yeah, I agree. It feels pretty rough to me. On older feature phones, you could accelerate this with a right arrow key which would lock to the key for key duplicates like 'cc' in success. Definitely feels like this needs a dedicated key for doing that
Just tried it out, how do you accelerate disambiguating a double key 'nn' in 'dinner' vs alternate? This doesn't feel very usable compared to the existing keyboard to me
> Between 2018 and 2022, 57 of the sensors in the Berkeley Environmental Air Quality and CO2 Network (BEACO2N) recorded a small but steady decrease in CO2 emissions
Convenient date range considering the global pandemic and WFH shift …
The paper[1] goes into this in more depth. COVID was definitely a factor, but not the only one. For example if you look at the YOY comparisons, both halves of 2021 hadlower emissions YOY than 2020. The H1 decrease you can blame on the COVID lockdowns that lasted until May. But by July 2020 everyone who was going to WFH was WFH, and by July 2021 many people who were WFH in 2020 were commuting again.
I only read the headline and was feeling justified purchasing 3000 pounds of globally mined steel, aluminum, rubber, plastic, graphite, copper, nickel, manganese and cobalt.
You can feel good. the carbon debt from manufacturing is amortized over the life of the car. As long as the car is driven more than 19,000 miles, EVs are better.
I have been surprised that environmental activists haven't protested return-to-office policies for the incident increase in pollution. Seems like there is very little data backing up RTO other than commercial real estate sunk costs, and loads of costs like lost time commuting, energy used to commute, emissions due to traffic, etc.
I know of one huge international pharma company with a site in South SF that is reducing conference attendance with the stated purpose of reducing emissions, while simultaneously requiring all employees to be on-site 3 days a week regardless of job function (yes, lab workers have to be in the lab for their work, but plenty of positions spend most of their time on video calls with other sites in Sweden, Netherlands, England, China, India...)
Wfh sure seems like a negative in terms of measured economic activity - less gas buying, fewer coffee and lunch purchases and happy hours, and or course depressed commerical real estate, all leading to lower tax in take. Happy to see the political upside.
Perhaps I’m an outlier here, but doesn’t this feel a bit exaggerated? I’m not sure why the author (or, for that matter HN in general) feels so strongly about this. In the end, everyone was made whole. VCs acted in the best interest of the companies they back, and SVB made some really poor decisions which caused them to implode. What exactly is the story here?
Some misguided people thinking tech startups are supposed to care more about maintaining the stability of the banking sector over whether they can pay their employees next week.
Interestingly enough nobody is blaming politicians and/or the Fed for causing all this in the first place. I mean, I get that tech and VC money in particular benefitted hugely from the zero interest rate environment in 2011~2021, but still, I fail to see where the moral obligations come from.
if you're into this I highly recommend checking out Bob Grieb's work[1]. He has reversed MCUs on many vintage synths and has a website dedicated to his explorations. Really impressive stuff...
Disagree hard - every major label I follow is embracing TikTok and encouraging their artists to leverage the platform for growth. Also, labels have so much infrastructure for marketing, merch, booking shows etc. The need for this support doesn’t magically go away with new distribution channels. It just helps newer artists get signed quicker :p
I didn't say that labels don't use TikTok, so you're disagreeing with nothing. What I said, was that labels don't have any legitimate value in a TikTok era, because there's nothing that they can do which an independent artist can't do on their own.
> Also, labels have so much infrastructure for marketing, merch, booking shows etc.
No, they actually really, genuinely don't. They use the exact same channels that independent musicians do. Booking agencies, merch providers, publicists -- all of them are hirable by anyone, not just labels. Everything you think that labels do, they hire someone else to do that, and then tell you that they need to keep ownership of your music to recoup those costs. That is how the music industry has worked for a hundred years, and if you disagree with that, then go read literally any book on the subject.
c) Sometimes, you perception has limited you to choosing between two choices. Change your perception enough to see that there are always a multitude of choices. You may not want to pick the 3rd+ choice, but knowing that you made your choices freely allows you to own the choice and the outcome.
I think this piece is really about identity, and what happens when you establish and associate so deeply with an identity that when something challenges it (e.g. the passing of a job opportunity) it turns your world upside down. The author claims to have found peace in motherhood and that the job she was seeking wasn’t even that great, and perhaps the interviewers single minded, and maybe the entire process a little absurd.
What I find interesting about this is that looking through the lens of ones ego, this seems like the logical way you would cope with losing a job - just convincing yourself it wasn’t ever really what you wanted
It's definitely about identifying where they can slot into society, and what it even means to exist within one. It is also about discerning what pieces of society exist in a more grounded reality and which are part of the grander meta-society that we play the hierarchy games within. A professorship to her meant she had won one of the games. An achievement within the university meta-game, which was important to her but probably more relevant, others thought it was important too.
Making bread will be important for as long as we need food, but a university degree is only important while the society that regards them highly still exists in a particular configuration. She convinced herself at first that getting a professorship was important to her because it was important to the society she was taking part in, and when that society started to fall apart, suddenly the meta-game didn't seem so important.
I come from a really young country and so it's sometimes hard to take our little society seriously, it's more obvious that it is all made up and the pandemic has also made it feel pretty vulnerable and precarious. What good is a university degree when there are no jobs left to find it important?
I can be envious of countries with a long heritage that can make the rules of society feel far more permanent and grounded, like they were borne from history itself. But it's just a perception mostly. How I feel about it doesn't change what it is just whether I am willing to invest in playing.
I sometimes hear teacher friends blurt that they’re not sure their job has any meaning. And I kind of understand in that it is supposed to be a glorified role, and at the same time it may have no direct real world impact and just be imposed boredom on unwilling pupils.
But teaching at a uni for instance is a big deal career wise, identity wise. You end up doing something that you love ans bring some riches, but may not matter at all to those you teach, is highly seen from the rest of the world and becomes your whole value proposition to outsiders.
Compared to that, motherhood has exactly the opposite proposition (lowish social regard, super high impact on someone’s life) while not being so different fundamentally.
I'm tremendously grateful to all of my university teachers. Some more than others, but in general I consider my university education to be a transformative experience in my life.
I also do, but recognize that more than half of the stuff I did to get graduation credits where very boring.
Of course, we don’t know in advance what will resonate and what will fall into a mental pit, so it’s all after the fact evaluation and I don’t see my “boring” courses as universally boring to everyone.
But I definitely was phoning in these courses, and I hope my teachers had double good feedback from the other students, otherwise it could be a depressing situation.
There is a teacher I kept contact with way after entering working life, and it sure felt like there was a small core of us really really thankful, and a gigantic mass of students just sliding by to get a number on their yearly report.
The DX7 can lay claim to being one of the most important advances in the history of modern popular music. Perhaps not since Leo Fender attached a pick-up to a six-string in 1949
Statements like this are, exaggerated, to say the least. While the DX7 is undoubtedly prolific in 80s pop, it was just a synth that was successful for its price point (and timing!) as called out in the article. Case in point that today, nearly all the major manufacturers are building re-issues and the most coveted are those the analog counterparts of the Dx-7 (the sequential prophets, Oberheims, ARP...). FM has no way succeeded the typical subtractive synthesis of the analog machines.
source: I write 80s influenced music and collect synths
The DX series is having a bit of a revival: Yamaha's Reface, Korg's Volca, and a few others. The DX are also in demand again: not so long ago I bought a TX7 for around $75, now they sell for $350. The DX100/DX27 is also desired by quite a few, it seems.
There are multiple reasons, I think:
- analog got popular again because bands started using it again when the prices dropped (due to digital tech, of course)
- classic synths are vulnerable, making them decent investement objects, thus pushing the price, and making them more coveted than they deserve
- that left only cheap digital synths for players bands without money, much like the 303, 808 and 909 back in the day (speaking of synths that changed music...)
- which makes them desirable for the trend-followers, like analog 10 years ago.
- the DX series fits better in modern music than something like the early Roland romplers with their super-cheesy sound.
How do you get good bells and brass or as punchy bass sounds from subtractive-only synthesis?
"According to Dave Smith, founder of the synthesizer company Sequential, 'The synthesizer market was tiny in the late 70s. No one was selling 50,000 of these things. It wasn't until the Yamaha DX7 came out that a company shipped 100,000-plus synths'"
> How do you get good bells and brass or as punchy bass sounds from subtractive-only synthesis?
Quick answer: modulation (primarily oscillator modulation but also filter and amplitude modulation.)
Analog brass is great already, but for metallic (or sometimes woody) sounds oscillator sync, cross modulation and/or analog FM, and ring modulation are your friends.
You can also get some pretty jarring sounds out of pulse width modulation, some tinkly bells out of sine and triangle waves, and "punchy" basses out of square and sawtooth waves. I hear a lot of pretty raw sawtooth-derived basslines and leads. Stacked waves of different shapes can also be interesting.
It also depends on your oscillators. Many subtractive synths will feature analog filters attached to flexible oscillators that can generate waves other than classic waveforms.
Are there any reasons to use a full synth these days? I'm not a musician but I've been dabbling in digital audio on and off and I really like the sound quality of sampled instruments especially for Piano. I haven't used the original DX7 only a VST (Dexed) for it.
Physical synths are great because they have knobs and are great for real time tweaking along with playing. Also, some people enjoy some of the "special sauce" that analog synths have due to their imperfect nature.
...with that said: the DX7 is digital, and its UI/UX sucks. It has only buttons and menus, so no realtime control, and it's a bit unpleasant to use IMO. There used to be an external programmer unit with knobs but I never saw one in the flesh.
So, your VST is light-years better in terms of both UI/UX and sound due to better anti-aliasing filters and probably new features. Another good option if you enjoy the DX7 sound is the Native Instruments FM7.
If you want to experiment with a real analog synth may I suggest something in the subtractive synthesis family? Something Moog-ish is a great start! Behringer makes some very affordable ones!
I much prefer using the Dexed VST software based synth for recording over a DX7. The sound is hard to tell apart, the DX 7 doesn’t have a good surface for programming, has a crappy midi implementation, and doesn’t integrate into a DAW as well as a plugin. Since the DX7 is digital anyway, you also don’t loose much real or perceived “analog warmth”.
Disclosure/shameless self-brag: I wrote the original synthesizer engine that became Dexed, though the team has moved it forward in lots of important ways. I did careful reverse engineering of an actual DX7 II, including disassembling its ROM, so the fact that it matches well should not be surprising.
You deserve a lot of praise for your engine! And the reverse engineering leading to full patch compatibility is one of the real gems about Dexed. And therefore it becoming arguably the unofficial official editor and librarian software for the DX7.
I hope you got some satisfaction out of the fact that 2020 seemed to be a real renaissance year for Dexed. It’s been at or near the top of every list of free plugins I’ve seen or watched, so your work from a long time ago keeps bearing lots of musical fruit!
Computers still can’t handle the style of complex analog FM synthesis that people do with “eurorack” style modular synthesizers. You can approach it with software like https://vcvrack.com, but it will start to stutter out quickly even on a fast computer, and introduces artifacts if you are modulating with high frequencies.
Well, VCV rack is far from the definitive solution here. There are commercial alternatives like Reaktor which are much more powerful. Reaktor is powerful to a fault, you might say, but if you are running into limitations with VCV Rack then something like Reaktor is the obvious upgrade.
As an analogy, if VCV Rack is like a Unix shell that lets you pipe programs, then Reaktor is like a C compiler.
Or Bitwig where you can integrate your physical Eurorack modules or other voltage controlled analog synths and build any synth or effects unit you want from small building blocks with Grid.
