ben7799

But would you have refused to buy that guitar if it looked a little more different than a Fender Stratocaster?

You clearly aren't bothered by it having a different headstock shape, Suhr could and probably will just change the body shape a little bit and it would be fine.

Ibanez sells tons of guitars like this. They're double cutaway guitars that are kind of similar to the Stratocaster shape, but they are uniquely different and still loved.

The weirdest thing is someone who hates Fender and won't buy a Fender but simultaneously demands that their guitar looks so close to a Fender that it would be in danger of infringing.

I've been playing long enough that I disagree.

Fender's quality is very good now compared to when I started playing.

But so is everyone else's.

This is completely true, and there's a good reason.

Almost everything anyone has tried to do to modernize electric guitars in a non-compatible way has had big downsides.

Almost any guitar with a pre-amp or whatever built into it that would allow it to use a cable like an XLR cable ends up needing batteries in the guitar, which then introduce a maintenance/failure point. And very often efforts to introduce this stuff haven't sounded great.

The only place this has kind of changed is super high gain guitars for metal. They are more likely to use active pickups, they'll have a battery, but they still use standard cabling for compatibility.

Anything that is modernized ends up being more expensive and harder to work on yourself. A basic guitar like a Strat or Tele has incredibly simple electronics and is super easy for any guitar player to learn to fix themselves, and most of the parts inside are super cheap. And it all just works really well.

And the audience never cares, they care about the notes you choose to play and the message the musician cares to get across.

This is incredibly hard to believe, Fender is many times bigger than PRS.

Fender sells at least 10x more guitars than PRS.

I play guitar, I own a Fender guitar and a Fender amp, along with another non-fender amp and 2 other non Fender guitars.

I'm just super sick of hearing about this story. Guitar players online are way too worked up about this. Fender is being annoying, but there is no way I'm getting rid of my Fender guitar or amp over this, and there is no way any of this would stop me from buying another one.

The Fender shapes just don't need to be copied at all. I live near a famous boutique type shop. They may have some boutique guitars that rip off the shapes of Fenders, it's been tolerated, but they have a lot of guitars that don't rip off Fender shapes and many of them are really great guitars.

Too many players are acting like the sky is falling if Fender wins with any of this stuff. The sky is not going to fall. We'll go back to the way things used to be where Fender body shapes weren't ripped off so often and it will be fine.

I think some of the doom and gloom is also because too many players are super obsessed with buying more and more guitars all the time. It's all about what is the next purchase as opposed to just enjoying the guitar they have.

Is this thing the basis of what Apple is doing in the Photos app in the most recent OS revisions?

It seems to work a lot quicker than 30s now on iDevices and Macs.

All of it is good but none of it is a shortcut.

The greats who became so good doing this had massive amounts of time to do it and put in massive amounts of effort.

I guess I'm showing my age but having read stuff like Michel Abrash's books years ago this article was a bit underwhelming.

Like no one who wrote any code back in the 80s or 90s even for a homebrew game was skipping this stuff, it was in almost every book and tutorial. Stuff like bit shifting was extremely common and a lot of games would have had design choices that were informed by coding challenges. Lots and lots of code had data structures aligned on byte/word boundaries or had data massaged to fit into the limits of hardware in order to make reads happen in a certain # of cycles, etc.. certainly almost all console games had lots and lots of fascinating design choices like this.

This game may have been exceptionally well optimized but it feels like if the original code is not in the public domain these weren't the best examples.

When he started writing about their being a clean sheet re-implementation I thought there was going to be a benchmark comparison of the modern rewrite vs the original on old hardware or something, that would have been interesting.

Thankfully or not I'm just barely young enough that I never had to write anything professional in assembly, though if I had gone into games maybe I would have.

You might be able to argue he was a bigger star than any of them.

His career lasted far longer. He had big movie appearances for 30 years, none of those people accomplished that.

Norris' first movie role was in 1968, first big credited appearance was 1972, Walker Texas Ranger finished in 2001.

The only problem with Chromebooks and the whole Google educational toolchain is it ruins school!

My kid is on it, every kid hates it and every teacher hates it. You just can't argue with the pricing. I'm amazed at how bad everything seems to old fashioned paper text books.

Every time I help my son I'm amazed how bad it all is. Horrible tiny screen that looks like is from 2000 and then the software is all designed for some Googler who has 2x 30" 5k displays. The usability is atrocious.

This won't actually work.

A Fuzz Face works the way it does because it actually gets affected by the guitar's impedance changing as you work the knobs on the guitar and pick differently. The Fuzz Face has minimal input filtering, the guitar's knobs actually change the bias of the first transistor IIRC and cause massive changes in sound.

If you stick a buffer in front of it that interaction is gone and there is nothing you can stick after the buffer to bring it back. You pretty much have to plug the guitar directly into a Fuzz Face for it to work as intended. There are even constant arguments about putting the Wah in front of the FF or after it. I'm not sure if the article even has it right or whether Hendrix did it differently at different times. Other articles show a different order of the effects.

There are other fuzz circuits that behave differently and work better with buffers and would be more uniform when used with other types of instruments or with electric guitars with active pickups (which are buffered).

E.x. I have a Tone Bender and have had several Fuzzes in the "Big Muff" category along with one that was based on the Fox Tone Machine. The Tone Bender and Big Muff can't clean up at all like the Fuzz Face via the guitar controls, and IIRC the Fox Tone Machine is somewhere in the middle. The Fuzz Face when setup correctly is really quite amazing as you can go crystal clear to crushing fuzz with your volume knob on the guitar. When you've tried it you realize Jimi Hendrix was doing it constantly in an amazing way.

There are certainly guitarists who can play simultaneous melodies.

If you're limiting to a 6 string guitar the distance between the two melodies would be limited compared to a piano but guitars don't have to be limited to 6 strings.

Classical guitar is full of this kind of thing.

Having taken piano lessons but being more into guitar I think the thing is almost all people who play piano are introduced to this and it is a core concept in far more piano music than guitar music. But it is not impossible on guitar, and many works for piano that get adapted to guitar require the player to do so.

E.x. there are plenty of players who have studied and played the Well Tempered Clavier on guitar.

The whole thing about people being defensive is interesting. I love techno, but anyone who has learned other styles of music recognizes the repetitiveness and quirks of a lot of techno and some other electronic genres.

They do a great job with changing their timbre and tones but often ignore a bunch of other factors that make music interesting. Whether that is the rarity of time signatures other than 4/4, the way certain rhythms are locked into certain genres, the choices of keys used, the limited or missing chords, etc.. at some point you start hearing two electronic songs that sound totally different at a superficial level and you realize they're incredibly derivative of each other.

LOL. Las Vegas water prices are ridiculously low for the paltry amount of water they have. It's hard to get people to not waste the water when the price is artificially kept low.

Las Vegas water is less expensive than mine, and we have in excess of 10x the precipitation and everything is naturally green.

Reactions to your statement seem to hinge on whether or not the person replying has a CS degree from a math focused program!

It makes perfect sense to me.

I still have an expensive Canon dedicated slide/film scanner from 20 years ago.

IIRC at some point their value started going up as they became rare.

Mine did something like 50MP scans of 35mm film/slides. The quality was more than enough.

But it was painfully slow.

This thing is not 100x faster, so I think it's still painfully slow. If it takes 5 minutes to do a roll of 24 that still means someone with hundreds of rolls needs to have a lot of time on their hands.

Not sure I can actually figure out software to get my old one to work FWIW, but I don't think I care to deal with it, I have a big enough mess dealing with the ~200k digital photos that are already on disk.

Another reason that this matters (which is artificial) is that at least in the US so many car owners are on "permanent car payments".

They never pay off their cars and trade them in on another one and just keep making payments without really ever owning a car outright. And increasingly as prices have gone up they are trading cars in that they are underwater on, rolling old debt into the next loan!

If you're in this category of insane financial ignorance trying to appear rich but actually being "car poor" of course this resale is a huge problem. But for anyone who buys a car outright or pays off their loan and then drives the car for many years it's not a problem at all whether you bought new or took advantage of the massive depreciation and bought a lightly used one for a great price.

This actually sounds a lot like the US problems with energy (electrical, gas) infrastructure and also things like telephone and internet providers.

They've almost always got a state approved monopoly or duopoly and then magically the state always allows them to raise their rates.

The Fahrenheit scale is European, not American. It was created in Poland well before the United States broke off from Great Britain. We're just slow to change.

People will grumble switching from Slack to Teams but it won't actually mess up the business.

Our business unit within a large public company was using it and we were spun off, Slack was going to be $1M/yr and the CFO/Execs definitely weren't going to pay that.

We are fine on teams, but there was a lot of wailing and gnashing. We had tons of slack customizations, automation, integrations, etc..

I don't re-read that much "fun" material. But I totally get it, some stuff is so good it will seem like a better option to re-read it compared to trying something new. That is an elite level of book though.

I just started re-reading LOTR for maybe the 4th time in 30 years and probably first time in 10 years. Probably more for the 2nd two reasons in this authors list.

Part of my motivation was I was looking at books in the same genre I had not read and have become mostly tired of it and just kind of thought that I know LOTR is still better than 99% of them, might as well read it again. I am pleasantly surprised by how many small things I had forgotten. It also helps to wash the movies out of my brain and restore the memory of the real story.

Someone mentioned Hitch Hiker's guide to the Galaxy. I just bought a copy of that for my son, it has probably been close to 30 years since I read that, I will be tempted to re-read it again when he is finished.

This says it. Actual "tech" circles were historically not super into the Mac. Of course there were some people who loved it, but the bulk of the classic Mac fanbase was design type people and people who were mostly recreational PC users but had way more money to spend than typical PC users. More hardcore tech folks were turned off by inflexibility and OS instability by the mid-90s.

This has of course changed over the past 20 years as all the OS limitations with the Mac were lifted and all PCs have kind of matured and you don't have massive increases in speed every year. So Apple's better quality, closer price parity, and better software support started to look better and better to actual tech people.

The writer seems to be one of the older crowd that made being a Mac user a huge part of their identity in the 80s and 90s. In the 80s that was tied in with the Mac being a pretty superior computer only accessible to the wealthy. In the 90s the Mac became a bit of a disaster as the decade went on and these guy stayed in utter and complete denial about it.

Then when OSX (-> Mac OS) started becoming really great in the 2000s I think they complained about stuff changing but then felt recognized when developers started flocking over to the Mac. But then you've got all these average people jumping on buying iPhones and iPads and Watches and AirPods and now they don't feel special.

It is pretty hard for me to get worked up about it. Some of the glory days were nowhere near as great as they remember, it's just they were a special club back in the day and now they're not really. The rest of us will just keep getting our jobs done using Macs.

One other aspect is a lot of these people were not particularly technical and as such were pretty inflexible in their thinking. They often seem to have built up extremely rigid and complicated ways of wanting to organize everything on their system because they are the kind of people who are used to following an exact set of steps to do everything on the computer, and they perhaps learned that at great pain. So they become extremely sensitive to UI changes as they perceive any change they have to get used to as wrecking their perfectly tuned productivity.

As an example they get super upset about the finder. They seem to have frequently built up some really complicated way of using the finder and then will get really upset, whereas an even more technical user will just go update their script/macros/whatever in 5 minutes if something changes and not get up particularly bent out of shape. The guy (and I've only ever met guys in this camp) who gets upset is probably not building a script that would have saved 100x more time over the years.

It's the left wing gaslighting everyone over all the issues caused by making it harder and harder to build anything. You blame landlords and PE when in actuality the government has stopped construction in it's tracks. This then feeds into the ultra-left agenda which tends towards socialism and "make landlords and private property illegal."

This is largely what the Abundance agenda and YIMBY is all about... getting the left to stop throwing up NIMBY road blocks.

The problems with not enough investment in new houses are not limited strictly to blue states but blue states seem to have the largest problem with it. Democrats love regulation so much that states like MA and CA have erected so many zoning and building regulations that new homes have become incredibly difficult and slow to build.

We struggle to even build apartment size condos in suburban MA that cost less than $1.1-1.5M per unit. We are rapidly heading towards new houses being $2M+ in lots of parts of the state. By the time a developer manages to buy a lot and go through all the red tape, possibly tear down an old house, go through environmental review, etc.. they can't make any money unless they build a $2M+ house. Any lot that doesn't have an old house on it in the eastern part of the state will have a long list of environmental gotchas a developer will have to fight through, possibly for years before they can even start building anything.

Housing construction is so far behind the demand that who owns the existing houses has little to do with it.

PE and Corporate landlords own more property in left leaning markets because Blue policies have made it more profitable to do so. The more new construction is slowed, the more valuable the rental properties become. Some of these companies won't want to go near red states where construction is easy. The property values and rents are just not high enough.

I worked at Cisco 1999-2001, it was my first job out of school. I worked in a group that did network management software, so we weren't touching iOS.

But it was kind of wild at that point there were still company mailing lists where these old heads would argue about iOS internals and flame each other in front of the whole company.

We still had a non-web bug tracking system while I was there. It was an interesting era! The product I worked on did have a web interface as essentially its only UI. We used Java, at some point we used MS Visual J++, and this was before JSPs existed. We used some proprietary templating engine to generate HTML.

You are agreeing with abundance theory here 100%. The author of the article is one of the Abundance folks. The issues with code and permitting and environmental review take up a substantial portion of the book.

Technically I did my first programming in the 80s as a kid. I went to college in the 1990s. I definitely learned Perl and used it.

However I would say an awful lot of the professionals I was around already thought Perl had a bad smell even in the 1990s. It was definitely looked down up on in academia by then. Maybe not in an IT department or Math department but in the CS department it was. It was used by IT guys, and QA guys, and somebody gluing some tools together. An awful lot of people thought it was unacceptable for it to be in serious production code or anything that had to be long term maintainable or be worked on by a team of people larger than size = 1. Your perception of it definitely came from where you were at the time and how you encountered it. If you were on a team producing software for sale that involved a bunch of people and you had version control and QA and everything Perl was already not your thing.

That still doesn't prove anything. The market demand for the Ford GT could have been 1/2 what Ford produced but the market demand for the F430 was double what Ferrari actually produced.

I am not saying that is actually the case, but production #s just don't really tell the whole story.

Ford only dabbles in these kinds of cars, they have different reasons for picking the # of units they build. They are a lot like Honda, they are not dedicated to this and they instead just build a small # of sports cars every once in a while to try and improve their reputation.

The article glosses over the core founding purpose of each company too. Ford was founded to build massive #s of assembly line built cars at a price the average worker could afford. Ferrari very reluctantly built street cars to fund racing and decided the sport/luxury cars were the best way to make the maximum money with the smallest # of street cars. Less street cars meant less distraction from building the racing cars.

This article is mediocre because smartphone is perfectly happy to take pictures that look like the "beginner photographer" pictures. You just have to know what you're doing.

- Don't use the super wide lens and stand too close to people

- Use the super easy edit features to fix distortion

- Pay attention to lighting & exposure

- Don't just accept the iPhones default settings

If you want toned down contrast and color smartphones are perfectly happy to do that.

Otherwise.. I do configure my fancy digital camera to capture reduced contrast and color saturation compared to the defaults on a smartphone. So a lot of the time my samples would look like his.

Average people want contrast + saturation turned up like crazy. This is why the defaults ship that way. This is why a lot of the beginner non-phone digital cameras often shipped with the defaults that way. This is why TVs ship with the brightness/contrast/saturation boosted. The average person might look at your more subtle photo and appreciate it as better than theirs but then they will go right back to being super happy with their high contrast/saturation images.

This is just what the bike companies are selling right now since an Aero bike with disc brakes and electronic components that comes in at the UCI weight limit is like $15,000.

If you can have it all you want it all.