What I think I said was that the comments made me realize that it is not enough to make something cool, tell people you made something cool, and expect them to figure out why it is cool with a minimalist, slightly ugly demo page, and that is I really want other people to be able to experience the joy I did, I'll have to take more time on the presentation of the documentation so they immediately see with little effort why they might want to try it. So then the choice for me becomes "how much do I care if something I made will bring a stranger joy?", and spend the appropriate amount of time on that marketing or "selling" angle.

For this particular project after the initial response, my interest shifted to "hmm, curious that these folks focused more on some alleged copyright or theft angle" and I lost interest in sharing it with people. Until I saw this conversation and thought I'd mention the previous experience, and the comment you replied to was me stating what I think I learned from the comments here.

Your "communicate its key points" is in line with what I took away from these comments, but the "shit like this and then nitpick" seems a bit hostile, to the point where I'm not even sure it is directed at me.

Thanks for the comment though.

If I really want to spread something that brings me joy to other people so that they might experience it too, I may have to resort to polishing up the presentation. The fact that I'm trying to give something with no strings does not obviate the need to make it look palatable. This is a reasonable take I think. I also think I've known and have had a sense for that, even if I try to ignore it, because "selling" something is typically uninteresting to me. I'll try to keep it in mind the next time I have something I think I want to share with strangers, and put more effort into how it is presented so they might be more inclined to look into the actual thing I'm trying to show them.

I'll make my own analogy, with it being like trying to share a chocolate cake that looks like literal turds to strangers.

Eventually, scope crept until it became an interesting and useful thing to be able to combine say, the top half of Arial with the bottom half of Times New Roman's letters (and combine with various boolean operations on the paths, with outlines, etc, and I assumed others would be as pleased with this ability as I was, so I documented some examples and shared it here and in a fontography subreddit.

To my surprise, it got essentially no interest when I posted here, and the response from the typography folks was basically negative with people somehow framing it as a piracy-adjacent thing, and not a fun thing to do, just mashing up vector paths to get interesting unique results. shrug

Seems like you and maybe some other participants in this discussion might actually appreciate this little tool and get some enjoyment and perhaps utility out of it, so I'll share it here. https://github.com/scottvr/fambigen

There are examples in the README that show what it does in ambigram mode or "font compositor" mode. Enjoy!

That project, for anyone interested in such things, is today https://github.com/scottvr/gtrsnipe There are useful demonstrations in the repo's wiki.

I don't know the name of the tool that did entropy visualization you're remembering, but this was my cue to mention that vizbin does that using the colorizer of your choosing.

https://github.com/scottvr/vizbin/blob/main/docs/GALLERY.md#...

It can also show you a binary diff with colorization (and unlike cmp, an insertion does not make everything after it a "change", which I find useful.) https://github.com/scottvr/vizbin/blob/main/docs/GALLERY.md#...

Another comment mentions using such a tool on source code; the binary strings example shows just that, with the source embedded in a tarball. Text is rendered as an 8x8 glyph font so you can immediately eyeball both.

https://github.com/scottvr/vizbin/blob/main/docs/GALLERY.md#...

Rendering known pure text as 8x8 bitmap fonts via the tool might be a bit ludicrous, but you can force a different byteclass and see only the colors and not the actual ASCII characters, which I think might be what they are getting atwanting to do. https://github.com/scottvr/vizbin/tree/main#profile-structur...

Another useful things falls out from combining these concepts, which is that you could run `vizbin` on an entire repo. The example from the README (which assumes binaries) is given:

  # which files stand out? cluster by their region composition
  vizbin profile corpus/\*.bin --json | \
  jq -r '[(.regions|map(.kind)|unique|join("+")), .source] | @tsv'

Thanks!

Working as I have for over three decades continually in IT, spanning industries, skills, tools, languages, responsibilities, seeing the coming and going of many "next" generations, etc.. I suppose the pool of words to choose from and the range of things to use as metaphors is just pretty large and much deprecated, outside of the contrived use case of tech nerd battle rap.

Nerd flexing boast/diss tracks until now, I didn't know was already a thing. I kinda thought I was innovating. Lol, maybe I was from your description of it being too loaded with technical jargon, but the jargon, the word play, was the point. I was having fun with it. Some are shallow puns, others, like the ReiserFS lines were amusing to me because of the way they just wrote themselves. Hmm. There may be a distinction between real connections and patterns and apophenia, and there may be a way that it is missing in my head or blurred, in which case it may also be the case that the symbolism I find obvious and amusing just seems inane or pointless to everyone else. That would explain a lot of things now that I think about it. Heh.

I knew "nerdy white guy raps" was a thing from a show called "Dave" (I think) a year or so ago with a (I think) real rapper called Lil Dicky. (Again, "I think".) The show was good but I wasn't connected enough to modern pop culture to really know how much was fictionalized or otherwise. (I did recently see that Selena Gomez got married and was a little too excited, announcing to nobody "that's... that's! From the show!" I just looked it up and his name is Benny Blanco so that part of the show was at least accurate about him existing in real life and being a producer or somehow connected to hip hop. That said, your message is the second time in a handful of days someone has mentioned ytcracker but the first time had less context, and the context I did have (it was related to a video) caused me to assume it was a mangled or auto-corrected term and that ytcracker referred to some tool for downloading videos (like yt-dl/yt-dlp) and so I didn't look further. I guess this is signal that maybe I should.

I don't actually plan on making another track of this sort (though it has occurred to me a few times even though it wasn't on the table prior to putting it out there; I've never had so many people tell me they've had it on repeat - or maybe I've never had anyone ever tell me that about any music I've put out until this one, for which the response has been way more positive than expected.

On the audio output from network traffic (oh congrats on the developing eurorack habit btw) I did something enough in that zone that it causes me to want to recommend a rabbit hole to you (if it is not one you've already been down.) That rabbit hole is Sonification. My entrance was specifically parameter-mapped sonification and a search will find you many interesting papers. I might save you some time, or possibly send you straight into an ocean of time-suckage by suggesting you start with "The Sonification Handbook". On the plus side it will reference and was edited by one of the authors of one of the main papers I was about to have to look up until. i remembered the larger work so there's two birds to get started, on the down-side it references loads of stuff that are rabbit holes of specialization that could prolong your foray underground. I hope that is useful to you.

So for this particular set of words and timing, I found I really disliked eyeballing the lines and doing quick time arithmetic and sanity checks because there were no obvious errors the two or three passes I made. So I found myself making a quick script to return the differences, to try to see what odd combination might be triggering a bug, etc. plus although what you see now looks like just standard subtitles, the original burn of them used some of the ass format's unique rendering capabilities and, as with the one-off script type automation cost/benefit.. I think it's actually cool enough and potentially useful for other cases (generative TTS/ai vocals, etc) that even if I never make another "rap"-style track and video, someone else is likely to encounter the same problem and find this solution useful.

But probably mostly it's a combination of sunk cost fallacy and stubbornness, with some laziness and fatigue thrown on top that has now a video for a song I wanted to share with whoever it might reach with broken subtitles and an unfinished tool to correct them.

OK, really? Y'all dig it; that's really cool. It is my first foray into creating something rap-adjacent (if you dont count the AI version mtlsnk discovered, and that was two years ago. I wrote the lyrics longer ago than that, slowly adding to them as new rhymes would come into my head. I really wanted it to exist but I don't have a typical voice you'd associate with rap (as you can hear even in this track's vocals.. Even with all the digitala help making it sound like I know what Im doing, the tone and tibre of my voice remain very much not a rap voice.) Oh and thanks for calling out a line that had you rolling; that's one o f my favorites. The bit about Hans Reiser might be a little risky, but very few people are going to have all the pieces to know what that;s (morbidly) funny as a diss.

I have basely zero natural flow really, and I was too self-conscious for many many takes to have anything worth keeping. That "incredible flow" you heard, zahlman, is the result of tedious manual slicing and moving and chopping of syllables in an old copy of Audobe Audition and to a lesser extent Audacity. And VocAlign is your friend. (I've seriously come to doubt that any recordewd rapper is as tight and precise as it sounds on the album and suspcet VocALign or something like it is the Auto-Tune (well, the other auto-tune, since they do use auto-tune too) of Hip Hop production.) I do most instrumental sequencing in an even older copy of Sony ACID Pro, but I'll have to put a little time and effort into listing the VSTs used if you're interested in that.

I'm actually working on documenting more of that production stuff that because the handful of people in the real world who have heard it aren't really familliar with a lot of the terms, but have told me that can tell that someone is geetting insulted and likely outclassed and they just really liked the track regardless. Amazing.

I'm curious, was I right that I could find enough folks who understand at least the surface "battle rap" style punch lines, or are you guys just saying you like the song? This is very, very different than anything I've made before.

Yeah I'm stil working on the subtitles. Subtitles are a solved problem, right? Well, not when you want to display something like /etc/passwd (and many such things) it becomes a pain.. The funny thing is that the main purpose in making a video was to maks e Lyric videom but that ended up the last thing I did insofar as editing the video, and it doesn't work right. I was tired from being up for two days trying to finish it.

I'm finishing up the lyric aligner I made for this video (which is why it's missing a section and starts to lag. But I was soo tired of editing and I wanted people to hear it so I took a break and upploaded it anyway I digress.) It let's you have a spoken lyric sheet for the aligner (whisper and stable_ts) to listen for, where you can put words in their phonetic spellings like you would for TTS, but the another lyrid sheet for presentation spellings that will be used in the subtitles. This was necessary due to all of the technical terms and acronyms that may not be pronounced in an expected way by the aligner tools. It zips (interleaves) the two together and creates a yaml file for hand editing tweaks suchas subtitle effects, then it generates the proper .ass file for that. I'll push the lyric aligner up to the repo when it's working 100%.

Thank you for the kind words. As I said, this is very different from what I've done before. A buddy and I put out a post-punk/new wave album in 2007 under the nema The Detached. It's free on the same site. Mostly we were doing pastiche of TubeWay Army, Devo, etc. You can find all of those tracks at https://killsignal.net/thedetached/ There's a couple of tracks the other half of the detached did not want to do, so they're solo efforts, like https://killsignal.net/thedetached/3.scottvr-every_day_I%20d...

Im on vocals, keys and occasional guitar. Dave Griggs played bass and guitar. Drums were all on my laptop.

Oh and I guess I released a video for an unfinished (sensing a theme?) cover of Black Sabbath's "Changes" you might enjoy, if you're info horror and such. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6btgKG0tWxg This is a different side of my limited vocal range and stylings. :-)

Rap is new to me; to get it to sound good takes surgery in a DAW slicing, moving, shifting, quantizing, etc. Even my Voice Live Rack can't make me sound like a rapper. Which is why the song maybe sounds more in the direction of 90's industrical club music (Front 242, Ogre from SkinnyPuppy, a lot of those guys were essentially "spoken word to rhythm, which one might call "rapping". Even if "El User" succeeds as "rap", I think we can all agree it is not so much "hip hop".

I'm so grateful you guys listened to it and enjoyed it. I just wanted a vehicle for the lyrics (which might be deeper or more layered than the nerd humor allows people to see. I don't know, which is why I wanted out in the world. I will get back to work on the multiple aligner tool and get the video perfect soon, and I'll let y'all know.. Oh also discoveref that the very last line, "#!bash" accidentlaly was elided from the final mix, so Ill have to tack that back on and make it not oend so abruptly.

Again thanks a lot for the feedback.

--Scott "UID Zer0" (I don't realy use that name; I just made up the DJ Defrag and UI Zero duo because I don't of course have a "rap name", but needed to be able to use some rap cliches like "first name x, last name y"

https://killsignal.net/El_User/full_lyrics.md

https://killsignal.net/El_User/dj_defrag_and_uid_zero-el_use...

If there is any interest, I can say more. Enjoy!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49226838

Points: 5

# Comments: 10

Reading these dot-related comments reminded me that I once made one here about how I was able to leverage this possibly asynchronous dot-handling at gmail. Because the story is a bittersweet sentimental one for me I had to go back and read it now, and though I am sitting here with bad allergies streaming down my face, it also felt really nice to remember that.

I know this is a bit of a sideways comment, and I apologize for that but it isn't often I am overcome with emotion on HN, or on the topic of email addressing, and well, I appreciated the opportunity to re-read it now. Thanks.

You might find my gmail dots story interesting too. It's a little long, but the dot-character portion begins about a third of the way down in my comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46539424#46541149

Cheers!

The venue and publication are a good fit for the paper and serve as useful signals for the temperament of the paper and the treatment throughout the development of the model. It also says something about the reviewers acuity and elite selection criteria, which are to be celebrated for what they are.

The conference proceedings are also available in print from Lulu at https://www.lulu.com/search?sortBy=PUBLICATION_DATE_DESC&pag... Just FYI.

As my paper's abstract makes clear, the model is not offered as a predictive instrument in the strict scientific sense. It is instead a formalized account of a familiar practitioner truth: software delivery is not shaped only by pipelines, tooling, deployment frequency, or architectural complexity; it is also shaped by technical debt, morale, urgency campaigns, competence mismatch, and executive volatility.

The ethos of GUM does not stem from a belief that DevOps metrics are useless. Rather, they are useful enough to make omissions conspicuous. If we can assign symbols to deployment frequency and change failure rate, we may eventually have to admit that organizations themselves also perturb the system. Recent literature has done much of the work of formalizing the example proxies given in GUM 1.0, which allows us to construct a new model that may satisfy the critics who claimed GUM 1.0 required "measuring the immeasurable."

While researching for GUM 2.0, we were surprised by how rapidly the recent literature appears to be moving into territory adjacent to that of the GUM. One paper formalizes delivery speed as a function of automation and CI/CD maturity; another models developer-experience variables such as cognitive load and technical frustration as causal contributors to release-cycle duration, which looks quite a lot like the GUM term M (Developer Morale Multiplier). A third attempts to quantify technical debt as a compound-interest problem with remediation ROI. It is, of course, an honor to see how much impact the GUM has had, even if it has not yet been cited in any papers. A more thorough survey of these papers from recent literature can be found at the GUM's primary site at https://github.com/scottvr/GUM_of_Devops/blob/main/sigbovik2...

We are currently working to address these developments in GUM v2.0. As stated in the original "Grand Unified Model of DevOps", when the real world begins to collide with a model, *it is time to introduce more formalism.*

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48352245

Points: 3

# Comments: 2

I wish I had written that.

Also interesting that while the big vendors are following this trend and are now trying to take a lead in it, they still suggest things like "but use a JSON schema" (the linked article does a bit of the same - acknowledging that incremental learning via `--help` is useful AND can be token-conserving (exception being that if they already "know" the correct pattern, they wouldn't need to use tokens to learn it, so there is a potential trade-off), they are also suggesting that LLMs would prefer to receive argument knowledge in json rather than in plain language, even though the entire point of an LLM is for understand and create plain language. Seemed dubious to me, and a part of me wondered if that advice may be nonsense motivated by desire to sell more token use. I'm only partially kidding and I'm still dubious of the efficacy.

* Here's a TL;DR for anyone who wants to skip the rest of this long message: I ran an LLM CLI eval in the form of a constructed CTF. Results and methodology are in the two links in the section linked: https://github.com/scottvr/jelp?tab=readme-ov-file#what-else

Anyhow... I had been experimenting with the idea of having --help output json when used by a machine, and came up with a simple module that exposes `--help` content as json, simply by adding a `--jelp` argument to any tool that already uses argparse.

In the process, I started testing, to see if all this extra machine-readable content actually improved performance, what it did to token use, etc. While I was building out test, trying to settle on legitimate and fair ways to come to valid conclusions, I learned of the OpenCLI schema draft, so I altered my `jelp` output to fit that schema, and set about documenting the things I found lacking from the schema draft, meanwhile settling to include these arg-related items as metadata in the output.

I'll get to the point. I just finished cleaning the output up enough to put it in a public repo, because my intent is to share my findings with the OpemCLI folks, in hopes that they'll consider the gaps in their schema compared to what's commonly in use, but at the same time, what came as a secondary thought in service of this little tool I called "jelp", is a benchmarking harness (and the first publishable results from it), the to me, are quite interesting and I would be happy if others found it to be and added to the existing test results with additional runs, models, or ideas for the harness, or criticism about the validity of the method, etc.

The evaluation harness uses constructed CLI fixtures arranged as little CLI CTF's, where the LLMs demonstrate their ability to use an unknown CLI be capturing a "flag" that they'll need to discover by using the usage help, and a trail of learned arguments.

My findings at first confirmed my intuitions, which was disappointing but unsurprising. When testing with GPT-4.1-mini, no manner of forcing them to receive info about the CLI via json was more effective than just letting them use the human-friendly plain English output of --help, and in all cases the JSON versions burned more tokens. I was able to elicit better performance by some measurements from 5.1-mini, but again the tradeoff was higher token burn.

I'll link straight to the part of the README that shows one table of results, and contains links to the LLM CLI CTF part of the repo, as well as the generated report after the phase-1 runs; all the code to reproduce or run your own variation is there (as well as the code for the jelp module, if there is any interest, but it's the CLI CTF eval that I expect is more interesting to most.)

https://github.com/scottvr/jelp?tab=readme-ov-file#what-else

https://web.archive.org/web/19991109163128/http://www.dfw.ne...

Using named pipes in this manner also enabled a hackish method to create server-side dynamic web content by symlinking index.html to a file created in this manner, which was a secondary motivator, which seems kinda quaint and funny now, but at that time, it wasn't very long after just having finally decommed our gopher server, so fingerd was still a thing, Apache was fairly new, and I may still have been trying to convince management that the right move was not from ncsa httpd to Netscape Enteprise Server, but to Apache+mod_ssl. RSA patent licensing may still have been a thing too. Stronghold vaguely comes to mind, but I digress.

Yeah, programs that do stuff based on filename, like busybox. Oh, and this long forgotten artifact this article just reminded me of that I managed to find in the Wayback Machine, a tool to mknod a named pipe on a SunOS 4.1.4 machine, to get server-side dynamic content when remotely accessing a daemon that was supposed to return content from a single static file. Ah, memories.