ABACUSYNTH by ELIAS JARZOMBEK [2022]

Item: Abacus Harmonic Generator

I went looking for more information (mainly hardware and firmware specs), and I found some impressive additions the inventor released!

Do you want to play with this? They released a web version with a number of options, and are you a digital musician who uses a DAW like Ableton to craft your tracks? yeah, they made a plugin version with some sweet automation guides for you to use.

Not to be pedantic, but it would be more like "hoy? Hoy? Uh-huuy??" because Bell thought the proper introduction on the phone should be "Ahoy!" (in fact that was the very first word spoken on the phone), and later shortened it to a "less" formal "hoy!", or possibly "ho!", unlike Edison who thought it should be "Hello", which became informally "hullo", only because he wanted something that ran counter to Alexander Graham Bell.

Hello at the time was a mark of exclamation or surprise, such as "Hello(‽!!) what have we here?", not as an introductory phrase. It only took on a greeting when Edison wrote that it was the "customary" and recommended ordinary greeting in the first phone books....

Sembalun Village, East Lombok, West Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia.

— The Brass’s Take on the Shake Up at WaPo

People love drama, and trump exploits that as far as he can, but that's what you get from electing an old reality television star.

The American people wanted someone who could keep them on the edge of their seats and play sportsball vicariously through politics and people's lives. Consequences be dammed. The farthest of them wanted him to accelerate the end of society, and bring forth the rapture and the gift of "heavenly immortality" free from the "apparent evils" of our society and others were in hopes he would help accelerate society to the end so that it could be rebuilt from scratch.

Dramatic Accelerationism will be the philosophy of our times, and they pinned their hopes and dreams on a man with a legacy of conning the public, history of bankruptcies, and the drama of a horribly edited reality television show to broadcast the end of the world. Don't forget about the racism and vitriol he threw into the mix, the wish of Dramatic Accelerationism is to create both a caste system and an anarachic society that will be dominated by the worst society has to offer.

But, I think this reign of terror had the opposite effect, his presidency, and conspiracies, and general stupidity of management, didn't lead to the breakdown of society, but it did express the holes in our electoral system, and brute-forced decades of changes into a very small timescale to be fixed.

The American public on the other side is exhausted, tired, and immune to his toddler-like shenanigans, and just generally we burnt out. Just as we are burnt out from overworking and not enough health resources, we are burnt out on extravagant tantrums and vitriol. Some are still addicted to it, as anger is a dangerous stimulant, but as we know you can't keep the habit up without dying or giving up.

The Biden presidency has surprisingly been very effective on their domestic policy, far more than I believe any president since FDR. But they are boring, they don't do well on their marketing front, making inroads with media, or just general propaganda. As much as I detest marketing, I think they could do a lot better. They keep things very minimal and out of the public view, and while I do think this has been a deliberate thing, I think it's a poor choice, but obviously some strategy exists and they are keeping it that way. I don't know why, but perhaps it's because they know we are too burnt out to keep track of everything and requiring everything to become armchair experts in a flash.

As said, the philosophy of our times will come down to the philosophy of Dramatic Accelerationism and the philosophy behind the work ethic result we call "Burnt Out". They are linked, and it's going to be a long time before either of them work their way out of our system as a society.

having an online persona is kind of funny bc you post abt something like twice and suddenly that’s the only thing ur known for...u post about cheese a couple times and suddenly ur the cheese mutual

ok new ask game what mutual am i

I have four legacies, some I am known for and get messages that I never publish about, and one that is still known. I hope I'm more known for my love for technology, science, and robotics, but the following will likely be my permanent legacy:

Kind of astonishing what movies I later find out to have been flops. Like apparently Scott Pilgrim vs. The World lost huge amounts of money; this in spite of the fact that the theatre was packed the night I saw it and everyone in my social circle quoted it constantly and it got an anime spinoff with the original cast, most of whom had become quite famous, 13 years later.

Don't forget about the award-winning video game that came out directly after, and kept being re-released due to how popular it was.

You should never create anything with a wide audience in mind. The so-called "general audience" doesn't exist; it's a fiction made up by advertising executives. Most of the time, great art and literature is made with the intention of pleasing no more than 4 or 5 specific perverts of the author's acquaintance

In the tech and startup world we've had a pseudo-mantra for the past twenty years that says "do things that don't scale", meaning you should focus on projects and ideas that you know would not scale well as they become too intense, or should be impossible to manage past a certain point.

Ideas and projects "that can't scale" are the very ideas that you can become an expert in and do well that others will toss aside from their mind because it "can't be possible" to do for the most people possible, because those are the ideas that do end up working out better than the broader, more generic, ideas out there.

In the music world (especially punk and electronica circles) there's another saying that was most perfectly said by Mudhoney in their 2012 documentary "I'm Now: the Story of Mudhoney", and sampled most recently in this excellent cyberpunk EDM track by Hyper:

Writing, like startups and music, is supposed to be about experimenting with new ideas, so do it. There are people out there who only make the most mass-market things as possible, but those are forgettable and without any soul or creativity. Do things that don't scale, don't play for the crowd, and don't make things for a broad general audience. You'll have more fun that way too.

In the 1960s, NASA had a bunch of dummies working to bring humans to space. Well, it was just two dummies, really. Each ‘Power Driven Articulated Dummy’ was a 230-pound robot that NASA engineers designed to test space suits. One of the dummies now resides at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, and the other was auctioned off.

Popular Science wrote about the dummies back in 1967. Controlled by an operator and driven by a circulatory system of oil inside tubes, each android could mimic 35 human movements, from arm and hand flexing to twisting at the waist. [x]

#i think this is the scariest fucking robot ive ever seen#like its not even the uncanny valley hes just fucked up like that.#like no bro. no thank you. this literally looks like a coilhead from lethal company irl. lets not.#the way its stanced in that first image. actual horror game render type shit#this actually looks like a rotting robot. like a robots corpse decomposing as flesh would. the petrified remains of a machine.#the way its head is literally visibly floating above the stump of its neck fucks me up

I think they're beautiful and perfect, and also that no horror movie could ever make something so terrifying to slowly exact their revenge on their creators for giving them a form in the mortal plane.

Kaplan Turbine being lowered into place at Bonneville Dam, circa 1937

I am not able to directly confirm, but this is possibly, the same Kaplan Turbine after 61 years in service at the same location (they had ten of them installed between 1933 and 1937).

Electricity at this location powers 500,000 homes at the moment, was created by FDR to stop the creation of private energy monopolies, and was opened as a public electric power source. This is considered one of the greatest depression-era engineering projects.

These type of turbine heads can range from 10 to 70 metres (33 to 230 ft) so these can get pretty large.

The Art of Computer Designing

- a book by Osamu Sato published in 1993 - The computer is a magic box. Many graphic images are hidden inside it. […] This is an everyday guide to computer illustrating, a collection of design ideas and a compendium of Mr. Sato’s own computer art works. […] Just looking at the myriad manifestations of form is a joy, but for those who will use it to begin creating their own shapes this book offers far, far greater pleasure.

I've reblogged this before, but I finally spent the time to quickly flip through the book (use the link above!). This feels like a grimoire, or spellbook, of a technoshaman from an ancient society. I've included a screenshot of his explanation below:

Continue Reading.

An alternate theory to dark matter is MOND (for short), which suggests that gravity acts differently at far distances like the edge of galaxies. But analyzed data from the death of the Saturn Cassini probe didn't act as the MOND theory suggests.

Never particularly been a fan of MOND, and still reasonably sure that 'dark matter' is the informational density of the universe, the data that surrounds us and verifies the information of our reality.

Just realized that if Sony ends up buying Paramount (as it seems likely), they will end up with the Star Trek IP which means two possible things:

Anime is great for creating non-canon (and experimental canon) works, imagine:

So many possibilities to torture our favorite characters and world. We could learn so much about the culture outside of what goes on in the ships, we could have dedicated characters and stories from all areas of the universe.

PSA: Don't use Open Office

I keep seeing people recommending Open Office as an alternative to Word, and uh... look, it is, technically, an open source alternative to Word. And it can do a lot of what Word can, genuinely! But it is also an abandoned project that hasn't been updated in nine years, and there's an active fork of it which is still receiving updates, and that fork is called LibreOffice, and it's fantastic.

Seriously, if you think that your choices are either "grit your teeth and pay Microsoft for a subscription" or "support free software but have a kind of subpar office suite experience", I guarantee that it's because you're working with outdated information, or outdated software. Most people I know who have used the latest version of LibreOffice prefer it to Word. I even know a handful of people who prefer it to Scrivener.

Open Office was the original project, and so it has the most name recognition, and as far as I can tell, that's really the only reason people are still recommending it. It's kind of like if people were saying "hey, the iPhone 14 isn't your only smart phone option!" but then were only ever recommending the Samsung Galaxy S5 as an alternative. LibreOffice is literally a version of the same exact program as Open Office that's just newer and better – please don't get locked into using a worse tool just because the updated version of the program has a different name!

Even, I, someone who loves LibreOffice to the end of the earth, sometimes confuses Open vs Libre. I was there when the war was waged between the two nine or ten years ago, but we should all be happy that Libre won out.

Seriously, Libre is fantastic and in many cases it has more features that actually matter + doesn't track you or try to force you to upload to a cloud every second it can.

There are so few compatibility issues between LibreOffice and Microsoft it's insane. They have done absolutely fantastic work.

LibreOffice isn't just Word (Writer), it's also Excel (Calc), PowerPoint (Impress), and more including Draw (for diagrams), Base (Database), and a dedicated program for Charts.

man the raspberry pi 3 really isn't happy being a desktop system. I haven't tried to use one as anything other than a headless compute box in years, the combination of cheap sd card flash, broadcom embedded GPU and pretty mid CPU cores really are bad tastes that taste bad together. There's core 2 duos with magnetic hard drives that feel snappier than this.

Yeah, worst part is that it's not even a great server either. It does work well in clusters, but that and the fact it destroys MicroSD cards is horrible and their heat production and overall degradation rate is abysmal. A cheap used, broken display, x220 runs better, but not as small ofc. The Raspberry Pi 4 isn't much better in these regards either. I tend to use them for the "brain" to my robotic systems for testing and connection of sensors, but even that I am currently working on something better from scratch with less memory but better consistency (offloading the harder computation to a central local "server" like a NUC).

NUCs are about (a little above) the same price point and give so much better power capabilities and handle so many things better.

need to fall down this rabbit hole immediately.

PLEASE listen to these fucking sounds (credit)

Oh shit that's so fucking cool. Those sounds are the actual "dead satellite" transmissions,

exactly what I imagined, beautiful

Yeah quiet quitting is great and all but have you tried chaotic working?

Like. I remember back in my grocery store cashier days I did so much crazy shit.

When WIC (Women, infants, and children voucher program to help low income mothers/families with children) people were in my line I would pretty much know who they were. Before the cards they had to tell us upfront they were WIC and show us their vouchers for what they were allowed to get (it was awful some times. Like. 2 gallons of milk. $4 worth of vegetables etc etc). They’d always have items hanging back, waiting to see what the total was and if they would have to take it off the belt.

I began to place the fruits/vegetables a certain way on the register scale so that like 1/2lbs of grapes read as like .28lbs or something. Then act shocked when I said that they still had X amount of lbs left. They got all their fruit and vegetables.

I think it started to kinda? Catch on to the women? Because I would have the same moms in my line month after month. And even after they switched to the cards (they worked like food stamp cards?) I’d still do the same thing. They were able to get more produce for whatever shitty max amount Indiana gave them.

Anyways. Be chaotic. It’s more fun that way.

Malicious compliance (and non-compliance) are incredibly vital as means of protection for consumers and the workers in the long run.

Source for the above via the IWW (International Workers of the World), they have a bunch on the history of strikes and different methods. Striking doesn't just mean picketing and a call to stop work.

Note (as always): Unions work, unionize.