rubberbandage

One of the other videos on his channel is literally “256 colors is enough for anyone”, which is one of the commandments of TempleOS, so your flashbacks are well-informed ;-)

Please submit direct links, not nonsense redirections through google.

I love this. Such a perfect web presentation for a man who has both experimented with cutting-edge technology (e.g. drum machine, vocoder and synclavier in 1981, the ill-fated Pono player) and been a near-luddite in his approach to digital music. Skeumorphism is due for its return!

Probably everyone reading HN in the last 8 years has seen the excellent video by Monty / xiph.org specifically addressing Neil Young and sample rates/bit rates (for delivery, 44.1kHz/16-bit is really truly all you need), but one thing very appreciated with this website’s audio streaming is the option of uncompressed audio, which is much more significant than any high-sample-rate file would be. And they even have a 320kbps fallback! Finally even Neil Young can see the benefit of being 12x more data efficient for 99.98% of the perceived quality.

A fellow Pownce user in the wild! Incredible to think that was 10 years ago. I feel like that app was years ahead of its time — the casual immediacy of Twitter without the character limits, the ease of sharing media like an internet-wide HipChat or Slack, topics like Reddit. Selfishly, I always hoped Leah would stop working at Dropbox and start another company :-)

Well, speaking of software… I assume LaTeX-to-HTML is the reason this formatting is so horrendously screwed up? It’s even mirrored in your copy-pasted text (“the  rst time”, “ She exh orted me:” “any ofour friends”, etc). I tried Safari and Chrome and got the same result, and had to read the PDF instead.

Looks really nice! I just played back a 1080p / 5.1 AC3 file, a 4K 5.1 DTS-HD file, and an audio ALAC file completely seamlessly. Only complaint so far is the playlist sidebar slid in from the side with every new track, obscuring 1/3rd of the content, and I kept having to manually dismiss it.

God, Mission Starlight was so great. I also played that on my Dad’s office Mac :-) He had a greyscale display for a long time, and I still remember the amazement of getting a color monitor and discovering Mission Starlight was in color, too. What a time!

Do you know of a playable/emulatable binary of this anywhere?

Every one of The Engineer Guy’s videos are a spectacular insight into the immense complexity of everything around us, and a beautiful demonstration in how to make that complexity both fascinating and understandable. It’s often quite a while between updates, but I highly recommend you subscribe to his channel.

Honestly, depending on your age, that still could be “golden” — I’m 31, I’ve taken very good care of my hearing, I’m very acutely aware of audio subtleties, and my hearing range tops out around 16.5KHz. The so-called standard upper limit of 20KHz really only applies to young children, which is why CD audio being able to reproduce frequencies of 22.05KHz is already beyond ideal, and calls for 48! no, 96!, no, 192! (or higher) is literally insane for playback.

Well, Kato is really the Green Hornet’s Valet/Sidekick, like a combo of Alfred + Robin for Batman.

Terrific list, thank you! I have pretty good absolute pitch, and can hear songs play in my head just like the real thing (I often wear headphones that aren’t connected to anything and just “listen”), but I never thought to make the connections like this. Very fun!

in the process learning about architecture, collaboration, resource management, economies of scale, and oh yeah, the ability to create a full Turing machine… if this comment was supposed to be disparaging, you’d need a different example ;-)

Hi Someone1234!

Happy to answer, and sorry for the long-delayed reply, hope you still see this and it’s not too wall-of-text-y.

A slight misconception/communication here; I actually attended Red Cedar School from age 5 to 18 (when I graduated), so I never attended a standard public school. From age 16–18, I spent half the school day at an offshoot of a public high school, studying movie post-production, but that was also relatively radical in both its trust of students to be independent learners and its lack of formal classroom setting. The difficulties I had with the pseudo-public film school were primarily with recognizing and respecting hierarchy and the student-teacher relationship. I talked with the school director/principal, the class instructor, and the students all equally as peers, and I critiqued curriculum, challenged teachers to back up their statements, and had little patience for students that screwed around or disregarded rules. Because of this I was often labeled (sometimes formally) as arrogant or standoffish to teachers, and aloof or condescending with my actual peers. I really took it to heart to learn and improve from this though, and I adjusted in about a year. I’m also very glad for that experience—understanding the structure of power and chain of command as part of nearly everything in society is pretty crucial to success, and that is one thing I just wasn’t exposed to in the fully democratic, completely equal-opportunity model of Sudbury schools.

As to “knowing as much as the other kids in a class”, I go into every class expecting we’ll all have the same pre-requisite knowledge for the subject, and if I know less than that, I study until I learn what I need (or more), so that’s never felt like an issue to me. Culturally though, I’m definitely the odd one out—just like a public school student in Vermont wouldn’t know about hardships of building a Spanish Mission model in school (as apparently every student does in California), there’s a core set of curriculums presented in public schools that bond public students together from across the US, and I have no knowledge of it. That can certainly be isolating—I’ve never had 1st-period gym (or any mandatory PE at all, we were outside when we wanted to be), never had notes passed in class, never been in detention, etc. and so I can’t participate in a huge part of most people’s common experience growing up. On the other hand, talking about junior high doesn’t happen much in your thirties anyway, so that’s not really an issue for me anymore :-)

Post high school: Like many students in Sudbury-Model schools, I took the SAT’s after studying for them intensely for several months, and I scored about as well as a traditional-curriculum student—much better than average in reading/writing/language, slightly worse than average in math/geometry. As my first real standardized test though, I was left fairly disgusted by the experience as proxy for college-worthiness, since every multiple-choice question was simply “confuse the test-taker into choosing the wrong answer”, and easily guessed by understanding the psychological tricks behind the test construction, even for supposedly difficult math problems. I ultimately ended up not going to college—the cost/benefit didn’t make sense for what I wanted to do—so instead I moved to the SF Bay Area when I was 19 to work on films—managing finances, meeting with clients, working with deadlines—I had no problem with any of that (though I was really poor… movie production is not a money-making market).

Now, I’ve worked at Apple for over 10 years, and the only difference between my colleagues and me is my tendency to still flatten the level of managers and direct reports, but fortunately the culture there leans heavily toward shallow hierarchy and candid discussion anyway. I’ve never once felt hindered or at a disadvantage for having gone to such a radical antithesis of the entire public school system.

Would I send my kid to a Sudbury School? Yes, definitely, if the student body was rich enough (numbers and diversity of students, not wealth of course), and if my kid clearly enjoyed it there. The school by its nature forces you to be introspective and consider your own needs, and some students do ultimately decide they need a different environment. It’s not a perfect fit for everyone as a start-to-end school, though for me the entire experience was ideal.