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I remember a survey of explanatory variables for obesity. The variable that explained more was the size of corn subsidies.

The hypothesis was: if you produce it, it will be consumed (Say's Law). Lower prices mean larger quantities demanded. (I know, it sounds like a confounding variable, you need a cross-sectional regression)


For work casual (and formal!), I was thrilled to discover tailored shirts. Not bespoke, but actually getting fitted in a store like Jos. Bank that handles the alterations.

The value proposition is comfort and they last a decade.


I have a G4 Cube running OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and "Ten-Four Fox" happily. But when it is on the Wifi, every ten seconds it logs an unknown (Bonjour) ping which fills up the log overnight.

Isn't it a thing for DAW developers to strive for a real-world-looking interface? What I hate is knob re-creations!

Interesting thing though, in some pretty extensive testing I've found that two versions of the same plugin[1] get very different opinions on sound quality depending on whether or not I use the skeupmorphic interface or a "flat" one drawn with normal toolkit graphics (I don't have a screenshot but think in terms of Ableton's vector graphics knobs).

Almost everyone seems to think the one with "real-looking" knobs and front panel "sounds better", "sounds more like the real synth", "has better filters" and so on than the flat design one, even though the DSP code and control ranges are identical between the two.

If you don't want to use knobs, what would you use instead?

[1] https://gjcp.net/plugins/peacock/


> Almost everyone seems to think the one with "real-looking" knobs and front panel "sounds better", "sounds more like the real synth", "has better filters" and so on than the flat design one, even though the DSP code and control ranges are identical between the two.

I mean, you know that objectively there is no difference, so to me this would seem like a good filter for what part of your userbase isn't worth listening to their opinions on sound quality. Sort of like "audiophiles" who insist that their $4000 gold plated power cables make things sound better. If you're just trying to shamelessly sell them something you dive in full force, if you actually care about making an objectively better product you give their opinion the lack of respect it deserves.

> If you don't want to use knobs, what would you use instead?

Sliders. Spinners. Anything that can be cleanly interacted with using the inputs available on a computer. Knobs are wonderful in the real world. Virtual knobs I'm operating with a mouse or touch input (screen or pad) suck.

I love all the knobs on my eurorack gear but I hate having to interact with the virtual knobs on the emulated forms of them in VCV Rack. Especially if they don't have clear markers on them indicating position. I own multiple MIDI controllers that are more or less just a bank of knobs specifically to make these things usable.


When I got into developing audio plugins a while ago (wow, what, 20 years ago) the library I used had rotary knobs that needed a rotary mouse motion to control them, although it had the nice feature that if you clicked on the knob the further you dragged away the slower the knob moved.

Since then I've switched to a library where even with rotary knobs you drag up and down to adjust them, which seems easier for most folk.

The advantage that rotary knob widgets have is that they are compact and you can see instantly what the value is set to.

I wouldn't even consider a spinner. They're utterly contentless.


This didn't look real. It looks like what we'd consider a TUI today

don't knobs also serve a practical purpose since otherwise you'd have a ton of horizontal sliders, which would quickly crowd the interface?

Spinner controls have been around ~forever in GUIs.

They take up about the same space in a UI as a virtual knob, but they clearly display the current setting and are much easier to interact with.


Forth user here.

Don't use AI, it writes Forth like it writes C. It has got better at following Standard, in Gforth style, but it is awful at the spirit of Forth: factoring programs into a vocabulary of tiny, reusable pieces.

I posted a Forth programming challenge. I was very disappointed to get two AI answers and one human. I think the humans sussed out the solution and described an algorithm to Opus, but, the AI strategy produced one large page-filling word.

A top-level word filling one page, doing everything there except some subroutines mimicking C Standard Library.

In Forth, that chunk ought to be many smaller words. Heck, even in C (at least it fit in a page.)


I want to learn Forth. Do you have any good reference or know about some good code examples?

Just learned the stack operations and trying to get used to them, but I have some bigger projects in my personal backlog.


Perhaps you just haven't used the correct AI yet? Perhaps none of us have in that Forth doesn't have much of a large dataset to train from?

Can you link to the programming challenge? It would be interesting to see if recursive language models that use double-blind latent space might work better.


> Perhaps none of us have in that Forth doesn't have much of a large dataset to train from?

Well, being terse as heck is the point of Forth so of course the dataset isn't large /j.

More seriously, I think the bigger issue is that Forth isn't exactly uniform. It is so moldable that everyone has their own style


What was the challenge?

There are anecdotes about trash incinerators requiring less kerosene to finish the burn, because of the plastic content.

Turning the issue on its head, if 4-9% is unsold, then the whole supply chain's success at predicting consumer preferences is 90-95%. Wow!

When I think of unsold, I see that some sizes run out, leaving odd sizes as surplus.


That assumes that they need to predict demand 1:1 which is not true.

They are more than welcome to have an over supply ready, they just need to use it productively is they can't sell it.


Not 4-9% unsold. 4-9% of unsold is destroyed without being worn.

Don't forget the wrist guard.

The Roman word for the projectile was bulla.

I don't think averages work that way

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