sarine

Sometimes an external perspective is what you need, just like in my analogy. You started off by laying down a solid foundation for arguing that distancing yourself from music would be the best course of action, and for all I can tell you made that case. I was confused when first you said this is a forced activity for you, and then asked tips on how to "keep going". It seemed like cognitive dissonance to me and hence I felt compelled to speculate about the presence of an element of obsession or emotional attachment to explain the glaring discrepancy between how you feel about the thing and your way of dealing with it. Some of the best advice I received from a friend was when I was struggling with motivation in university. He said; "Have you considered... just giving up?" Well, yes, but hearing it from him, spelled out like he did in that lenient tone without a trace of judgement, legitimized it in a way that was outside my own power. It took me a while to figure it out because I was stubborn and hell-bent on persisting because I'd grown to expect (and expected other people to expect from me) academic success, but the words kept echoing in my head - and not only the words, but that sound of approval. It took me longer still to come to terms with the reality that school is not my thing at all, and it never was. It's just an example, and that's just me, but I've made it a habit to say what I actually think instead of what people want to hear. It got me fired once, but my spine is intact and I like to think that everyone involved will go to our graves knowing I was right and acting in good faith on both factual and moral grounds, while they embarrassed themselves by lying to get rid of me and I will forever remember them for it. Would do it again. I'm kind of tired of hearing this particular sentiment because it's so out of touch with reality. Go out, talk to people. I mean; Get around the Internet sometime. Every imaginable niche has dedicated fans. It's easy to find weirdos who don't care at all about the mainstream or global culture and never leave their bubble. Of course it's not true. In this particular case it is certain that you are right. For me all artistic expression is about cultivation of the soul, communicating secrets (both private and public), illuminating the dark corners of reality, celebrating life and humanity, and other such mundane grandness. It's not about recognition, fame, respect, ego, validation, etc. I wish I could say; "I wish I could say that I don't understand people who do seek things like fame and recognition, but alas, I can't, 'cause I do", but alas, I can't, 'cause I don't. If you add money in the list, then I do get it - the rest is a stupid load of rubbish. That's why I don't care if somebody doesn't like my music; if somebody says it's crap, I can say "You're wrong. I like it. I made it so." I do care if they do like it, because then it makes me feel connected to them on some fundamentally meaningful level. In art I can only do my own thing and hope that somebody connects with it. If I were doing some other thing focused on what I expect people to want to hear/see/feel/think, it wouldn't be art but engineering of emotional responses. That's my personal truth and arbitrary definition of art, feel free to disagree.

I don't understand what the problem is. You list very valid reasons for getting away from producing music, #1 being that apparently it makes you miserable. Still, you're interested to hear how other people "keep going". What am I supposed to say? I don't want you to be miserable. This seems the most (if not the only) proper advice in this situation. Maybe you need that distance to become disentangled from your current impoverished relationship with music. Your hobby sounds like a jealous partner who's keeping you hostage by threatening to invalidate you and dissociate your past accomplishments from you, should you have the audacity to leave them to live independently (or worse yet, with someonething else). "You'll never make it in the cold, cruel world out there! I am your only fortress! I am the only one who truly understands and appreciates you!" - then proceeds to give you a beating in form of more joyless, unrewarding labor that only amounts to yet more mediocre crap on your HDD, and what better way to wrap up domestic violence than; "I love you. You know that, right?" You keep trying to maintain the relationship by working extra hard for it, while everyone else around you can sense that you're not happy, and that it's not actually your fault. The moment you give up and let it go, you're going to release the tension and be free. So, to return from the awful analogy back into the real world, your now-ex partner might not be that bad - it just wasn't working out for you two. Maybe they were holding you back, or vice versa, or you had both become so stuck on old habits and patterns that the dynamics of the relationship itself had been imprisoning both of you. Sometimes the only way to reinvigorate your relation with someone/something is to rediscover them instead of just adjusting here and there, and you can't truly rediscover something without taking distance. Assuming OP's livelihood doesn't depend on music, this is sound advice. It actually is that simple, so don't make it complicated. There's nothing inherently bad about departing, other than maybe the pain experienced by your emotional attachment from the tension exerted by distance (akin to longing, homesickness etc.). Emotional attachments can also be considered pathological, such as in certain unhealthy relationships (especially the abuser-abused type) and hoarding syndrome. I feel inclined to think that the mechanisms of attachment to more abstract things are capable of manifesting similar pathologies, the main difference being that some such subject-object relations are even more opaque to outsiders, and even if they weren't; who's to say my attachment to Daniel Barenboim's certain interpretation of Beethoven's Waldstein Sonata is pathological, for instance? (Although it seems nearly isomorphic to relations that we could agree to be unhealthy or at the very least abnormal in more transparent cases). Hard to argue with "The reality is, I don't think ..." 😄 -- Doesn't make your thoughts as good as fact. "A false belief can be embraced ..." -- That something may be falsely believed doesn't mean it can't be true. Your assertion (the gist of it, from what I gather) is absurd and you can't possibly believe it. The lawyer speak leaves you a lot of room to backpedal from an absurd position though, should someone decide to argue against it. I won't, because the whole thing is setup for No true Scotsman; "You have an example? Oh, but they weren't professional (didn't earn six figures) / their productions weren't professional (didn't win a Grammy) / they didn't get anywhere (maybe just a little short of anywhere) / it wasn't the final product (you used LAME to encode) / blah blah..."

I do prefer. 🧐

"Usually" is not a word that the OP used (in contrast, "actual" was). Also, for me it confirms what seems to be horrible abuse of math/language. No wonder people find math confusing after all the obfuscating. A 100th = a hundredth = a percent = 1 per cent = 1 per 100 = 1 / 100 The "th", "per" and "/" here all indicate that we're dealing with a fraction. The fractions are nested, and dividing by divisor is the same as multiplying by its reciprocal, i.e.; A / B = A / (B / 1) = A * (1 / B) and if we replace B with (B / C) thus; A / (B / C) = A * (C / B) = AC / B we can already see that if either A=B or C=B, the factors cancel each other out, and because B=1 is implicit in "th", we assign A=1, B=1, C=100; and find that B=A, so we can write; A / (A / C) = A * (C / A) = AC / A = C Or, because; nⁱ = 1 / n⁻ⁱ ; we can write; p / (1 / n) = p / n⁻¹ = (n⁻¹ / p)⁻¹ which in our special case of p=1; = (n⁻¹ / 1)⁻¹ = (n⁻¹)⁻¹ = n¹ = n or more generally; (n⁻¹ / p)⁻¹ = n / p⁻¹ In other words: This is 1 of anything: This is a 100th of it: "How many times does the latter go into former" is the answer to "How much is 1/100th of itself". Something divided by a hundredth of itself is, unsurprisingly, one hundred. ◻ Quod erat deobfuscateraendum.

That would be 100 seconds. Sorry. I had to. It's not a choice. Of course I also had to look it up... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jiffy_(time) Clearly it's some kind of imperial unit.

Those would be reference manuals, which are extremely handy when you want to look up what's what - and nothing more. Also called cheat sheets in other contexts, and similar to spec sheets (data sheets) which only specify technical characteristics - e.g. physical dimensions of a PC case or the pin layout and electrical characteristics of an integrated circuit - in that their purpose is to relay the most relevant information that would concern a user who already knows how to apply it, in a condensed form for the referrer's benefit, and any excess would be to its detriment. As useful as they are, of course they're not a substitute for a user manual which is supposed to explain how to operate an appliance from a typical user's perspective in a way that is congruent with the skills and knowledge that can reasonably be expected of them. So the actual question is: What is a reasonable expectation regarding average user's skills and knowledge? In reverse: What is the knowledge domain that the user can reasonably expect the documentation to cover? If I buy an oscilloscope, I don't expect the instructions to lecture me about electricity. Similarly, I don't think a user manual for a synthesizer is the proper place to teach the fundamentals of sound synthesis. They're not obliged to explain to the user what modulation or phase mean. Even if the documentation is written concisely and at "the reasonable" level of detail, some of that logic is inevitably going to be documented (implicitly at the very least) in descriptions of how everything is put together or usage examples. That's not to say that a plugin vendor wouldn't benefit from producing teaching material in broader scope, but I wouldn't want it to clutter the operating manual. This seems like an unreasonable request. How many fundamentally so different yet statistically significant learning styles can there be that producing a clear and thorough user guide necessitates attuning to the multitude of them, instead of just adhering to what are considered good practices and standard form and structure. It's (mostly) fairly mechanical machinery and deterministic processes that we're talking about, so I'd think there really does exist a single best way to document how it functions. Now to translate the documented behavior of the system into effective prose that successfully communicates the experience of using it is a bit more open-ended problem, but I think the possible differences in workflows between different users, or the same user trying to achieve different things, would deserve more attention than individual learning styles. They're also more clearly defined and thus more manageable, because we can say some use cases are definitively unsane, and be dismissive of them. I bet that applies to some "learning styles" too and that sometimes the problem is not how the documentation is written, but how wrong the expectations were; the writer reasonably or unreasonably expected too much from the user, and vice versa. Bad documentation can also follow from (or in spite of) reasonable expectations, and good documentation from unreasonable (pessimistic) expectations. No, the biggest insult is: "You're wrong / your book is wrong." - followed closely by any of its less direct and/or friendlier variations, including accidentally enabling them to read in between lines that you don't recognize them as God and the classroom as their dominion. When students/pupils question the utility of what they're being taught it's probably due to innocent frustration, but to avoid a patronizing answer it's best viewed as sublimation of rebellion spirit (domesticated anarchism). It allows the teacher to respect the challenger and their chosen rules of contest and to respond effectively and with the appropriate attitude (even easier to respect these days when waving a knife is increasingly considered to be a socially acceptable way of challenging the teacher). It's an opportunity for the teacher to justify the institution, their position in it, and the studies. Like you said it's also an opportunity to motivate the students, but one should be wary of inadvertently alienating them further. Even in responding to that one person you're really talking to the whole group, and it's really difficult to motivate someone without addressing them individually. I don't think knowledge and rhetoric have that power, and instead you need charisma and strong transference. Same goes for projecting authority. I think you're "born" with these traits and that they cannot be learned (although, practically speaking, effective imitation is learnable). I've worked with pupils/students, done private teaching/tutoring/directing as well as for small groups, and I love when kids test, challenge and try to outsmart me. I especially love it when they're smart and push me to push myself, because when I win they get it, they earn my respect, I earn their respect, and I know that they know all of this. Smart kids who are upfront and confrontational are great to be around if you want to stay awake and alert, and I make sure to reward them for trying to best me (after kicking their *****). You also occasionally hear quite acute observations from them and they will quickly pick up on pretense and posing, so your only option is to be real, and when you've established with them that this applies in both directions, it simplifies the game of social interaction tremendously and frees those mental resources (yours and theirs) to be used for things that aren't trivial BS. Don't take yourself too seriously, don't expect anyone to respect you until you demonstrate why they should, and once you have; don't think that you've established yourself some immutable status, but be ready to prove yourself repeatedly and without warning. Be prepared to be humbled from time to time, should you forget your stature in this world. Your long-term reward will not be some arbitrary status, but the kind of solid mutual trust and respect that can only form under great pressure.

That's my current codebase. The fella at the bottom is dead since July, and the other two don't know.

It hurts everybody's brain. Out of those who are hardcore enough to want to learn it, some are hardcore enough to learn it, but nobody is hardcore enough to learn all of it. The beginner's biggest challenge is to actively ignore most of the language so that you can learn a subset that is a good match for solving your problem. ****LOL ...and nobody is.

I have licenses to some software that I don't update for a year simply because it never crosses my mind. They still receive updates - some more frequently or more major than others - but the software already worked fine years ago, continues to work today, and I expect nothing less when I check for updates again... next winter or something. Some of these guys have a pretty good track record of not breaking my shit, which is kind of admirable considering how little testing I do for them.

By "previewing" do you mean viewing the MIDI data, or hearing it? I'm not sure how viewing the MIDI data would be useful unless you're working with the data, like when you're composing in a DAW. Perhaps the visual cues could help in finding points of interest faster than by blindly clicking the playhead around. Listening to MIDI used to be easy when Windows Media Player just did it. Last I checked it seemed that you had to separately install a third-party application and/or the GM soundbank. I'd be interested in minimalistic solutions to this problem that I didn't have in Vista or XP.

Perhaps it was that unhinged aggressor who assaulted your gun with their back. Not fooling anyone, Dawg.

It begs the question why I need a "media file manager" when I already have a file manager that can probably do all the same things except display and playback MIDI. Inventing problems and needs and providing overspecialized solutions to what used to be non-problems seems to be symptomatic of capitalism. Solutions that work toward unifying the existing systems by leveraging what is already there while keeping introduction of new concepts (functions, interfaces, presentation) to a minimum, are far more compelling to me. If you do have such a brilliant idea that you want the user to adopt a new way of working with the-same-old, it should apply in a broader scope - e.g. instead of a media file manager, go all the way and design a superior generic solution for file managing.

What's going on? Oh, this is the feelgood thread. I was looking for the feelbad thread. Carry on... #ukraine #trump #jihad #lgbt #obamacare #antivaxxers #metoo #socialism #climatehoax #blacklivesmatter #altright

Definitely true, and I think the autodidact path is more challenging precisely because of the lack of direction from somebody or something that embodies the accumulated experience in the field. After all, that's why we have education, so that everyone doesn't have to discover everything on their own and solve problems that have been solved. It also makes sense to tell our kids to look left, right, then left again (if their cars drive on the right) before they cross the road, and not to walk on ice during transitional seasons - they don't need to "self-learn" through getting hit by a car or plummeting into freezing water. Same goes for the technical side of playing an instrument; there are principles and practices already known that not only are convenient, but may prevent permanent injury. When @Tim Smith remarked about his unorthodox technique (presumably excessive curl of the fingers), I meant to write about this and what the technical challenge means for the autodidact and what they (or a teacher of adult students in particular) should know, but while "gathering the material" I found myself on yet another rabbit trail. Because the thread seems aptly titled and technique has been brought up again, I'll try to follow up - in sha'Allah and all.

Maybe it's self-awareness, their sixth sense telling them that the third iteration would bomb (as per the pattern). I consider it a feat to hold interest and sustain motivation enough to make a sequel, let alone keep churning them out. It's different if you just throw money at them as an investment, but I also like that they're not milking the franchises (god I hate that word). At this point the customer base would probably find it suspicious if they released a 3rd anything, and a heated discussion would ensue debating if Valve is selling out. Like any big fish the company receives a lot of hate these days, but I think they have personality and I kind of like it. I also like that they were bold enough to branch into hardware and succeeded. I don't like how heavily they tax developers for using their platform for distribution, what they did to Team Fortress 2 and how they've gamified Steam and hustle pixel junk. I also hate the "new" Steam after they introduced the bluish tint, infinite scrolling, revamped Friends list, and more recently *****ing animated avatars (can be disabled, fortunately). The whole Steam client has a somewhat comical feel of a demented old sloth who frequently forgets to take their pills, although some aspects definitely work better than they used to. What irks me the most is that from the user's viewpoint the tagging, content filtering and curating could be super powerful were they brought into synergy, yet I still continually struggle with the simple task of finding the [kind of] crap I want. The UI is inconsistent, unresponsive and missing or obscuring basic functions. At least they haven't gone with rounded corners yet, and I shall curse the day that happens. Indeed, Lord Gaben himself must be aware that the meme is the product. The Templars must protect at all costs! 😄 All they need to do now is monetize it by turning it into pixel junk.

Yes, but the second statement is a tautology. There are also compatible bad students (slow learners) and incompatible good students (fast learners), worst case being incompatible+slow and best case being compatible+fast. A good student would also likely learn more from a bad teacher, than a bad student would. I'm not sure what we can infer from this. The problem with group teaching is that no matter how good the teacher is, they're a limited resource distributed among the whole group and thus have to compromise their teaching style and pace on some presumed average. Ultimately the student's most important teacher is themself - that's the one you find everywhere you go, and the one that will make or break you in academia at the latest. I think some positives of autodidacticism are precisely that you do discover things and form perspectives that might never have been introduced in school, and that creative crossing of boundaries leading to multidisciplinary thinking is far more likely to emerge when you're not digging deep with blinders on into that infinitesimally narrow sector of reality that academia wants you to know intimately. The converse is of course also true (the autodidact may have blind spots and miss obvious things), but I don't think this works in favor of formal education, especially in creative fields. However, there isn't a real substitute for school as a social environment and a melting pot of ideas where ideas can also be products of the interaction happening right there and then, and where cross-pollination occurs (even jamming with your band isn't functionally the same, let alone virtual contacts). While the point about exposure may be true in your case, the barriers to discovery that were in place 50 years ago are mostly irrelevant now. For all practical purposes, in this day and age the entire world is open to you. You no longer have to hunt rare and obscure recordings on physical media, tour libraries or bookstores to find in-depth information, or call or arrange to meet that one person who's an expert in the field to ask them a difficult question. The Internet is oozing information that would've been considered highly esoteric back in the day, and when you do arrive at the edge and need to take your excursion further to find an obscure book/paper/article/recording, the Internet will also help in locating the stuff that ain't on the Internet. The downside is that there's so much stuff that it's easy to go 100mph in every direction only to find it amounts to nothing, whereas attending school has the advantage that the institution has designed for you a curriculum and provides a plan to advance through it in manageable steps, and you can focus on fulfilling their requirements instead of being pulled toward various attractors and absorbing what you happen to stumble upon. Then, when you have fulfilled some requirement (e.g. passed a course) you get another clear target to aim for, and the hierarchical design guarantees that you'll be leveling up while every challenge is manageable (or at least tips the odds in your favor). In this setting you get a clear view on your progress. Ideally, that is. In reality, the curricula may as well be contrived garbage arrived at by an unvisionary, conformist committee, either because they truly are stupid or because funding is held for ransom by people whose interests are less than visionary.

I just think of all the bugs Imagine all the bugs and glitches, and pretending to file a bug report while you explain to your wife you weren't actually thinking of adult entertainment.

What's obvious is that it isn't a numbered sequel and doesn't have "3" in the name, but what's less obvious is whether we could justify numbering it the same way we did with The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past when we call it "Zelda 3". The answer depends on whether or not we consider it part of the sequence (which by itself is a muddy concept). Based on the pretty specific kind of experience that we'd grown to expect from "the" 3rd installment with regard to game mechanics, pacing etc., I feel reluctant to include it in the sequence. However, I'd attribute my reluctance more to the mythical memetic status of HL3 than anything else. After all the waiting and speculation (and the implicit hype and jokes), my intuition is that it's nigh impossible for Valve to release a HL3 and simultaneously avoid both humiliating themselves publicly and losing a significant amount of money (i.e. pick one). I'm sure it still is an in-house joke at Valve that gets brought up occasionally. Maybe someone mentions it, a conversation follows and people take memos "just in case". Maybe there's a side project, an indefinite blob of accumulated ideas and influences, dragging along sluggishly and catching up with technology and experimenting with game mechanics in random bursts, all the while accumulating and consolidating ideas of which only the best persist. Maybe they don't call it HL3 - because nobody would dare - but for some reason it's reminiscent of something old... something good... something made in-house, that was a product of that culture, of childish playfulness, of that imagination and thrill-seeking of the spirit of a little boy in the mind and body of an adult that has the means to play god and create worlds. Then some day somebody will wake up, they will go to work, get their coffee, test the latest build of that side project just to wake themselves up before moving to proper work, and... they will dare. I can't believe I wrote HL3 origin story fan fiction, I'm so disappointed in myself, please kill me.

Oh, you're right. It's so good that I forgot it doesn't exist.

Super Mario Bros 3 The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind DoDonPachi DaiOuJou Half Life 3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder

In my opinion the main advantage of attending school is probably the social environment that provides ideas, feedback and reference to realistically assess your level compared with your peers. At best the competition can motivate you to push yourself harder and get validation for your efforts, while on the flipside it could make you question your existence. "School taught" doesn't really exist in higher education. There are self-learned people (amateurs, dilettantes) who never attended university but may be at the same level of proficiency (or higher) in a subject as someone with a Ph.D. However, being "schooled" by university isn't really a thing; to succeed you must learn to seek information and teach yourself with the mindset of the dilettante in addition to actually attending the school. The involvement of external guidance, curriculum requirements and progress tracking might help you find your "destined" path, or they might cause you to lose sight of it forever.

Also, careful with the "N" word. I thought we'd moved past this kind of language. Why don't we just return to the Stone Age while we're at it?

As do I. I just avoid buying from unknown distributors, and will rather pay a little extra for the luxury of not having to worry about trust when dealing with renowned distributors. It saves me the time and effort I'd have to invest in background checks just to guess the ballpark of trust I should expect, as well as from the extra stress (that I don't need) if I decide to try my luck. Those are probably OEM or volume activation licenses, likely the latter if the type is not explicitly mentioned and/or we're dealing with opportunist swindling. OEM keys usually sell for a little more. OEM licenses ship with hardware and are unique and can thus be used to activate Windows indefinitely (as well as associated with a Microsoft account which can then be used to activate Windows indefinitely). They are typically printed on the stickers on the bottom of laptops, etc. Volume activation keys can be purchased from Microsoft as a single key allowing a large but limited number of activations. They're intended for use by large organizations that may want to automate parts of the installation/imaging/activation/deployment chore, and I don't think selling them for individual use is legal. It is the most common type of cheap Windows "license" sold on the web. You're not actually buying a license, but a shared access to the volume activation key with everyone else who bought the same "license" from the same vendor. If you buy one today intending to activate Windows tomorrow, in the meantime someone else who bought the same key might have activated twice and used the last activation on the volume, leaving you without activation. Active sellers of these keys typically have multiple volumes at hand so that they can simply hand out another key in case a buyer complains his didn't work. Even if they don't, if every buyer left feedback they'd probably get an overwhelming net positive because for most people the activation succeeded and they went on with their lives. AFAIK Microsoft can invalidate these keys/activations on a whim even after activation, if they determine they're used illicitly - and I can't blame them. Correct me if I'm wrong.

The "files" you see in File Explorer, they are actually hard links. What they link to is a data structure (inode) in the file system, an abstraction the OS uses to manage storage, that is used to find the actual data (and some metadata). When you "move" a file from one folder to another on the same volume, it doesn't actually move the files (the actual data) around on the physical storage, just the links. The OS (or FS driver) does reference counting on the inodes, e.g. increments or decrements the count when a hard link is created or deleted, and when it reaches zero the inode is removed from the FS table and the physical storage space denoted by it flagged as free space. You can create many such links that point to the same file, regardless of their name or location in the filesystem. The new link is not a reference to the original link (which we normally call "the" file), rather it takes its reference from it, and the two are equal and independent of each other. The actual file only gets scrapped by the OS when both are deleted. There are some gotchas, such as that file indexing/caching may depend on the reference used rather than the FS table entry, and probably a few ways to shoot yourself in the foot if you try to be too clever. tl;dr for programmers: It's like copying a pointer to garbage-collectable memory.