wvh

I've been digitising my music collection since 2000 and still buy CDs or, if available, lossless FLACs. I really wonder how many people still bother "owning" the music they like instead of "renting" it. It might be irrational, but buying it and owning it feels very different than getting it over the radio or some streaming service.

This. I generally much rather watch a live video of the band performing the song interspersed with some behind the scene footage than some random badly acted (non-AI) slop video on top of the song.

If you like the music, you probably want to feel some connection to the people making that music.

A lot of iconic scenes were at the discretion of the actors in those scenes. One wonders how much personality and complexity you can really get without the skills and idiosyncrasies of everybody in front of and behind the cameras on a real movie set.

My point being there's a lot more complexity in not producing slop than it seems.

Because the software industry doesn't pay anymore for constraints or doing things "the hard way". Everything is high-level language and by tomorrow. The day after it doesn't exist anymore anyway.

I'd wish to get a project that's low-level, multi-year and high quality of engineering and longevity. Make the best you can – something to be proud of.

If the US would truly try to raze Iran, they would do so at immense cost, both financially and reputationally.

I have to wonder what your definition of "winning" is.

In this situation I just don’t understand what people expect Russia to do??

To stay within its borders. And that counts for the others on this planet, too.

Perhaps darker than the initial mild optimism of the early internet.

It would hurt, for a while. Then people would wake up and slowly better solutions would appear. Not unlike post-Trump NATO. But the US would have lost its leader position and a large market.

I think the EU needs a kick under the ass to stop its comfortable inertia.

That's not how democracy works. You have responsibility and accountability. These people can and do real harm.

But do these intermediary commits run? I wouldn't mind making smaller commits, but usually wait until the changes result in a bunch of code that compiles and does what it should. It sounds as if you do checkpoints that don't necessarily result in working code or pass tests. Not that that is wrong, but it is a very different philosophy. I usually expect what I check out to compile and sort of work. I can't really pick up somebody else's train of thought midway.

PGP had the right idea, but the system is too hard for the average person.

With "system" I refer to building a web (or multiple!) of trust, based on parameters that you decide upon.

It is a slippery slope. I'm just hoping that a more surgical drone strike against a weapons factory will create less victims than the blunt force of a ballistic missile aimed "in the general direction of".

In a way, technology could enable one party to "outwit" their opponent by taking away the means to wage war without causing random loss of life.

The moral question is if you've unknowingly contributed to war, death and destruction, or if you are actually helping drones to accurately find real targets – which hopefully are not innocent civilians but legitimate military targets.

I guess one can only optimise the system for the majority following the beaten path. Some folks just have to find a way both through the world and through their own head.

I'd say there's at least a third reason: intellectual (or rather technical) curiosity of photography itself. Often, when I take a picture, it is just to see how a particular shot turns out, much less so for any sentimental value to myself or anybody consuming those images later on.

I'd also say that's most likely a healthy kind of dopamine usage, as it's leading one into a life of exploration, learning and wonder.

But you're right, taking a true in-the-moment picture is a skill.

I've been telling less computer literate folks not to install random stuff since the nineties, and I can't understand how many devs are doing just that these days.

I used to work in security auditing, and it makes me feel pretty jaded to think of the gigabytes upon gigabytes of random stuff that just gets pulled in from everywhere in IDEs, package managers, build pipelines and container images.

At least back then there was still a chance to read a significant part of the code and find problems before they found you.

I've been playing guitar since I was a little kid. I wonder how learning "two-handed" skills such as playing music impacts how "handy" or "polydextrous" one is.

There are left-handed guitar players that play right-handed, such as Nick Johnston, who claim the gaps in their technique or preference for certain left-hand-only techniques are informed by being left-handed; so it seems that a life-long of an insane amount of practice does not necessary change how comfortable one is using either hand for a given task.

The alternative is/was of course to be stuck in a small space for several days with smokers showing withdrawal symptoms. Not sure I'd want to experience that in something like a submarine...

I've never owned anything from Apple, but this model has me interested in having something that can run commercial software (I'm a long-time Linux user). But I really think 8GB is going to be a major limit for running a DAW or anything related to live music production.

I understand these are the limitations of this option, but can you really do more than just run a simple word editor? Even my Firefox session here uses over 16GB of RAM.

Sometimes you've got to protect people against themselves...

It used to be so local (regional) brands had sizes adapted to their demographics. There used to be a thing like Italian, French, German, Scandinavian, etc sizing. I guess for global brands like Patagonia it's going to be challenging to fit everybody into the same – let's say – "M" size.

One could argue it was not given away for free, but with a silent expectation of reciprocity. Using open-source is a gentleman's agreement to be respectful towards the project, a good citizen, not to abuse and potentially contribute.

But you're right communities are now having to concoct a wild-growing collection of semi open-source licenses to protect themselves from abuse by a few big players.

This is a flash from an almost forgotten past. I'm happy people are still using and even improving Enlightenment.

I used to run Enlightenment in the late nineties and early 2000s, first by itself, then with Gnome bar. At some point Gnome turned hostile on power users and I switched to KDE, leaving also Enlightenment behind, as well as any extensive customization of my desktop. At that time, the ubiquitous themes.org also got in disarray, and I feel it was a bit an end of an era of design and theming experiments on the early Linux (and *BSD) desktop.

Oodi is more an experiment in creating a social, communal meeting space than a library. I think there's a terrible need for such social spaces in modern society with very few places where you can meet people and where you don't need to consume to hang out somewhere; this especially in countries with climates that make it difficult to hang out in streets and market places.

What's also special is that this is a beautiful building, instead of the derelict buildings such social projects get usually shoved away in.

And, it's welcoming to babies and children.

Cranked tube amps melting down was also part of that magic. A feat not appreciated anymore in this day and age on most stages.

A lot of us don't turn out to be professional musicians, writers or athletes. In between family and work, you start to realize how much these people put in to be at the top of their game. Time and effort you can't really put in if you didn't make the jump and have other life commitments.

I guess that's why a lot of people grow old wondering what life would have been if they would have followed through on whatever talent they appeared to possess in youth.

I think it's pretty frustrating if the songs/pieces you actually want to play are demanding or even at the virtuoso level.

If you really want to play a David Gilmour guitar solo or sing some Led Zeppelin, it better not suck because it won't hit the mark at all.

For me, the reason to pick up the guitar as a kid was to play stuff I liked, stuff that turned out not to be that easy, and every time I play, I feel that gap of where I feel I should be to respect the music I'm trying to play.

I wish I had more your attitude.

I feel trying to codify human behaviour into simple rules is pretty tough.

Playfully rough intercourse might be the best ever, or turn out quite horrible at the wrong time; the only difference being subtle difference in mood of the parties involved. Same for using somebody as an emotional trashcan, or making a semi-offensive humorous joke about somebody. There's no objective truth.

Boundaries are very fluent and dynamic, depending on moods and trust between parties. Knowing when to give in and being able to walk those rough edges is often what makes life interesting and people good partners and friends.

First you probably need some silent, persistent and occasionally cantankerous folks that can grudgingly work on annoying boring problems all night just because they want to solve it no matter what. If you have a few of those, you really have to start looking for more social people that can glue the herd of cats together so all noses point the same way.

My experience has been that solving a very technical problem and solving a social one are very different skill sets and very few people have both skills and are capable of using both of those skills at the same time.

We ignored Richard Stallman?