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sarine

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Posts posted by sarine

  1. 18 hours ago, Frank said:

    Not the best time for maintenance before Valentine day.

    Not the worst time for maintenance before Valentine's, is another way to look at it.

    As a sidenote, the part of me that just wants to watch the world burn gets exhilarated by the fact that Valentine's -  the day you're supposed to celebrate love and friendships - has become yet another day of self-indulgence.

    • Like 2
  2. I find it funny how people call this guy a soy boy while to me he seems like someone who'd eat your liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti. Because clearly fava beans are superior to soy and you can tell this guy has an exquisite taste. 

  3. 17 hours ago, abacab said:

    I believe that you have confused Java virtual machine with the old Java browser plugin for web (which has been deprecated). Or Javascript, which has really nothing at all to do with Java, except an unfortunate name.

    The name wasn't up to [mis]fortune as JavaScript was intended to complement Java as a scripting language.

     

    17 hours ago, abacab said:

    The Java browser plugin was a lousy idea, a security risk, and it's use has mostly been eliminated. The Java browser plug-in was designed to allow the JVM to execute so-called Java applets embedded into HTML pages.

    Yes and JavaScript is a much more brilliant idea. Browsers run VM's that compile JavaScript to bytecode, just like a JVM. I think the main difference is that JavaScript VM's run inside the browser so escaping the sandbox lands you in the browser process with its privileges and you have to separately find and exploit vulnerabilities in the browser to gain higher privileges, whereas JVM is designed to provide all kinds of access to system resources (to facilitate useful applications) which grants the exploiter greater power if they're able to execute arbitrary code. Both are sandboxed and both have had vulnerabilities that allowed escaping the sandbox. Really, if there's an apt combination of words to describe current web technology with its duct-taped software stacks and high reliance on execution of client-side code written in a loosely typed language, then "a lousy idea" comes to mind.

     

    17 hours ago, abacab said:

    A side note here is that native Android apps are written in Java, and is a requirement for the Android development kit.

    They aren't necessarily, and it isn't. Android runs its own VM (Dalvik) with its own bytecode that is fundamentally different from JVM's. The VM is language-agnostic so you can develop in any language provided that you have a compiler or a translator to produce the bytecode. Nowadays Android compiles its bytecode to native machine code for better performance.

     

    18 hours ago, abacab said:

    There is no reason to fear or avoid Java, except maybe you prefer not to have extra stuff installed on your computer.

    Yes, except maybe. 😄  When I'm browsing for software and I see the mention that it's written for a VM/interpreter, I browse elsewhere. Mostly because in some cases choosing to use a scripting or a heavily boiler-plated API compositing language reflects the developer's lack of work ethics which gives me less incentive to invest in something they built, but also because I'm averse to accumulating junk on my systems (I have separate, dedicated environments for bathing in mud). But the hackers and script-kiddies love the ultra-convenient scripting environments proliferating on casual users' computers.

     

    10 hours ago, abacab said:

    Huh?

    Going by the bolded text, I think he meant to say he's not confused between JVM and browser Java applets.

  4. On 2/6/2022 at 12:55 PM, Lee Shapiro said:

    That's actually what I did.  I finally finished a song (in the song's forum) called "Something To Prove".  And it's about trying to prove to myself I can write a halfway decent song again.

    This is kind of like what I meant by "growing outward" from a state of rest (comfort, the lowest energy state). It is meta and thinking outside the box. 

    I tend to think that the stereotype of a suffering artist is true. If you're struggling to do something that used to be a big part of your life, that struggle is certainly worth a song.

    What do you mean by "halfway decent" though? The way you phrased that makes it sound awfully unambitious, but of course it depends on what you mean. How do you know if you've succeeded?

  5. Sometimes when you feel uncreative, the simple interpretation that your well has dried up, your muse dumped you -  i.e. you're "out of ideas" - may be a matter of fact.

    For me, the feeling of comfort is a universal red flag that my mind is gravitating towards a standstill. If something feels too easy, familiar and unconflicted, I know it's about to turn flat, one-dimensional and uninspired unless I somehow grow outward from it. Artists as communicators need high exposure to the world around in order to make meaningful comments about the nature of things. High sensitivity is an asset but not a substitute for going out there and letting people, stories, phenomena, and sensory experiences influence you directly. If you only reference the most familiar of your own thoughts and feelings when observing the world and in creating art, you're becoming an immobile, static, outside observer that winds up cataloguing reality instead of interpreting and reformulating it. Comfort attracts to the familiar, and the seeming repetitiveness of the familiar will desensitize you and dull your perception, creating even stronger bias towards the familiar (the dried well).

    In my case, curiosity is the strongest predictor of increased creativity. When I get curious about something and it sparks my imagination, it's like an invitation from the world to come in and see for myself; there's this miracle, it wants to be seen, and you're welcomed to approach it. You get closer and closer until you're so infatuated with its soul that you lose sense of the boundary between the two of you, and it does too, and so it starts speaking through you. A more superficial take on the process is what people casually call "being inspired by something". These are variations on the same phenomenon in varying degrees of depth, breadth and intensity, similar to religious experiences.

    • Great Idea 1
  6. I tried a few gadgets (Push, QuNeo, Octatrack) and it was enough to determine that gadgets don't increase my productivity. I sold them all eventually after having given them a few more chances (too many, in retrospect).

    I've been using simple MIDI keyboards on and off, but now only plug one in if I need to do stuff like trigger effects. It doesn't help with composition at all, is completely redundant, eats up the little desk space I have, and smuggles in all kinds of ill effects that easily fixate me, like getting stuck tuning in velocity curves, getting lost in improvising (hours spent with nothing substantial to take home), or trying to learn finger-drumming while toing through 150 drum kits.

    To me, everything that is not mouse & keyboard is a now a pile of expensive junk whose primary function is to get on my way.

  7. On 1/29/2022 at 7:01 PM, Paul Young said:

    My gaming collection is as bad as my VST collection.  I have plenty of games not even touched.

    In my case it's much worse. I have hundreds of games on Steam that I've never installed. The only things growing faster than my games collection are my wishlist and the shame.

  8. 23 hours ago, Hugh Mann said:

    Intel is the dark side. 🤣

    What does that even mean? I don't know if you're just trying to be ironic, but that's probably not a good idea when you've already made yourself sound like a fanboy and the statement can easily be interpreted to reflect your actual mindset.

    Intel is as ***** of a corporation as any, sometimes excelling above. But at least they're heavily investing in growing the semiconductor fabrication industry in U.S., to make the West less dependent on China.

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

    https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/06/how-intel-plans-to-catch-up-to-samsung-and-tsmc-with-44-billion-of-new-global-chip-fabs.html

    Quote

    In 1990, 37% of the world’s semiconductors were made in the U.S., according to industry association Semi. Last year, U.S. market share was down to 12%, according to the association. The government is hoping to change that with the CHIPS Act, which includes a proposed $52 billion in subsidies for chip companies like Intel that commit to manufacturing in the U.S. 

    “It also starts building up that base within the United States, so that the United States can become more self-sufficient,” said Ann Kelleher, Intel’s senior vice president of technology development .

    TSMC is responsible for 92% of the world’s 5-nanometer chips, according to research group Capital Economics. This leaves the global chip supply vulnerable to natural disasters like earthquakes and the region’s current drought. There’s also the escalating geopolitical tension between China and Taiwan, as well as the U.S.-China trade war.

    “Every aspect of defense, intelligence, government operations is becoming more digital,” Gelsinger said. “And we want to rely on foreign technology for those critical aspects of our defense and national security? I don’t think so.”

     

    Apple mostly helps to grow the industries in China...

    https://www.apple.com/supplier-responsibility/pdf/Apple-Supplier-List.pdf

    https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/China-tech/China-ousts-Taiwan-as-Apple-s-biggest-source-of-suppliers

    Quote

    The number of Apple's U.S.-based suppliers has dropped as well, to 32 last year from 37 in 2017. Most of those remaining -- such as 3M, Corning, Micron, Lumentum and Qualcomm -- supply high-value semiconductors and materials that are difficult to replace.

     

    ...and of course the creative "industry" and mindnumbing consumerism in the West, increasing "quality of life".

    Not to belittle anyone's productive endeavors on their Macs but computers are far more important than any number of concrete tasks you're using them to do today.

  9. 5 minutes ago, Nick Blanc said:

    Well, I don't really see a solution to the driver problem. Apart from buying a new interface, which is not going to happen. And weird that I did'nt have those issues with my old PC. And I already connected the interface to a dedicated USB connection on the motherboard. First thing I did.

    It is weird, but the driver could still be the culprit.

    Did you see that there are no other devices connected to the same hub?

  10. 2 hours ago, Carl Ewing said:

    Software developers got spoiled by the ever increasing speed, efficiency and lowered cost of CPUs / hardware. Why bother writing efficient software when the consumer can just keep updating their specs?

    With regard to performance, application developers tend to aim for the low-hanging fruit; if it runs, it's good enough. User feedback likely confirms it is good enough, and by good enough I only mean it doesn't generate waves of negative feedback (it may still be a garbage fire of sloppily coded bloat, but statistically it appears to be doing its thing). This approach was easier to justify in single-task/single-purpose systems.

     

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth's_law

    Quote

    Wirth attributed the saying to Martin Reiser, who in the preface to his book on the Oberon System wrote: "The hope is that the progress in hardware will cure all software ills. However, a critical observer may observe that software manages to outgrow hardware in size and sluggishness." 

    Other observers had noted this for some time before; indeed, the trend was becoming obvious as early as 1987.

     

     

     

    Timestamped to the relevant part towards the end, but the whole rant is hilarious.

     

  11. 35 minutes ago, Kevin Perry said:

    Apparently they've already tried then backtracked.  But it would stop existing license holders not creating new plugins in VST2 format and (potentially - IANAL) not releasing updates to existing ones.

    Where can I read about this?

    Just going by intuition, as IANAL, BUT (see what I did there)... Plugin vendors have been selling perpetual licenses to consumers and professionals. If their licenses were effectively revoked, they could sue the vendors. The vendors would file a class-action lawsuit against Steinberg. Steinberg is based in Germany. EU laws are fairly pro-consumer. License terms are not above the law. For Steinberg there would be virtually nothing to gain and everything to lose, so in conclusion I think this scenario is paranoia and not reality.

  12. I am also mad that this person stole my idea. The fact that I never even told anyone about this idea and what I was going do to with it, only makes this look more sinister as now I'm thinking some type of black magic was probably used to extract the information from my brain. At least a year ago this idea came* to me that I could just scrape this forum for price history and draw some simple graphs to help in purchase decision making, as I was not excited about implementing any combination of AI & webcrawling and this is the only place I check for deals anyway. I didn't actually do anything with the idea, possibly because the same black magic used for stealing the idea was used to steal my incredible productivity and industriousness, turning me into a lazy sloth. Many red flags about this new site and its creator... Proceed with caution.

    * I stole it from IsThereAnyDeal and the dozen other similar aggregators.

    • Haha 1
  13. 25 minutes ago, JoeGBradford said:

    Can we have a truce now guys please? 

    Just for the record:  In nothing I said did I mean disrespect for the person, and nobody has offended me. If I told you your shoes were unlaced, you'd either agree or disagree, then choose to tie them or not, and go on with your day without feeling insulted. That's how I see it.

  14. 7 hours ago, cclarry said:

    People spend far too much time trying to establish their own intellectualj
    superiority, rather than actually trying to understand what it is that people are saying, and why! 

    This is a catch-all - you could use it as an argument for typing in all caps, dropping all punctuation, violating every possible grammatical rule etc., if one just feels so, the words are identifiable English and the intended meaning can be derived from the [con]text with any imaginable effort. In essence, the writer puts the bare minimum effort into making themselves understood while expecting the reader to compensate by putting in extra effort. By implication, the writer places that much more value on their own time than the reader's, and the disproportion only gets grosser when you're writing to a larger audience because you're now multiplying the extra work required to patch up one person's sloppy work. If that isn't entitlement, then what?

     

    7 hours ago, cclarry said:

    expecting people to use literary
    conventions that most Rhode Scholars would have a hard time following, in typing out
    their random thoughts, on the Internet, usually hurriedly, is the epitome of condescension and virtue signaling!

    I can't relate to that because it's not in proportion to what has been discussed (basic common courtesies), and I've not been virtue signaling at all. In any case, I will take your feedback as proof that I'm not communicating as clearly as I imagined.

    You too should take my criticism as constructive - I was only using it to illustrate something in trying to answer your question "Who made these rules?" by going into why they exist. Just in case I came off as condescending (and all that jazz); I don't have any gripe with you and no intellect could possibly compete in value with your contributions to the forum. I've seen you not holding back punches when expressing your own opinions here, and it's something I respect. I can only hope we can continue to give & take and shrug it off. Water under the bridge.

    • Like 1
  15. 6 minutes ago, cclarry said:

    You are most certainly entitled to "your opinion"

    Just to clarify, the important thing here is how our conduct makes impressions and evokes feelings and associations in other people.

    If I have any opinion on the matter, then it is that, there's a relatively lax range of acceptable behavior between the extremes when it comes to balancing things like action vs. inhibition, extraversion vs. introversion, speaking vs. listening, exerting influence vs. adapting, etc., that working out how close to me you'll stand if we're talking, how and when to interrupt - and generally; how do we maintain the balance so that we're both satisfied - is so easily achievable when certain compromises are made that demanding that effort from others is easily justifiable (and it is on average easily achievable specifically because human behavior itself defined the acceptable norms). I also like hopping in my car knowing everyone else on the road will be driving on the right lane (and we all know that the right lane is the right lane, so if you're from UK, Australia, Mozambique, or some such... get bent), so I don't have to stress about some non-conformist crashing into me just to express their sovereignty.

    That opinion has little (not nothing) to do with how breaking of certain social rules makes me feel. Just like if you suddenly walk up to me in the street and punch me in the face, it just feels uncomfortableOr if you emphasize too many words in your writing, you effectively de-emphasize your whole message because that's how my brain's heuristics respond to the discomfort. That's not my opinion, that's just a description of reality.

    • Like 1
  16. 1 hour ago, cclarry said:

    CAPS, when typing, is commonly believed to be the same as "yelling".  However, some use it
    for EMPHASIS, and not yelling.  But this creates confusion because the person typing believes
    that they are using CAPS for added emphasis, but the person reading interprets that as "Yelling"
    and "Anger".

    Fakebook is a good example of this.  They don't allow "Bold" or "Italics" so, if one wants to add
    "emphasis" then you have no choice but to use CAPS.  Then others believe you are YELLING because
    of the "stigma" of CAPS being most often referred to as being the equivalent of YELLING. 

    Who made these rules?

    The rules weren't made - they emerged from the underlying social norms applying themselves to the new medium, and reflect the consensus. If you think differently and don't conform, people will perceive you as being impolite, awkward and/or aloof, and be annoyed with how you present yourself. It can't be that alien of a concept to anyone cultured enough to be blending in in civilized society where conforming to surrounding culture and abiding by social contracts is crucial for getting along and going forward.

    People are much better at reading the context than you (seem to) think. Generally they can tell whether using caps signifies agitation or emphasis.

    The problem with adding emphasis to every other word is that you lose the effect from overuse and end up sounding agitated. For instance, you emphasized "caps" by capitalizing it a total of four times and "yelling" twice, and in four out of six instances it was totally pointless. You also used quotes to put emphasis on "emphasis" the second time, even though no emphasis is needed and the quotes are completely out of place. You also quoted and capitalized "bold" and "italics", effectively adding awkward double-emphasis (I know it wasn't the intention, but by then you'd already set up the context for this interpretation), and you also randomly capitalized "yelling" once.

    I'm not even nitpicking, it is just tedious to parse. When there's so much irregularity jumping out from the text, I feel the temptation to skim it from start to finish by jumping from emphasis to emphasis instead of reading it thoughtfully, and in the end it indeed gives the impression of agitation, because I've never met one person whose words were so drenched in wisdom that their delivery would require so much emphasis. I wish I could say I've never met one person who would be so stupid that the emphasis was actually necessary, but that's not quite true. They're not here though.

    • Like 2
  17. 14 hours ago, Paul Young said:

    There was a developer who used the sounds in Kontakt to sell them as a refill.   After being caught one of the statements was "autism is a serious thing".  It's our nature when we are caught to always deflect.

    Intentional or not, that's genuinely funny. Succinct, suggestive and open-ended. There's just so many directions to go from here in speculating what kind of person is behind the statement and what were they thinking. Whether it's a childish impromptu lie, satire, one of those cases where reality is indistinguishable from parody, or a sociopath giving us the middle finger, it seems there's no uncomical way to interpret it.

     

    12 hours ago, bdickens said:

    Mental illness doesn't justify bad behavior.

    Right, and I'd go even further and say it doesn't automatically excuse it either. When you deal with people - business or not - you don't dump on them just because you got a bad dice roll. I'll cut you some slack according to your personal shortcomings but I will also expect you to own it and not presume on my hospitality.

  18. On 1/19/2022 at 11:51 PM, James Foxall said:

    ...and Wusik will spam you into the ground.

     

    12 hours ago, Paul Young said:

    He also likes to flaunt his mental illness whatever it is for sympathy.  It's the net you can be anything you want to be.

     

    These are the things that rub me the wrong way about this guy.

    During the end of the year sales circus the spamming got ridiculous, he makes a lot of noise about nothing.

    The mental illness (bipolar) part is a double-edged sword for me. On one hand being open about such things could take courage and sincerity which is respectable, on the other you may come off as whiny and make everyone uncomfortable. It's a private matter and begs the question; why are you making it a public matter? It's especially bad when you're handling stuff meant to be shared with your family, friends or a therapist, in public and to an audience that are essentially [potential] customers of your company and thus confound your private and public personas with your business entity. It could end up having a negative effect on everything you represent - a totally unnecessary risk you didn't need to take. Which brings me to the reasoning behind choosing to take it, namely that it seems the personal problems are used to publicly excuse [in]actions of the company. In summary, unprofessionalism shines through.

    I feel dirty just talking about this stuff because I have no reason to doubt his diagnosis and I feel for him. But I'm as confounded as anyone with regard to where the person ends and the business begins, so let it be an example of the dangers of shoddy PR.

    • Like 1
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