Hacker News: pitchlatte

New comment by pitchlatte in "Teaching Kids Forth"

pitchlatte — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 08:11:24 +0000

that’s not even notation though, that’s a rubric for the order of operations.

New comment by pitchlatte in "Teaching Kids Forth"

pitchlatte — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 04:55:20 +0000

what aspect of school level “mathematical notation” is so bad as to be brain damage inducing?

New comment by pitchlatte in "Simulate cassette tape audio profiles using FFmpeg"

pitchlatte — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 23:20:59 +0000

i don’t think any dynamic range manipulation is being done, beyond the slight variations as a consequence of the other processing.

generally 0dBVU is mapped to -18dBFS with VU style RMS metering being used on the digital side as well. but that isn’t some kind of physical translation, it’s rather arbitrary and more a convention.

New comment by pitchlatte in "No Stack Overflow, No Autocomplete: What Coding Felt Like in the 80s"

pitchlatte — Sun, 26 Jul 2026 13:19:17 +0000

i understand this very well. i’m trying to work through SICP but without a goal i’m struggling even though i enjoy LISP. on the other hand i’m playing Mindustry[1] in which you can use a kind of domain specific assembly language called mlog, and there’s very little documentation and no in-game console for error messages, so the code either works or doesn’t and you have to manually print assertions to understand what’s going wrong. in some ways similar to this article. we had an intro to 8085 in school but beyond that i would otherwise have never bothered to learn low level stuff, but i’m having a very good time now.

AI tools can write mlog but there’s not much of it out there so they frequently make errors, making it even more of a “you’re on your own” experience. i recommend the game anyway (it’s libre) but the opportunity to code this way has considerably added to the enjoyment for me.

[1] https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry

New comment by pitchlatte in "The End of Creativity"

pitchlatte — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 21:57:29 +0000

AI is merely exposing an already existing tendency. the creative output of the average non professional will always tend to the mean. it’s a tautology, that’s what the mean is. professional artists are treasured most of all for their _taste_, which tends to be novel and deliberate. the input of good taste into the Gaussian cloud of the average pulls it into new directions. the idea is in fact to improve the mean, that’s artistic education on a societal scale.

on the subject of AI, though: it definitely aggravates this trend.

New comment by pitchlatte in "SendLang: A DSL for Email Automation"

pitchlatte — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 17:10:41 +0000

yeah that’s pretty much what i thought as well, this rhymes with the post earlier today about DSLs working well as harnesses. i get the logic but i find it depresssing that even language design is now not just AI aware but including it as a core use case.

New comment by pitchlatte in "Pine64 launch $50 smart speaker for Home Assistant tinkerers"

pitchlatte — Wed, 01 Jul 2026 10:18:17 +0000

i just wonder how good it sounds. open audiophile grade hardware is something of a gap.