Ajahn Brahm of BSWA is a right laugh. An Aussie from England, the story goes that went to all Buddhist temples in London until they found the happiest bunch of monastics (Thai forest, eventually under Ajahn Chah).
I had the same question, the piano is already a well developed and standardized instrument from centuries of revision and engineering. Returning to one string seems like a step back into the past. The video is really nice though, explaining how they came to this idea, and now I want to hear one of these one-string pianos! From Nils Frahm:
"It really felt like a brilliant new instrument, it was so nice. First time in my life to have kind of like a new piano. It sits in between a clavichord, guitar and a harp, and that was exactly what I wanted."
Or if you have some spare basement space, pick up an old Dell PowerEdge or some HP equivalent from eBay and slap ESXi on it. Works well for me, and I use my PowerEdge T410 for some other home services. 12 cores, 24 threads and 64GB DDR3 ECC RAM goes a pretty long way.
If you’re an Emacs user, TRAMP makes running compilers on an external system feel almost completely transparent. New shells automatically open up on the remote machine and it feels almost local if your network latency is low enough.
One of the great beauties of working with scripting languages, they work just fine on lighter laptops. The MacBook Air is a great machine for the node/python/php programmer on the go.
Running an old T440 Thinkpad to do my work programming. Mostly doing data analysis. Never ran into an issue with any kind of speed or capacity, and I love the keyboard.
I have a gaming laptop as well that I don't bother to carry around. It's just not necessary unless you're doing GPU programming or model training. Even then, I'd rather just work with a cloud instance.
Devs, you're supposed to know how to make a computer meet your needs! Don't outsource it to someone else. Even 5+ year old computers run pretty damn quick if you use a lightweight linux distro.
Most Devs don't want to deal with hardware restrictions. Its a lot easier to just get a good, general all rounder instead of coding on a dinosaur. Many lightweight distros barely have any meaningful functionality and usually require all interaction with the console to get even basic things usable. And quite frankly, even though you can do more with a console, its a lot easier to remember how to do things with a GUI then without one.
Older hardware generally means older, unsupported, unsecure drivers as well.
Also, I'm confused as to why you claim that you shouldn't outsource to someone else, yet you're fine with working in the cloud...
No idea how you'd run into hardware restrictions; T440 is from 2013, and I have yet to run into a driver issue dual booting Debian and Windows.
I don't understand the bit about the console; I haven't met a dev who doesn't find terminals worlds quicker than hunting and pecking in a GUI. Maybe an argument to keep general users on Windows, not really an argument against devs running a linux distro.
I was suggesting you should understand what's running on your machine and why, and if you do, that $2k mac isn't doing anything for you that a machine worth less than a quarter of that will. Whether or not you have a top of the line machine, there's still reasons to reach for an AWS instance with a powerful GPU attached.
> No idea how you'd run into hardware restrictions;
Hardware can become unsupported when you update the OS. It's happened to me with wireless cards when running FreeBSD on an old EeePC. Even when using xfce, having wpa_supplicant UI was much simpler than remembering and writing a bunch of scripts to set all the crap involved with getting it working. Not everyone uses Debian.
> I don't understand the bit about the console; I haven't met a dev who doesn't find terminals worlds quicker than hunting and pecking in a GUI
Doing a few clicks in a GUI can often result in very complex command executions in the CLI, sometimes across multiple processes. It can be confusing what's going on, especially with redirecting I/O and if you have to do something different, it often requires editing multiple arguments depending on what you want to do.
This is good if you want to script a common task that's repeatable and changes infrequently, but frequent changes in a GUI are much faster and you don't have to worry about copy/paste errors or spelling errors.
And if consoles were so much faster, why does everything evolve into a GUI at some point?
> I was suggesting you should understand what's running on your machine and why
There's hundreds of processes running on the machine at any given time. I would guess that most people don't know or aren't even aware of what and when each process runs at any given state of a machine.
The point is, with a $2k mac (which I would never get by the way), there's easy room for expansion.
> And quite frankly, even though you can do more with a console, its a lot easier to remember how to do things with a GUI then without one.
I don't know about this. Whenever I do something unfamiliar/complicated on the command line I copy every command I used to a text file for later reference. Repeating these actions in the future is as easy as copy and paste. If I figure out how to do something in a GUI and I don't have to do it regularly I will almost certainly find myself flailing and clicking around randomly when I have to do it again in 10 months.
Brain hack: Formulate your thinking in terms of positive statements.
Example:
* Negative statement: Don't use object inheritance, it leads to confusing code.
* Positive statement: Try to make your inheritance tree flatter, this helps make more straightforward code.
The negative statement is both discouraging and ambiguous. When you tell someone or yourself to not do a thing, it begs the question, "What should be done instead?" Meanwhile, the positive statement is incisive and gives the listener better direction.
If you can spot something to not do, you can probably come up with something to do as well. This shift in thinking seems small, but has had a profound impact on how I interact with the world, and improved my outlook on life, work and relationships.
The "where is this child" query is unaffected by the ordering, whether Z-order, Hilbert, or other. However querying "which children are in this area" requires that you come up with corresponding ranges along the curve. This is where the Hilbert curve is slightly better because in many cases the same area can be covered by fewer ranges.
Follow up questions: How do the number of ranges compare with the different orderings? How much does having fewer range segments affect database query performance? Does it make up for the added computational complexity of Hilbert curves? I've not answers, but these can be answered by science.
