windowliker

Yes, I remember that table with the T800 skull. It was indeed epic.

You are correct, sir. See the link bluedino posted!

Super cool, thank you!

This is true, it was a big cultural moment, but the level to which they sold the absolute heck out of that film should not be understated. It was one of the first times I can clearly remember where a film came along at roughly the same time as all the secondary IP like games and merch, and seemingly more and more kept coming. Another film from around that time which had a similar media blitz was Alien 3, released the year after.

Disappointed this only focuses on the contemporary technology used in making the (admittedly amazing) visual effects for the film, which has been addressed multiple times across various formats. When I first watched T2 as a kid the thing which grabbed me more was that gadget John Connor uses to hack the ATM and all the cool stuff in the Cyberdyne offices. It would be nice if someone wrote an article discussing that aspect of the film, for the record and posterity's sake.

it's a fun toy, but I wouldn't depend on it for anything important.

This could be said for the rail network as a whole.

Neglect and underinvestment over the last 60+ years has left it in a sorry state, and debacles such as HS2 show how government has no ability to deliver proper material upgrades to the ageing infrastructure and service. The direction of travel (scuse the pun) has been clear since the Beeching cuts: roads are the priority. Add to that Neoliberal divestment policies and we end up where we are today: overcrowded, filthy, ugly trains barely fit for cattle transport and chronically understaffed stations and train crews. Not to mention the extortionate prices for a ticket to travel on the network.

I adore rail travel, but dread the necessity of using it any time I go on a journey.

IIRC 10 minutes is the minimum threshold for a train to be officially considered as delayed.

That's no surprise. The French equivalent of anything rail related is always more complete than the UK.

Stock macOS uses a bash or zsh shell in the terminal (depending on the OS version), so the same points of caution hold there as well.

It took me a long time to understand why colon wasn't a valid character for file names on Mac and I still find the colon separator to be the least visible these days. Finder can display paths with the forward slash separator (defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES), and yet forward slash may be used in a file name created through Finder as noted in the post, while colon cannot (which is not addressed), but creating a file in the terminal named with a colon is possible and the shell will escape it correctly in use. This file then shows up with a slash in place of the colon when viewed in Finder, and conversely the file with a slash in the name shows up in Terminal with a colon!

the government doesn't like the idea of displaying an official page stating that you are not allowed to see something

They don't even have to do that, the connection can just be left to time out on the client side. This is what they did (and some ISPs still do) for the Internet Archive...

Yes, archive.org is classed as an adult site in the UK.

Oh right. I don't see Apple having any interest in supporting that given their current trajectory.

It would be wonderful if this ran on older versions of macOS, but according to the README they only support 26.

How long until we find out the politicians have written in an exemption for themselves and the security apparatus? I hope my pessimism is unwarranted in this case, but it certainly isn't unfounded.

Can your external place objects and route cables around on the patch? That's the main thrust of my original comment, which is that JS scripting can help avoid having to patch lots of objects together in the GUI. Live scripting music is beyond the scope of my advice.

Well, it's obviously not intended for realtime 'live coding', but as an answer to the problem of dealing with the GUI and manually cabling a patch up it suffices, though it does help to be fairly conversant with the basics of Max to begin with. For instance I've used JS to auto-populate a patch where the number of abstractions isn't known in advance and may need to change, with each abstraction then getting its own settings passed as generated arguments. It could be a nightmare cable spaghetti patch but JS made it end up very neat and tidy.

IMO there are far better options for realtime code-generated music. Max does what it does well, and shoehorning in interrupt level scheduling for scripting on top is out of scope for its remit.

Ableton and Max are totally separate codebases, and "Max for Live" is just a ~VST interface between them.

This is not strictly true, and Max for Live (M4L) is much more than a pseudo-VST. In the context of Live, the Max runtime is controlled by the DAW, which itself then exposes part of its interface to Max. So there's realtime bi-directional communication going on, more akin to how Propellerhead Software's (now deprecated) ReWire protocol used to work, the host passing control information (transport position, note data, etc.) and audio buffers into the client software and vice-versa. There is some superficial similarity with VST in this sense, but with M4L it's much more deeply integrated into the DAW as a whole. The Live Object Model[1], while not complete, is extensive, and there is very little that is off-limits to a M4L device to manipulate, with the caveat that care must be taken to avoid overflow of the control stream coming back from Max into Live (certain operations must be placed in the low-priority scheduler thread).

This new API gives much of the same control that M4L already did, but without having to have Max involved.

In Max, you have to build everything from scratch, every time.

Again, not strictly true. Editing a M4L device opens the full Max environment, which has a snippets[2] feature much like any other good IDE. You can easily build a large library of boilerplate code for your own specific purposes with it. There are also many basic examples included out of the box.

[1] https://docs.cycling74.com/apiref/lom/

[2] https://docs.cycling74.com/userguide/snippets/

The visual patching part of Max makes sense when you know the history of the program. It was built for musicians working at the forefront of interfacing MIDI with the power of the more compact mainframe computers of the day (PDP-11 IIRC). The 'programming' was done through a GUI running on the first Macintosh. At first there was no audio processing in Max itself, it was purely for generating and manipulating MIDI data.

You can see this 'bare-bones' style of Max with Miller Puckette's continuation of his original work in Pure Data[1] (aka Pd). The nice thing about Pd is that it's open source, so all the scheduling and signal flow logic can be examined and understood. As I understand it, the basics of Pd are comparable to how Max still works under the hood, though no doubt there has been some deviation over the years.

As it is now, Max offers a very smooth interface to the basic paradigm that was established 40 years ago, with many modern advances, but the fundamental idea hasn't changed all that much since it first came out.

If you really hate having to work through a GUI for computer music there's always SuperCollider[2] and its many derivatives (Sonic Pi, TidalCycles, etc.). It's nice to have options!

[1] https://msp.ucsd.edu/software.html

[2] https://supercollider.github.io/

Max itself can be manipulated through JavaScript. You can dynamically create and connect objects in it, set scheduler tasks, etc. Max goes a lot deeper than wiring some GUI boxes together.

Have a dig around here: https://docs.cycling74.com/apiref/js/

This blog post is highlighting their specific contribution to the UK government's open consultation[1], not a general call for sanity. There's a link to their open letter at the end of the piece. No doubt they will write other authorities when the need arises.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/growing-up-in-th...

FWIW I absolutely love how 'no-frills' PG is compared to so much of the bloated, over-engineered, script-riddled web these days. Please don't ever change that!

This might be the only calculator ever where it would be a shame to type in 5318008.

I didn't specify that the training had to be a classical, conservatory, background. It was only mentioned with regard to the background many of the original computer musicians came from, and which is understandable considering the era and situation of computing back then. Autechre are a good counter-example of that, which I have noted above. Two hip hop heads from the north of England, who have made some of the best contributions to electronic/computer music in recent decades. As you point out, there are loads more, not worth making a list here. Though I will still assert that I am yet to hear any good music come from someone who has anything less than a developed knowledge and passion (obsession?) for their area of interest, be that classical repertoire or drum and bass.

I wonder how one is supposed to exercise intent when the tool in question is specifically designed with the purpose of removing your ability to have direct influence on the result it produces. At best we get curation/collage, which in itself is no big change from the way things have been for decades (sample packs, premade loops, and going back further, sample CDs, for instance), but what goes away is the human touch.

The main unconsidered criticism that used to come from old-school musos was that 'you press a button and the synthesizer/drum machine/whatever does it all for you'... Only now is that perhaps coming to be true.

There's a difference between technology/technique that adds a new sonic palette to the canon, and one that takes away the necessity to have any direct input in the process of production. I guess we'll find out which this is if there's a wave of novel AI assisted genres that emerge, or not, as may be the case.

No alarms and no surprises

This as well. Most 'classical' algorithmic music had an element of expressiveness allowed to the composer in the moment.

Firstly, they all came to the use of those techniques after having been through years of work the 'hard way', often being able to play to a conservatoire standard, and had a very extensive grounding in the tradition that came with that. Then they owned* or designed the thing they were asking to 'do it for me' and could modify it at their discretion, effectively making it an integral element of the composition. The prior training was crucial in getting anything good out of any of it IMO (high level reflection based on canon knowledge and deeply considered personal sensibility, etc.)

* I suppose in the early days, running on an mainframe would belie the definition of ownership per se, as it required access and was limited to that specific machine/institution, but then we are talking about a time where personal computing wasn't available.

I will caveat my first comment by also noting that I am well versed in computer music history, and read many many papers in CMJ[1] and elsewhere about generative and automatic composition tools such as Emily Howell[2]. I do NOT have a problem with generative, algorithmic and automatic composition in this sense, as an extension of the creative intentions of the human composer, in the right context. See also Autechre[3] for what can be done with Markov chains and good taste. What we are discussing here is the musical equivalent of a dishwasher.

[1] http://www.computermusicjournal.org/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Cope#Emily_Howell

[3] http://autechre.ws/

Addendum: I would highly recommend the Margaret Boden book referenced in the wiki on David Cope/Emily Howell, which is an absolutely fascinating read and was incredibly far-sighted in its enquiries on this topic.

For me, the point of making music is making it myself. If want to have something done for me I could just play someone else's record and pretend like I made it.

Anyone with experience of standing in front of a bass bin at a drum n bass rave will instantly understand why this could work.