> If big government, high taxes, and immigration delivered prosperity and social peace, France would be paradise. Instead, the protesters on the streets of Paris are demanding more of the same medicine that made them sick.
These two sentences alone demonstrate a total lack of understanding of the situation in France, as well as a strong ideological bias. That guy was an economic advisor for the main populist right-wing party in Spain.
Every musical device starts as an idea and ends up as thousands of concrete decisions: what the player touches, how it responds, what the software lets them do, what gets left out. The wrong ones usually come back later as rework, bad reviews or support emails. I help you get them right, and then I build them.
I make firmware and desktop software for musical devices, often as the one person covering both sides, and I enjoy helping shape the product along the way. 15 years in the field, musician, PhD in HCI. I can take on all the software or just one part.
Before freelancing, I spent 9 years as the software developer at a small French instrument maker, writing all the software for its products, which I also co-designed and helped showcase through demo videos and music: Sylphyo (electronic wind instrument with a wireless receiver), Anyma Phi (semi-modular physical modeling synth) and Loom (multi-touch MPE ribbon controller, finished as a freelancer this year).
Since 2025, as a freelancer:
- Firmware and guidance for a team building their first MPE controller.
- Firmware features and Ableton Live remote script for an MPE controller already on the market.
- High-fidelity prototype of a desktop app for a soft robotics simulation framework, from user research to usability testing.
Looking for: freelance work on musical devices or other interactive products, day rate, available from November 2026.
He never was a "spiritual leader". He was a med school professor. He had been ordained as a _upāsaka_, a lay Buddhist disciple, meaning he took the vow of following the five precepts and he was given this name by the people who ordained him, that's not a weird thing. He later was removed from the board of the meditation center he co-founded because he broke the precepts (adultery and lying about it to his wife, hardly a criminal)[1], so he was prohibited from teaching things. He died recently from cancer[2].
His approach in the book, which seems still taught at that center, probably because it's excellent, was to lay out a path for meditation practice that was inspired from classic Buddhist writings, but presented and explained with modern neuroscience.
Getting advice from a divorced guy doesn't look great, but thankfully there are many more role models to look up to, and (early) Buddhism requires very little faith and demands that you verify the teachings by yourself anyway.
To be clear I'm not saying being divorced is a failing. But he has now been married 3 times, and has admitted to having extramarital affairs with prostitutes, as well as "supporting" them financially.
Big fan of your OS X stuff! I still have a 11" 2012 MacBook Air with Core i7 and 8 GB RAM, if only I could use it as my everyday machine I'd be very happy!
I didn't know about Firefox Dynasty, it's very cool.
(Wow, and Archive Plus and Preview Plus… you're killing it!)
What's your experience with those shady USB-C to Magsafe 2 cables/adapters? Old MacBook batteries are bound to deplete faster and faster every year, it'd be nice to be able to charge using what's most common nowadays.
I wouldn't trust the adapters. Maybe in theory it's possible to do it right, bridge PD negotiation to a 1-wire protocol negotiation but you've got to trust that they handled both the usb-c part correctly and the 1-wire part correctly.
There's not much rigorous testing I could find online, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qg6pPDys-s0 tested a few and found that some spark when first connected, which implies they're not doing the 1-wire negotiation properly (real adapters will prevent arcing by sensing if it's connected first before increasing voltage)
> What's your experience with those shady USB-C to Magsafe 2 cables/adapters?
I don't have experience--I would probably try to get a real one. I'm also a big proponent of getting batteries replaced. I know this all costs money, but if you like and are using this computer, make it nice!
I've got this idea that third-party batteries are mostly crap and die very fast, but it's based on ≈10 year old experience (although the last official battery on my iPhone SE 2016 was the same)
Indeed: your comment made me curious, so I've read the article although I wasn't initially interested, and I gained a nice point of view about conversational interfaces to LLMs and how friction, usually a pure HCI concern, is being weaponized to bring about a profitable and inhumane world. I didn't need to read this today but will surely remember or think about at some point.
Thanks for wasting my time! You might just want to exert a little bit more effort next time to explain why you felt that way, which would make your hard-earned piece of advice a useful contribution to this place instead of that weird way of reminding everyone that you exist at the detriment of others.
I've been designing and developing digital musical instruments and synths for more than 10 years, including two commercial products used by professional musicians around the world.
Combined with a background in HCI research, I offer strategic assistance, interaction design, and software development services to companies interested in building reliable interactive products, be they hardware or software.
I work using a positive, humane, and mindful approach aimed at understanding the underlying needs of stakeholders and making the best of a situation. I try to avoid dogmatism in my own thinking but at the same time respect existing rules and processes.
I'm currently working with a handful of small companies as well as a public research institution, and I'm looking to expand my network outside of France.
If you have needs that intersect my background and interests, or if you want to chat about making fun, profound, and expressive tools, or anything pertaining to HCI, software, DSP, or music, don't hesitate to contact me!
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