Miredly

Location: Honolulu, HI

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Python, Rust, Unity/C#, Max/MSP, AWS/Google Compute

Résumé: mired.space/Resume_2020.pdf

Email: miles@mired.space

Background: Audio engineering and multimedia development, worked previously at the Smithsonian on various projects including an app to make the Eclipse accessible to people who are blind or visually impaired, and a multimedia installation at the National Air and Space Museum. Open to a variety of work from consulting to game dev to backend media processing.

It's designed to be useful for more than one kind of "Pro". The old Mac Pro, for instance, seemed to completely forget about music studios and their professional requirements for Macs. This new machine may seem like overkill to software developers, but as an audio engineer, it's perfect.

I don't even want a 1TB SSD in it, the 256 is perfect to hold the OS, a few DAWs, and all the plugins I could ever want. Everything else gets saved to drives in a toaster anyway. A rackmountable unit with a ton of PCI slots for HDX/Dante cards was on my Christmas list, and I'm not alone- there's a reason they made a point of showing how many HDX cards it can fit in their presentation.

It also looks like an amazing workstation for video editors. I really don't think it's designed for software engineers who make 500k a year.

Or we could just start punishing companies for massive and widely damaging data leaks. AFAIK about GDPR, it wouldn't prevent this. These things keep happening because nothing bad happens to companies that let it happen.

It specifically mentions that he waited until late at night after everyone went home.

Nothing could hold up to the amount of hype Magic Leap got, but based on what I've seen it's been an excellent use of its investment capital. They've been experimenting with new technologies for years now and they finally have a development kit that speaks to the path they plan to follow in the future.

I also wouldn't trust Palmer Lucky to have anything like an objective opinion about it.

I'm sorry, but your example falls a little flat when you look at how Fox News became the lynchpin of the shit-show the US is sinking in to right now.

People adapted to it, sure- but that's the problem.

I still don't really understand how exclusive franchise agreements /aren't/ illegal, given antitrust laws.

I don't think it's possible not to.

Yes, I disagree with the above user's statement about why they're said to be federated- they're federated because content from any instance can appear on any other instance. The federation is the cross-talk.

From the looks of it, no actual subset of it would form a functional system, so it is itself a fundamental unit?

From what I've seen, no one involved really cares about how robust it is. It's a crypto-bandwagon cash grab.

Oh, yeah- I only ever use the Twitter website to manage my notifications. Tweetbot on OSX and Flamingo on Android are my gotos.

Also, LinkedIn is terrible, and has been for the entire duration of my experience with it. I recently discovered that someone had tried to contact me about something extremely important using the LinkedIn messaging service, so now I feel somewhat obligated to follow it, and trying to navigate it was physically painful for me. I'm deeply upset that it's been made a necessary part of my life.

also Opera.

I've been really engaging with Mastodon lately and having a similar experience. I find it's also changing the way I behave on sites like Twitter and HN as well.

I decided last year that after 10 years, I would figure out how to get something out of twitter, and what I've found is that it really became a useful tool for me by the time I was following around 300 people, and had curated joke and garbage accounts out.

What I have now is a bunch of people in my own industry (music twitter, tech twitter), a bunch of people in industries I'm tangentially related to (Game dev twitter, vis-art twitter), a bunch of individual journalists, but by and large not the accounts of the publications they belong to, as well as the senators and congresspersons from my state.

By keeping a realtime stream of the people I follow in my periphery, I know when something is interesting when the list moves faster than normal, and if I feel like paying attention to it, the list moves quickly enough normally that there's a steady stream of real-time thoughts from people that I care about, and it doesn't move too quickly to read them.

The biggest thing I had to get over early on was wanting to read everything. Twitter's timeline isn't particularly legible if you want to go through and read everything your friends have written, but that's not how most people are really using it in my experience. People are checking in, seeing what's buzzing, and participating in the conversation if they have something to say.

That was the next big hurdle that I'm trying to get over now: Twitter is a participatory thing. You get more out of it if you start engaging with people. Twitter is so obtuse though, that it took my getting in to Mastodon to realize this.

You can talk to the void all you want, but if you want people to find /you/, you have to start talking to people.

It seems to me like what you're trying to do is analyze video, while Moviepy is mostly really good at programatic editing. Have you looked in to OpenCV?

How much video/audio editing have you done?

I've used Moviepy fairly extensively in a recent project and yes, the docs are incomplete. I've had to resort to actually reading the source code to figure out why, for example, my argument was being ignored. I still have some unresolved (though seemingly obscure) issues with transparency, and my question to the moviepy subreddit went unanswered.

There's so much range confusion over at Apple right now it's starting to feel like the 90's all over again.

Compare the Macbook with the 13" Macbook Pro, there's a ridiculous amount of overlap there that makes their pricing structure seem ridiculous.

This isn't a post about why the author won't buy one. The post is about why the author, a long time Apple die-hard, doesn't believe the current Macbook Pro is "Pro".

These posts get so high up on HN because they resonate with people on HN. I'm a new-media producer/developer, and my 2014 MBP is the best machine I've ever owned- but the state of the current MBP and the current Mac Pro have left me in an interesting situation: If this machine dies, there isn't anything in the Apple line up that I want. I refuse to pay $400 more for a touch bar that I don't want, and I refuse to get locked in to a configuration on a /desktop machine/, which rules out the current MBP and iMac Pro.

These blog posts are creative pros telling Apple to get their shit together, and they get upvoted on places like HN because a lot of other people feel the same way.

This is as asinine as the "guns don't kill people, people kill people" trope. People use guns to kill people. People use privacy breaches to kill people.

People also use ideology to justify killing people, so you're not wrong there.

I lived in Spain for a year, and everyone had chips there. My US card always drew eyerolls as they had to find the /old/ machine and dust it off and find someone who remembered how to use it. I was excited that we were getting chips here in the US, but of course they fucked it up and for whatever reason it takes ages for your chip to be read, and there are frequent chip read errors.

Then you make a note of it, and send them a letter (certified, receipt requested).

I'm really amazed I had to scroll down this far (past the pedantic supercharger/turbocharger nomenclature arguments) to get to someone making this point.

I make a pretty decent salary in the US, and I wouldn't call that affordable.

And multitrack audio recording.

Again, it's a matter of perspective. Strictly speaking, I don't need a faster dGPU for audio. But I also work in VR, and right now I need a separate computer for that, even with a brand new "pro" laptop with a pay-through-the-nose dGPU option, which is yet another disappointment.

As for the weight, again it's a matter of perspective. If it's too heavy for you, that's a valid complaint. But I carry my machine, and a charger, at minimum, everywhere I go, and I frequently have to check to make sure I remembered to put it in my bag because I can barely feel it. At that point, for me, remembering what carrying a 10lb machine everywhere felt like, making it some fraction of a pound lighter just does not take priority over better battery or more power.

I think your confusion is stemming from your perspective. To you, smaller and lighter is unequivocally a Good Thing- However my 2013 MBP 15" is already light enough that I can one hand it comfortably, and can carry it everywhere without noticing. If they'd allowed the new machine to stay at the same thickness, they could have gotten more battery life out of it, which would be something that I would consider a priority- They could also have conceivably crammed a newer, faster graphics card in to it, which in a time when the entire world is starting to look towards AR development, would be a welcome addition. There are a lot of creative professionals, like writers and some developers, for whom the new machine is fine, but there are plenty who have a massive investment in outboard peripherals (that now need a couple hundred dollars worth of adaptors), as well as requirements for power that's now being offered in PC portables but not Macs, and for us the new machine with its compromises and price inflation was a slap in the face.

As for what wasn't released alongside it, I'm talking about desktop machines. Apple's desktop machines are direly out of date. Speaking only as an audio engineer, I need a machine that I can rack in a machine room and slot my dante card in to. There are many more who have multi-card HDX setups who are even more screwed by the current Mac desktop situation. For apple to use "Hello Again" in their teaser for the event and then /not/ release a new Mac desktop was another slap in the face to people who have been waiting /years/ now to upgrade.

So again, to answer your question in the context of the 2016 rMBP, The machine itself was slightly disappointing. The fact that it was the only machine that we got at that event compounded the disappointment exponentially- and the combination of the two is indicative of a thought pattern at Apple that's out of touch with what their long term userbase has always used their Macs for.

BSD is Unix-based.

The actual problem for me (audio engineer/music production) isn't so much the new machine itself, it's that after /years/ of stagnation, at a much-hyped keynote titled "Hello Again", referencing the original Mac launch, it's the only machine we got, and it's not much better than the machine that came before it.

Essentially what this signaled to me, and a lot of other people, is that Apple has lost sight of the distinction between its Pro models and its consumer stuff. The touchbar is an interesting innovation, sure, but it's better served, at least at first, as a gimmick for their consumer devices. There were a lot of design decisions that add a lot of cost for people in a lot of Creative Professional segments, including Audio and Video production, without really adding that much functionality. Sure you can use the touchbar as a scrub-wheel in ProTools-- if Avid gets around to coding it in. But even that isn't worth the $400 price bump, when most Audio guys have their own DAW controllers already. That now need adaptors.

Furthermore, if you want a dedicated OS X desktop machine for your studio, what are your options? You can pay through the nose for a Mac Pro that has a couple thousand dollars worth of (now outdated) graphics cards that you don't need, along with an extra grand for a rackmounting solution that will convert your thunderbolt ports to PCI for your HDX/Dante/whatever setup, or you can buy a Mac Mini (which is itself direly in need of a refresh) and be severely limited by your RAM. And spend an extra grand to install your HDX card.

So I suppose to answer your question, the rage is less about what the new rMBP isn't doing for people, and more about what wasn't released alongside it.