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Loog Guitars

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Rafael Atijas, founder of Loog Guitars:

Loog Guitars are small, 3-string guitars designed to make it fun and easy for anyone to play music. They come with flashcards and an app that get you playing songs on day one.

I don’t know much about guitars, but these look cool and the prices seem very reasonable, and the app looks great. It’s a Kickstarter project, but it’s already fully-funded (several times over) and they expect to start shipping next month.

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karll
2743 days ago
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Guitar Center has new six-string electric guitars starting at $80 and used ones starting at $40, and new acoustics starting at $60.
Houston, Texas
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Testing the Limits of 16 GB of RAM on a MacBook Pro

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Jonathan Zdziarski, pushing back on the notion that “pro” users need more than 16 GB of RAM:

I fired up a bunch of apps and projects (more than I’d ever work on at one time) in every app I could possibly think of on my MacBook Pro. These included apps you’d find professional photographers, designers, software engineers, penetration testers, reverse engineers, and other types running — and I ran them all at once, and switched between them, making “professionally-type-stuff” happen as I go.

Here’s a list of everything I ran at once:

  • VMware Fusion: Two running virtual machines (Windows 10, macOS Sierra)
  • Adobe Photoshop CC: Four 1+gb 36 MP professional, multi-layer photos
  • Adobe InDesign CC: A 22 page photography-intensive project
  • Xcode: Four production Objective-C projects, all cleaned and rebuilt
  • Microsoft PowerPoint: A slide deck presentation
  • Microsoft Word: A 20* page document with graphics
  • MachOView: Analyzing a daemon binary
  • Mozilla FireFox: Viewing a website
  • Safari: viewing a different website
  • Preview: Three PDF books
  • Hopper Disassembler: Performing an analysis on a binary
  • WireShark: Performing a live network capture as I do all of this
  • IDA Pro 64-bit: Analyzing a 64-bit intel binary
  • Apple Mail: Viewing four mailboxes
  • Tweetbot: Reading all the flames and trolls in my mentions
  • iBooks: Currently viewing an ebook I paid for
  • Skype: Logged in and idling
  • Terminal: A few sessions idling
  • iTunes
  • Little Flocker
  • Little Snitch
  • OverSight
  • Finder
  • Messages
  • Veracrypt
  • Activity Monitor
  • Path Finder
  • Console
  • Probably a lot I’ve missed

The result? I ran out of things to do before I ever ran out of RAM. I only ever made it to 14.5GB before the system decided to start paging out, so I didn’t even have the change to burn up all that delicious RAM.

I think it’s a legitimate complaint that you can’t get a new MacBook Pro with 32 GB of RAM, but agree with Zdziarski that the practical effects of having “only” 16 GB are overblown for most typical use cases, even with “pro” software.

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karll
2934 days ago
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You can ran an MBP out of memory quickly, just open a bunch of tabs in Chrome.
Houston, Texas
smkelly
2920 days ago
Not to mention battery.
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3 public comments
martinbaum
2934 days ago
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After Effects or C4D with 4K comps will bring 16 gigs to a crawl. Of course, you should be using a Mac Pro, but...
spongbeaux
2934 days ago
"I only made it to 14.5GB before the system decided to start paging out" - um... so the system decided you were out of memory, and any additional tasks would have been pagingly slow. Lucky he "ran out" of things to do...
walokra
2935 days ago
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One word: Docker.
davidedwards
2935 days ago
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640K ought to be enough for anybody.
Fort Collins, Colorado

SaxoBank Predicts Universal Basic Income For Europe

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jones_supa writes: Saxo Bank, an investment bank based in Denmark, has released a list of its outrageous predictions for 2016. Among these predictions, economist Christopher Dembik claims that Europe will consider the introduction of a universal basic income to ensure that all citizens can meet their basic needs in the face of rising inequality and unemployment. This will come on the back of increased interest in basic income from Spain, Finland, Switzerland, and France.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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karll
3222 days ago
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"We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork." -- Milton Friedman
Houston, Texas
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JayM
3222 days ago
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Um. Ok. Universal healthcare makes a lot of sense even to my free market/meritocracy brain. But basic income, I dunno. Perhaps when there are Star Trek replicators, but then, why would we need money at all... where will our evolution take us? I dunno. Just doesn't seem like this will help us get there.
Atlanta, GA
secondshadow
3222 days ago
How do you resolve the issue of there being, on the whole, more people than things to do?
JayM
3222 days ago
I qualified with two different "I dunno" ... if I had that the answer with resolving any issues, I'd certainly want to offer them! :)

It's Not Politically Correct To Say, But People Who Say "It's Not Politically Correct To Say, But . . ." Are Generally Assholes

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What, exactly, do people mean to signal when they preface a comment with "I know this isn't politically correct to say, but . . ."?

It is boasting? "Please acknowledge that I am brave, a rebel, a nonconformist, by being willing to say the following in defiance of social convention." Is it special pleading? "I recognize that the following may be considered rude, but please pretend that it is not because I have acknowledged it." Is it lampshading? "You can treat this as not-rude because I have pre-announced that it could be seen as rude." Is it strawmaning? "Nobody would actually be offended by what I'm about to say, but I'm going to pretend that some people will in order to paint them as ridiculous." Is it self-serious cross-climbing? "Contemplate, for a moment, how I will suffer for being willing to share great truths with you."

I ask because it seems so common, in public or private. Take the case of a 47-year-old Englishman who used LinkedIn to praise the looks of a 27-year-old Englishwoman, a complete stranger to him. “I appreciate that this is probably horrendously politically incorrect but that is a stunning picture," he said. The recipient shared the message and her rebuking response, leading to a flood of both criticism and support.

There are plenty of interesting issues embedded here. Is there some sort of social or moral convention that requires us to keep unsolicited messages private? (I lean towards no, in most cases.) If, for the sake of argument, an unsolicited message is rude, is it proportional or compassionate to share it to make a point about such messages? (I submit it depends upon the message, and the sender, and the recipient.) Are some women reasonably irritated by unsolicited messages about their appearance in professional settings and through professional channels? (I'll answer that obliquely with an observation that when I was a prosecutor, my female colleagues told me that after a trial, when they interviewed jurors, the jurors wouldn't necessarily comment on their trial performance, but at least one would almost inevitably comment on what they wore.)

But let's carve out just one issue: what's the guy signalling with "I appreciate that this is probably horrendously politically incorrect"? I don't see anything to admire about it. It smacks of "I sense on some rudimentary level that this will likely annoy you but I'm going to say it anyway, so deal with it." Or perhaps it means "modern norms of discourse annoy me and I shan't abide by them and I find it necessary to announce my defiance." Saying it strikes me as strengthening the argument that the communication is rude, or uncouth, or aggressive.

Norms about courtesy and rudeness change. Do you disagree with the changes? Are you trying to resist and push back against the changes? Fine. Speak, and let the chips fall where they may. But ask yourself: what are you trying to accomplish by such a preface in any particular communication?

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karll
3357 days ago
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OK so whether it was improper or not and whether she was right or not to flame him for it or whatever, can't we just treat it as an eyeroll and move on?

It's pretty much just like flamewars on Usenet 25 years ago except there a thousand times as many people in the conversation and as soon as a thousand people "tweet their disgust" or whatever, it makes the news.
Houston, Texas
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ahofer
3358 days ago
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like "with all due respect"
Princeton, NJ or NYC

Airline Begins Weighing Passengers For 'Safety'

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New submitter Lopsemily writes to note that passengers on Uzbekistan Airways may face a new pre-flight check: In a recent statement, the country's flag carrier announced it will weigh passengers and their carry-on luggage prior to flights to determine how much weight they'll be adding to the plane. 'According to the rules of International Air Transport Association, airlines are obliged to carry out the regular procedures of preflight control passengers weighing with hand baggage to observe requirements for ensuring flight safety,' says the airline's statement.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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karll
3387 days ago
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Many airplane crashes have occurred due to the plane being overweight or out of balance.
Houston, Texas
KaiUno
3387 days ago
Yeah, they keep falling out of the sky in droves, what with the american obesity epidemic an all. *shrugs*
karll
3387 days ago
Aaliyah's crash in the Bahamas, Air Midwest Flight 5481, Beech Super King Air 200 from Long Beach in 2011, UTA crash in France in 2003, National Air Cargo Boeing 747-400 in Bagram, Afghanistan, but by all means eyeroll me, overload and get the CG way off in a Cessna 172, take off and see what happens. There's a searchable NTSB crash database... lots of crashes from overloaded and/or out-of-CG aircraft.
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The Economist on Microsoft

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The Economist:

“What are you on? The ‘fuck Windows’ strategy?” Back in the late 1990s, when Bill Gates was still Microsoft’s boss, any employee who had the temerity to suggest something that could possibly weaken the firm’s flagship operating system was sure to earn his wrath. Even after Steve Ballmer took over from Mr Gates in 2000, that remained the incontestable law at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, in Washington state. Everything Microsoft did had to strengthen Windows, to make it ever more crushingly dominant. Many of the company’s best innovations were killed because of this “strategy tax”, as it was known internally.

Today the rules are different in Redmond. The new boss who took over last year, Satya Nadella (pictured, centre, with Mr Gates to the left and Mr Ballmer on the right), recoils when he hears the term “strategy tax” and says he now tells his staff simply to “build stuff that people like”.

Sounds like just what Microsoft needs. Then this:

Yet Mr Nadella’s biggest achievement so far is that he has given Microsoft a coherent purpose in life, as it enters its fifth decade. He sums it up in two mottos. One is “mobile first, cloud first”: since these are where the growth is going to come from, all new products need to be developed for them.

At first I wanted to quip that they can’t both be first. But maybe they can. They’re not in conflict, and they’re potentially complementary. complimentary. The idea is, everything Microsoft does should be of primary relevance to mobile (devices being used) and the cloud (for storage and incoming data). That strikes me as a good focus for Microsoft.

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karll
3520 days ago
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The everything-must-make-Windows-more-dominant strategy had stopped working and become detrimental at least by 2007, when it became clear Microsoft was flubbing mobile, and maybe earlier, when they failed to get the web locked into the proprietary web browser and web server technologies. And I am very glad it went that way.
Houston, Texas
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aaronwe
3520 days ago
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At this point I'm so invested in the Google ecosystem that it would take a lot to get me to switch... but Microsoft finally has the right pieces in place that if I had to switch, I probably could without too much pain.

I guess that's not quite a ringing endorsement.
Denver
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