In Moscow metro my personal bane is the mind-numbing amounts of reverberating noise due to open design of stations with no soundproofing, but yes, there are also advertising screens in both trains and on stations.
In Beijing metro while going from the airport I remember the looping propaganda on LCD screens with caricatures of how the West consists of bad, fat, ugly people who should be hated. It’s been like 10 years since I have been there so I forget the details, but I have some photos from the metro where ads ended up in the shot.
In Shenzhen metro, screens with ads, screens everywhere on eye level. The highlight is when a screen is glitching.
I think whether they also blast audible ads, so that you truly have no escape, depends on the train. In Hong Kong, newer trains do.
People are often misled that because a country is ostensibly in opposition to the west, it is somehow immune to inconveniences and issues we associate with capitalism. All of those places are de facto capitalist, just with higher degrees of corruption and oligarchy, and (despite what propaganda paints) they suffer from all of the same issues, multiplied by lack of care from the authorities.
macOS sandboxing for native apps has a long way to go to catch up with iOS. As one example, any application can read from your clipboard at any time. Web apps are, I believe, much better sandboxed.
Untrusted by default is a feature. No user would be able to protect themselves, unless perhaps they are a highly trained security expert always on alert, which is not a thing.
This is not the exciting early days of the interwebz where script kiddies run amok and it’s mostly for the geeks anymore, it’s where government-affiliated gangs are launching ransomware attacks on critical infrastructure in order to finance nuclear programs. Accessing arbitrary resources on your local machine is how that happens.
Web apps, given a modern browser, naturally have stricter sandboxing, but native apps are treated as untrusted on any modern OS, too. If I launch anything new, the dialog will have me confirm before it accesses anything other than its isolated app data directory.
I dont run a single native application across five operating systems that requires a popup nag to access the clipboard or that is unable to put any data other than text, html and PNG on the clipboard.
Every mobile OS from Apple would show a popup if an app tried to access clipboard without your explicit pasting. Obviously, if you tapped “paste” then popup would be unnecessary since you would be approving your own action, not app’s action.
It is somewhat crazy that macOS doesn’t do that yet.
But the comment I replied to was talking in general terms. Yes, for some APIs native apps are for now more trusted than Web apps, depending on the OS, but the trend is that they are becoming less and less trusted.
Nope, native applications are not ever going to get the ridiculous level of sandboxing demonstrated by the restrictions on accessing the clipboard in the article. Nor are they ever going to be prevented from accessing the file system as web applications are.
What technical issues are there with VCV Rack that are addressed by the forks (Cardinal, MiRack, etc.)?
I recently switched to VCV Rack 2 as my main creative tool, and it has been very stable and performant with frequent updates[0]. My experience led me to pay for Pro just to support this work (even though the free feature set is more than enough).
[0] My only beef, I suppose, is that those frequent updates can alter the sound in case of long-running projects; it never happened with the rack itself, but it did happen with some modules. That said, regular copies of the app and the plugins directory is a sufficient workaround for my purposes, it’s less than 50 MB after all.
Things like “Core only” vs. “Everything is internal” make perfect sense to me as a developer, but this doesn’t answer my question. In fact, “everything is internal” is a downside since no one really uses all modules.
It also appears outdated, since Rack 2 supports ARM (that’s how I use it).
It is also clearly disingenuous in quite a few places, such as by:
a) providing an uncritical generous excuse for every downside of its own (e.g., lack of multi-threaded engine), but never for VCV Rack’s (an opportunity to pay for an open-source project’s development so that it can sustain itself as a proper business is a feature that benefits both the project and OSS ecosystem as a whole), or
b) pointlessly comparing to VCV Rack Pro. I, like many, am not using any of the Pro features—just one of the amazing things about the base version of VCV Rack is its completeness, combined with generous licensing. The VCV Rack 2 I use is open-source, and is free (though I paid for Pro to support the project I don’t use any of the Pro features, I literally never needed them yet), and is supported (it receives updates regularly).
It is not factual as it is clearly biased in ways I described. It is also outdated and factually incorrect in ways I described. Feel free to address those ways specifically.
I wouldn't lump Cardinal and MiRack. The latter is more audaciously wrapping an outdated VCV and selling it on the App Store. I would like to throw my bones at VCV for such a thing. Hopefully they are working on it.
the plugin implementation and audio I/O backend are not designed in what would be considered "standard" ways among other audio developers.
it works fine, but it can work better.
cardinal also provides some of its own modules to provide better integration with host provided time.
cardinal also, of course, is now compilable to wasm allowing it to run in-browser. the fact that Rack itself can't be used that way is not, however, an issue or flaw, just a choice.
Thanks, interesting. As a musician I suppose it’s not worth switching away from the original until I have an understanding of how Cardinal works “better”.
I like the idea of Organic Maps in general, but using it in Hong Kong is awkward; not only because in many cases it uses Pinyin Mandarin place labels (which locals never use) but also because requires me to download 200+ MB of “China Guangdong”—a large but, critically, distinct in every de jure and de facto sense place beyond a border restriction with no free travel (considering in the case of, say, Kaliningrad, with the same situation and even smaller/sparser place, I would get a separate download). For me it raises questions about who exactly is behind the app and why should I trust its privacy promises.
Can't you just write an Github issue and suggest splitting of these areas? I remember them splitting some areas in the past (because map data are getting bigger and bigger)
True today! In classical orchestra performances, that usually required the composer to insert a solo 'cadenza' section where the soloist was free to be expressive without a conductor 'click-track'.
Today, bands (esp. jam bands like the Dead) might agree to back up anyone who decides to go 'off-plan'. (These days, we can even take big samples of someone else's tracks (if they agree) and do 'covers' that are an entire re-working of their originals.)
One you drive your patch from a random source, the notion of score goes mostly out of the window—you just have the patch and you adapt to what comes out in the live.
It’s easy to push for solar in Europe and the US if >80% of the panels are made in China, a country which not only benefits from increased sales of said panels but is also (hardly coincidentally) leading the planet by the number of new coal plants being built.
If CCP did not manage to create that image, developed countries would have much more difficulty funneling taxpayer money to PRC. It’s easy to lead if everyone else is behind, and it pays for itself (and for future coal plants, I suppose[0]).
If SpaceX wants Starshield to operate in Taiwan, it would. If DoD wants it to, it means nothing unless they convince SpaceX, which apparently has a conflict of interest through its CEO’s other businesses, or force it legally.
It sounds like SpaceX wanted to make Starshield & Starlink a bundle deal. To fulfill the DoD contract, they could only operate military Starshield and not consumer Srarlink. They even use different satellites as far as I know.
Everyone seems to say children should go to libraries more.
At 9, I didn’t need to go to a library—we just had bunch of books at home. Books are cheap, especially second hand. Some of our books were in fact from a library (my mom went, but I never did), so those would rotate.
I suppose the fact that books were physical and I did not have something like TikTok on my phone when I was 9 helped me read whatever was lying around.
As adult I used Kindle for a while but got back to sourcing physical books, even though I have no permanent place and books are difficult to travel with.
> At 9, I didn’t need to go to a library—we just had bunch of books at home. Books are cheap, especially second hand. Some of our books were in fact from a library (my mom went, but I never did), so those would rotate.
You know what isn't cheap in the 2020s? Space.
My grandparents had a full-ass room just for books. I can't even fit my modest blu-ray collection in my apartment, they sit in storage along with my DVDs and physical books.
I've got a Kindle and Calibre with hundreds of books and they don't take any space.
Your grandparents’ house must be huge. We never had a room just for books, not me, not my parents, not their parents. A family of 4 in 2 bedrooms, one living room. Shelves are not expensive and you’d be surprised, they can fit quite a lot of books. Over time some books were lent or given to libraries, others added.
When I was a kid we lived in a small apartment. We still managed to have room for books though. A single bookshelf or two takes up only about 10 square feet of floor space.
I've become an avid reader of web novels when I found out about them as a teenager sometime before 2010.
Idk, for me it completely removed the urge to get physical books. I've got a Kindle too at some point, but I felt the form factor was terrible for reading fiction. There is a reason why newspapers always put their publications into columns, because it makes for an extremely fast reading experience - which is great for fiction.
Another factor is that web fictions are targeted at people that just want to read for a short moment, so you're basically only gonna read for 5-10 minutes before the chapter is over and you're done until the next publication.
IMHO the biggest danger to the medium (written fiction) are LLMs. Since they've become well known, the amount of content has skyrocketed and most of it is without any point. No coherent story that develops with characters growing over the months/years you're following them.
I never got into reading web-native writing, though sometimes I wish I did. I also don’t piecemeal publishing, even though I know many classics were published that way initially. On the contrary, I like to read for as long as I want, finishing a book is always frustrating.
Agreed, LLMs are an issue and will probably reduce the amount of written content published in the open (or at all).
Going to the library means you pick what you want to read from a much wider variety of available books, not just the ones the adults in your life deemed worthy of purchase.
I would almost certainly be on a diet of some attractive but unchallenging fast food like teenage detective novels if I had that choice as a kid. Would my life actually have turned out better if I didn’t read the likes of Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Hesse, Garcia Marquez back then? Perhaps, but at the time I was enthralled and didn’t mind being able to choose among the books adults in my life had around (likely knowing I would end up reading some of them).
In Beijing metro while going from the airport I remember the looping propaganda on LCD screens with caricatures of how the West consists of bad, fat, ugly people who should be hated. It’s been like 10 years since I have been there so I forget the details, but I have some photos from the metro where ads ended up in the shot.
In Shenzhen metro, screens with ads, screens everywhere on eye level. The highlight is when a screen is glitching.
I think whether they also blast audible ads, so that you truly have no escape, depends on the train. In Hong Kong, newer trains do.
People are often misled that because a country is ostensibly in opposition to the west, it is somehow immune to inconveniences and issues we associate with capitalism. All of those places are de facto capitalist, just with higher degrees of corruption and oligarchy, and (despite what propaganda paints) they suffer from all of the same issues, multiplied by lack of care from the authorities.