ms or so) to noticeably impact performances by musicians. Latency is also an issue when you want to monitor a live signal along with other recorded audio, like in a DAW. It is not as big a deal with a playback only device.

I used to frequently boot up my SGI and NeXT and try random sites with super old browsers to see if they still work. Sadly SSL everywhere has largely killed that experiment.

I have two kids in elementary school. Our school district issues Chromebooks for all students in the district and have been doing this for several years. We are fortunate to have Google Fiber in the city and have a fairly high percentage of households with broadband. I believe the district already worked with families prior to the outbreak to provide hotspots.

The students will resume class on Tuesday, but they did a quick systems check today and it went a lot better than I would have expected. The teachers and school district have worked very hard to pull this off quickly.

For students that receive free and reduced food, the district has set up delivery locations at various spots in the city so kids will still have access while the physical schools are closed.

I don't know how they will handle some of the special classes like physical education or music yet, that will be interesting to see.

Agreed on the talking. Especially if you are in a club before a show. Talking over the noise is taxing.

Great job putting out an entire self produced album and documenting it. I wanted to bounce this opinion off you.

Its my opinion that most folks who are going to be using programmed drums would be better off with an inexpensive MIDI controller with some pads (like the one pictured in your article) vs playing them on an electronic kit unless they happen to be a very skilled drummer.

I play drums passably, but when I'm demoing up ideas I just thump them in with some pads on a MIDI controller.

If you want to eat a banana before you singing go for it. Things you eat or drink don't touch your vocal folds, so they aren't going to coat or otherwise mess with them.

My recommendations are drink plenty of water, avoid alcohol, and practice.

I recently replaced a bunch of bulbs in my recording studio with LED and it was a huge mistake. They are basically RFI cannons. I removed them after realizing what was going on. I spent a couple of days hunting down a really nasty rogue noise and it ended up being a LIFX bulb I had forgotten about. Now I have to find a huge pile of black market incandescent bulbs...

There have been no fares on our streetcars in KC since they debuted a few years ago. Currently they require EVERYONE to exit the streetcar when it terminates at either end of the route and this seems to work. Not sure what they will do with the bus lines yet.

You have to be somewhat careful with statistics like these when dealing with cities like KC. Population information is frequently reported as 'Metro Area' as in the source you provided. The actual population of KCMO is < 500,000 and I'd wager access to public transit is useful to far greater than 1% of the population of KCMO proper.

FWIW, I live in the metro area and the buses are not super useful for me, but I used the streetcar frequently when I was working downtown. The streetcar is 'free' and is funded by a special tax along the streetcar line, that was voted for by the people that live along the line. It has been very popular and the city recently voted to expand it for several more miles. The latest announcement is expanding the 'free' to buses. I don't know if there is really a plan to pay for that yet.