vr46

A great update to older articles on Ruby concurrency. I pored over some of my code from Ruby to Rust - nothing exciting, turns hundreds of Instagram posts into Markdown text with resized and watermarked images - but maxes out my cores. Using actors, love those.

Considering porting the code back now to Ruby to get some developer friendliness, er, back. And for fun just to see performance across 10 years of posts.

Rust is cool but Ruby deserves to stay useful.

I just spent two weeks wasting my time trying to code my pet project in various flavours of Next.js plus Prisma/Drizzle etc and gave up at having to constantly reinvent the wheel or work around some incomplete/naive implementation. And then went back to Rails where everything just works. Etc etc etc

Germany is a disaster zone in a number of ways, but it is as easy as pie to fire people in companies with fewer than 10-12 people so startups can move quickly there.

Starting a startup on the other hand is damn near close to test-tube fusion and even then makes you think, why would I bother?

So fucking hard to enter any kind of industry or profession here, and most industries do not share the value like companies in the US do. It’s a country of dragons hoarding wealth.

That's kind of cool, maybe each key could be a mini apple watch screen. A digital crown mounted fairly flush into the side could handle small, precision movements with haptic feedback, and perhaps an iPod wheel.

Keen to see more of these PopTouch buttons on flat screens!

WHAT. A. RUN. From gigging weddings with Ray Charles to helping Jacob Collier launch his career, and Michael Jackson wasn't even the halfway point.

I briefly saw him in 1990-1, can't remember exactly, when he came to the UK screening of Listen Up! He had already done more than enough to pack an entire film about his life, and that was 34 years ago and Fresh Prince of Bel Air hadn't even screened.

The Soul Bossa Nova album is on now, I'll go upstairs and put Sinatra at the Sands on later, and work my way back up to now.

RIP QDJ Jr, you were a composing, producing, arranging, making shit happen powerhouse of a Dude.

It was no substitute for function keys, but being able to get close to the screen while editing pictures and using the touch bar to adjust sliders with my finger without looking at the control on screen was A+, so much nicer than cursor keys.

Having a secondary display that was context-sensitive (thanks Better Touch Tool) was super cool.

My point was that power user hackers will find interesting ways to use interfaces and controls. I’m not really interested in the people who tell me it’s useless for them or don’t need it, that’s fine, but I do want to see stuff that isn’t immediately understood or with a predefined purpose, just because it’s cool.

I think Macbook Pros should be quite advanced machines with slightly out-there features, so I would love to see the touchbar back as a power user option but above function keys. I absolutely loved it on my 2019 MBP and it represented a bunch of new ways of doing things, but it was gone too soon to really mature. Most Mac users clearly don't need it, but there's a certain group of obsessive users that will hack on stuff like this.

I think I played straight into Logic with the metronome on, two sections and then pushed that forward to create some blank bars for the intro and then added the drummer on multiple tracks and same for bassist, then fiddled with some of the settings for each section.

I was pretty impressed, though, for approximately ten minutes start to finish. I should probably go recall what I played so I can try and finish the riffs off or something.

An actual competent musician ought to be able to make the most ridiculous demos with this thing.

A fantastic product but the colour science does not look great from a first play, and I don't know if seven days is long enough to figure it out. If I had a job I'd pull the trigger anyway, but too much of a luxury right now. I can't believe I did not know about this application. Shocking marketing! :D

Yeah, even DNGs don't really work because as you say, the edits are application specific. My entire workflow converted everything to DNG for about 15 years but now I don't bother.

The thing that Lightroom really got right was not trying to mix all this stuff and organizing the master files well, so it was extremely clear where source material lived. I certainly don't want to root around thumbnails and previews in randomly-named folders.

Aperture's interface could have been great with some decent performance, and some of those decisions seemed to have survived with the iPhoto Library. Perhaps one big-ass ball of mud works fine for consumers with small file sizes and no archival strategy, but it's too prescriptive for me. If they brought Aperture back, and incorporated Photoshop-like features, that would be interesting and cool, so long as they left photo management alone.

The lesson I took a long time to learn was to not have the RAW processor import your files and instead get Photo Mechanic to do it instead, because it does a better job, and just use the RAW processor to process RAWs.

XMP/ITPC has been around longer than I've had a digital camera, do you know why Aperture didn't make use of those?

I know, it's nuts!

Again, thanks for the interesting insights.

I personally witnessed one incident I mentioned, and for my sins tried to help my panicking classmate, I think we reached a good-enough outcome. On the subject of raw files processing, I have yet to find an ideal system, if it is even possible, where edits to get a RAW photo to its final state are handled and stored in some deterministic format, yet somehow connected to said image, in a way that allows the combination of the edit and raw to travel around.

Everything I've tried - let's see, Aperture, Lightroom, Capture One - have to use some kind of library or database and there's no great way of managing the whole show. The edits ARE the final image and the only solution I had that ever works was to maintain a Mac Pro with RAID and an old copy of Lightroom, and run all images through that.

IIRC, I never understood the Aperture filesystem, probably not meant for humans, which didn't help. Does that sound right?

Thanks for the lovely insight, super interesting - I don't think I made it to Aperture 2 - but sounds like some unusual decisions made in that editing process. I suspect, based on my own history with disk problems, that the filesystem issues that would regularly pop up and not dealt with by your average technically-over-trusting student were the root cause, but exacerbated by the choices of image management and application speed.

Going back to 2007, so can't remember super clearly, but IIRC the db was a sqlite like thing and all info about everything was stored in this, and it was vulnerable to corruption, plus all versions and thumbnails were mixed together with original image files - a total mess. The digital photo management landscape wasn't so mature then, and some people trusted Aperture with their original images whereas later versions allowed or encouraged people to keep their "masters" elsewhere.

Because the whole thing was as slow as a slug dragging a ball-and-chain, pre-SSD, issues with that filesystem or master database were sometimes mistaken for just general slowness. I jumped to Lightroom faster than you could say Gordon Parks.

In defence of the AI hubris, I laid down a funky rhythm guitar track, verse and chorus, and then fiddled around with the AI bassist and AI drummer and blow-me-down-with-a-feather if the results weren't outstanding. Like a perfect demo. I was able to send that to my mate and say, here you go, here's a demo with guide tracks for the bass.

For making demos and filling-out sketches, I'm thrilled. Here's the audio, and all rough playing, bum notes and general incompetence are my own.

Drums and Bass by Logic AI: https://www.mixcloud.com/hnvr46/demo-rvg/

Aperture could have been amazing, but it was slow, buggy and suffered from a catastrophic data loss that several of my Photojournalism classmates fell victim to - just as Lightroom appeared.

FCP was outstanding in its time, but was neglected.

I went all in on Logic, however, and that has proved a great buy, no subscription model, fantastic extras and works super well. If they can rebuild a enthusiast-targeted set of apps again, but stick with it, the future looks bright.

I cannot imagine Apple ever competing with Capture One or most of the other circle of RAW image processors, which have some rather niche features, but they might be able to take on Lightroom.

Finally, some literal yak shaving on HN

Is MulletWig.com available?

Asking for a friend

You can find countless lists describing principles and tenets of journalism that differ from each other.

Accuracy, verification, impartiality, yes, but seeking the truth upsets people, and the usual attack on that is to claim bias, prejudice, activism and “fake news” on the part of the journalist/organization

This is a completely wrong and perhaps deliberately misleading impression of journalism and journalists. Healthy journalism absolutely provides critical analysis.

There is no neutrality in the face of evil.

Journalism and journalists are not supposed to be neutral, but impartial.

Ethics are pretty universal.

It's only 22 tons, we could probably polish that off over a weekend.

Not sure how either side in this dispute are going to “win”.

It misses the "cool" bit

Only if you assume people are after the music and not a cool artifact, memento or souvenir.

I can understand the attraction of a set of needlessly complicated physical contraptions that outweighs the appeal of the actual outcome - and not talking about making coffee here - so cassettes make a lot of sense, they’re unusual, uncommon, and look better on a shelf :)

I think Type I tape has a fairly low ceiling, my old TDK AR-X were as good as they got, and I can’t imagine these Maxells are any good these days regardless of where they come from. Any other tips?

I still have my Technics 646 I bought new as a student, but do I use it? Barely. Chrome tapes seem to be a thing of the past, forget Type IV, and I don’t think I could spare the time anymore for anything less! Lol.

A lovely medium, but my favourite memory of them isn’t a Nakamichi-scented one. It’s a Sony Walkman-centred world that I miss! If only I still had that Sony DC2, I could retire.

Edit: my mate tells me to STFU, he can bring me some new Type IIs from Greece or Turkey. Result! Back in business!

Like an inverse subpoena, brilliant

Does it really make sense that 20% of the entire turnover of business shouldn't go through the business?

Is good service only available to those who tip?

Why are there so many hidden costs in American pricing? Why can't everything be upfront and honest and transparent?

Whose responsibility is the welfare of the staff?

Why do only waitstaff get the tips when the less-visible staff also contribute to good service?