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Steven made the Whacko AVS packs for Winamp back in the day under the name UnConeD, which were easily the most impressive visualizations I ever saw in AVS. He

by Nition 4y ago

Steven made the Whacko AVS packs for Winamp back in the day under the name UnConeD, which were easily the most impressive visualizations I ever saw in AVS. He has them all for download on the website[1]. You could always see the source code, and I remember as a teenager trying to pick them apart to see how they worked. It seemed so much more advanced than what everyone else was doing. Other packs would have pretty waveforms. Whacko AVS had, as just one example, a spaceship flying through hyperspace in a storm - and it still reacted to the music! Justin Frankel, the creator of AVS (and Winamp itself), now makes Reaper, one of the world's best DAWs. [1] https://acko.net/blog/avs/ https://acko.net/blog/avs/

exodontist 4y ago
- snakeboy 4y ago
  I don't know him, so I took a quick look. It looks like he was against some of the mandatory COVID measures. I don't really understand the point of you trying to call out his politics here. It's not the topic at-hand, and his views are hardly outside the mainstream, and at a first glance don't seem to be hateful or bigoted. So can't we just stick to the topic, and agree to disagree instead of trying to wholesale imply this guy holds "sus" (i.e. "not acceptable") views?
  - throwaway64052 4y ago
  - Kiro 4y ago
    Sus doesn't mean "not acceptable". Anyway, "against some mandatory measures" is an understatement. He's literally an antivaxxer and it's not just about COVID. E.g.: https://twitter.com/unconed/status/1558063608772366337 https://twitter.com/unconed/status/1558063608772366337 You don't have to go far back in his Twitter timeline to also see him bashing the trans movement, green energy and Ukraine. He's definitely hateful and bigoted. Notch was cancelled for less.
    - galangalalgol 4y ago
      Depending on what you mean by bashing the trans movement, almost half the coworkers and neighbors I know talk about US backed bio warfare labs and how Putin was justified in his attack, how the vaccines sterilized Taiwan, and the election was stolen. They also typically say something like "I don't care what adults get up to, but letting kids make permanent body modifications before they can drive is wrong" I can't cancel almost half the people I know outside my friend circle. Some of them are family. These people span working class to PHDs in hard science from top tier schools, and backgrounds of midwest evangelical Christian to fertile crescent Muslims to west coast atheists, and I don't have a theory about what line of thought they all followed to get where they are. I try to have calm conversations with them when I can, but there is always some anxiety there, I suspect they don't talk about that stuff unless they think people are like them, and when they realize I have a multidimensional political spectrum they get nervous. At least at work I try to engage with them only on the merits of their work. I think we can do that with creator's like this, but I also don't want my money funding hate groups, so there is a line. I suspect in progressive environments people with these viewpoints are pretty quiet. I've bumped into them in fairly progressive cities as uber drivers or ML researchers. The "silent majority" is no longer a majority, but they aren't just a handful either, and their views have shifted.
      - antifa 4y ago
        > The "silent majority" is no longer a majority Maybe, but they were never silent.
    - twic 4y ago
      Having had a look at his twitter, i rate this situation 220 milliurbits.
- hobo_mark 4y ago
  Or https://twitter.com/unconed https://twitter.com/unconed for the full experience. I used to follow him for gfx stuff, until he lost his marbles during covid. The world at large has moved on with their life but from a cursory scroll he's still living in 2020.
  - zqalk 4y ago
    He is literally citing Chomsky on manufactured consent in the top tweet. The world has indeed moved on, because according to the consent Covid is now magically over in 2022, so now we are supposed to worry about the latest manufactured crises like Taiwan etc.
    - hobo_mark 4y ago
      He worries plenty about the latest and not-so-latest manufactured crises, as it's all he tweets about nowadays, is my point.
- sirmike_ 4y ago
  So? Who cares. Just because he is a thinking and breathing human being with a pulse and a different view than you. How many times have you made the front page of a prolific website? That’s like me telling the world — you, based off one comment sampling that you are stuck up and one dimensional …. Which we both know isn’t true, right? Benefit of the doubt.
  - Kiro 4y ago
    "Different view" is a nice way of putting it. He's literally an alt-right troll.
    - sirmike_ 4y ago
      And how does that change anything else he says? It doesn't. Thats also not how "literally" works either. Your commentary surely tells the reader to use caution, but not how you think it does.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - Kiro 4y ago
        He's not untouchable just because he's writes a good technical article. He should be called out for spewing hateful bigotry on his Twitter.
        sirmike_ 4y ago
        Maybe for you. But not for me or others. Careful where you stick your nose.
  - the_only_law 4y ago
    > How many times have you made the front page of a prolific website? Tabloid papers have been on the front page here. I wouldn’t it hold it in such high honors.
lproven 4y ago
Just in case it helps anyone else struggling to understand this comment (let alone the blog post) AVS was an addin for WinAmp, a Windows MP3 player app. AVS stands for "Advanced Visualization Studio". More info on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Visualization_Studio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Visualization_Studio) but it seemed to be plugin that supported other plugins that in turn did fancy graphical "visualisations" (moving screensaver-like visual effects) based (?) on the currently-playing music. Since the site has gone and the new Winamp site is content-free chrome, it's hard to say more. AVS was made FOSS in 2005: https://web.archive.org/web/20051102072333/http://www.nullsoft.com/free/avs/ https://web.archive.org/web/20051102072333/http://www.nullso... "DAW" means Digital Audio Workstation but honestly even the Wikipedia articles are so full of references that one is assumed to already know that I am not sure what the phrase means. As far as I can glean, a very fancy sound editor program.
- lproven 4y ago
  If anyone could ELI5 the whole web link in the style of my comment above, I'd really appreciate it, because I am curious but I can get nothing at all out of it. I do not really understand any of it. WebGPU? Reactive? Declarative? It's... some kind of Javascript thing (?) that lets you program (?)... fancy animated (?) graphics (?) in a web page (?) that are hardware accelerated? That is about all I can get, and I don't think I am all that dim. I got the Arrested Development reference, and almost nothing else.
  - sdwr 4y ago
    That's pretty much the gist. I don't know much more than you, anyone else feel free to correct me. This guy made a Javascript library running on WebGPU (an upcoming web GPU wrapper) that uses the coding style popularized by React. React was designed to make it easy(-ish) to dynamically update web pages. When data or properties are changed in the JS code, React updates the DOM (HTML that tells the browser what to draw on screen). That's reactive. Declarative is how it's organized. To change what shows up on screen, there has to be some kind of update loop that checks for/reacts to (pull/push) new data. React hides all that, the idea is you declare what you want drawn once, and it's updated for you as the data changes. React stays efficient by only updating what needs to be updated in the DOM. This gets a similar result by memoizing (caching function return values) (for what data??). Editorializing from my experience with web frameworks, that style feels magical when it works, and makes for flashy demos (look what I can do with 10 lines of code!), but it gets there by hiding a lot of complexity inside an opinionated framework. It's way easier to get started with, but you have to be disciplined and know how it works under the hood to stay on the happy path with larger projects.
mikecoles 4y ago
Cthugha did similar on Linux. Many hours were spent 'watching music'. Even in a sober state it was amazing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthugha_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthugha_(software)

by Nition 4y ago

exodontist 4y ago

snakeboy 4y ago
I don't know him, so I took a quick look. It looks like he was against some of the mandatory COVID measures. I don't really understand the point of you trying to call out his politics here. It's not the topic at-hand, and his views are hardly outside the mainstream, and at a first glance don't seem to be hateful or bigoted. So can't we just stick to the topic, and agree to disagree instead of trying to wholesale imply this guy holds "sus" (i.e. "not acceptable") views?
- throwaway64052 4y ago
- Kiro 4y ago
  Sus doesn't mean "not acceptable". Anyway, "against some mandatory measures" is an understatement. He's literally an antivaxxer and it's not just about COVID. E.g.: https://twitter.com/unconed/status/1558063608772366337 https://twitter.com/unconed/status/1558063608772366337 You don't have to go far back in his Twitter timeline to also see him bashing the trans movement, green energy and Ukraine. He's definitely hateful and bigoted. Notch was cancelled for less.
  - galangalalgol 4y ago
    Depending on what you mean by bashing the trans movement, almost half the coworkers and neighbors I know talk about US backed bio warfare labs and how Putin was justified in his attack, how the vaccines sterilized Taiwan, and the election was stolen. They also typically say something like "I don't care what adults get up to, but letting kids make permanent body modifications before they can drive is wrong" I can't cancel almost half the people I know outside my friend circle. Some of them are family. These people span working class to PHDs in hard science from top tier schools, and backgrounds of midwest evangelical Christian to fertile crescent Muslims to west coast atheists, and I don't have a theory about what line of thought they all followed to get where they are. I try to have calm conversations with them when I can, but there is always some anxiety there, I suspect they don't talk about that stuff unless they think people are like them, and when they realize I have a multidimensional political spectrum they get nervous. At least at work I try to engage with them only on the merits of their work. I think we can do that with creator's like this, but I also don't want my money funding hate groups, so there is a line. I suspect in progressive environments people with these viewpoints are pretty quiet. I've bumped into them in fairly progressive cities as uber drivers or ML researchers. The "silent majority" is no longer a majority, but they aren't just a handful either, and their views have shifted.
    - antifa 4y ago
      > The "silent majority" is no longer a majority Maybe, but they were never silent.
  - twic 4y ago
    Having had a look at his twitter, i rate this situation 220 milliurbits.
hobo_mark 4y ago
Or https://twitter.com/unconed https://twitter.com/unconed for the full experience. I used to follow him for gfx stuff, until he lost his marbles during covid. The world at large has moved on with their life but from a cursory scroll he's still living in 2020.
- zqalk 4y ago
  He is literally citing Chomsky on manufactured consent in the top tweet. The world has indeed moved on, because according to the consent Covid is now magically over in 2022, so now we are supposed to worry about the latest manufactured crises like Taiwan etc.
  - hobo_mark 4y ago
    He worries plenty about the latest and not-so-latest manufactured crises, as it's all he tweets about nowadays, is my point.
sirmike_ 4y ago
So? Who cares. Just because he is a thinking and breathing human being with a pulse and a different view than you. How many times have you made the front page of a prolific website? That’s like me telling the world — you, based off one comment sampling that you are stuck up and one dimensional …. Which we both know isn’t true, right? Benefit of the doubt.
- Kiro 4y ago
  "Different view" is a nice way of putting it. He's literally an alt-right troll.
  - sirmike_ 4y ago
    And how does that change anything else he says? It doesn't. Thats also not how "literally" works either. Your commentary surely tells the reader to use caution, but not how you think it does.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - Kiro 4y ago
      He's not untouchable just because he's writes a good technical article. He should be called out for spewing hateful bigotry on his Twitter.
      - sirmike_ 4y ago
        Maybe for you. But not for me or others. Careful where you stick your nose.
- the_only_law 4y ago
  > How many times have you made the front page of a prolific website? Tabloid papers have been on the front page here. I wouldn’t it hold it in such high honors.

lproven 4y ago

Just in case it helps anyone else struggling to understand this comment (let alone the blog post) AVS was an addin for WinAmp, a Windows MP3 player app. AVS stands for "Advanced Visualization Studio". More info on [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Visualization_Studio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Visualization_Studio) but it seemed to be plugin that supported other plugins that in turn did fancy graphical "visualisations" (moving screensaver-like visual effects) based (?) on the currently-playing music. Since the site has gone and the new Winamp site is content-free chrome, it's hard to say more. AVS was made FOSS in 2005: https://web.archive.org/web/20051102072333/http://www.nullsoft.com/free/avs/ https://web.archive.org/web/20051102072333/http://www.nullso... "DAW" means Digital Audio Workstation but honestly even the Wikipedia articles are so full of references that one is assumed to already know that I am not sure what the phrase means. As far as I can glean, a very fancy sound editor program.

lproven 4y ago
If anyone could ELI5 the whole web link in the style of my comment above, I'd really appreciate it, because I am curious but I can get nothing at all out of it. I do not really understand any of it. WebGPU? Reactive? Declarative? It's... some kind of Javascript thing (?) that lets you program (?)... fancy animated (?) graphics (?) in a web page (?) that are hardware accelerated? That is about all I can get, and I don't think I am all that dim. I got the Arrested Development reference, and almost nothing else.
- sdwr 4y ago
  That's pretty much the gist. I don't know much more than you, anyone else feel free to correct me. This guy made a Javascript library running on WebGPU (an upcoming web GPU wrapper) that uses the coding style popularized by React. React was designed to make it easy(-ish) to dynamically update web pages. When data or properties are changed in the JS code, React updates the DOM (HTML that tells the browser what to draw on screen). That's reactive. Declarative is how it's organized. To change what shows up on screen, there has to be some kind of update loop that checks for/reacts to (pull/push) new data. React hides all that, the idea is you declare what you want drawn once, and it's updated for you as the data changes. React stays efficient by only updating what needs to be updated in the DOM. This gets a similar result by memoizing (caching function return values) (for what data??). Editorializing from my experience with web frameworks, that style feels magical when it works, and makes for flashy demos (look what I can do with 10 lines of code!), but it gets there by hiding a lot of complexity inside an opinionated framework. It's way easier to get started with, but you have to be disciplined and know how it works under the hood to stay on the happy path with larger projects.

mikecoles 4y ago

Cthugha did similar on Linux. Many hours were spent 'watching music'. Even in a sober state it was amazing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthugha_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cthugha_(software)