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Would be really nice to be able to use this with an acoustic piano.

Brilliantly put. Also, the very fact that there are millions of underfed people in the richest country in the world, is itself evidence of the economic failure of markets. As Richard Wolff put it: in a milk shortage, markets allocate milk to the people with the most money - i.e. the least need for milk. That's not efficient.

OK, maybe. But how many programmers will know this in 10 years' time as use of LLMs is normalized? I like to hear what employers are saying already about recent graduates.

Because kids famously hate drawing and using their imagination. How wonderful to have technology that can solve that ancient problem.

Agree with all of that apart from "although cool". Why is it 'cool'? It's 'cool' only in the way Elon Musk and his retracting door handles are 'cool'.

I can only say that, in my own experience, you can't. Traveling pre- and post-smartphone are two completely different realities. The thing tethering you to a gigantic global faceless 'community' has the cost of weakening or blocking your engagement with real immediate physical people, and chance events and immediate experience. There is definitely a trade-off, no matter where your preferences lie. The last time I stayed in a hostel it was in Lima, Peru. It was mostly young people traveling. On every bunk in the room, a guest staring silently into their glowing palms. The joy of traveling used to be having very intense and focused encounters with completely new people who you would probably never speak to again...

I think the central message of that article is precisely that he is completing the adventure only because of community encouragement - but that that is the assistance of all the incredible people he met along the way, strangers on the ground who supported him and helped him on his way, and his friends and family at home. The community is the real people on the ground, and it is the real and living community of the humans who inhabit the entire world. The commercial transmissions with you as TV star are totally unnecessary, and actually only get in the way... Thesiger said that the greatest thing about his adventure across the Arabian Desert was his comradeship with the Bedouin. You just can't have that while waiving a selfie-stick and grinning into the camera...

There is nothing so wonderful that it cannot be ruined by turning it into a youtube channel... The really brilliant people I've met doing things like this always absolutely refused to mediafy their experience. Turning your adventure into a continuous TV show is great way to kill the adventure. We're now so used to everyone running their own shopping channel we don't even notice it. Read Thesiger's books for an account of real experience. The film I urge everyone to watch is Cronenberg's Videodrome - truly the film of our times.

Disingenuous is making a bald statement like that about a very long and involved debate in philosophy. Suggest you read around the subject a bit first before making such haughty comments... Could start here:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/technology/

https://bpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com/sites.uci.edu/dist/a/3282/file...

I think Israel would find it harder to kill children, yes. In my view a good thing.

A very jovial discussion of systems that have killed millions of innocent people. Maybe you could do the same treatment of Nazi gas chambers or something for the next video?

A portal to an Otherworld in which I feel harassed, agitated, anxious, and stupid.

Also Maxima.

OK, but a bit lame. Luddite Club is more radical: https://www.theludditeclub.org/

Good. Given Keir Starmer's abysmal behaviour, this is about the only chance there is of keeping a Tory/Reform coalition out at the next election. I would like to see voting age capped also, at 70. Increasingly senile and racist pensioners in comfortable homes are dominating British politics with horrific consequences.

Articles like this always start with such radical criticism, and end with such dismally modest proposals: "try not to look at your phone for 1 hour after you wake up", "before you pick up your phone, try counting to 100 first", "move 'instagram' away from your homescreen", etc. What about just getting rid of your smartphone? Who really needs anything beyond calls and text messages...? You can get a GPS map, and a camera. Complete freedom is right there for the taking.

Great work, and great to hear about Echoplayer. Sorely needed. I currently use a Cowon Plenue D2 and have an iPod Video running Rockbox. The iPod looks nice, but is flaky and outdated, and can't utilize 24-bit flacs. The Cowon is pretty good, but the UI has a load of irritating elements and proprietary nonsense.

Congratulations on not carrying a cell phone!

https://www.theludditeclub.org/

Good short survey of an interesting and strange writer. I don't agree with the last paragraph however, and the sentence about "hyper-liberals" is embarassing.

A truly great film, but always spoiled imho by the fans who won't stop quoting lines from it. The lines are funny because of the context, and delivery, chaps. As Wittenstein put it: raisins may be the best part of a cake, but a cake is much better than a bag of raisins...

But those numbers aren't meaningful in a scenario in which that revenue were redistributed in social housing, public healthcare, and national insurance. I don't think the world needs, or can carry, any millionaires. Public affluence--public luxuries--like housing, libraries, schools, universities, trains, parks, museums etc, do far more for human welfare, and far less ecological damage.

A very good explanation of why millionaires should be taxed out of existence. What an utter waste. I can't believe people still parrot the line about markets being "efficienct".

Suicide rates are not a good metric of mental illness: they are a function of several things, most obviously opportunity and access to a means. E.g., in the UK, farmers have a disproportionately high rate of suicide because they have unusually ready access to guns. This post also distinguishes itself in speaking arrogantly about teens without bothering to check any record of what they have to say themselves. I think movements like "Luddite Club" are only going to accelerate, and they will be led by young women. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/02/opinion/teen-luddite-smar...

Uehreka, I'm sorry, but this is such utter tosh. This is the sort of rabid utopianism I remember hearing about the web in 1996. But then of course it was predictive - at least a bit excusable. Take a hard a look at the actual history of the web in the last 30 years. "Democracy"...what? It is a story of corporate seizure of commons leading to the frankly nightmarish scenario we are in now, heading full steam into a total surveillance techno-fascist neofeudalism. Here's an innovation in the last millennium that did actually democratize access to information: Libraries. Simple public libraries. Look at the message that is engraved over the door of one of my favorite libraries, the central library in Edinburgh, Scotland. These places were palaces for public learning. Contrast them to the grotty, advert-saturated, casino of the web. Also, the calm, reflective, intelligent state of mind they cultivated. How many people can even read a book anymore, cover to cover? Or even a single page without electronic interruption?

"I've never been so conflicted"? Err, where's the sense of conflict? All I see is: "it sucks, it's helping kill the planet, but I need a job."

Laughing my ass off all the way to the apocalypse. It's now Earth vs. the machine, and I know what side I'm on, and who's ultimately going to win. One day, the technosphere will just be a thinly crushed layer in the geological record, mark of a dark age of barbarism.

Snow cuts loose from the frozen/ Until it joins with the African sea/ In moving it changes its cold and its name/ The reason I come and go is the same/ Animal game for me/ You call it rain/ But the human name/ Doesn't mean shit to a tree/ If you don't mind heat in your river and/ Fork tongue talking from me/ Swim like an eel fantastic snake/ Take my love when it's free/ Electric feel with me/ You call it loud/ But the human crowd/ Doesn't mean shit to a tree/ Change the strings and notes slide/ Change the bridge and string shift down/ Shift the notes and bride sings/ Fire eating people/ Rising toys of the sun/ Energy dies without body warm/ Icicles ruin your gun/ Water my roots the natural thing/ Natural spring to the sea/ Sulphur springs make my body float/ Like a ship made of logs from a tree/ Redwoods talk to me/ Say it plainly/ The human name/ Doesn't mean shit to a tree/ Snow called water going violent/ Damn the end of the stream/ Too much cold in one place breaks/ That's why you might know what I mean/ Consider how small you are/ Compared to your scream/ The human dream/ Doesn't mean shit to a tree

Thanks for posting. It's so good to see this sort of stuff on Hacker News - so good to see other programmers who care about trees and the natural world. I just found out about a giant redwood in a Victorian park very close to where I grew up that I never knew about.

"the most famous"

Also, haven't seen anyone mention this yet, but the most famous K is Josef K, of the 'The Trial'. Presumably that's why you chose it. But... you're hoisting a flag of dark cynicism. Reading your blog post, you have seemingly initiated a self-fulfilling prophecy. Getting out of your Kafka-esque nightmare could indeed start with changing your surname, at least informally.

Contains a couple of pop narrative cliches that always turn out to be gaudy exaggerations for journalistic effect: "he came from art, he is driven by beauty! he stunned the mathematical world!", it's bollocks really, and he's no doubt quite embarrassed by this article. He once thought about being a poet, but actually didn't like the work. His parents had a mathematical academic background and he picked that up as an undergraduate. He exhibits fairly typical neurodivergent behaviour of people with ADHD and/or autism. I would like to see journalists start writing about actual poets, or sculptors etc, in this absurdly valourizing, mythologizing way.