BadassFractal

There's no mention of the word "testosterone" in that article?

Being locked into a specific cloud is usually nowhere near the top of threats to a startup.

Request for startup: Tinder in the US that isn't utter garbage. Maybe you can find a cofounder on this platform :)

Excellent, thank you! The swiping model didn't feel like an ideal solution for the task.

Yes! YC calls them "scenesters", but the reality is that often you don't know if you're cut out for the gig until you actually do it, so lots of people have to experience it first-hand to realize they don't actually want the job.

Similar situation here, thanks for sharing your journey this last time around, I'll have to reuse some of those ideas myself.

+1 on the site being lower value than it could be for repeat founders with previous successes, but who still want to build things with other people with extensive experience and a track record.

You could argue that if you're in that situation you should be relying on existing networks to propel you into your next thing, but sometimes you want a new start or things just aren't aligning time-wise with your former allies.

The majority of folks on the site have never done a startup before and are entirely unproven in a startup context, or have a couple of short stints that they unfortunately didn't learn much from because the thing never gained any traction, so they did "1 year experience 3 times over". Doesn't mean they're not potentially great startup material, it's pretty hard to get something to take off. But, it's still a pretty risky bet for someone who wants to derisk partners a tad more.

There was a similar case in Italy regarding its own version of the 90s satanic panic, which led to dozens of kids separated from their parents, parents committing suicide from shame and grief, an overall travesty of justice. Until Pablo Trincia made a podcast out of it and conducted an investigation the case was considered closed. The podcast entirely overturned it two decades later, reuniting many of the kids (now adults) with their legally estranged parents and sending a bunch of people to jail for intentional malpractice: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/polis/2021/08/04/investigative-podca...

Incredible work with this article. I didn't realize experiences like that were even possible in the browser without a whole company backing the effort.

We're in the desert? Do the stereotypical Arabic singing sting!

It's interesting you say that because Hans Zimmer specifically said in an interview they tried their best to dodge the cliche' middle eastern musical tropes in this soundtrack. Perhaps they didn't go far enough for some people.

I'm also a big fan of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warnock%27s_dilemma , which I wish had gotten more traction over the years.

Are there any examples of successful companies out there with no Twitter presence? I've always wondered if the downsides of being exposed to the Twitter outrage machine as a brand are greater than whatever a company and their staff have to gain. Curious if anybody's ever attempted that experiment.

Wonderful blog, I'm in awe of people who can consistently write quality posts like this year after year.

Steve is a national treasure, I've been a happy supporter on Patreon for years. I love how perfectly consistent he is with his catchphrases.

I had the same happen to a mid-tier brand portable bluetooth speaker that was charging from the wall outlet on my night stand. Burst into a massive chemical flame right next to me, splattered the wall with molten plastic. It took me a few seconds to understand what was happening, at first I assumed it was my SO playing a really dumb fireworks prank on me. Took a few good inhalations of whatever black smoke came out of it while trying to put the fire out with a pillow. I was very, very lucky that this happened while I was in the same room, and not out at work with nobody at home to put out the fire. It would have easily caused a building-wide fire.

The company behind it offered to replace the product with whatever I wanted from their store as long as I signed a "I won't sue you" form and sent them the unit back for investigation. They said it was a manufacturing defect. I wasn't feeling like spending months or years in litigation, so I took the offer (no batteries this time) and moved on with my life. No regrets since.

The reality is that we're all surrounded by these ticking battery timebombs, and we're all at the mercy of manufacturing quality control and luck. Ever since that incident I never charge any new device unless I'm sitting next to it for a few hours, just to make sure nothing of the sort happens without my supervision. I realize it doesn't accomplish much, since these issues often happen hundreds of hours into the device's regular operation, but it gives me a false sense of safety.

I got bitten by a fake SNES Classic off of ebay a few years back. I was super excited to play Super Mario RPG on the real thing, only to find out that it was running with all sorts of glitches due to how the clone device had been designed, to the point where it was unusable. I suppose it's a pretty good scam since the thing goes for $200+ these days and I'm guessing it's some kind of a low powered android device on the inside.

Haven't quite figured out how to play those old classics again.

The physics of music comes up a bunch in music production. When working with different waveforms, filter types and specific bass frequencies, you always have to make sure you know what your spectrum looks like, or you'll have phase issues, or you won't hit the desired levels for each instrument and so on. You end up staring at fundamentals and harmonics a lot in order to get the timbres and the mix you have in mind.

It took me about 3-4 separate attempts over the last 15 years to get music, and only this last couple of years I was finally able to crack the music notation, music theory, and music production nut. I'm by no means pro-level, but I can follow along and have a mostly intelligent conversation about anything musical and audio-related now, and also put out my own tracks that are based on this shockingly broad set of concepts that you can pick up as you're learning the world of music.

I had to attack this from every possible angle because I had practically the same experience as you. What ultimately worked for me was a combination of a piano teacher, going through the Adult Piano books, doing a few music production programs (including some online university ones) and surrounding myself (virtually) with people writing music regularly. Eventually, although through many ups and downs, it all made sense.

IMO the hardest part is having to scale the massive wall of terminology and basic concepts you have to grasp in order to speak music theory. Notes, durations, keys, chords, intervals, scales, modes, music notation, meter, various modifiers you would find on a sheet of music, etc.. in addition to being able to actually play those physically in the real world... It's a ton. You don't need any of it to actually write music that people will like, but if you want to feel like you can at least communicate about it to other humans, it really helps.

I would be surprised if that was the case. Picking on Bezos specifically does a better job at creating drama, than by pointing a finger at a giant faceless organization.

It got you to click, and to create engagement for this article, I wasn't aware of this product's existence and I likely wouldn't have been if not for the clickbait headline that got it to surface. That's a successful marketing endeavor right there.

What's the recommended way to run nvim on macOS these days?

Just run it within Terminal? I recall that unlike on Ubuntu, there was some scrolling lag to it that might have required some tweaking. Not sure if that's the case anymore.

Looks like my 5500M GPU draws 10W fewer when I change my external 4K monitor from Scaled (to accommodate for every OS UI element being minuscule) to the display's native resolution. It makes the OS barely usable from a UI standpoint, but the fans are now a lot quieter. I'm on a Dell monitor.

Is this by design?

I experience this 100% with writing music. I suspect most of it is around the need for your creation to be good, versus allowing it to be child-like play. If you're able to suspend the need to be good for a moment, you can start to experience again the joy of playing, inventing, letting go. Kenny Werner's book Effortless Mastery is a great reference for this.

I would love something like this for the longer, boring, predictable drives.

For example the I5 drive from LA to SF. That's a pretty straightforward, predictable and mostly uneventful 6h drive that seems straightforward to delegate to a machine. There are no pedestrians, no intersections, nothing crossing the street. The main dangers would be around objects on the road, other vehicles getting in a crash or doing something unpredictable next to you, animals running onto the path of the vehicle. As a human you might actually be worse equipped to react to in time compared to a car.

That one use-case alone where the car drives itself on the I5 while I read a book or watch a movie would be worth something. The human can handle the quirks of the more treacherous local roads. I'd still prefer a bullet train of some kind, but in its absence, this would be a decent climate-friendly alternative that doesn't require a giant plane getting up in the sky for a 50 min flight.

Another example of how bananas the system is: when I go to order prescription refills through my health care provider, it is currently unable to tell me how much it's going to cost me. You're expected to say "Ok, charge me whatever these cost" and then, I suppose, call customer support if you don't agree with the price you were charged that day.

I don't know if there's some kind of a "price of the day" marketplace calculation that needs to happen for the provider to find out the current prices, but that's pretty odd. It's like buying stocks or a Dungeness crab dish at a restaurant.

I clearly remember burning CDs up until around 2010, but I never realized that the technology was already around 30 years earlier.

I still have rose-colored glasses nostalgia of the days of PC games in large cardboard boxes containing multi-CD jewel cases and elaborate manuals.

I bet you the CD will come back as a vintage retro format in about 10-15 years when the kids who never grew up with them learn to treat it as a cool hipster format. Just like my generation did with vinyl, which I never experienced myself back in the day, having arrived too late on the scene.

Friendly plug for LGR and 8 Bit Guy channels on Youtube who often dive back into these antique devices.

I own that very sling and the attention to detail is exceptional. It's hard to put down. Their clip system is rather convenient as well, including its interoperability with the Manfrotto tripods. They're expensive products, but you'll keep them for a long time.

Is there anything today that feels like a underground scene that's "happening", that is acting as a technological vanguard, that is full of mystique, but that hasn't gone mainstream yet? The demo scene felt like absolute magic to me as a kid in 80s.

Making games used to be that in the 80s and maybe 90s, but now it's a well-rehearsed, mostly commercial dance with clear parameters and tooling. Yeah, there are game jams and all that, but I'm not sure how much new uncharted territories are being discovered these days anymore in it.

Making electronic music in 60s-80s used to be magical and now is also mainstream and commercialized. I don't mean this cynically, but more from the perspective that there isn't as much in it left now that hasn't been done plenty before. It's no longer a case of Vangelis buying one of the few outrageously expensive CS-80 ever produced and hammering away at it in his studio producing sounds never heard before. Or hearing a Buchla for the first time. It's all one small VST download away now, with super powerful tools to stitch it all together often available for free.

Where is the bleeding edge magic happening these days? VR? Crypto? Machine Learning? Generative art?

If you're doing any kind of composition where mixing and mastering are a mandatory component, you're strongly encouraged to have a proper set of cans, or even better, a decent set of monitors. The tech has gotten rather good these days, so you can get a decent pair for not that much. But if the class is primarily about the theory and the arrangement, and not so much about the final mix, then I don't imagine a good setup will be needed or even recommended.

I remember experiencing issues earlier last year with Zoom correctly transmitting the sub bass frequencies in a music production class I was taking.

Perhaps that was a user error, but in a craft where getting your frequencies right across the whole spectrum is paramount any kind of lossy optimization can lead to undesirable results.

I wonder if there are parts of Zoom's audio transmission that optimize for the frequency range of the human voice, and everything else gets mangled a little, along the lines of chroma subsampling optimization in the visual world.