Jose Camoes Silva

It's one of the WANs, far back, when they pointed out that TF was acting as if no one at any of the Hyperloop companies had ever thought of basic issues. I think there are posts about it here on the forum.

TF is hit-and-miss with a miss ratio well above 80% (more if you look into the details of the videos where he isn't completely wrong), but this time he's probably right (based on the product and my understanding of the science involved; I'm not watching a 50-min TF video). Perhaps a quick rejoinder to that Techquickie would be a good thing. (I'm sure TF relished the opportunity to get back at Linus after being called on his arrogance/ignorance on the hyperloop livestream.)

Trigger: people who don't know anything about tech bragging about specs of whatever product they bought because it was the "premium version" of whatever everyone else is buying; Trigger squared: when said people use incorrect units ("my MacBookPro has 16 MHz of RAM and 500 MHz of disk" nope, not kidding); Trigger cubed: when said people argue when you try to correct their units; Trigger exponentiated: when said people pass themselves off as experts…

Many moons ago a colleague told me to "listen to the harpsichord strings resonating with the voice of the soprano when she's singing solo." I thought, ok, I'll indulge your fancy, but what difference can this setup make? It turns out, the difference between two amplifiers was such that you could tell which was which by those little resonances -- they made a difference. The better amplifier, and we're talking homemade amps here, allowed those differences to show sound through. Once you learn how to tell things like that, you start the path to ruin. Each 5% increase in quality is a three-fold increase in price, and it never ends... (There are many things that simply cost money and make no difference, but there are things that do make a difference. Only the ears can tell. Preferably in a blind sound test.)

Multiple computers from working at home: - Employer-owned desktop, over-specced machine since basically it serves to log on to employer computer farms with the occasional local software development. - Employer-owned two laptops (same machine x 2), to serve as hot-backup to each other and for presenting and corporate education using two projectors. Employer machines are audited often and have many usage restrictions. (There's a good reason for this, it's not just paranoia.) - 3 personal laptops, separated by three years each (yes, one is 7 years old, one 4, one 1), where I do personal stuff. I sometimes use these to do some work when I want to be able to test ideas without having corporate IT looking over my shoulder. Hypothetically, the oldest laptops might have software that was validated for that machine by a previous employer and would cost a lot of money to buy for personal use, so that's one hypothetical reason to keep them, not that I would do that because that would be morally wrong. Also, these older laptops have optical disc readers so if I wanted to rip a disc, not that I would do that to DVDs or BluRay discs because that's a violation of DMCA, much less to Netflix or borrowed DVDs and BluRay discs because that would be so so wrong, I would hypothetically use one of those. Inspired by the "Show us your rig" thread, I'm thinking of building a nice machine, something that's powerful for personal work (say consulting) and also fun like multimedia creation and perhaps even [-blushes-] gaming. Now, where's the closest Fry's, again?

Since my forum name is my real name, I obviously have never pirated anything. There's no need, some say, with streaming services, discs, and digital copies. What else are you going to spend money on? And don't you want to support the industry? But here's the thing: - I have Netflix streaming, which I can use to watch movies. Except if I'm on a plane, which happens a lot. Or outside of the US, which happens a bit. Or in the gym, because the WiFi there is crappy. (Netflix has experimented with downloading some content for offline viewing, but it's not widespread yet; as for out-of-US, they blame the movie industry licensing agreements.) - I buy a BluRay disc and can watch the movie -- after ten minutes or so of non-skippable ads, annoying menu animations, and a FBI warning from the 1980s or so. And this happens about half the times I put that same disc in a player, not just the first time. It's particularly annoying when this is the 3rd time I've bought the same movie (DVD, Digital copy, 4k BluRay)... - Oh, and I can buy that BluRay disc for say, a Homeland season, about 8 or 9 months after that season ended on premium cable, just before the new season starts. Because... reasons, I guess? Of course, I could use my DVR to record the show and download it to a hard drive -- oh, wait, the hardware DVR I paid for and assumed was mine got a software update a while back that had only two purposes: allow premium channels to block recording of certain programs and delete third-party patches that allow recordings to be offloaded to outside storage or computers. - And that Netflix stream, BluRay disc, digital copy, or even DVD, that's for stuff that sells in the US market. Because if I want to watch something that was a hit outside the US, but not liked in the US, I'm seriously out of luck, as they say with a different "S." Now, being a fairly competent EECS, I could rip the discs I buy, remove copy protection from digital files, patch the software on my DVR, and use torrent or other download sites. But I would never do that. Never, not once, not ever. No siree. Because I really want to support this industry that treats its customers like drones to be squeezed of money instead of people who want to enjoy the content they buy in their own terms.

Interesting… so the next step will be to remove the actual resonances and add the adequate ones (big question if it is possible); as it is described right now, the Gadget appears to do the equivalent of changing the size of the surfaces and volume of the virtual instruments to go with the change in tuning. Edit: easy enough to try with a synthesizer, so just decided to do that (tweaking master tune should have the same effect as the Gadget - basically plays back the samples at different speed.)

Possibly my fault; I tweeted that excerpt of the WAN show at TF… within a long tweetstorm analyzing/critiquing his Hyperloop videos. This new video shows mostly his bewilderment with basic engineering concepts: things like disposable test platforms and prototypes, for example. And note the complete lack of response to Linus's point.