kingrolo

Ah this has reminded me of dejanews.com the usenet archive. Before the days of Stack Overflow that was absolute gold for looking up an error message or code issue.

If I remember rightly Google bought the data when they shutdown and incorporated it into Google Groups.

I decided years ago to limit myself to just one box of cables... So then I ended up having to keep finding a bigger and bigger box to switch them to.

One thing that bothers me though (or an excuse my brain uses to justify it maybe) is that it feels so wasteful to dump so many cables that will probably end up in landfill when I know there's someone out there who could make use of them.

If anyone has a suggestion on that or can tell me about the pop up local cable donation swap initiative I haven't heard of them that would be welcome.

I'd consider myself quite positive about AI but when someone asked me I put my P(doom) at 10% too.

I think there's a much bigger chance it saves us all as well though and makes life brilliant for everyone - P(yay).

I really think its just unknowable how a world after superintelligence will look.

These days in my experience most people don't use a sidechain signal, just chop out, or filter, enough of the first base note so that it doesn't clash with the kick. People still refer to it as "sidechain" just because historically that's what it was. Most popular plugin to achieve this is LFOTool but also Shaperbox is used now too which is nice as it lets you cut in frequency ranges in different amounts. Its all about making it gel with the kick. You want your bass to be powerful but in the modern sound you always want the kick to win.

Yes phase alignment is important too. There's always a sweet spot where it just sounds "right". Plus staring endlessly at an oscilloscope to check they aren't interfering. Then doing it for hours and hours and wondering at the end if it sounded better before you started mucking around with it actually but your ears are so tired of it you can't tell anymore.

This stuff is such a rabbit hole. Lots of fun though.

This has reminded me of the awe felt by 12 year old me when someone showed me that you could use a hole punch to make a hole in the corner of a single sided 3.5" disk to double the capacity.

Adult me is now going to go look into how or why that worked.

It feels to me as though LLMs should (eventually?) really shine at these kinds of tasks where the intent is already defined in code of some sort and the challenge of the task is lots of detailed legwork that humans find hard, more because it's time consuming and not interesting so hard to focus on, rather than because it's technically challenging.

So swapping languages, yeah maybe, but I expect of more practical use would be the situation where you inherit a legacy codebase in an ancient version of a language or framework that hasn't been loved in a long time. I saw this so many times when doing dev team for hire work.

Obviously you'd want to do boat loads of testing and there may well be manual work left to do afterwards, but I think it would be the kind of manual work that felt like you were polishing something new and clean and beautiful rather than trying to apply bits of sticky tape to something unmaintainable.

I also wonder about eventually being able to say to an LLM "take this codebase and make it look like my code", or maybe one of your favourite open source developer's code. Maybe everyone could end up with their own code style vector attached to their github profile describing their style. You could find devs with styles close to yours to work on your team, or maybe find devs with styles different to yours so you could go and argue about tabs vs spaces or something.

I was thinking that the current chatbot showdown reminds me of the time before Google won the search wars.

There were sites like this that had several search engines side by side in frames so you could compare the results returned from all of them at once.

Will be really interesting to see how all of this plays out.

Its been very interesting to watch all of this play out. FTX going under feels somehow bigger than Gox, bigger than the DAO. Gox looked like it was held together by bits of string, the DAO was always something new and had the potential to be a risk, but FTX seeemed safe as houses.

For crypto to exist in the regular world, its always seemed like more regulation of some sort is inevitable. Particularly for a company like FTX with US ties, and it looked like SBF was starting to cosy up to the regulators and fit himself in among the powers that be in the US. His big political donations, sports sponsorships, philanthropic funds. It looked to me like a person who believed in the idealism of crypto was fitting himself into the old world, and all of this lended credence to FTX being trustworthy.

In the end his views on regulation went too far for many and this was strangely the thing that led exposing the dodgy things going on behind the curtain (with the leak of the balance sheet, and CZ saying he would exit his FTT).

That said, Alameda Research, the trading arm, were clearly no slouches, they used to be up there on the Bitmex leaderboard and it seems so hard to grok that they couldn't have modelled all of this risk properly. Accounting for who is holding large amounts of FTT and the price impact that could have.

I sort of feel there must be more to it, or maybe, then again, it just comes down to the same thing that's caused many other crypto funds to blow up - simple greed. The collateral is sitting there, so why use it. What's the worst that can happen?

I have a beast of a desktop PC but still find myself getting into console games far more than PC games.

I think when I'm at my desk there's always this nagging feeling telling me I could be doing something more productive (code, music, learning) whereas on the sofa with a console I don't feel that.

Ah this looks great. My Dad would buy and sell second hand BBCs and my whole family were well into all of the Repton 3 games. I remember loving discovering the level editor too and proudly making my own themed set of levels which I think scratched a similar itch to programming for 7 year old version of me.

I always thought Repton was the greatest game ever. Am keen to see how it holds up now.

I also remember Imogen being very clever, Citadel I found a bit creepy, and everyone loved Chuckie Egg except me for some reason.

I use black by default across all our projects now and I'm all for it, but it does seem kind of ironic that whilst the main selling point of black is to take away these kind of code style discussions there seem to have been way more of them since black came to popularity :)

I do expect it'll just be fine once everyone's got used to it. Maybe its a consequence of a tool like this coming into existence on a language with such a long history already.