mrob

28 ms·

571.
by mrob 2y ago
>I've heard people quip that browsers should be less forgiving and enforce perfection. That allowing jank makes the web somehow 'bad'. Considering all the misery inflicted by computer crime that's enabled by the forgi
572.
by mrob 2y ago
And "Damascene" is a reference to pattern welding (often called "Damascus" even though it's not the same thing as historical Damascus steel), where different metals are forge welded together to make laminated patter
573.
by mrob 2y ago
PLATO is notable for being the origin of the of the computer role playing game. The history of early CRPGs is murky, because PLATO was intended for educational use and games programmers had to work in secret to avoid the administrators dele
574.
by mrob 2y ago
>One must have a certain amount of wealth just to be able to travel to enough different places in the world to notice that they are all kind of similar. You don't need to travel in person to see things. I like watching videos of for
575.
by mrob 2y ago
The modern interior design with hard surfaces everywhere is worse for usability/accessibility because it reflects sound, increasing noise levels. This is especially a problem in restaurants, some of which are loud enough to cause heari
576.
by mrob 2y ago
For something simpler than the computer described in the article, you might be interested in Usagi Electric's UE-1 vacuum tube computer. Construction is nearing completion, and it's documented on Youtube: https://www.yo
577.
by mrob 2y ago
It's useful if you're singing a song that starts a cappella and has instruments join later. Admittedly, this is not common. Only example I can think of is The Smashing Pumpkins - Bullet with Butterfly Wings.
578.
by mrob 2y ago
Also: * "Concert pitch" of A=440Hz is not universal. * 12 tone equal temperament is not universal. * Analog playback systems often run at slightly incorrect speeds. * Some instruments are difficult or impossible to tune, so the tu
579.
by mrob 2y ago
You can use equal temperament with any number of divisions of the octave (or other interval, e.g. Bohen-Pierce tuning's equal division of the "tritave" into 13). Some of these provide excellent approximations of common just i
580.
by mrob 2y ago
Recorders also have big variation in timbre (and volume) with different notes.
581.
by mrob 2y ago
Every instrument is a C instrument if you want it to be. "Transposing instrument" is a misleading name. They're really just instruments for which Western staff notation is conventionally written transposed. If you're wri
582.
by mrob 2y ago
I don't want to die. However, I can imagine many scenarios that are worse than death. In many of them I am too incapacitated to arrange my own painless suicide. Allowing third parties to help in these circumstances, with appropriate co
583.
by mrob 2y ago
The probably kill more than they save by impaired health from the stress and sleep deprivation they cause.
584.
by mrob 2y ago
You capitalize "Warrior Culture", so I suspect you're using it in some jargon sense. I'm talking about the plain English meaning. The distinction between "warrior" and "soldier" does not preclude grea
585.
by mrob 2y ago
Why would any modern military want a warrior culture? Warriors fight for personal glory, not maximum operational effectiveness. E.g. a warrior culture would never use drones to their fullest extent, despite their demonstrated effectiveness,
586.
by mrob 2y ago
Even the best stereo speakers have an inherent weakness: comb filtering between the channels. You can easily test this yourself by generating some mono pink noise in Audacity (or your favorite audio editor) and playing it on stereo speakers
587.
by mrob 2y ago
Audio does not make it impossible to do an instant swap. Any good ABX tool lets you switch between test/reference samples with zero delay. Hear for yourself: https://abx.digitalfeed.net/list.html (you can press A, B, o
588.
by mrob 2y ago
>A sound can mask another sound. Details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auditory_masking Bernhard Seeber of the Audio Information Processing Group at the Technical University of Munich has some good demonstration vi
589.
by mrob 2y ago
We don't need to understand those things to determine if the differences are audible. We can simply perform listening tests: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABX_test A properly conducted ABX test is the most favorab
590.
by mrob 2y ago
Because that pattern forms a scale that allows for playing several intervals such that the harmonics line up nicely, so that they're either very similar or very distinct, but not annoyingly almost similar. William Sethares has a good o
591.
by mrob 2y ago
Another counter-example: the movie Tokyo Story. The main characters have already entered their uncomfortable situation before the first scene. The twist happens unexpectedly and isn't even shown on screen. The uncomfortable situation r
592.
by mrob 2y ago
Day of the Tentacle is also very American, in both style and content. I'm glad I didn't play it as a child because I wouldn't have understood or appreciated it, even though I knew it existed and I played Maniac Mansion. Day o
593.
by mrob 2y ago
>If information can be looked up at any moment, why does it need to exist in our brains? Because creativity involves making connections between seemingly unrelated knowledge. For a good example, consider Richard F. Lyon's 1980 optic
594.
by mrob 2y ago
Wasting people's money is damage.
595.
by mrob 2y ago
While it's possible they meant something nefarious, I think the goal was probably just to prevent confusion around shared computers. Such confusion might seem unlikely, but when your market is as big as Microsoft's even unlikely t
596.
by mrob 2y ago
If that meaning is "intuitive", why was it not used before the Open Source Initiative introduced their definition? The competing uses are the ones co-opting an existing phrase.
597.
by mrob 2y ago
The term "open source" had no significant use to refer to software before the Open Source Initiative started promoting it. Previously, it was only intelligence industry jargon, meaning "publicly available information", w
598.
by mrob 2y ago
Not open source. Even if we accept model weights as source code, which is highly dubious, this clearly violates clauses 5 and 6 of the Open Source Definition. It discriminates between users (clause 5) by refusing to grant any rights to user
599.
by mrob 2y ago
The references to Land Rover and Doctor Who make me think the author is British. In British English, "scheme" does not usually have negative connotations.
600.
by mrob 2y ago
Embeddings are the only aspect of modern AI I'm excited about because they're the only one that gives more power to humans instead of taking it away. They're the "bicycle for our minds" of Steve Jobs fame; intellige

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