agallant

It's interesting you say "just" a tool - I think the median reader here sees tool as an inherent part of what "computer" means.

I'm not trying to dismiss your perspective here, I think you have a real point about the intimacy and personal importance of modern smartphone usage. From a layperson perspective, you're absolutely correct that these deliver on the promise of "personal computer."

But to those who choose to spend more time learning and understanding them, computers are (very flexible) tools, and specifically they're tools where you get to choose the computation being performed. This is why, to me at least, (most) mobile devices simply can't be "personal computers."

Smartphones and tablets are still useful to people with that perspective - but I see them not as a computer but as an appliance. I turn it on, I turn it off, I maybe get to fiddle with a few knobs, but most of it is a black box that hopefully "just works."

And hey, I like that convenience - as long as it's not the only way I have to interact with technology.

So, it may seem pedantic, but I think it is worth distinguishing true general purpose computers from phones. They are absolutely personal - a "personal smart appliance", if you will, but not a personal computer at the end of the day.

More personal in terms of use case, sure. And it performs computations - but it's pretty clear most mobile devices are not really your computer, when push comes to shove.

So, it's hard to call it a PC at the end of the day IMO.

Human art most definitely can be reduced to tokens, since that's also essentially how we compress and transmit it.

Now, whether a statistical token generator makes "real art" is subjective (as human art already is). And again, I'm actually quite sympathetic to the "humans are special" perspective.

But the point of my comment is that this philosophical stance is not a practical reply to what will actually happen in terms of social dynamics and content creation/consumption. Whether we call it "real art" or not, generative tools exist and will be used. So, it makes sense to understand them, even if your goal for doing so is to mitigate their incursions into "real art."

In other words, art must adapt. Which, it always does.

Sure - but it could still be pretty relevant if we want to ask about the future of beverage making and consumption, especially if new technology enables everybody to mass-produce lemonade (and similar sugary beverages) at home at minimal cost.

I'm quite sympathetic to poetry - I actually wrote a blog post about this article last week https://gallant.dev/posts/whither-poetry/

But much like the "debate" between linguistic prescriptivism ("'beg the question' doesn't mean 'raise the question'") and descriptivism ("language is how it is used"), both perspectives have relevance, and neither are really responses to the other.

I certainly hope people keep writing great, human, poetry. But generative ML is a systemic change to creative output in general. Poetry just happens to be in some ways simplest for the LLMs, but other art is tokens and patterns as well.

The takeaway (that obfuscation is bad and specificity is valuable) is clear and uncontroversial. But an issue is that nearly every suggestion entails lengthening your prose.

There is a time and place for precision, and there is also one for concision. Marketing speak is dangerous not due to brevity but intent.

If it truly worked as a series of incremental improvements, and considered total carbon footprint (transportation costs etc.), then sure.

Those are two pretty big "ifs" - people can be inclined to satisfice and pat themselves on the back for having done some minor symbolic thing, and then not go deeper. And it's much easier to sacrifice plastic straws than question whether your "bucket list" should really have a ton of carbon intensive global travel.

As most of the messaging on this page implies the release will occur in 2023, I figured it was worth noting this excerpt towards the bottom:

  We will be exhibiting the Omnichord OM-108 and announcing the new official release date at the Winter NAMM show to be held in Los Angeles, USA from January 25, 2024.

Whatever the default is in this Nikola theme - https://themes.getnikola.com/v8/hack/

I tweaked the theme just a bit, to add the faux scanlines, URL mouseover highlight, and background green glow (trying to mimic an old CRT). But pretty much everything else is just whatever the default was.

https://gallant.dev

Haven't had the chance to write for awhile, but been wanting to get back to it. In addition to normal static site stuff it has webmentions/pingbacks, comments, and (probably now broken) interoperability with Twitter (likes would show up as webmentions) - overall it was a fun excuse to figure out IndieWeb stuff (https://gallant.dev/posts/a-blog-reborn/ is where I explain that).

I also make music, and have found the Fediverse to be a far more welcoming and varied place than commercial social media. Sure, I'm only getting maybe hundreds of impressions - but that's better than the dozens I got organically (without paying) on Twitter. I'm not making a living from my music - but from your profile it looks like you're not either.

Of course a site that enables making money "in simple and direct ways" would be a hit - but I'd suggest that what you're missing isn't a site but a time. Early social media was part of the general gold rush of commercializing the net - a lot of easy money was bubbling about. The Fediverse doesn't really have that gold rush, but neither will Twitter 2.0 - it'd require a paradigm shift (like the Metaverse - which I'm not particularly bullish on, but it's a possibility) for fresh investment at scale.

Anyway, depending on your creative goals, I encourage you to still check out the Fediverse. It won't be simple and direct, but (if you're not already popular / willing to pay for ads) you'll probably get more genuine listens and engagement than you will from commercial alternatives.

https://gallant.dev/

A straightforward blog (static site generated by Nikola), but I had fun styling it to look kinda like an old CRT. I also loaded it up with IndieWeb goodness (webmentions, pingbacks), bridged the webmentions to Twitter (will add Mastodon at some point), and added comments via GitHub. All this is described here: https://gallant.dev/posts/a-blog-reborn/

Laptops from the same series are still offered, and (for good or ill) still pretty similar to 2019 - https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/workstations-isv-certif...

I have a 2020 model, and would concur with this post - good screen, build, thermals, lots of ram, no having to fight with drivers. Even firmware updates "just work" (apply as snaps).

I did find this review more helpful when making the purchase decision - https://www.engineering.com/story/dell-precision-5550-review...

It's perhaps worth steelmanning the argument here - though technically one can release an app for free, it is generally the case that any app with significant investment (warranting monetization) will take one of the two paths he described, and this describes the majority of popular apps.

I agree that it's similar to a hard fork (and has similar problems), but would argue that (due to the "interdisciplinary" nature of fintech) it's not incompetence or laziness but rather the blind spot/hubris of being a technical person looking at a social system.

An experienced developer has seen enough technical systems to understand the lurking complexity and hard problems within them. Realizing that applies to other systems is a separate insight, and one that is harder to reliably teach/learn. It's not enough to dabble in other fields - it's easy to do that as a mental tourist, assuming your prior experience generalizes.

Learning these challenges requires a form of intellectual empathy - believing that people who think hard about things that are alien to you are still thinking hard, and have probably tried your first intuitions already, as well as things you've not thought of yet.

True, but it was also relatively harder for pictures to become famous, and there wasn't massive face recognition systems to use the data in unexpected ways. Also, a lot more people are taking pictures, and though I'm not art-gatekeeping, it's fair to say that at least the motivational context for most photography is different now than it was historically.

As another example "fake news" isn't new either, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

However, I'd suggest that the new challenge isn't simply scale and omnipresence but algorithmization - modern platforms can tune and target to the level of the individual. In the past, (dis)information had to be broadcast in a far more one-size-fits-most style, perhaps segmented by broad geographic or demographic groups at best.

From the registrars I've checked, many are passing on a slightly larger price increase (e.g. a nice round number like $1). Granted that's on them as well as Verisign, but as others have noted it's increasing the price of something when the objective costs of operation have decreased.

I'm a huge fan of lifelong learning, and overall agree with this post. But, from a hiring perspective, it is missing a few important details:

1. Sometimes you have things that need to be achieved in a time-sensitive fashion, i.e. the time to ramp up may be problematic, and "taking a chance" may have real business ramifications.

2. Even if you don't have anything urgent, naturally there should be some discount factor for future utility (due to intrinsic uncertainty, etc.) - it's still positive, but remember "I'll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today."

3. Learning is not a clean linear process, and is also hard to really suss out in a few interviews - I still absolutely look for it in people I hire, but it's pretty easy to claim you take a few MOOCs and harder to know if you really engage with new ideas on a regular basis.

Again, I still very much agree with the spirit and substance of the post, but hiring is complicated, and as with most complicated things there are multiple considerations to balance.

So, you're saying because past research has been correlated with causality fallacies, we should just assume it's the case when we see claims of this sort? ;)

More seriously - I'm well aware of the difficulties of causality, and also use causal direction as a great illustration of them. As I've said in pretty much every comment here - I'm not championing the study, I simply haven't done a deep enough pass to have a strong opinion, and it may have any number of subtle flaws (off the cuff my biggest concern is that they're focused on one city, and I'd like to see similar results elsewhere, preferably in different geographic areas and cultures).

In other words, yes - more controls like you said. But I am responding to the overuse of a simple statistical argument in the face of studies that, whatever flaws they have, are not cases of "the researcher forgot the controls." Demographics, income, and homeownership are actually not bad features to have I'd say, and again it seems like most of the large claims bothering people are from the coverage and not the research. To refute research you generally need to dig into the details of the research itself.

The sentence you're concerned with is the headline of the article, but isn't found in the original paper. Here's how they close their abstract:

  This result supports the notion that the prevalence of Airbnb listings erodes the natural ability of a neighborhood to prevent crime, but does not support the interpretation that elevated numbers of tourists bring crime with them.

And again - I'm just responding to the idea that saying "correlation is not causation" can allow one to dismiss any statistical study. The study may have flaws, may overstate its results, could be completely terrible in fact - but the people who did it know about correlation and causation, and refuting them requires going deeper than that. In general, it requires looking at their paper, not the news coverage of it.

Again, not vouching for the study as a whole - and agreed that scientists can get a bit "creative" when trying to actually describe and motivate causal mechanisms (in their defense, a very hard problem).

But I'm just talking about the statistics here, and specifically that saying "correlation is not causation" is a bit overused. Researchers know about it too, those four words don't magically dismiss all statistical studies. Most modern statistical approaches are explicitly built to try and help address these sorts of concerns.

There could well be other flaws with their statistics, and even if there is causation they could be failing at theoretically motivating or connecting it to their overall narrative. But it takes more than four words to make that case.

EDIT - just acknowledging that you've since edited your comment to add concerns about p-hacking and reproducibility. And that may be the case - but it wasn't what I was responding to in my initial comment.

  We use difference-in-difference models (Eq (1)) to test whether a rise in the prevalence of Airbnb in a census tract in one year predicts increases in crime and disorder in the following year.
  ...
  The models control for tract-level and year fixed effects. In order to make the parameter estimates that follow more interpretable, we note that the average census tract in the average year experienced 11.32 events of private conflict, 7.68 events of public social disorder, and 28.58 events of public violence per 1,000 residents.

I've not dug into the study enough to vouch for its quality as a whole - but it's clear the researchers are plenty aware of the differences between correlation and causation and are at least attempting to address them. This is actually often the case with scientific papers, even if it's lost in the media coverage of them.

I also found the balance of the book refreshing, and took the lack of "character development" as instead a sign of his intense focus on the problems at hand. It actually made it more plausible to me that he survived - sure, if he'd spent many sleepless martian nights agonizing and introspecting it could have made for more drama, but his optimism and ingenuity would have been less believable, and ultimately had he survived it would feel more fantastic than earned.

It is well worth archiving. I recently helped typeset and publish (via Amazon) a diary written by one of my ancestors - https://amzn.to/3tmUI3l ($0.99 as that's the lowest price Amazon accepts, but you can read the preview to get the gist)

It is written by a homesteader in 1930s North Dakota, and she just relates bits of her life, her family, and her favorite recipes. Simple, yet it's still a remarkable way to evoke the life of the era, and worth preserving and sharing as you are comfortable.

On a related note, you may want to be sure you take care with the actual physical media you have as well. Time and improper storage can render things unreadable - archival boxes (https://www.archivalmethods.com/ and elsewhere) are made to be neutral/alkaline rather than acidic, and are the sort of things museums use to preserve artifacts.

I've also seen similar usage of glitch versus bug, and think it's a useful distinction. But I'd say that actually it can be consequential from an engineering perspective, and can even run counter to the outsider intuition - that is, "doesn't work at all" is usually easy to diagnose and often not that hard to fix (e.g. "we just need to update the cert/restart the db/etc."), while "weird every-other-Thursday glitch" is harder to pin down and usually more intertwined with system logic ("why does our videogame physics system cause characters to float but only on levels 3 and 7?").

Basically, "complicated system doesn't work" is often a less intricate problem than "complicated system almost works." The perception may be opposite because it seems like more work to fix something that is "more broken", but that's the same logic as LOC as a good productivity metric. As with all things, there are exceptions, but I'd say the tendency is that glitches are harder to fix than bugs.

As with much expensive software, the biggest difference isn't what it does but who uses it. You didn't mention it, but Pro Tools is the dominant (and truly pricey) DAW in professional studios, and so a big reason for using it is if you want to work with those folks and share projects back and forth.

Logic Pro is actually pretty darn affordable as DAWs go ($199, which is more than base Reaper but actually less than Reaper commercial license), and it's essentially an upsell of Garage Band and almost a loss leader for Apple to keep a "creative" tinge (except I'm sure they make money on it, just less than they could if they pushed it - it was more expensive before Apple bought it). It's well worth trying if you have a Mac, comes with lots of virtual instruments that are arguably worth the price alone - but it is opinionated about AU format whereas Reaper is nice and compatible with other things, programmable, etc.

Ableton is a different and interesting beast, a DAW but also oriented towards live performance, electro-DJ-loop stuff, etc. If that's your bag then definitely give it a go (the full version is expensive but you can get Ableton Lite for free or close to it via special offers and hardware bonuses), but if you're working with more sequential music then a traditional DAW is probably more natural. (See also in this space, Bitwig and FL Studio.)

At the end of the day, all modern DAWs can do all the same common/core tasks. It's just a matter of community and workflow/UX - different tools are optimized for different things and entrenched with different users. And Reaper is almost a meta-tool that you can optimize yourself, if you take the time to do it.

You may be interested in https://devdocs.io (offline-friendly documentation tool). And if you prefer a straight up desktop app - https://zealdocs.org

They recently updated it to allow you to use an iOS or Android device as an external display: https://www.roland.com/us/support/knowledge_base/36005866483...

Clunkier than a device with a proper screen, but the same approach the OP-Z uses (though I think it can use bluetooth to connect instead of a cable).

This is a fun tool, but it's also pretty revealing of the arbitrariness with which "genre" is labeled. Though I get that there is frequent innovation in electronic music, I would argue the same is true of all music, yet electronic music is the most likely to see that innovation as a "new genre."

Searching this page for "jazz" I find results that don't really capture the space, and instead go deep into interesting but likely unrepresentative niches ("icelandic jazz") that musicologists probably wouldn't consider genres/subgenres. There's also things that clearly aren't genres but are just keywords people like using ("jazz organ", "jazz clarinet").

Overall, again this is a fun music discovery tool, but if you want to learn about music genres I'd suggest reading about music history. This doesn't just mean old/classical music (though it is influential), there's lots of fascinating books about modern music as well.

Recordings are great, and powerful (and I'm very familiar with multitracking - it works for a studio setting, but not so much live ensemble performance which is what I was referring to). But, to someone versed in both sheet music and improvisation, the written form can be freer (leaves more up to you), yet also more precise (knowing the specific harmonies desired rather than whatever happened in the recorded take). It can also be more convenient and efficient for focused practice. You can also take in more visually in a score and see the overall form of something in a glance, whereas with a recording you have to experience it over time and store the model fully in your head.

This is really a "yes and" situation - improvisation and "playing by ear" are great, and have always been part of music (the original "classical" musicians improvised, a tradition we've sadly mostly lost). Improvisation is even more dependent on theory than written music (many folks who "read music" don't actually understand the theory behind it). But being able to read and write is just a super convenient tool, and it addresses use cases that other tools (including recordings) don't.

As with regular writing, it lets you give persistent form and structure to your thoughts. This enables sharing, reviewing, and coordinating in a way categorically different than recordings (books still have value despite the existence of podcasts). This doesn't mean you're "not a musician" if you can't read sheet music, any more than a classical musician who doesn't improvise "isn't a musician" - I'm not trying to gatekeep in any fashion. I'm just saying that both of these dimensions are valuable, and ultimately, complementary.