Mastodawn

Here’s the 14-minute version, with a transcript.

Experimenting further, I made a 14-minute version of this, but then I discovered that the music I had pulled from my collection is not licensed for remixing, so I need to redo the ambiance.

blakestacey Mar 8

Non-Sensational Physics: Episode 0

https://awful.systems/post/7525765

Non-Sensational Physics: Episode 0 - awful.systems

Sometimes I get stuck on everything I am doing and try to break out by essaying a weird creative thing and just going with whatever I can make in a single sitting. This time, that ended up being a teaser for a podcast that doesn’t exist: https://icosahedron.website/system/media_attachments/files/116/170/107/979/783/002/original/90a6aed4e6e0061c.mp3 [https://icosahedron.website/system/media_attachments/files/116/170/107/979/783/002/original/90a6aed4e6e0061c.mp3] The background beep-boops are an aleatoric tune I made in Sonic Pi, a program that I can’t get to work on my new(er) computer, so I had to run it on the half-busted laptop, slipper-net it over to the new one and tweak the WAV in Audacity. (Weren’t we supposed to migrate off Audacity? I forget what the suggested replacement was.)

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blakestacey Dec 24

Previous random positivity threads:

Computer warm-and-fuzzies

Books

Random Positivity Thread: Happy Computer Memories - awful.systems

Time for some warm-and-fuzzies! What happy memories do you have from your early days of getting into computers/programming, whenever those early days happened to be? When I was in middle school, I read an article in Discover Magazine about “artificial life” — computer simulations of biological systems. This sent me off on the path of trying to make a simulation of bugs that ran around and ate each other. My tool of choice was PowerBASIC, which was like QBasic except that it could compile to .EXE files. I decided there would be animals that could move, and plants that could also move. To implement a rule like “when the animal is near the plant, it will chase the plant,” I needed to compute distances between points given their x- and y-coordinates. I knew the Pythagorean theorem, and I realized that the line between the plant and the animal is the hypotenuse of a right triangle. Tada: I had invented the distance formula!

blakestacey Dec 24

Random Positivity Thread: Happy Food Memories

https://awful.systems/post/6691680

Random Positivity Thread: Happy Food Memories - awful.systems

Once I asked a friend of mine, “What was the best meal you ever had?” He thought about it a moment and then replied, “A stick of pepperoni dipped in peanut butter… after a day hiking the AT.” (He’d actually hiked the whole Appalachian Trail, as I recall.) Years before that, a different friend asked me the same question. The one item that came to mind above all others was the dessert course at a resort my family visited when I was a child, on a snorkeling trip to the Caribbean. I don’t think I’ve had a sopapilla that good since. And sure, childhood taste buds and all, but that’s kind of the point: the best subjective impression is the best subjective impression. One of the best things I’ve ever made myself was early in the first COVID season. I was throwing together a soup of whatnot, and I made a broth of soy sauce, mirin, gochujang, garlic and probably a few other things. When I had a taste, it was knee-bucklingly good. I haven’t hit the proportions just right again, or something; everything I’ve tried in that genre has been nice, but not that nice. Dad was the sort who’d try a new thing at a restaurant and then try and figure out how to make it at home. He was good at it, too. I picked up that habit, a bit. My white whale is the suanla chaoshou/suan la chow show/swans from Mary Chung’s in Cambridge, MA. For that, I have to go by memory, since the restaurant closed years ago, and I have to adapt it to my current diet, since I went mostly-vegan vegetarian. There’s a dumpling-sauce recipe from 1993 [https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mjw/recipes/sauces/potsticker-dipping/potsticker-dipping-sauce-3.html] that is perfectly serviceable, but I tried it with three different chili pastes and it just wasn’t the same. I think it was adapted for home cooks of the early '90s and left out doubanjiang, which a Sichuan restaurant would have had on hand. A couple heaping teaspoons of that brought the flavor a lot closer… Anywhoo. Do you folks have food memories that stand out? Best ever pizza? Cookies that you’d like to find again?

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blakestacey Dec 8

This was the second fork I heard of, the first being “clbre” (“calibre” without the a and i):

github.com/grimthorpe/clbre

GitHub - grimthorpe/clbre: A fork of Calibre called Clbre, because the AI is stripped out.

A fork of Calibre called Clbre, because the AI is stripped out. - grimthorpe/clbre

GitHub

blakestacey Dec 7

Coordinating a post-Calibre path forward

https://awful.systems/post/6514607

Coordinating a post-Calibre path forward - awful.systems

Cassandra Granade writes: > Things are moving really fast, so I went on and created a Codeberg organization for coordinating a post-Calibre path forward for uniting readers and writers in the goal of archiving, organizing, and reading books. > > https://codeberg.org/rereading [https://codeberg.org/rereading] > > DNS is still propagating, but https://rereading.space/ [https://rereading.space/] should be up soon as well.

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blakestacey Oct 8

I converted this to LaTeX and made a version that looks all official and spiffy. In the process, I edited the paragraph about the “Ask me anything” chapter, so I modified that paragraph here to match.

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blakestacey Oct 3

While most bullish outlooks are premised on economic reacceleration, it’s difficult to ignore the market’s reliance on AI capex. In market-pricing terms, we believe we’re closer to the seventh inning than the first, and several developments indicate we may be entering the later phases of the boom. First, AI hyperscaler free-cash-flow growth has turned negative. Second, price competition in the "monopoly-feeder businesses” seems to be accelerating. Finally, recent deal-making smacks of speculation and vendor-financing strategies of old.

www.morganstanley.com/pub/…/gic-weekly.pdf

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blakestacey Oct 3

A new longread about FTX:

motherjones.com/…/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-crypto-ba…

Sam Bankman-Fried and the multibillion-dollar drama over FTX’s ruins

In exclusive prison interviews, the convicted crypto king is still fighting to control the narrative ahead of a high-stakes appeal.

Mother Jones