Notices by Matthew Lyon (mattly@hachyderm.io)

@codemonkeymike well, if it plays Forza

so a week ago my ADHD brain decided to get preoccupied with Sudoku again (despite it being largely a math problem) and I resumed playing via Zach Gage’s “Good Sudoku” iOS app, which has a great hint system which teaches you various strategies for eliminating possibilities (you can read more about those here https://www.sudokuwiki.org/strategy_families ). I find several families of strategies difficult or time-consuming to spot by eye, and so I wondered:

would trial and error with undo be faster for me as a human, after I get through a set of basic, easy-to-eyeball strategies?

The answer is a resounding yes. I tried some of the hardest puzzles that game offers using only stuff under “Basic Strategies” in that link plus some X-Wing/Rectangle solutions when I spot them, and my average solve time with trial & error is 1/10th of what it is when using advanced pattern deduction strategies.

Of course, this method is “impure” and generally frowned upon by those who take sudoku seriously. Reminds me of this Zach Tellman piece that @sstephenson linked me last week about OO/Agile purity versus adaptability and getting results https://explaining.software/archive/the-sudoku-affair/

@joshsusser I’m not entirely sure I could explain the idea of a card catalog to someone who’s never encountered one before

@joshsusser it went well!

the kid asked about why some things with the video game system take a long time to load and some things don’t, and why getting things from the internet takes even longer, and being the type of person I am, I wanted to come up with a good explanation of RAM, storage, and networking that a nine year old for whom “computers” are minecraft, racing games, funny youtube videos, Libby, and things you do at school would understand. I’m pretty happy with this analogy:

Computers have a working memory, kinda like a big table, and a place to keep things, kinda like a big bookshelf. When the game needs to use something, artwork, maps, whatever, it has to go get them from the bookshelf and put them on the table. There’s not a lot of room on the table, so it can’t keep everything on it. We have an external drive for the console for some games, and that “bookshelf” takes longer to get things off of because it’s in another room.

Getting things from the internet is even slower because it’s like having to go to the library or the bookstore to get something to put on your bookshelf and carry it all back home, but like, only being able to carry a few pages at a time.

ok now I remember why I bounced hard off Reaper last time. It’s the “just compile your own Linux kernel, it’s easy just follow this 318 step guide in this 8 hour youtube video” of DAW software

No, I’ve been evaluating reaper for 12 minutes, not 2 years

even the "I write 90% of my code with AI" posts are saying the output is bad. like sure, you could generate a ton of garbage and whittle it down to something you're actually happy with, or you could just do good work yourself to begin with, which you're perfectly capable of

you aren't chiseling a block of marble, you're constructing logical proofs, act like it

@draNgNon the entire damn thing is written in Rails

presumably because it “makes it easy to contribute to” (this is a common logical fallacy among the rails cult) but now more than ever the question to ask about that is “by whom?”

I’m not aware of any sentiment among Masto official other than Eugen signing the open letter that’s been going around

@developerjustin @michi maybe “creative freedom” means the tools are actually free?

(this is non-serious but one can hope, and in 30 years of doing digital media stuff, my observation is that statements like theirs indicate a forthcoming removal of creative freedom)

@kingcons the note layer editor now only shows layers based on which clips you’ve selected in the arranger view. Want multiple layers? Select multiple clips.

They removed the tree view and instead order the tracks in the layer list based on order of selection. There’s no more pin/lock icons and instead you can have it “filter” so only the active layer is editable with the rest locked

there is no way to have multiple locked layers with multiple editable layers. There’s no easy way to just add or remove a track from what’s visible

I know the current changes have made a lot of people unhappy, but if you’ve got an active license and this concerns you, please download the beta, play with it, and email beta@bitwig.com

@ramiro I don’t find it _calming_, per-se, but in the same general “well I can listen to a book while I do this” as doing the dishes or similar chores

I’ve sort of understood why people would stick with discontinued software, such as say MacOS9 and its older music creation software, or things like Digital Performer, but have never really felt that kind of attachment to anything

And now macOS Tahoe is out and I think it’s garbage, and Bitwig 6 is in beta and they’ve entirely broken my workflow, and all of a sudden it’s like, yeah, maybe I could just never upgrade

@mhoye another rumination on the topic
https://genexgeek.com/2025/04/20/gen-x-cynicism-betrayal/

"dad, what does 'redacted' mean?" is a hell of a way to find out your kid has started reading The Murderbot Diaries

@mhoye perhaps as importantly to them, my job here is taxed here, not there

that bit of emotional labor you’ve been doing for well over a decade when you go to buy something on the internet and realize the online store uses a platform owned and run by awful people

@janl no

Someone sent me a “must-listen” podcast episode, I explained my wariness about it being 90 minutes long but they swore it was worth it

15 minutes in and the hosts haven’t gotten past their banter yet

Sorry guys, that’s not compatible with my ADHD

@sstephenson oh shit, this is Zach Tellman; I consider his Clojure book one of the best books about programming ever written, for any language