- bnastic parentEverything after Win 2000 was a bad idea. Enterprise or not.
- I dont/didn't use Jack at all, straight into pipewire, which makes for a super unintuitive way to select 'audio device' in Reaper (iirc, something like select ALSA and 'default's for input/output and somehow that's all routed via pipewire). I'm not unhappy about pipewire, I finally have a low-ish latency audio system (enough for mixing, if not recording) that I don't have to spend hours on to get it to work. A la MacOS.
But generally that's my point, 'it works if you go and edit this obscure line in this obscure config file'. Mac has had a stable CoreAudio backend for quarter of a century now (counterpoint - Windows is also a mess). I wish Linux would stabilise their userland a bit more and stop rewriting stuff every few years.
Sometimes I wish there was a commercial company behind 'linux for audio' that will give me a finely tuned Linux distro on a finely tuned desktop machine, based on whatever distro, I don't really care. But have it all released/patched at their own pace, as long as everything 'just works'. I'd be happy to pay for that. The whole 'OS due upgrade, is anything going to work tomorrow, I have a session' is still an unsolved problem on _every_ OS/platform. Most busy studio heads go years without installing/upgrading _anything_ for fear of having a lemon after said upgrade, with clients waiting at the door.
- I used this site as a reference earlier this year quite often, as I attempted to establish some baseline for a Linux DAW. I use Mac for serious audio stuff, but 'what if' (since I use Linux for everything else anyway).
I came back pleasantly surprised with the current state of things. Minus the underlying linux sound system, which is still a mess of things that barely work together. (I have a lot of expensive/pro plugins and all the DAWs on the Mac, so this was mostly a filtering exercise - what I can use on Linux that can still mix/master a whole project).
- I'm not a FOSS purist in audio, so that wasn't a requirement. But I am 'linux purist' so no VST wrappers of windows DLLs etc.
- Watershed moment for me: Toneboosters and Kazrog coming to Linux. Along with u-he, these make for a very, very high quality offering. You can easily mix a commercial release just with these. Kazrog isn't even 'Linux beta' like the rest, proper full release on Linux. I was briefly involved in beta testing for Linux, Shane & co are incredible people.
- I have most/all DAWs for the Mac. Reaper and Bitwig on Linux are enough for me and feel like good citizens in Linux. (ProTools is never coming, neither is Logic. But addition of Studio One makes for a really good trio).
- Any USB class-compliant audio interface will work (modulo control applications which generally aren't available on Linux, so ymmv).
- iLok is missing, which removes a whole host of possible options (I have 500+ licences on my iLok dongle, none of that stuff is accessible). I can't say I miss iLok, but I do miss Softube (not that it's available on Linux, iLok or not).
I made a few 100+ tracks mixes on my thinkpad with Reaper and the above combo of plugins, it worked just fine.
But Linux is still Linux, and 30 years later still annoys me with typical 'linux problems', which generally boil down to 'lack of care'. UI is still laggy, compositors be damned. While Reaper is butter-smooth on a Mac, audio thread never interferes with UI (and vice versa), it can get quite choppy on Linux. If you allow your laptop to go to sleep with a DAW open, chances are good that upon resuming you'll have to restart it as it will lose sound. And a lot of smaller annoyances that are just lack of polish and/or persistent bugs, that I'm sadly used to on Linux (want to switch users on Linux Mint? The lock screen can get hella confused and require a lot of tinkering to get the desktop back). But overall, it's a million miles away from a hobbyist endeavour that Linux audio used to be until recently. I could get actual work done with Linux this time around.
- Macintosh has always been application-centric, instead of window-centric desktop. Hence the top application menu that controls the 'application'. There is nothing inherently wrong with that approach.
And I'm not sure why anyone would complain that installing (most, not all) applications is just dragging an icon into applications folder.
- There are a lot of small companies / single devs working in very technical, pro-oriented, industries. They still thrive in the days of browsers and javascripts and what not, writing super optimised, super inovative, native code.
Like all the 'audio plugins' people that essentially write .so's that go into the big desktop audio workstations, doing anything and everything with sound, while also experimenting with various UI/UX paradigms, unrestricted by what's possible in the DOM/CSS, integrating hardware into it all etc. (I imagine similar in the video/rendering industry, but I'm not too familiar with that side)
- A lot of this stuff has been investigated in Mr Alexandrescu's ironically named book Modern C++. Typelists (before variadic templates) recursive templates and componenet-like assembling of classes, etc. I imagine there is a modern-modern-c++ version of Loki library somewhere on github.
- Indeed. Although I don't know what precisions are required in crypto products, in traditional trading an 8 byte double is quite enough - the price submitted will have to be rounded to the instrument's precision anyway (e.g. most spot FX products are rounded to 5 decimal places).
With a caveat here, after a very quick look at the code: The price here is defined as long double, which can be different among platforms... My Mac/clang says that long double is still 8 bytes, Linux on that same arm64 machine says it's 16 bytes (and I'm not sure what that's mapped to these days - 80bit FPU instructions, or some Float128 representation)
- Thanks for that! I remember reading something on the subject years ago and scrolled through comments hoping someone would dig it up! Kudos!
(But there was another, similar article, much longer, with the actual frames from the movie, going through symbols one by one… I thought I had it bookmarked…)
- > There is no reason to pay the money I am paying here if I can get better food, climate and general quality of life for the same (or even less!) money elsewhere in Europe
Sure. And you should probably do that. But then a lot of other people are of the opinion that they can ignore food and weather and come to Britain. Net migration numbers in recent decades have not gone in favour of your line of thinking?
UK high street is being attacked from multiple sides, from apparent lack of labour satisfied/pressured into low wages, to having their access being cut by the latest LTN measures around the country. Rental market is getting squeezed hard by the latest measures that will only make the situation worse, esp for London (I'm lucky I've escaped that place when I could). Current/incoming gov't is drunk on high taxation and more and more regulation of every facet of your life and business. But I'm still unsure my business/work would fare better in any other european country (forget Brexit, it doesn't have much to do with any of this). The malaise is everywhere.
- Truth to be told, A* over navmeshes and path smoothing ('string pulling' by eliminating points with LoS) with adding occupancy/weight to individual triangles (or polygons? Not sure what's used here) is nothing particularly new... going some 25 years maybe?
I've not been in triple-A games for many years, but I'm not sure I'd choose navmeshes today for an RTS style game over a large terrain - they tend to be static in nature (without attaching a lot of additional data to them, projecting dynamic obstacles onto them, re-weighting all the polys all the time, while making sure that the resolution is fine enough for this purpose or coming up with some vector field on top of the larger ones.... but no one needs to save RAM these days, do they... it's not 32MB of Playstation 2 anymore).
Edit: forgot to add that once you realise that A* is 'open ended' and that you drive it via the heuristic estimate, that can be anything, it becomes much much more suited to 'strategic' path-finding than what's normally envisaged described as 'A-to-B' path finding.
- I remember the Knight Cap event, I was working on order routing at the time.
Things have changed a lot since 2012, and at the same time haven’t. Circuit breakers and position monitoring are no.1 in any sane market making firm. What happened then I can’t imagine happening now (accumulating a huge position for, what was it, 30 minutes? With nobody killing the algos within a couple of minutes?). On the other hand, the perfect world of “code hygiene” and 100% test coverage will never exist in this world, things will slip and they do frequently. What’s better, externally, is the availability of good tools for development and change reviews (bitbucket taking hold, for example), automated deployments, containers, testing frameworks and similar. This type of software, end to end, is incredibly complex and difficult to reason about when unexpected happens (there was a TTL misconfig for multicast and we never got such and such update? Well, no one thought of that!), esp these days with the influx of ML algos for price generation.
- I wish there was a bit more overlap between US and UK writing supplies. For some reason, certain Japanese pen companies will sell Pen A in the US only, while having Pen B for European markets. Eg. Pilot C4 0.25, you can still only find it from one small boutique seller in the UK (at one point I thought I bought all of their stock of 025).
I had to order notebooks with Tomoe River 52g paper (well, “had to”…) from JetPens some years ago, as no one in the UK had them. (The situation has improved somewhat in recent years, on both fronts)
- I tried this setup a few years ago, over a couple of weeks whilst in Spain on holiday. iPad Pro (1st gen + apple's keyboard case), shared Wifi from my iPhone (4G in roaming), blink, and OpenBSD VM from Vultr.
It was surprisingly OK. Mosh definitely works for dodgy connections, tmux keeps the session(s) around and all works fine. I was writing C in vim, so that also helped, no heavy tools other than the compiler.
I only wish I had the bigger iPad model. And I wish there was a way to attach that keyboard when in portrait mode (far superior for coding on iPad).