I worry about the Slate truck being DOA with expiration of incentives for EVs. Someone please tell me I'm wrong, because if they do deliver as promised, I'll be excited to buy one.
For me, I'm hoping it fills the mid-90s Isuzu Pup sized hole in my heart.
From the papers I've read, the stem separation models all seem to train off what seems like a fairly small dataset that doesn't have great instrument representation.
I wonder if you could assemble a big corpus of individual solo instruments, then permute a cacophonous mix of them. IIRC the main training dataset is comprised of a limited number of real songs. But I think a model trained on real songs might struggle with more "out there" harmonies and mixes.
MuseScore is good enough that I haven't bothered to check back with commercial vendors. I'm pretty novice with it, however, so perhaps Sibelius power users will disagree.
Tunable transparency mode sounds great, and I wish Apple would do something like this as first-party support.
As a casual trombone player, who often plays in louder settings, the airpods pro are almost excellent hearing protection. Passive (even "audiophile" or "concert") earplugs make me feel like I'm under water. Airpods Pro attenuate a lot of sound but don't feel so unnatural.
Unfortunately, they tend to drop my own sound out of the mix when sounds around me get louder.
I'd love a mode that selectively let in more trombone frequencies, or better, that mixed noise cancellation and transparency to give me more of a studio monitor effect. Maybe the airpods could figure out which sounds were mine via the buzzing sounds that propagate through my head from my lips.
apple doesn't allow much customization, only the 9 presets under accessibility>hearing>headphone accomodation. this eq then also applies to the audio played and transparency settings both. maybe one of those nine presets suits your needs?
I think the answer here involves licensing and Apple control of the infrastructure, but my first thought was, "I historically trust Apple with my data a bit more than I trust Google, how is this not just trusting Google with my data?"
Apple previously pitched a vision of local-first AI for privacy, but seems to have badly miscalculated the kind of customer experience they could provide. My personal experience is that Siri has suffered greatly.
Case in point, I like to listen to music in the car, and Siri now confidently starts playing artists whose names sound nothing like what I requested. Also maddening "Play [x] on Apple Music" "You'll need to authorize me to use Youtube Music"
Still I live with / pay for so much that is broken based on a kind of Apple privacy vibes inertia. Siri being wired up to more of my personal information plus Apple maybe shipping that data to Google is going to make me reevaluate that.
I don't think those work between iOS and KDE Connect. I would love to be able to type iMessages on my Linux desktop's computer. If I'm wrong about this not working, someone please let me know, but I've never been able to make messages work.
I can't remember where I read it, but I read that Signal's popularity was high (highest?) in Germany. Assuming I'm not misremembering or that the situation hasn't changed, it seems that Germans care enough about the issue to stake out a position.
Though this is more "LLM uses a variety of open source tools and compilers to compile source," I do wonder about whether there will eventually be a role for transformers in compiling code.
I've mentioned this before, but "sufficiently smart compiler" would be the dream here. Start with high level code or pseudo code, end up with something optimized.
There's been a decent chunk of research in this direction over the years. Michael O'Boyle is pretty active as a researcher in the space, if you're looking for stuff to read: https://www.dcs.ed.ac.uk/home/mob/
Gosh, I remember my family renting this and the VHS player to watch it as a kid. I remember nothing about the plot. Only pizza, soda, VHS rental, and this title specifically.
My first and only time playing Asteroids in its original vector CRT glory was a bit shocking to me. I remember the evolution of CRTs in the 80s and 90s. My family had a small B&W CRT that fascinated me with its image quality, in that it always reminded me more of a b&w photo than color CRTs reminded me of color photos.
Still, that vector CRT that I saw perhaps a dozen years ago was quite a surprise. Lack of rastering and the utterly insane brightness sent me down a rabbit hole. I ultimately concluded I'm not ever likely to own a basement Asteroids cabinet.
> My family had a small B&W CRT that fascinated me with its image quality, in that it always reminded me more of a b&w photo than color CRTs reminded me of color photos.
The problem of a finite dot pitch interfering with image quality, especially on small displays where the dots were necessarily larger relative to the image size, is what motivated Tektronix to develop field-sequential color CRTs which they used in their digital oscilloscopes in the 80s and 90s. JVC also used the technology in some professional broadcast video monitors. Basically it was a B&W CRT with a changeable (liquid crystal) color filter in front of it. The R, G, and B channels would be shown one after another with the corresponding filter activated, in a similar manner to a color wheel DLP projector.
I had similar reactions, only it all happened while I was in grade school!
Oh yes! The bright projectiles really add to the game impact. And on some cabinets, the lines were not perfectly straight. It looked for all the world like the phosphor coating had a bit of texture to it. Now being older, I realize an effect like that could just be a marginal DAC too.
IMHO the best vector experiences, in order are:
STAR WARS
This is a color vector display cranked up to the nines! The processor handling the vector drawing is fast! Tons of vectors are possible with only subtle impact on display refresh speed and overall quality. There is some global image size artifacts that happen when some of the brightest objects occupy a significant percentage of the display.
And that is a feature! Love it. Get into a sit down cabinet if you ever get the chance.
TEMPEST
This game is not for everyone. Most of these drive people to their limits, but TEMPEST ramps up and beyond normal human limits! Not everyone can play this game at its peak. Same can be said of nearly everything on this list, but without that aggressive ramp up.
ASTEROIDS
I prefer the original cabinet with the somewhat slower object motion. That one is a bit easier to play. Depending on the operator and how hard they drive the CRT, image brightness ranges from a bit old, washed out and tired looking to WOW! How do those tiny projectiles not just carve a line right into the phosphors.
Cinematronics games: TAIL GUNNER, STAR CASTLE, RIP OFF.
These use overlays for a bit of color. Oh, I forgot ARMOR ATTACK, which uses large ones like STAR CASTLE.
The quality of the vectors is not quite as good as the ATARI displays and this too is a feature. That gives Cinematronics a bit of charm I find quite enjoyable
And sound! Hoo boy! STAR CASTLE has great, loud --> I mean loud sounds with full bass notes able to rumble you and the cabinet!
OTHER COLOR VECTOR GAMES
I like playing all of these, but they simply were not peak experiences. Still damn good, if you ask me:
MAJOR HAVOC, GRAVITAR, A Two Player tandem Asteroids game I cannot recall. Fun though!
And last place: QUANTUM played with the Trackball. You circle atoms over and over. This game looks cool and is hard.
GRAVITAR uses the Asteroids movement dynamics to great effect! A fun thing in this game is massive changes in scale happen often. Rare to see.
Vector gaming delivered many of my very highly cherished arcade gaming experiences for sure.
ATARI and Tektronix deserve special mention in this context:
Atari made color vector games work! Did anyone else? Those look amazing! And hold up today in my view.
Tektronix invented both a pure storage tube CRT. Their graphics terminals often doubled as Minicomputers programmable in Tek Basic. The large ones offered a 4K vector space! Crazy good detail for the 70's. And one in good condition, operating in a reduced light room is beautiful to use.
My first manufacturing CAM software experience was on one of these. Used a fixed record length cassette so that many "files" could be accessed almost like a floppy disk drive. User data went right to the paper tape puncher / reader. 1200 baud punch, reads could be faster, up to 9600, if one had a good reader unit.
One ran applications from that cassette and stored and used user data from the paper tape.
But I digress!
Right near the end, Tek managed to get both storage graphics and dynamic refresh capable graphics, both in a different color. I only got to use one of those one time. I loved it because many different work flows were possible.
Man, for the chance to code a UI on one today!
One last thought: in my view vector displays are best on a CRT, mostly because of the image contrast and speed possible, but great vector experiences can also be had on a wall, or perhaps a screen with some coating to bring out the best possible.
We may yet see vectors appear from time to time in these and other ways simply because of how great they are. Hope so, and building a small, color capable one using a low power laser and screen with coatings sure to deliver motion trails is on ky bucket list.
For me, I'm hoping it fills the mid-90s Isuzu Pup sized hole in my heart.
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