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Asking as a novice, how come this is such a big deal compared to just vibe coding something for an stm32 and hooking up a midi keyboard? Is it the professional enclosure + screen + hackability combo or something extra?


I spent a number of hours building a minidexed from a RPi Zero 2 and parts I already had on hand, and it still doesn't have a proper case. Add 40 buttons, 8 pots and a screen, that's an easy $20-40 worth of parts. Then there's lithium battery and charging curcuits.

Or just buy an FM-1 for $60, most musicians are not hardware hackers.

For the hardware hackers there are hundreds if not thousands of open-source projects. Infinite Digits Zeptocore immediately comes to my mind.


I grabbed one of these since I didn't have a hardware FM synth. While playing around with a web-based patch editor and seeing how well synths can run in a web, I started using AI to build out my own synths, and it's been a lot of fun. I've done FM, granular, samplers, 303 and 808 clones, and a bunch of others. So yeah, if you don't care about the experience of having a bespoke device, you could probably one-shot something much more sophisticated than this.


> 303 and 808 clones

It doesn't have nearly enough power for proper circuit modeling. You might as well use samples.


Define proper circuit modeling, please.


SPICE.


SPICE is a good first step. Raw metal code, the next best thing. Go ahead, prove me wrong.


Yes, musical instruments represent the refinement of technology towards a very specific purpose: the creation of music.

The nature and form of the instrument directs the talents of the musician towards their desired aesthetic. In many ways, the interface informs and sculpts the final product - so instruments which are malleable (software-upgradeable) while providing a canonical haptic experience (hardware control surface) are very appealing to the modern artist.

There is a lot of innovation in the music technology world, vis a vis turning technology into an instrument of sound - but there is also a lot of stagnation, too. Whether its the ancient art of menu-diving as a performance method, or indeed if its the sudden appearance of cocktail devices with whimsy and creativity encoded in the interface, music technology offers a big, wide and often very woolly world in which to apply creative juices.

The M-VAVE is fantastics because it's cheap, it has a somewhat decent user interface layout, haptically, and now .. it is getting serious hacker attention as a boutique/unique thing to play with. Musicians - especially of the technology-aligned variety - absolutely love to one-up each other and excel in distinguishing themselves from standards - of course, musicians also love standards too - the field offers a very broad spectrum of tastes.

Vibe-coding something for the STM32 is indeed a fun thing to do from a music technology perspective - but having it in a fancy case with a battery management PMU, a decent screen with whimsy (and as little menu-diving as possible), and .. interesting sound .. is very, very appealing.

The issue is, music-technology manufacturers often take the shortest possible route to getting their interfaces implemented. Menu-diving is the scourge of music technology - at least until, that is, someone finds a way to incorporate the washing-machine method into a really kickass performance. Think Kraftwerks' reference to the Operator With Their Pocket Calculator, the mundane yet fashionable laptop-on-stage DaDa faction, and compare it to the real rock and roll of guitar and 'tradititional' instruments. The M-VAVE is an expression of the desire of music technology to not only be great (cheap!) but also full of unexplored potential. It is that unexplored potential which motivates the musician, after all ..

(EDIT: there are plenty of examples of music-hacker toys which fulfill your STM32 postulate: the monome, the Zynthian, the insanely great and fertile field of Eurorack modules, many of which did indeed first start off as some hacky STM32 project .. but there are plenty of STM32's which have found their way into a fancy, somewhat expensive case, too .. so seeing M-VAVE pitch into that world is exciting. I literally cannot wait to see what the M-VAVE will have to offer next week ..)


Were you reading through the code it was generating to make sure the flow was intuitive and comprehensible for each PR? Projects only turn in to maintainable messes if you blindly merge in unmaintainable messy code.


The law is only meant to apply to citizens of Utah though. Blocking all exit relays would mean that absolutely anyone accessing that website would not be able to do so from a VPN which burdens people outside of Utah too.


This is what I was missing. Demanding that porn sites block VPN traffic (or only accept residential traffic) would mean that everyone everywhere using a VPN gets blocked not just in Utah.

I still suspect there's some kind of solution. Like Utah could tell VPN providers that if they service a customer in Utah then the VPN provider can't route traffic to adult sites. Or put the burden on the VPN provider to do age verification if porn is gonna be available through the VPN.

Come to think of it, I'm still a bit confused as to why VPNs are even relevant because it would seem to me that age verification would be done through some kind of having-credit-card type scheme which VPNs are entirely irrelevant to. I even read the article and I'm still confused. Oh well.


You can mail cash to mullvad.


VPNs are relevant because Utah only has the power to require ages verification in Utah, and a VPN allows someone to pretend they're not in Utah.


I think they just meant its weird as in if you met a software dev at a dinner party who was still writing all their code by hand it would raise an eyebrow and you’d want to enquire further why that is.


I think understand the purpose of this comment. I think you're sensing friction and you'd like to reduce that by explaining for the other guy. Which is a common social script, but one that is being exploited here I'd say.

But, regardless, what is interesting I think is the scenario chosen there. Because a "dinner party" is not where engineering happens; and that's kinda the point I was getting at. That's pulled from the pool of "social consensus" and not "math" or "physics" or whatever.

It's interesting, isn't it? Just like how specific tokens in the context window of LLMs pull probabilities towards specific clusters of ideas (and tokens); with humans, you see similar things happen.

(This comment is more coherent than it might look at at first sight.)

___

Anyway, point (and to the point) is: Don't get hacked by the current thing fraudsters/grifters.

They don't respect you or me or really anyone the slightest. They're just in it to get rich quick (or simply just inflict psychological damage for sadistic reasons), and they will use any means necessary to do so.

This comment chain only exists because some hype guy is trying to induce FOMO into people for not doing more AI. Why is unclear, but it's clearly malicious. Whether they consciously know that they are doing that doesn't matter for that assessment.


I think LLMs just allow you to get to where you want to get to quicker. So in a productivity oriented world it seems weird to not be making use of them where those gains can be had.


Yes, please stop trying to drag the conversation back into default "AI good/AI bad" scripts.

It was not about that. Thank you.


what


Yes, exactly.

Let me try another analogy: AI-related comment sections are like a watering hole for both get-rich-quick grifters, but also bad people wanting to hurt others.

The technology is so disruptive that there are all sorts of opportunities while stuff is still developing, things aren't regulated, and people themselves have not yet learned how to self-regulate.

So if you're looking to make money or to just inflict pain onto others, you're pulled towards this stuff.

This is what I am seeing in this specific comment sub-tree. A troll.

But in current year, you cannot just call people trolls, so instead you get these elaborate meta comments that bypass the anti-anti-troll defenses, but get so abstract, people just go "what".

My advice would be to view any of these comment sections through a zero-trust lens.

Godspeed. We will all eventually get through this.


I guess the 21st century classroom is the free online classroom you connect to from your portable device


Android and iphone emulator MCP, model compares screens, flags is theres drift? Something like that I’d guess


But the screens should look different, right? That's the point of building separate iOS vs. Android versions is to make each version "native" to its platform. The feature-set should be the same, but the interfaces can diverge.


I think the whole native thing is more for better performance, debugging ease and dependency reduction rather than seeking variation in UIs.


It is both. You want the application to look correct on the platform the user is on, i.e. Liquid Glass on iOS and Material on Android.


I guess theyre talking about all the electronics being used to populate the various data centre's popping up about the place. The GPUs, RAM and what not


Probably not exclusively using Fable.


Yeah which is a bit underhanded. Because the implication of "using Fable" is that it was done in under ... a week? So it's just a bit of click bait.


That's nearly every single article on the front page of HN nowadays that talks about AI related stuff


For that to be click bait it implies people wouldn’t have clicked on it if any other model were used. IMO the more interesting fact is they ported a game over to iOS.


I dunno... Command and Conquer ported to macOS/iPad in 18 months using AI coding agents probably wouldn't have the same ring to it


The port to MacOS is from the parent upstream repo, which also has it working on Linux, this fork added iOS support.


I'm a bit confused by the title. It seems to suggest that ripping a DVD in 2026 is no longer a federal crime, which I'm pretty sure it is. And that ripping a DVD in 1999 didn't require $22 worth of hardware and some free software -> both of which I'm pretty sure it did.


Ripping a DVD is and was not a federal crime. The DMCA had carve outs for personal use and DeCSS was free speech (as argued and won by the EFF).

Using DeCSS to rip your own dvd was never illegal.


I'm not seeing personal use as one of the DCMA exemptions to prohibition against copyright protection circumvention: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-37/chapter-II/subchapter-...

The exemptions seem to be for pretty specific cases. Have you got a link to the EFF case?


The DMCA includes a provision for the Library of Congress to grant exemptions, and they exempted DVDs, but if I remember correctly the exemption does not include Blu-Ray disks.


Im definitely in this camp.

It seems like the biggest frustration from the teachers’ part with modern schooling is lack of engagement from the students. This is clearly telling us something.

Sure some students have not even had their basic needs met, which is a separate issue. But those that have and still don’t engage tells us that their brains have probably assigned the information they’re receiving as “having little or no value”, i.e. meaningless.

I bet if you were to lead a class of teenagers on the subject of relationships or friendship, or even how to host a successful party, suddenly you’d see a lot more engagement. Why? Because it’s actually relevant to their every day existence.


In highschool, at least, you have to somehow elevate the meaning of your subject to be more interesting than the movie theatre/concert/video game system they have in their pocket.

Kids will make eye contact with you and nod along as you teach, but they are wearing air pods and can't hear you over their spotify playlist.

Im not sure I can be more interesting than Taylor Swift, Call of Duty, MrBeast, and texting with friends all at the same time. You need the student to be a little bit receptive to even have the opportunity to convince them what you are teaching is relevant to them.


Just ban the phones from schools. Because with that you cannot compete. Instant gratification vs hard work?


I think math bas be slowly transforming more and more into word problems and scenarios. You might think oh yeah this engages the student by showing them reality, but I actually found it incredibly boring and useless, it served as a distraction from the actual numbers that I think are important to learn too.


Part of the goal there is not only "relatability" (demonstrating how this could be useful in reality) but "applicability" (demonstrating HOW to distill a math problem out of some potentially messy real world anecdote).

I have legit seen real world adults do things like say "Well, I got ten widgets because I know that's enough for two people. But there's gonna be four coming so.. uh.. 10+2=12, I'll bring 12 widgets"


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