mt32-pi has been, and will continue to be, a source of great joy for many retro PC enthusiasts. For those of us with a particular interest in DOS music, it is huge.
Some modern projects generously give enthusiasts access to the power and functionality of (what might otherwise be $1000+ in) rare retro hardware, and in this hobby, mt32-pi ranks high among them.
The internet, or dare I say it, Information Technology itself, has not yet come to proper terms with Time Context as an implicit aspect of data. Much information is not static, but rather is a growing or changing development from year-to-year.
Using today's generic tools to search for digital information relevant to a specific version or time period of anything is very ad-hoc, hit-and-miss. And we're only a mere few decades in. I think the time context of data is going to become increasingly important and valuable.
Having been involved in creating content and deciding whether it should be retired or not, it really isn't about the money. Product docs can be locked to versions and archived pretty well; most sensible people understand the docs for 1.0 may not apply to version 3.0. But there are a ton of things on a company website that don't really apply to the here and now and will be increasingly out of date. And, if you just leave everything accessible forever, it pollutes the current information.
I get that some people prefer everything is just left online but it gets harder and harder for all the folks who just want info that's fairly current.
You can explicitly move old content to an archive and put big banners on it that it doesn't reflect current information. MS does an OK job of making it obvious that you're looking at documentation for an older product, for example.
As I wrote, product documentation is versioned anyway so that's fairly straightforward. But a ton of other stuff is variably still relevant and can get in the way of finding what's most relevant and accurate for today.
Whenever I would go to update something older, it would invariably take me longer than I planned because even things that were not flat-out wrong often didn't reflect current thinking, terminology, usage, etc.
In addition to what's most relevant and accurate for today, past context is also important; knowledge accrues. In computing we are used to fast technological redundancy, surfing the cutting edge of technology, where the greatest commercial relevance is.
But one of my hobbies is vintage or retro computing, and something everybody in this hobby realises sooner or later is how much of an ordeal it is to collate even 20-year-old internet information. And that's in a digital interest area! Now do the same for news or the detail of recent history. Pick an issue and follow it's thread through internet history, year-to-year. It should be easy, shouldn't it? The reality is, half the sources aren't even dated. If we were designing an internet future, the ability to step back through time, in terms of digital information, would be a huge boon for humanity. Because, as critically important as it may be!, today is still only today.
The way search evolved, it never had much of an explicit temporal component--probably because it didn't matter much early on. But now we have a situation where companies legitimately don't want old results polluting newer (usually more relevant to most people) results.
I can relate. There's something about the human group dynamic that, by default, isn't kind to certain types of personality.
Internet-only friendships and acquaintances and groups can be deceiving too. They can be great and full of wonderful people, but the reality is usually that even if you spend 20 years in a particular internet community, you could leave tomorrow and few (if any) people would be talking about you for longer than a week.
I'm glad you said "less" dependent. Never forget that what you're striving for a balance point appropriate to yourself. Your goal isn't to attain one end of a scale.
I imagine that, for the young people of the world, the Covid years really ripped away the illusion that the adults of the world are in competent control. To a degree that modern generations (from otherwise relatively stable, wealthy countries) have never experienced. While there are other major factors clearly contributing to the generational angst, I think this was the catalyst.
I wonder how the economics stack up, because intoxicants aren't free. If the researchers are saying there's X less drug use, then presumably that either implies (a) teenagers are now spending X more on other areas instead (and what are they?), or (b) teenagers now have X less money.
the financial crisis was just financial. 9/11 or war on terror was just behind a tv screen.
covid was actually something everyone felt personally - not just empathized with through media. I feel like I just started recovering mentally from the lockdowns - all my college years eaten up by them.
i am just old enough to have experienced 9/11 when i was in elementary school. it was a similar change to society to how covid screwed everything
when i was a child, there was no security in airports. like literally NONE. you could walk in and buy a flight with physical cash. if you wanted an international flight, there was a metal detector like you might find in a night club
government ID and drivers licence did not have your photograph on it, and some state drivers licenses were printed on non-laminated card. there was also no functional internet surveillance (there were no good search algorithms or tools in the early internet, so the government couldnt search either).
but the real big change, which is kind of what everyone felt i think, is the whole world was celebrating the end of the cold war and so vehemently protested going into the middle east, and the government just did it anyway. the largest protests in the history of the west were against that war and it was all totally ignored https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_the_Iraq_War
then we got the PATRIOT act, NSA/CIA spying on the population, heavily armed police. btw, in the 1990s you would NEVER see police with assault rifles and armoured trucks etc except for swat teams in major cities and the ATF. The idea of your local police department having a heap of military equipment was crazy. a great example of this is the LA riots in '92 - they had to call in the army and the national guard because the police simply werent equipped for it
and they would run these polls on tv, like gallup polls, falsely claiming that 20%+ of people publicly supported the war
even though it didnt affect anyone as much personally, it was the turning point where the gov just started brazenly ignoring people and introducing the heavy duty surveillance state, which was especially painfully felt in aus, canada, new zealand, the us, and the uk. and covid19 tyranny was only possible because of what bush did in response to 9/11 - it physically could not have happened in the 1990s as there were no government agencies that could have done it
Sounds like you were born around 93, but a lot of the things you're saying weren't the case in 2000. Airports had metal detectors and xrayed carry-ons well before 2000, and drivers licenses also had photos on them around that time. What you're describing is more 1990 than 2000.
I thought the AR-15s that the police carried in America were semi-auto. More like a sporting rifle than what the military uses.
AR-15s are more versatile than shotguns, though less powerful they are more accurate. If your going to carry a long gun around, it's probably the most logical option.
Basically anyone who isn't a prohibited person in America can field the same equipment. Though I think police have more access to restricted ammunition.
you are correct re: semi autos. most infantry would rarely use fully automatic fire with ar15 spec rifles too, as it is wasteful and inaccurate. exception being squad automatic weapons
echoing wat titanomachy said, there was a time where it was unthinkable to see police with anything more than a sidearm. a lot of police still had revolvers into the 90s as well.
> really ripped away the illusion that the adults of the world are in competent control
In the context of this the GFC was much worse, though. It was entirely avoidable and a direct outcome of extreme greed and extreme incompetence. With Covid/lockdowns all options sucked to one extent or another.
I mean, lock down absolutely was a disruption - but I know more than one or two young men that ended up in the desert after 9/11. Maybe we’ve also acclimated so much to the post-9/11 infrastructure of fear and surveillance that we assume this is how it always was?
When I was a kid in the 1980s, distant buildings were bombed too, and endless Cold wars and Middle East wars etc were a given too. However, your average 12 year old doesn't deeply care about finance or politics or distant wars. Their day-to-day routine goes on. Those are adult problems.
With Covid, the difference is that it came home, for everyone. And not just the US, but globally. Every home was directly affected, for months or years. 9/11 or 2008 didn't lock down entire countries for weeks and months at a time, impose country wide curfews, close all schools, suppress all socialising, impose home schooling, adults/parents working from home or not-at-all, shuttering of global supply lines, increased mortality fears for all older relatives, and constant everyday panic headlines and monitoring for years. We're still working through the aftereffects. So yes, very unique, in its direct effect upon the youth of wealthy countries in modern society.
Presumably you’re referring to disillusioning a generation, right? I wonder if the masses had smartphones in 1992 if they would have withdrew to the internet rather than vodka. Genuine question - yours is an interesting connection because the circumstances of disillusionment are so different.
- the TV
- the radio
- board games
- card games
- video games
- theaters
- phones and faxes
- the mail
Perhaps the above where the equivalent of vodka to some of you, but I wouldn't look at someone with their smartphone and think "wow, they're getting wasted !"
It replaced those things but that list doesn’t include the major time sinks, besides TV: social media, porn, doomscrolling. We already made fun of TV zombies, and at the worst it absolutely can remind me of a drunk or unstable person.
I understand how much people are emotionally reactive to these part of the net, and the cultural hatred some can have for "unproductive" time (does it match what you call "time sinks"?)
I still don't think they stand on the same foot as vodka.
I find it easy to drink in moderation because I only do it socially. One or two drinks at a dinner party has never cost me a day of work. But I have spent a whole morning in bed scrolling Instagram Reels instead of going in to work.
Passive consumption of short-form videos lacks that social feedback mechanism that keeps my behavior in check. It’s easy to stay up way later than I meant to and be wrecked the next day.
Consuming by yourself in a dark room is the default consumption mode for Reels/Shorts/TikTok, whereas in my social circles drinking alone is very unusual.
Would you say the same for people looking at the clouds passing by the window ?
Should we classify these clouds as worse than alcohol because they were looked at alone in a room instead of doing some other work ?
To get more personal, I had a CD player as my alarm in the morning, and a few times skipped worked because I couldn't get myself to stop the playing album. I didn't blame the CD.
That's also how I realized that job was well paying but otherwise really shitty.
I probably wouldn’t stay up 3-4 hours past my intended bedtime staring into space or watching clouds or listening to music. It’s just not stimulating enough. I wouldn’t stay up that late reading either, since once I get tired enough I can no longer do it effectively.
There is definitely something different about TikTok, or video games, compared to your examples.
> He says everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine any alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society. Over time, the mass delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy, with everyone accepting it as the new norm rather than pretence, an effect Yurchak termed hypernormalisation.
Given the increasing prominence of 'anchor dragging' and other such alleged sabotage incidents in recent years, I can only imagine that a very great deal of geopolitical-related planning is involved.
And indeed, looking at the 'sources say' map in the article, the planned route has a decided southward leaning, in what I assume may partly be an effort to steer a wide berth around most hotspots. (Or perhaps I am reading too much in to it.)
(I'll nest my thought here, as there's some relevance to your position)
I'm looking a long way back to when I was in your position : I got fired about 10 years ago, after unrealistic expectations and mental health burnout led to me making regrettable statements to executives.
The entire experience and time since is far too large to encompass in a post. But perhaps my biggest takeaway after all this time is that most people waste a great, great deal of money frivolously. Having even an average income, more often than not, leads to a lifestyle where it's standard to buy a $50 version of an everyday item because it has a certain stamp and shiny packaging, instead of the $10 one that frugal people use. Going to the food markets with a comfortable income is a thoughtless experience of filling bags with items you like the look of, regardless of price or purpose. Tens of thousands are dropped on a whim for a change of travel-box (car). An executive spends more on daily coffee than I do on my total coffee+breakfast+lunch. The income finds a way to be spent, but the experience isn't necessarily that different.
I'll indulge in another edit-in point. Home economics. It used to be a school subject. People thought it was about cooking, and sewing. Millions of mothers and grandmothers from past generations know that basic cooking skills actually = a lot of money in the bank. The best food you ever ate, at half the cost, in perpetuity. Concepts like these, where you trade a % of your time for directly applicable, $-winning skills (as opposed to using salary to pay others) is a key necessity of living sustainably outside the traditional 40-hour-week employment system.
The best part is when you realise it's all the same. You'll job Here, or you'll job There. Everybody does 24hrs of something per day, and if you're smart, you WILL find your way to comfort. Perhaps on surprisingly less money than you thought. It will just take time and persistence.
And if not, well, the traditional job market always wants smart people too, sooner or later.
Musical notes are rarely (never?) a single frequency waveform - there are layers of ordered harmonics. Some peoples versions of perfect pitch often seem to have some reliance upon the particular harmonic structures that they've trained their ear to, e.g. a particular instrument.
And it makes sense that those extra layers of info and interplay would be useful to the brain as it makes its analysis. As opposed to the brain entirely brute-force-counting a notes primary frequency in some manner.
Interestingly, other aspects of music and listening can develop great levels of aptitude too - not just absolute pitch. Relative pitch is a common one, closely related to harmony. Rhythmic analysis is another - a suitably skilled listener or musician can audibly derive the exact rhythmic structure of extremely fast and/or complex pieces that would boggle the mind of a casual listener.
Yeah - there has been some speculation that the additional overlaying of a sound (overtones, timbre variations, etc) can help someone who has absolute pitch - whereas even those with the ability can sometimes struggle with something more pure - like a sine wave.
Also, as codebases and systems get more (not less) complex over time, the potential for technical debt multiplies. There are more processing and outcome vectors, more (and different) branching paths. New logic maps. Every day/month/year/decade is a new operating environment.
I'm sure there are portion of us for whom this treasure trove recalls fond childhood memories of reading Dahl's short story The Mildenhall Treasure, a creative account of real events in 1942 surrounding the controversial finding of a huge cache of 4th century Roman silverware - one of the other great historical hoards dug up in modern Britain.
Some modern projects generously give enthusiasts access to the power and functionality of (what might otherwise be $1000+ in) rare retro hardware, and in this hobby, mt32-pi ranks high among them.