kingrolo's comments

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.

You might like Scaler 2 https://www.scalerplugin.com/

It isn't really for learning theory but more for wielding it to write chords.

I use it as a VST in Ableton but you can use it standalone.

I also started learning piano as an adult around 6 years ago and have mostly been trying to use it to understand the theory to compose and improvise rather than perform. The more theory I learnt the more bits of Scaler made sense and I think half recognising concepts from Scaler as my piano teacher was explaining them at the piano was a help.

Also one other thing that I want to stress as I see it - some of theory is based on fundamental truths to do with clashing frequencies but also some of it is just trying to put a framework around what we already know sounds good, and the ultimate rule for music I think is, if it sounds good, it is good. Good luck!

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.

MUD2, the next incarnation of the MUD by Bartle and Trubshaw mentioned in the article is still running and free to play (I believe), http://mud2.com/. I played it on and off from 1994 to 1999 or so. If your character was killed in combat you died dead dead and had to start all over again which made it feel very high stakes when you could spend months building a character only to have to start again.

I decided the only way I'd get it out of my system was to make Wizard which I did eventually (that was quite the phone bill) and I stopped playing a little while later. I've never really got into another online game since.

I seem to remember some gaming service in the UK trying to make a client for MUD2 with some graphics to try and give it more mainstream appeal. It didn't really work. I do remember the conversation of "I wonder if it's possible to make a MUD but with graphics?" came up in the teamroom chatter from time to time.

Now my kids play Roblox, which is also kind of amazing in its own very different way. It has the social element of a MUD (although my kids mostly know the people they play with in real life first), and its a gateway to programming, but all the experiences are far more lightweight and short lasting whereas I think the land of MUD2 has left some kind of lasting impression with me.

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.

Django Developer - REMOTE but bonus points if you can get to London sometimes.

Wildfish - https://wildfish.com

We're a London based consultancy who work exclusively with Django. We're looking for a full stack developer to join us permanently but will consider freelancer too.

Primarily you'll be working on our client sites maintaining and developing Django web applications and mobile APIs, but also working on some of our own products and open source work.

Everyone in our organisation is technical, all of us working remotely, although it's handy if you're within distance of London for meetings occasionally. We're ideally looking for someone in the UK, but will possibly consider someone overseas with excellent English in a similar timezone.

Some of the things we use, which it would be good for you to know some of:

- Python/Django [Essential]

- HTML/CSS/Javascript [Essential]

- React

- PostgreSQL

- Docker/Kubernetes

- Ubuntu Linux Server Admin

You'll need to be able to work autonomously, so it's important that you're the sort of person who has attention to detail and can be self motivated. The most important thing is that you must be passionate about your craft, and eager to share and learn with others who feel the same.

Please email [email protected], including the salary or rate you're looking for, along with a list of 3 Django apps you like to use in projects, and a link to any code you have available online. Thanks.

I really enjoyed this book for RL. https://www.packtpub.com/gb/big-data-and-business-intelligen...

If you learn well from videos many rave about the free fast.ai courses which now use PyTorch I believe. Seems to start with image classification. http://fast.ai

* NO AGENCIES OR RECRUITERS PLEASE *

Wildfish - https://wildfish.com

We're a London based consultancy who work mainly with Django.

We're looking for a full stack developer to join us, ideally permanently but will consider freelance too. Primarily you'll be working on our client sites maintaining and developing Django web applications and mobile APIs, but also working on some of our own products and open source projects (https://github.com/wildfish/).

Everyone in our organisation is technical, all of us working remotely, although it's handy if you're within distance of London for meetings occasionally. We're ideally looking for someone in the UK, but will possibly consider someone overseas with excellent English in a similar timezone. Some of the things we use, which it would be good for you to know some of:

- Python/Django [Essential]

- HTML/CSS/Javascript [Essential]

- Twitter Bootstrap

- React / React Native

- PostgreSQL

- Ubuntu Linux Server Admin

- Docker

- AWS, GCE, Kubernetes

The most important thing is that you must be passionate about your craft, and eager to share and learn with others who feel the same. You'll need to be able to work autonomously, so it's important that you're the sort of person who has attention to detail and can be self motivated.

Please email [email protected], including the salary or rate you're looking for, along with a list of 3 Django apps you like to use in projects, and a link to any code you have available online. Please also mention if you have any interest in cryptocurrency.

Thanks :)

Wow, I'd never heard of that. Looks really interesting!

I'll just piggy back this comment to add that there's a whole world of milk alternatives too if you're worried about the ethics and don't like soy.

I'm not keen on soy but use coconut milk. Others I know prefer almond milk or oat milk. Probably took about 3 weeks to get used to but now I definitely prefer it.

Google Container Engine supports cluster autoscaling to automatically add nodes with load. It's listed as a beta feature though.

I've tried most of the Docker orchestration offerings and Container Engine seems by far the nicest. Swarm and Compose are really simple for getting up and running, but when we evaluated them there was still a missing piece required in that there was no neat way to do zero downtime deployments.

There's a tool called Kompose to convert docker-compose config to kubernetes manifests (https://github.com/kubernetes-incubator/kompose) although whilst it's nice to get you started we tend to maintain them separately now.

docker-compose is really straightforward to get running, even moreso with docker-machine, and it gives you dev/prod parity, but the downside is that there's not a built in way to do zero downtime deploys.

Systop of Overdose BBS, sometime around 1993/94. I was 13 or 14 years old.

From a look at a list of software on Wikipedia I think we were running Remote Access (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RemoteAccess). I remember hooking up a Fido mail feed which fetched email at 5am every day towards the end of things, and playing a Mud (Mud 2) and Lord.

Crazy to think how far things have moved on in 20 years.

Django Tech Lead at Wildfish (http://wildfish.com) | London | UK applicants only. Mostly remote, but some London meetings.

We're a London based consultancy specialising in building web apps for startups using Django.

We're looking for a Technical Lead. You'll need to be someone who is an enthusiastic and experienced hands on developer when required, but also comfortable managing and scheduling a team of developers and their workload, and happy to be a point of contact for the client or product owner for your team's projects. You'll need to be able to work autonomously so it's important that you're the sort of person who has attention to detail.

We all work remotely via Slack, but we'll need you to be in or near to close enough to London to come in for meetings as required.

Everyone in our organisation has a background in code so it's at the core of our organisation, so we'd like you to be someone who is passionate about their craft, and eager to share and learn with others who feel the same. We'd encourage you to be contributing to our open source projects and blogging as a regular part of your work.

Some of the skills which would be useful:

- Python / Django

- Ubuntu Server Administration (AWS / Linode / Docker)

- Project Management

- HTML / CSS / Javascript

- React (plus npm, browserify and associated JS tooling)

- Twitter Bootstrap

- PostgreSQL, Redis, Nginx, Elasticsearch

- Testing / TDD

- Docker / Ansible / Terraform

We've also recently finished a couple of projects in React Native, so any interest or experience in that would be a bonus. Please email [email protected], and let us know 3 of your favourite Django apps along the salary or rate you're looking for. As this is a fairly key position ideally we're looking for someone permanent but we'll also consider someone who might like to freelance to start with.

I've probably had some 50 nodes with Linode over the last 7ish years. Until about 2 years ago I would enthusiastically recommend them to anyone who would listen, but I've found the service has slipped massivel over the last couple of years and now we're trying to migrate people away. We have about 10 nodes left now and blips of lost connectivity and hardware failures are common unfortunately, and the feeling I get from their support team is that this is just to be expected now.