Hope you managed to preserve these, I’d be keep to take a listen if they’re hosted online somewhere. I’ve been using renoise for 15 years on and off and while nowhere near 100s of tracks a month I fondly look back on the first year I used it similarly - that combination of youthful energy and tracker software is really something special. Renoise has come a long way and is a joy to use.
Alas most died on boxes of floppy discs which succumbed to a flood
I recently discovered some 50 odd floppies which survived, and a couple old 5" hard drives - so I'm hopeful! I assume most of the data will be pretty patchy by now (if not totally gone) but I'm gonna try some forensic recovery
If I manage I'll put the survivors somewhere for sure :)
Anywhere I can check out your renoise stuff? Always keen to find new stuff to boggle at
I had more than a hundred 5.25" floppies from the 1980s and I successfully recovered all but two of them thirty years later. It's definitely worth a try.
Same, I had several hundred 3.5" floppies from the 80s and they were all fine when I ripped them. I think double density might be more reliable than high density.
What sort of memories did you find? (if you don't mind sharing)
Also: any tips for recovery? I'm so far assuming I'll just get them nice and cool, then do multiple raw read passes so I can then choose the individual bits which are the same across most passes
Oh that woulda been a neat bit of time travelling, glad it worked out!
I'm quietly hoping I end up finding a bunch of my old x86 assembler projects in these discs (well - excited and a little scared... perhaps better through the rosy glasses of nostalgia)
The crazy thing to me is that you’re confused about this. These companies make huge margin fooling consumers who aren’t paying attention. Nearly all the consumers I know are barely conscious, the first promoted link on Amazon is the one they buy. Losing customers like you who actually inspect the listed price is a pittance to the Amazon machine.
How much time have you spent in physical stores observing the physically listed price per volume labels? These things are all labeled specifically to fool people who are alive but not conscious. Again, we are just a rounding error to these monoliths
It's absurd that you have to become a being of continuous price comparison in order to be considered conscious. This is predatory behaviour loaded with decades of psychological research around manipulation strategies to increase purchases (e.g. price anchoring, physical positioning on shelves, store layout).
These things only work because of innate human biases and cognitive defects. The idea that anyone less than a pure rational being lacks consciousness is just silly. There's a huge power imbalance which is systemically leveraged against the consumer and it's more useful to see this as a designed aspect of the system rather than the collective individual failures of "nearly all the consumers"
PS: Even the conscious consumers loose, as they spend a ton of time at minimum wage scrolling prices for goods and services. Basically, yes, you get pay less, but for that you have to work 24/7 in the mine-defusing sweatshop.
Feels like winning to me. Feeds into my hunter-gatherer complex and every cent I keep from them gives me great satisfaction. Though, you are right, it does get old but then my defiant and vengeful nature kicks me right back into.
I know it doesn’t matter to them, it matters to me and it’s a win and winners keep winning, right?
It’s a slog to do the “which one of these is least a ripoff” calculation, at the grocery store or online.
I try to do the calculation nonetheless. But every time I just need to buy some ordinary staple, I’m up against the Relentless Spirit of Pure Deception, who attempts an ever evolving and always brand new form of trickery, at every engagement.
Sometimes, I simply make the $1.00 donation to P&G or whoever just to avoid having to think of strategies to outsmart. This too feels terrible and exhausting in a different way.
> It’s a slog to do the “which one of these is least a ripoff” calculation, at the grocery store
Where I live price labels must carry the per liter or the per kilo price too. It's printed with a smaller font size but it's visible and it's often the only price I look at.
The unit price labels here in the US are hilariously messed up. The items you want to compare will be say, a pack of 6 granola bars or a 10 pack. The unit prices will be like:
#1: $0.37 / ounce
#2: $6.50 / pound
or even:
#3: $1.82 / each (a price per item)
This will even be common within the same exact brand too. The stores seem so bad at picking a consistent unit for a product category that it seems malicious, but it stretches my belief that they have the time to get it so wrong intentionally.
Sure but multiplying by ten to get the price per kilo shouldn't be the most complicated thing for even those folks that aren't math savy. It means to move the decimal point (or comma) one place to the right IIRC.
If you had to convert from arms to legs or feet like in certain areas of the world, that might be much harder, of course.
I prefer prices per 100g because I mostly buy food that's under one kilo. I'm sure they show prices per 100g just to make them look cheaper but in my case I actually prefer it this way.
It doesn't even matter what unit is chosen as long as it is kept the same across.
Comparing Smarties to M&Ms is super easy if both have to use price per pound, price per oz, price per g or price per kg. Who cares if the price per kg would be $0.031.as long as I can see it's $0.028 for the other for the same unit without doing math.
Comparable unit-pricing: A mandate brought to you by the European Union. You know, this allegedly evil entity that always hassles with the free market and annoys global companies. /s
Whilst I am waiting for my number in a chemist, I kill time by finding the highest price per litre. It's normally some anti-aging cream at well over €1000 / l.
It's malicious compliance. They probably wouldn't show anything other than the pack price if they had a choice, so there's something forcing them to show unit prices. So given that they have to show them anyway, they have an opportunity to inject profitable confusion.
"They probably wouldn't show anything other than the pack price if they had a choice"
The absolute dream would be to price it like health care. You only find out the price months or years after buying the item and multiple phone calls to clear up errors. And for one person it would be 50 cents and for another person 200 dollars.
I remember that around year 2000 a coworker from England told me that petrol pumps changed the prices from pounds per gallon to pounds per liter when the cost crossed the one pound mark. There is some malice in that too. Something like that could be the origin of using different units in those USA shops, not to cross some psychological threshold.
It's been a long time since I went to the UK so I can't say if petrol is really sold by the liters there. Maybe somebody from the UK could confirm or refute the tale. Anyway it's probably way more than one pound per liter now.
The UK switched from selling petrol in gallons to litres in the 1980s. I think I just about recall petrol prices suddenly changing dramatically when I was fairly young - I used to help my Dad keep records of how much fuel we'd bought at what price. I'd write down the figures in the book while he went to pay (it was always self-service) so I must have been old enough to be left alone for 5 minutes!
This Energy Institute statistical series - https://knowledge.energyinst.org/search/record?id=58969 - says that their records changed from "new pence per gallon" to "new pence per litre" at the start of 1989. That seems late for my recollection.
Looking back at historical data from https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/oil-and-..., it appears that the average price for "4 star" petrol (97 RON) crossed the £1 per gallon threshold some time in 1979 (Table 4.1.3, and multiply by 4.54609). I'm not old enough to remember that!
By 1989, prices were at 168.8 pence per litre (i.e. £1.68). So I think the story about the change being because it had gone over £1 per gallon has to be a myth. However, retailers certainly weren't complaining about the price displayed being less than one quarter of what it had been! In contrast, they were much less happy about prices per kilogram being more than twice the price per pound (weight).
Prices crossed £1 per litre for 'Premium Unleaded' (95 RON) in November 2007. They fell back below this level in November 2008 but went back up over it in June 2009.
The change-over was actually driven by the technology at the time - namely the outdoor road-facing price advertising panels, as well as many of the pump displays.
Simply - they were only designed to show 2 numbers so when the price-per-gallon exceeded 99 pence many had to stick a static "1" in front, and many point-of-sale terminals and cash registers couldn't handle it.
Since there are ~4.5 litres in a British gallon displaying pence-per-litre brought the displayed prices back to 2 digits and allowed for a gradual transition to 3 and 4 digit displays.
And yes, at the time the switch from pence-per-gallon to pence-per-litre occurred some retailers did take advantage to 'add some profit margin' but it wasn't universal.
Gallons are larger than litres, so in Canada you'll never find anything sold by the gallon. However, pounds are smaller than kilograms, so produce at the grocery store is commonly advertised with per-pound price, with the per-kilogram in small print.
It is, and everything is required to be sold in metric units. Except for things like pipe fittings and screw sizes, but even those have to show the metric somewhere.
There's an effort to switch car efficiency from mpg (higher is better) to "l/100km" (smaller is better), because the latter has more intuitive scaling as well as being properly metric.
There were definitely people complaining about the price hike when the currency changed, but that was back in 1971 so it's only boomers who'll bring it up.
Some pipes are in imperial units in Italy too. For example, from my memories of few days ago at a store: we have metric series of rigid PVC water pipes (32 mm, 40 mm, 50 mm) and imperial series for the flexible ones used for watering plants and grass. I remember sizes of 1/2" 3/4" 5/8" 1" 1 1/4". But there are also metric ones that more or less can fit with some of the imperial ones. Of course there are two series of adapters, hoses, etc.
Gas pipes are imperial. I think they never changed to metric because of safety concerns or because the number of meters sold is lower than water pipes (gas pipes last forever) and it's not worth splitting the market in two. But it's just my suppositions.
And I see there is a similar but less catchily-worded concept, "Hubbard's corollary" from 2020 mentioned in the Wikipedia entry for Hanlon's razor... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
I actually thought I made it up, and almost called it "Nerdponx's Razor", but I thought it would be arrogant to name it after myself. Hubbard can take the credit!
Oh, they have plenty of time to do it. We have created lots of MBAs...people who want to take advantage of their education, and to do so they want to squeeze a little more profit. And they're bored. And they need to stand out from their coworkers. Therefore 'price per net weight' becomes a thing. And Surge pricing.
(Peanutbutter M&Ms are an egregious example...the share bag price varies 20% depending on the calendar, as does Hilshire Farm Kielbasa...which now comes in 14 oz packages...which is a choice and means a family of 4 needs to buy two of them now to make a meal.)
it has to be intentional. almost any two products that you might want to compare are always using different units. haagan Daaz pints are always shown with different units than the larger haagan daaz.
They have to do that in the UK too, but unfortunately the law doesn't seem to standardise the unit for these comparison values(or it does and is ignored).
If you have two packs of coke cans next to each other, and one gives you a price per 100ml, and the other per can, it doesn't help that much(yes you could multiply the value per 100ml by around 3x, but at a glance the difference isn't obvious).
My store has a few different brands of coconut milk. Some of the unit prices are per pound, while others are per quart. I make the approximation that coconut milk has the same density as water, which is two pounds per quart. The unit prices are all odd three digits numbers. It's a pain.
You could have one person who works in an office somewhere who's responsible for itemizing inventory for the whole grocery chain. They could solve this problem (maybe automatically!) with a spreadsheet. They could also solve the problem of tomatillos not being registered in the self-checkout catalog. But what is that person's salary paying for in the company's eyes?
To be fair, maybe the real explanation is "lots of stuff, shit happens." And it's only a factor of two (for watery goods, anyway).
Where I live, labels get these price per amount labels...
But they don't keep the denominator consistent, even across the same category of product.
So I get to compare a price/oz, versus a price/lb versus a price/serving and all the while, I contemplate why nobody's interested in burning the whole store down.
My mum has told me about her shopping habits in the 70s, she would have a list of everything they needed, she would walk around the first shop writing all the prices down. She would walk around the second shop buying the items that were cheaper, then return to the first shop to buy what was cheaper there.
We will all end up having to walk around with an AI shopping assistant that can do all these pricing calculations and comparisons for us.-
(Other than biases, them AI's being "mindless" might be an advantage here ...)
PS. Until we go so so multimodal that they start to be influenced by packaging size, bright colors, rounding, and big breasts.-
PSS. Heh. Perhaps the ultimate Turing test is when them AI's start to be influenced by marketing, and shady practices thereof.-
If a company makes something like Meta's ray-ban smart glasses but with the one function of being an AI shopping assistant (preferably offline), it would instantly make the case for why AI is good for the world. I think it could quickly become an unicorn startup, if it can deliver.
The company would have to make a compelling case of not selling itself to brands, and I am not sure such a company exists. Maybe we need an open source project, but it will be constant battle as with ad blockers.
The base features we need are:
1) price comparison: scan all unit prices of products on the shelves, compare and covert, then use AR to superimpose the comparison charts/prices.
2) filter by feature: e.g. food restrictions (allergy, halal, etc.), flavors, etc.
3) ad block: for the real world. Block misleading prices (3 for the price of 2, etc.), to avoid being primed with biased triggers in our choices.
I was excited about the brief wave of startup grocery stores that were selling zero/minimally packaged staple goods, like “The Rounds.” But it seems like they’re just not able to hit a level of scale to where they can be price competitive with the sneaky dark patterned stores.
If by "these companies" you mean the third party suppliers, then sure, but Amazon obviously loses business when a customer can't trust the branded microphone cylinder they bought to place the desired order for them and make the program profitable. This is especially evident in the failure of Amazon's bid over the past decade to replace the big box supermarkets and grocers: clearly customers aren't pleased enough with the service quality to select it over physically picking their "essential goods" themselves, even when their probable prime subscription partially went to setting the system up. What good does Amazon get in hamstringing its own ability to acquire new markets in exchange for enriching someone else? The argument that they've arrived here out of some rational, intentional economic calculation that they can but choose not to change is clearly penny wise but pound foolish.
If you look at the list of top online stores after Amazon, many are brands with also physical stores. One would assume they are less shammy. I know if I go to a regular supermarket here, great effort has been spent by the buyers and the organization to ensure that everything is actually of decent quality. Even the cheapest alternatives. That cost of course I then have to pay in the price of the products.
I prefer not to buy things from unknown sellers which I can get from known sources. Sometimes you need something special like a car spare part that has local markup of 300% so then online is worth the risk (not safety critical parts).
I just don't understand the situation where a person decides to buy a regular product from an unknown seller, especially from a system that incentivizes something that is not in the interest of the buyer.
On the other hand, hearing you refer to the people you’ve met as “consumers” before criticizing them sounds pretty dehumanizing.
It leaves me wondering if you were able to connect with them on a personal level at all, or if perhaps you were also “barely conscious” during these interactions.
Yeah, but I don't know anyone that will just blindly order stuff from Amazon using Alexa like this. They all know that they have no idea what item will be shipped or what price they may be charged. So I'd argue that they are leaving money on the table from potential sales.
A nurse was unable to give my wife medication while in labor because the barcode on the bag of drugs wouldn’t scan. Fortunately we just had to wait another 20 minutes to get a new bag from the pharmacy but I can easily imagine a world where doctors are unable to perform procedures they are physically capable of doing because of liability surrounding not using the computer systems as intended. Epic particularly has really done a number on the healthcare system.
I really, sincerely don't understand that. How does an unscannable barcode prevent a doctor/nurse from administering medicine they are holding in their hands?
The other commenter already said it: Liability. What if the scan is part of a procedure that ensures that the right drug is given to the right patient? Giving someone the wrong drug or even the wrong dose can cause serious harm. Imagine they kill someone that way and then during the investigation it turns out the they didn't scan the meds. It doesn't matter why they didn't scan it (lazy, forgetful, computer problem), it is en enormous legal risk for every party involved. Thousands of people die each year because of medical errors, so trying to prevent doctors from killing people by using strict procedures is very important. Even if it means that in extreme situations like this the procedure can cause harm as well. Overall it will save many, many more people than it will kill.
What if it turns out they harmed the patient by insisting on following the standard procedure during a worldwide outage? Isn't that the same kind of liability risk, and is the regulation really going to protect them in this case? If so, isn't that a hugely problematic regulation?
In that case the nurse or doctor has a strong defense of "I was following policy" for their insurance and boss.
The people writing hospital policies or regulations aren't thinking about individual patient outcomes unless some notable news story came out recently, and even then it's maybe the third or fourth priority on a list a hundred items long.
We don't know that this is what actually happened in OP's case. I was referring to the comment you replied to and there it is pretty obvious that the regulation is exists to prevent harm from being done. But even if there is a clear justification, you would expose yourself to a lawsuit and need argue all this in court. I can totally understand why people don't want that, especially in the US. So if anything, you should blame the legal system.
It probably also automates the chart entry and billing to insurance/patient, at least to an extent. I wouldn’t rest sole responsibility for this system on legal compliance or risk mitigation. Under normal circumstances, there’s also an efficiency improvement. The problem arises when there either is no workaround when the system doesn’t work, or workers aren’t trained well enough to know how to do things manually (or don’t have enough time under the less efficient mode of operating).
It doesn't. We do this all this time in rapid responses and cardiac arrest scenarios, when we can't wait for an order in the EHR; someone keeps track of the medications, doses and rough times of administration, and it's entered into the EHR later.
An awful lots of apparently useless bureaucracy exists because many people, left to themselves, are often very, very stupid.
Bureaucracy certainly stops smart people from doing the right thing, but more often, it stops stupid people from doing the wrong thing. Hack away at bureaucracy at your peril.
If the barcode wouldn't scan there it might also have not scanned correctly when that bag was being filled which could have led to it being filled incorrectly.
I think a good remedy would be to completely remove "normal procedure" as a defense against liability. Our legal standard should defend people who break protocols if they know they will result in harm, and prosecute people who don't, or prosecute the people who make the protocols in those cases. Law should supercede corporate policy, not treat it as a form of law
The gnorp apologue demonstrated there is a lot of interesting design space left in the genre. I’m excited to see what comes of games made by folks who were inspired by it.
Curious to hear more about your process here - did you start off with one of you homeschooling her and slowly just gave her more freedom as she got older? My oldest is not quite two and we're thinking about how we're going to approach this as we're older and your case sounds intriguing to me.
Nope. It was honestly our intention since the very beginning.
My wife and I are anarchists, and the idea of requiring our kids to attend a government school is kinda anathema to us. We knew about unschooling before our oldest was old enough for her peers to enter kindergarten, so we never really did anything else.
If there’s any one thing we’ve learned it’s that the key is to just let them live life with you. They’ll develop their own interests; support them in that.
If you’re concerned about them learning a specific skill or concept, find a way that it’s required for something they want to do. My oldest learned to read at a conversational pace through Guild Wars 2; my youngest learned basic math through crochet and needlepoint.
Learning is part of human nature. Kids aren’t an exception to that. As long as they have supportive people around them, they’ll learn everything they need to achieve their own goals - and in the process, they’ll learn “how to learn” and build the self-confidence needed to embark on more and more ambitious projects as they get older.
Practicing piano and fooling around in a DAW are completely different realms of music related activities. The pianists all know have given me the impression the activity is many more parts stress if the goal is practicing to be able to play a challenging piece, while working in a DAW can be more like splattering paint on a canvas when done like the parent comment describes
I have been producing music as a hobby for around 25 years. There were maybe two songs where I had to put some effort into practicing the parts I was recording. Maybe even just one.
The hard parts for me are finding good arrangements, making stuff sound good in a mix, writing lyrics, finding ways to do certain non trivial things in my DAW, reviewing what software I want to purchase, ... Stuff like that.
It doesn't involve much focused dedicated practice. It's just too general of an activity, and it's very easy compared to playing classical pieces on a piano.
The difference here isn't the instrument, it's musical composition vs performance. You can compose and edit piano works in a DAW, or you can perform those piano works on a piano.
Well, musicianship is musicianship, but that doesn't say much.
But how fun/relaxing it is can differ between instruments and between genres (baroque vs folk or blues) and approaches (e.g. strict sheet music interpration vs improvisation).
Also working with the DAW is more like composing, arranging, conducting, and producing/mixing than playing an instrument.
He mentioned one of the practical problems in the article, that the current mode of romanticism has been used as a justificatory foundation for fascists.
> This is insidious; by linking military prowess and savagery to an entire ethnic group, it encourages its appropriation by racial supremacists.
I think in general though that any amount propagating misinformation is bad and can have all kinds of minor unforeseen consequences that can add up.
On the idea that 'wild men' are superior fighters, and that hard times breed strong men, strong men make good times, good times breed weak men, and weak men make hard times. There is a nice (but long) series of blogposts: https://acoup.blog/2020/01/17/collections-the-fremen-mirage-...
It brings up how many times this idea was brought forth by people frustrated by the limitations of civilization, who wished to convince their peers they would be better off as a wilder people.
People are being morons is a fully general justification for censorship because people are always either deeply misinformed about something, hence moronic, or doing something someone thinks is stupid, hence moronic.
> I think in general though that any amount propagating misinformation is bad and can have all kinds of minor unforeseen consequences that can add up.
Yes, other people agree with you that there are bad people out there with bad opinions who should be stopped. They just disagree on who the bad people are, and what the bad opinions are.
Some people think Drag Queen Story Hour is great. Others think that all guns should be banned. Some think that teaching first graders about gender identities is wonderful, others that denigrating religion is wrong.
Misinformation is an excuse for censorship and people aren’t dumb enough to fall for it for long.
Sorry, I thought it was common knowledge since the 90's [1] and kind of obvious being that they often use the valknut, Thor's hammer and Tyr's rune for their logos. There's nothing hand-wavy about it though. It's huge in current fascist movements, you won't have to look too hard.
Congratulations! I've had my eye on this game for a while this post + your story motivated me to buy it.
I'd be interested to hear what kinds of resources you found most helpful in getting something like this to a shipped state. I've never worked on a game before but having played factorio, DSP, and satisfactory I've had a lot of ideas / my own views on the genre. There's definitely room in the market still and I think you will be able to find success, especially as a two person shop. Congrats again.
Thanks! I'd say that the most important "resource" is dedication. Anything else is just matter of doing it until it works. We've been chipping away for so many years without an end in sight and if just one of us gave up, that would be probably the end of it.
Of course my degree in computer science and computer graphics helps, but with dedication and you can just search your way through most problems.
I'd also recommend to limit the scope as much as possible. We might have been a little too ambitious. Don't design features that you cant make. For example, in one iteration we had a vision of global economy where you can buy/sell materials, competing with AI players. On paper, that's great. When we started coding, we had no idea how to make this all work, and after a few months of failed attempts we completely scratched it.
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