Yes, that's the point of musique concrete and why this page that recycles the original list gives really bad context and the renaming is inappropriate, IMO.
There is plenty of electronic music from before 2001 but this list is extremely focused on a handful of composers of academic electroacoustic recordings.
While it has plenty of interesting entries, I think that linking site with the renaming is really bad at giving context, even where they try:
> Also, there’s clearly much more to electronic music than either celebrity DJs or obscure avant-garde composers. Many hundreds of popular electronic composers and musicians—like Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, Bruce Haack, or Clara Rockmore—fall somewhere in-between the worlds of pop/dance/performance and serious composition, and their contributions deserve representation alongside more experimental or classical artists.
Even where they try to give context, the cambrian explosion of what most people now consider electronic music from the 70s, but mostly 80s and 90s is completely ignored, and that's not just techno and dance music.
The original name "electroacoustic" seems much better, but even then, I don't feel this to be a very meaningful curation with e.g. all the Stockhausen recordings just dumped in with each of their parts counted as one "track" each (this terminology clearly alludes to the electronic music more usually listened to).
To be honest, find this type of music interesting, but calling the blog post misnamed is almost too charitable, given it links the other list, changes the title and even hints at how limited its perspective is.
In the 20th century, there were musicologists who insisted on the difference between "E-Musik" (Ernste Musik, "serious music") and "U-Musik (Unterhaltungsmusik, "Entertainment music").
The problem was that this distinction was indeed meant to be snobby and completely ignored how interesting new music, including experimental music, was created before and then came to real fruition in the 20th century.
Stockhausen et al are interesting, but this seems like a "selection of 476 pieces of E-Musik / electroacoustic music / musique concrete" more than a "history of electronic music".
This distinction apparently only existed in Germany, so no English Wilipedia article.
Most of the "music" made by these people originates in publicly funded institutions and academia.
Fine, but it's really the "black square on black canvas" type art academia in a way.
It is interesting and was certainly influential, but there is a level of unfounded snobbery to many of these artists and their listeners when it comes to other electronic music.
The main critique is repetition (obviously, in all dance-adjacent genres), and lack of radical departure from harmonics and rhythm. Also regarding electronic music that is not only dance-oriented.
There seems to be very little overlap of people who even know less commercial -more experimental- "regular" electronic music and come from this electroacoustic movement.
Although there are some artists who cite this movement and musique concrete as inspirations, especially Noise and Ambient artists.
It's like making a "history of 20th-century" music that is half twelve-tone music and half experimental organ music with no Western scale or harmonics, all by obscure academic artists.
Still interesting, but also kind of... meh. Limited.
> ephemeral, stateless nature of docker is a huge detriment in usability, and a chroot would be far more appropriate
But ephemeral changes (e.g. inside the running container) are the opposite of statelessness in the comment you are responding to?
And if you have required intricate custom changes in mounted host volumes (config, ...) that are not living alongside the compose file in the same repository, you can have "statefulness" that survives killing the containers.
Have to admit (I added to a snark comment about Substack and productivity blogs when this was posted), it addresses a problem that is plaguing myself.
Still not sure if it will help me overcome this, but the "quitting point" concept and the drawing example made it a good read for me.
Not 100% the same, but I've also heard there is a correlation between procrastrination and perfectionism, narcisissm (not only grandiosity, also vulnerabity and low self-esteem):
+1 - this resonated with me. For 25 years I have been an aspiring songwriter and it’s a constant battle against perfectionism and learned/imagined standards. I believe the right path is to just write a large volume of songs at a high rate no matter how bad they are, but that is an amazingly hard thing to let yourself do
> And the only real hope I have here is that someday, maybe, Bitcoin will be a currency, and circulating money around won’t be the exclusive purview of Froot Loops. Christ
PLEASE NO. The only thing this will lead to is people who didn't get rich with this scheme funding the returns of people who bought in early.
Whatever BTC becomes, everyone who advocates for funneling public money of people who actually work for their salary into Bitcoin is a fraud.
I don't think the blog author actually wants this, but vaguely calling for Bitcoin to become "real money" indirectly will contribute to this bailout.
And yes, I'm well aware that funneling pension funds money etc into this pyramid scheme is already underway. Any politician or bank who supports this should be sued if you ask me.
Yeah, I think for crypto to actually turn into something net-positive, Bitcoin needs to lose a lot of value. It would almost certainly be some other network that would actually solve this problem, given Bitcoin's essentially frozen in a half-completed state now (Ethereum still seems to be trying to make something that scales to a point that would be usable, but it is also the nexus of a lot of the scams for the same reason)
Having currency is only meaningful if the amount of currency someone has correlates, at least loosely, to some kind of merit or work.
Let's say me and my friends agree to carve off 0.00002 BTC supply and pretend that is the whole world of currency. We could run a whole country using that 0.00002 BTC as money. Except that anyone who has 1 BTC can break into our walled garden and, with a tiny fraction of their holdings, buy the entire walled garden, and there's no way to prevent this as long as our money is fungible with theirs. It's the same reason you wouldn't use immibiscoins as a currency: I could just grant myself a zillion of them and buy everything you have. Except that in the case of bitcoin the grant is pre-existing.
Deflationary currencies are fundamentally unstable, just like currencies that one guy can print at will, because they decorrelate quantity and merit.
It's such a shame that the premier cryptocurrency chose a speculation friendly emission that concentrated wealth on early adopters (its creator included) rather than a speculation resistant pure linear emission (no halvings) that would give future generations their fair share to mine.
It's by design. Either the inventor knew what he was doing, or was tricked by someone who knew what they were doing. Perhaps it was invented by someone who made a lot of money speculating on gold so they knew how the model worked.
Luckily there's more than one cryptocurrency. Many of the current generation have asymptotically constant tail emissions, which doesn't really solve the underlying mismatch between emission and demand, but at least doesn't make it deliberately bad.
Well, there was one that tried to maintain a constant US$ price by cross-leveraging all of the risk onto a sister currency, but that crashed pretty hard (partly by the algorithm not working as well as thought, and partly by deliberate rugpull).
One that I'm aware of is radically different and allows both positive and negative balances that decay towards zero; although I don't really like that one's implementation, that feels like an idea worth exploring. It's pretty much incompatible with any traditional currency though.
Last time I named specific cryptocurrencies I got downvotes for advertising so I won't.
I mean, bitcoin needs to not be the biggest cryptocurrency by market cap. It's a comment on the utility of bitcoin compared to other networks, not about how it can be subdivided. As long as bitcoin is the most valuable coin, the cryptocurrency market is unconcerned with utility for everyday transactions and far more concerned with line go up by finding more and larger bag holders.
He wants normal banking and money transfer... but just to anybody, and for any reason. As an example, he'd like people to be able to pay him to draw bespoke furry porn for them. Or as another example, why can't a US citizen pay an Iranian citizen to do some work for them? (e.g. write a computer program)
That is totally possible. The only thing that stands in his way, and drives him into the arms of the cryptocurrency frauds, are moralising and realpolitiking governments that intentionally use their control of banks to control what bank customers can do with their money.
In an ideal world, government would only regulate banks on fiscal propriety and fair-dealing, and would not get in the way of consenting adults exchanging money for goods and services. But because government does fuck with banks, and sometimes the banks just do the fuckery anyway and government doesn't compel them to offer services to all (e.g. Visa/Mastercard refuse to allow porn merchants?), normal people start listening to the libertarians, the sovereign citizens, and the pump-and-dump fraudsters hyping cryptocurrencies.
He wants decentralised digital cash. How can it be done, if not Bitcoin et al?
It should, but nobody can quite agree on exactly what should and shouldn't be allowed. Fraud, everyone agrees no. Porn, drugs, guns, gambling, foreign work, etc. everyone has a different opinion; governments abuse their power to prohibit transacting "harmless" goods/services, the people who transact those things reject the prohubition and turn to grey and black markets, then suffer from the lack of strong regulation therein.
Would it change your view if they mined instead of buying?
If you were to create a decentralized and limited supply currency, how would you distribute it so that it's “fair”?
Sounds a bit like if the world was running only on proprietary software created by Microsoft and you criticized the move to open source because that would enrich Linus Torvalds and other code creators/early adopters.
Are people better off by continuing to use centralized broken software that they have to pay a subscription for (inflation) than if they did a lump sum buy of a GNU/Linux distro copy from a random guy and become liberated for the rest of their life?
It's more fair if every generation gets to mine the same amount.
You want supply to be predictable and for the inflation rate to go steadily down, but there's not much point in limiting the supply [1].
Not sure. IMO the best thing that could happen for the next generation is to be born in a Bitcoin standard were politicians don't control money, people are incentivized to save, and the world does not need to use housing and stocks as a way of saving and protecting against inflation.
Technological progress makes the world deflationary. Your money should be able to buy more every time as we improve the productive efficiency of everything. And for poor countries, the best thing they could get is a censor resistant and value preserving tool.
Even if there was a tail emission, newer generations wouldn't have the capital needed for mining rigs. That's not just something unique to this case, same happens with stocks, real state or any other investment asset.
You didn't really answer the dependency argument though.
Until the data for a static website becomes large enough to make JSON parsing a bottleneck, where is the problem?
I know, it's not generally suitable to store data for quick access of arbitrary pieces without parsing the whole file.
But if you use it at build time anyway (that's how I read the argument), it's pretty likely that you never will reach this bottleneck that makes you require any DBMS. Your site is static, you don't need to serve any database requests.
There is also huge overhead in powering static websites by a full-blown DBMS, in the worst case serving predictable requests without caching.
So many websites are powered by MySQL while essentially being static... and there are often unnecessarily complicated layers of caching to allow that.
But I'm not arguing against these layers per se (the end result is the same), it's just that, if your ecosystem is already built on JSON as data storage, it might be completely unneeded to pull in another dependency.
Not the same as restricting syntax within one programming language.
Getting cache keys or caching events wrong is easy and a nightmare.
But getting them right can easily cross the boundary of purely optimizing performance towards simplifying public API of something. I think this is true.
I'd imagine an involved example where semantics and caching really start to offer a trade-off.
Imagine that somehow querying the actual meteorological data is quite expensive, and consider this badly written pseudocode (equals sign denoting default parameters):
I know, reality is much more complicated, and using time (seeing it as quasi-continuous) as a caching parameter is already stretching it so far.
Just a stupid example that came to my mind.
I've bitten myself in the ass with caching rasterized reprentations of images more than once, where the input were SVG images or limited formats that convert to SVG.
Late binding is also what the above poster is complaining about and they mention the habit some have in class constructors for "early binding" to try to avoid it.
The `class` keyword is as much "just" syntax sugar for stuff you can do without the `class` keyword. The behaviors are the same.
Late binding happens whether or not the function is a part of the Object's prototype chain or directly attached. JS is built so that's all mostly the same thing. That's why late binding exists. Maybe you copy a function from one prototype to another to create a new sort of prototype with a bit of "code-sharing", which is the same if you want to copy a function directly from one object to another. You want that function to work in all these cases, you don't want to redefine the function explicitly for a different kind of prototype or a different kind of object, you want to pick up what it is bound to by how it is called (thus late binding). Late binding is an ancient feature of JS that feels like a bug if you think `class` works like it does in OO languages like C++ or Java or C#. Late binding feels like a bug if you think of an Object's prototype as being a strongly formed contract and not a runtime object that itself can change at any time, or can be used as a lego brick to construct other types of objects and code-sharing beyond traditional class-based OOP "inheritance" models.
The difference between a "regular object" and thing constructed from a `class` in JS is effectively nonexistent. It's the same stuff, just a few syntax niceties. (In the old days, it was a lot harder to build a clean prototype, `class` makes it a lot cleaner. But that's all it does, it makes it cleaner to write, but under the hood it is entirely the same as it was.)
> in the constructor, using arrow functions?
The example above was the related but similar thing of doing `this.a = this.a.bind(this)` in a class constructor. It's very similar to using `this.a = () => …` arrow functions to early bind `this`. (Assigning a function to itself in a constructor with a `bind()` is also an idiom pattern that predates arrow functions and class syntax. Constructors predate class syntax, but they used to look a lot different. You can still write that form of constructor if you want, but class syntax is a lot cleaner.)
Late binding is an old feature that feels like a bug today, so a lot of people work very hard to early bind functions or only ever use arrow functions because they don't trust late binding.
Yes, I think we are on the same page. I did not want to include "legacy" prototype-based inheritance examples because I'm on a phone and didn't want to make complexity
explode here.
Also I made a weird statement here:
> That can also be done after the class was declared?
That doesn't make much sense for binding "this" to the class that was declared, I wsd mixing up arrow function class properties inside the class declaration with adding prototype properties (which is exactly what one doesn't want for classes with many instances).
In the scope of the class declaration, all methods of adding methods to the prototype are awkward, I guess.
Regarding the "early-binding" using .bind or arrow functions in constructor, I see your points, and it's the subtle and hard-to-explain differences that are really annoying.
JS really requires some discipline and sticking to a pit of success, while it's still essential to know the basics.
> Late binding is an old feature that feels like a bug today, so a lot of people work very hard to early bind functions or only ever use arrow functions because they don't trust late binding
Yes, that's what I was going at, thanks for making clear the difference between arrow functions (lexical scoping) and using `bind` (arbitrarily fixed "this").
I was lately (no pun!! really coincidence, it just wasn't only recently) using late binding with object literals in tests with Jest and TS and had to ignore TS there, it's pretty much the major reason I'm commenting here. It was convenient and succinct for a mock object implementing an interface otherwise used by class instances to use late binding.
> JavaScript used to be a nice prototype based programming language
"this" binding depending on the call site never made sense to me. Why do you think it became worse with arrow functions and Function.prototype.bind?
In case I'm not misunderstanding you. Tbh I haven't read the article so I'm only responding to your first sentence, since the CSS hyphens thing has been cleared up already.
By the way, CSS hyphens have been my most-wanted feature ever when I was working for a web design agency. So glad to see it gain traction over the years.
There are JS libraries for this, and of course they cause ugly page reflow and/or overhead.
Prime example of what should be in the CSS domain, and such a frequent problem when putting real content into design templates.
This has been known for ages in school and college tests, the German word is "Fangfrage" (literally translated: catch question or better, trap question).
Ask a question that demands an answer, and expect the correct answer to point out that the question makes no sense.
What I hate about these questions is that they're exactly what's asked in exams, so you're expect to make assumptions or fail. At this point, LLMs etc have more critical thinking to dodge these than humans who are conditioned into doing this after a decade of schooling.
There was a little entrepreneurship workshop I went to once. The trainer put a pen on the floor, gave us a ball, and asked us to stand behind the pen and throw the ball into a box. It was to demonstrate that most people didn't practice throwing before entrepreneurship and then blamed the environment for their lack of planning. I picked up the pen and moved it right next to the box so that I could walk there and put the ball in. I thought this was the actual solution (e.g. entrepreneurs were supposed to be creative), but was "failed" for "cheating".
I think it would be OK as long as the expectation has been set throughout the semester with other questions that sometimes questions are incomplete and don’t make sense, and pointing that out is an acceptable answer. My math curriculum in high school had many problems, but this was one thing it did that I liked in hindsight.
I think it would be great to decrease the stress by using a lower repetition workload, and still asking thoughtful questions. Hear you though... it's not that I'm highly educated :D
But I appreciate people and teachers who emphasize knowledge/understanding over repetition and "saying what is expected".
I'm not in academia, but I happen to find this type of question helpful, when done well.
When questions make no sense and it takes a lot of effort to find out, I would agree that this is stupid and not testing for any real skill. But when questions are designed in a way to meet the knowledge level that is expected, I think this type of questions is good.
For example:
For what x does the value of function 1 / sin(x) become zero
This question leads you astray, but it is a genuine sign of understanding when the answer is "none". OK, this is not a real trap question, but it borders on one.
A more callous example, not a MINT question (not sure what kind of test would ask this question though):
A hotel room costs 400$ a night, breakfast not included. It is situated in NYC and the cost of a hotel room in NYC averages at 250$ per night. The average cost for breakfast is 50$. Hotel rooms in Manhattan average 500$ per night, while hotel rooms in Queens average 120$/night. In what part of NYC is the hotel located?
The answer one gives to this question could be quite revealing. If so says "it might be in Manhattan, hotel rooms are particularly expensive there, but it is not possible to give a definite answer", fine.
If someone starts bullshitting, not so good.
Another one at high-school level maths:
A room has one wall that is 16ft long, another one that is 24ft long. What is the area of the floor of the room?
It might be reasonable to assume a rectangular room, but it's not given. So it should be expected to give a nuanced answer.
Even more callous would be to say the room is rectangular and then point out that the floor might be tilted :D
But yeah, I would be pretty annoyed by that, too. I mean, nobody would say that it's a good answer to start fretting about curved space-time or something given this question.
But in every domain, I think it's possible to design good "trick questions".
The more I think about it, this type of question is basically the same type of question one would use to "benchmark" an LLM.
And again, I'm not saying that I'd answer these correctly...
There is plenty of electronic music from before 2001 but this list is extremely focused on a handful of composers of academic electroacoustic recordings.
While it has plenty of interesting entries, I think that linking site with the renaming is really bad at giving context, even where they try:
> Also, there’s clearly much more to electronic music than either celebrity DJs or obscure avant-garde composers. Many hundreds of popular electronic composers and musicians—like Brian Eno, Kraftwerk, Bruce Haack, or Clara Rockmore—fall somewhere in-between the worlds of pop/dance/performance and serious composition, and their contributions deserve representation alongside more experimental or classical artists.
Even where they try to give context, the cambrian explosion of what most people now consider electronic music from the 70s, but mostly 80s and 90s is completely ignored, and that's not just techno and dance music.
The original name "electroacoustic" seems much better, but even then, I don't feel this to be a very meaningful curation with e.g. all the Stockhausen recordings just dumped in with each of their parts counted as one "track" each (this terminology clearly alludes to the electronic music more usually listened to).
To be honest, find this type of music interesting, but calling the blog post misnamed is almost too charitable, given it links the other list, changes the title and even hints at how limited its perspective is.
In the 20th century, there were musicologists who insisted on the difference between "E-Musik" (Ernste Musik, "serious music") and "U-Musik (Unterhaltungsmusik, "Entertainment music").
The problem was that this distinction was indeed meant to be snobby and completely ignored how interesting new music, including experimental music, was created before and then came to real fruition in the 20th century.
Stockhausen et al are interesting, but this seems like a "selection of 476 pieces of E-Musik / electroacoustic music / musique concrete" more than a "history of electronic music".
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-_und_U-Musik
This distinction apparently only existed in Germany, so no English Wilipedia article.
Most of the "music" made by these people originates in publicly funded institutions and academia. Fine, but it's really the "black square on black canvas" type art academia in a way.
It is interesting and was certainly influential, but there is a level of unfounded snobbery to many of these artists and their listeners when it comes to other electronic music.
The main critique is repetition (obviously, in all dance-adjacent genres), and lack of radical departure from harmonics and rhythm. Also regarding electronic music that is not only dance-oriented.
There seems to be very little overlap of people who even know less commercial -more experimental- "regular" electronic music and come from this electroacoustic movement.
Although there are some artists who cite this movement and musique concrete as inspirations, especially Noise and Ambient artists.
It's like making a "history of 20th-century" music that is half twelve-tone music and half experimental organ music with no Western scale or harmonics, all by obscure academic artists.
Still interesting, but also kind of... meh. Limited.
reply