A programmer living in the Boston area, working at the Nucleic Acid Observatory.
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2024-11-17 21:00:00
I hosted another post- EAG music party, and we ended up singing a lot of things out of my secular solstice songbook ( making of).
This prompted me to make a few fixes: ~~break
Previously I only showed the chords for each section the first time they appeared, which meant that (a) a small screen the chords would scroll out of sight, and (b) if you don't know the songs well it's not obvious when to play which chords. I've now manually duplicated them, fixing both of these.
But this then makes the chords take up a lot more of the screen, so I've added a checkbox that lets people hide the chords.
I've added a few songs: Bold Orion, For the Longest Term, You've Got A Friend in Me, Give My Children Wings.
As you can see from the previous bullet, now you can link to
specific songs via URL fragments. This also simplifies my JS: for
some reason I'd written code that called scrollIntoView
when people clicked links. Now the JS annotates each header with
id=name-of-song and inserts links that take you to
#name-of-song, and the browser does the rest.
I'm still liking the combination of simple HTML for the authoring format combined with a little bit of JS for navigation. Each song is:
<h2>Title</h2> <h3>By Author</h3> <div class=song> <pre> chords go here </pre> lyrics with linebreaks preserved </div>And then at the end a bit of JS:
for (const h2 of document.getElementsByTagName("h2")) {
const btt = document.createElement("a");
btt.href = "#top";
btt.innerText = "return to top";
h2.parentNode.insertBefore(document.createElement("p"), h2);
h2.parentNode.insertBefore(btt, h2);
h2.id=h2.innerText.toLowerCase().trim().replace(
/[^\w\s-]/g, '').replace(/\s+/g, '-');
const li = document.createElement("li");
const a = document.createElement("a");
a.innerText = h2.innerText;
a.href = "#" + h2.id;
li.appendChild(a);
toc.appendChild(li);
}
show_chords.onclick = function() {
for (const pre of document.getElementsByTagName("pre")) {
pre.style.display = show_chords.checked ? "block" : "none";
}
};
Happy to take suggestions on how to make it more useful!
(This is an example of a post where I'm glad I can author with the
xmp
tag.)
2024-11-16 21:00:00
Recently a bunch of my friends, primarily in the contra dance world, have decided to give Bluesky a try. I think a lot of this is a post-election reaction to Musk and X (Twitter), but since I'm not on Twitter I'm mostly seeing the Facebook side. Regardless, I'm happy to see energy for migration: I'm pretty unhappy with FB [1] and if we can get critical mass on a better platform that seems good.
Playing with Bluesky it seems fine. I turned off Reposts (Settings > Following Feed Preference > Show Reposts) because otherwise my feed was full of things from people I don't know that I wasn't interested in. I like that it seems to be run by people who value openness. Not sure yet whether it's default algorithm is any good, but I like that I can experiment with other algorithms or (if I'm willing to put in a bunch of work) I could write my own.
If I end up liking it I'll write a comment bot like I did for Mastodon. Speaking of which, I'm still cross-posting there [2], from a previous effort to move to a more open platform, and I'm still reading it with with Shrubgrazer. But more friends have joined Bluesky in the past few days than ever joined Mastodon, so this seems more likely to take off.
If you'd like to add me I'm @jeffkaufman.bsky.social.
[1] Very high ad load, keeps trying to push reels and groups,
increasingly buggy (for months long comment threads only load if I
switch each one from the default of "most relevant" to "all
comments"), doesn't show me posts from most of my friends, still quite
bad at predicting which of my friends to show my posts to, broke my
comment bot enough times that I've given up on it, doesn't support
good search because people find it creepy, terrible flow for review if
one of my posts is accidentally removed, etc.
[2] As platforms proliferate I'm glad to be using a POSSE ("Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere") strategy.
2024-11-15 21:00:00
This year's Boston Secular Solstice will be on Saturday December 28th, and again I'm organizing the music. Are you interested in singing or playing? A wide range of instruments work here: in the past I think we've had people play piano, flute, guitar, mandolin, and cello. This isn't a large time commitment: we typically meet once or twice before the event for an evening to run through songs.
Here's something I wrote up about last year, with links to the songs we did: Boston Solstice 2023 Retrospective.
We haven't finalize the song list yet, but the current draft is "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life", "Battle Hymn of the Rationalist Community", "Brighter Than Today", "Endless Lights", "Find My Tribe", "Gather Round", "Give My Children Wings", "No One Is Alone", "Old Devil Time", "Somebody Will", "The Circle", "The Mary Ellen Spider Song", "We Will All Go Together When We Go", "When I Die", "When I'm Gone", and "You've Got A Friend In Me".
Let me know if this sounds fun!
2024-11-14 21:00:00
Let's imagine you have a community where there's enough interest for something like a dance every week. What's better: a single dance with a weekly schedule ("every Friday") or multiple dances dividing up the month ("1st Fridays", "2nd Fridays", etc)? While there are advantages to both, I think the latter is usually better. And the more different the individual dance series are (different halls, parts of the city, vibes, booking approach) the better.
This is mostly based on two observations:
Even in a city where there's a lot of dance interest there are a lot of people who don't want to dance every week.
It's better if you know more of the people at a dance.
So let's say you're a person who wants to come occasionally, perhaps once a month. The experience of coming monthly to a weekly dance is ok: you know the regulars, there's some automatic coordination that happens when you and your friends like the same bands and callers, you can explicitly coordinate with your friends. But coming monthly to a monthly dance is much better: you are a regular. The more the dances are differentiated from each other the more people with a monthly appetite will end up attending the same dances each month.
Other advantages:
It makes it easier to match the number of dances to the overall demand from the community. A weekly dance can't scale up or down easily, while changing the number of monthly dances is natural.
It increases total demand for dances, by making it more likely that there's an option that's a good fit for any individual dancer.
If the dances are at different halls then you're more robust against a dance losing their hall.
It spreads the work of organizing around.
It allows more experimentation and different booking thresholds.
The main disadvantage I see is that if your community is able to support a large number of weekly dancers, there's something pretty great about how tight a weekly community can be. And the dance skill level will generally be higher.
Other tradeoffs?
2024-11-12 21:00:00
In the comments of yesterday's post on the most booked callers and bands, several people were interested in the gender composition of the bands. I looked at this in 2018, covering four years of data (2014 through 2017); what does it look like now?
I took my stats for 2023 and 2024 [1] and attempted to annotate the gender breakdown of the bands. This is a fraught endeavor: gender is not always obvious. In cases where it seemed unclear I looked at band websites, and when it was still unclear I looked for publicity that referred to musicians with pronouns.
The biggest change from last time is the number of non-binary musicians. I didn't count any as non-binary in 2014-2017 (which might have been a mistake), while for 2023-2024 I count 2% of musicians. And 10% of bookings contained at least one non-binary musician.
I'd like to plot something meaningful that I can compare across years, and it would be much clearer with two axes, so here's bookings by number of men vs number of non-men:
The total is essentially the same: 77% male in 2014-2017, 76% male 2023-2024, but the distribution has shifted in interesting ways:
There are now more than zero duo and trio bookings with no men, and a noticeable increase in trios with one man. I had initially expected to see that the overall balance had shifted away from men (which it hasn't) and I think my impression was driven by seeing these groups. The largest contributors here are Eloise &Co. and River Road.
All the solo bookings with one non-man are Rushfest, but I'm not sure the decrease there is real: dance weekends are very inconsistent at listing Rushfest gigs, and I've often missed them.
The increase in trio bookings with three men is primarily Playing with Fyre, the Dam Beavers, and Drive Train.
That these seem to be driven by individual bands suggests we shouldn't trust individual buckets too much. How sensitive is the overall ratio, though? The totals are based on 1,032 booked individuals for the smaller 2023-2024 set, so if one of the top bands (~15 bookings over two years) had a female member replace a male one or vice versa that would bring the totals up to 79% or down two 73%.
If there are other ways of slicing this data that would be helpful in answering this question, let me know!
[1] This means the same caveats apply: I'm not counting bands without
names, bands that played fewer than two weekends/festivals/etc in a
year, ways that the lineup at the gig might differ from what's on the
band website, etc.
2024-11-11 21:00:00
Each year ( 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2023) I put out a list of how many dance weekends, festivals, camps, and long dances contra bands and callers are doing. I don't really know why I do this, but it's about an hours work on top of that I'm already collecting for trycontra.com/events so I might as well keep doing it!
In 2023 I saw that the total number of events (107) was down 20% from 2019 (132), where a lot didn't come back from the pandemic. This year we're back up to pre-pandemic levels, with 131, which is great to see!
Bands
| River Road | 9 |
| Countercurrent | 8 |
| Playing with Fyre | 8 |
| Drive Train | 7 |
| Hot Coffee Breakdown | 7 |
| The Engine Room | 7 |
| Stomp Rocket | 6 |
| Toss the Possum | 6 |
| Wild Asparagus | 6 |
| The Dam Beavers | 6 |
| Eloise &co | 5 |
| Elixir | 4 |
| Kingfisher | 3 |
| Nova | 3 |
| Open Band | 3 |
| Stove Dragon | 3 |
| The Mean Lids | 3 |
| The Moving Violations | 3 |
| The Stringrays | 3 |
| The Syncopaths | 3 |
| 3 Wheel Drive | 2 |
| Audacious | 2 |
| Contra Sutra | 2 |
| Contraforce | 2 |
| Contrasaurus | 2 |
| Good Company | 2 |
| Joyride | 2 |
| Lake Effect | 2 |
| Lighthouse | 2 |
| Meadowhawk | 2 |
| Notorious | 2 |
| Pimento Mori | 2 |
| Raise the Roof | 2 |
| Riptide | 2 |
| Rushfest | 2 |
| Supertrad | 2 |
| The Faux Paws | 2 |
| The Ice Cream Truckers | 2 |
| The Latter Day Lizards | 2 |
| Thunderwing | 2 |
Callers
| Will Mentor | 19 |
| Gaye Fifer | 15 |
| Alex Deis-Lauby | 13 |
| Lisa Greenleaf | 12 |
| Bob Isaacs | 10 |
| Seth Tepfer | 9 |
| George Marshall | 8 |
| Susan Petrick | 7 |
| Terry Doyle | 7 |
| Cis Hinkle | 5 |
| Janine Smith | 5 |
| Lindsey Dono | 5 |
| Mary Wesley | 5 |
| Nils Fredland | 5 |
| Adina Gordon | 4 |
| Maia McCormick | 4 |
| Steve Zakon-Anderson | 4 |
| Wendy Graham Settle | 4 |
| Ben Sachs-Hamilton | 3 |
| Charlie Turner | 3 |
| Darlene Underwood | 3 |
| Devin Pohly | 3 |
| Emily Rush | 3 |
| Isaac Banner | 3 |
| Jacqui Grennan | 3 |
| Koren Wake | 3 |
| Michael Karcher | 3 |
| River Rainbowface Abel | 3 |
| Scott Higgs | 3 |
| Chris Page | 2 |
| Claire Takemori | 2 |
| Dereck Kalish | 2 |
| Donna Hunt | 2 |
| Frannie Marr | 2 |
| Jeremy Korr | 2 |
| Katie Zanders | 2 |
| Liz Nelson | 2 |
| Louise Siddons | 2 |
| Open Calling | 2 |
| Open calling | 2 |
| Rick Mohr | 2 |
| Sarah Kaiser | 2 |
| Susan Kevra | 2 |
| Susan Michaels | 2 |
| Warren Doyle | 2 |
2024-11-10 21:00:00
LLMs are getting much more capable, and progress is rapid. I use them in my daily work, and there are many tasks where they're usefully some combination of faster and more capable than I am. I don't see signs of these capability increases stopping or slowing down, and if they do continue I expect the impact on society to start accelerating as they exceed what an increasing fraction of humans can do. I think we could see serious changes in the next 2-5 years.
In my professional life, working on pathogen detection I take this pretty seriously. Advances in AI make it easier for adversaries to design and create pathogens, and so it's important to get a comprehensive detection system in place quickly. Similarly, more powerful AIs are likely to speed up our work in some areas (computational detection) more than others (partnerships) and increase the value of historical data, and I think about this in my planning at work.
In other parts of my life, though, I've basically been ignoring that I think this is likely coming. In deciding to get more solar panels and not get a heat pump I looked at historical returns and utility prices. I book dance gigs a year or more out. I save for retirement. I'm raising my kids in what is essentially preparation for the world of the recent past.
From one direction this doesn't make any sense: why wouldn't I plan for the future I see coming? But from another it's more reasonable: most scenarios where AI becomes extremely capable look either very good or very bad. Outside of my work, I think my choices don't have much impact here: if we all become rich, or dead, my having saved, spent, invested, or parented more presciently won't do much. Instead, in my personal life my decisions have the largest effects in worlds where AI ends up being not that big a deal, perhaps only as transformative as the internet has been.
Still, there are probably areas in our personal lives where it's worth doing something differently? For example:
Think hard about career choice: if our kids were a bit older I'd want to be able to give good advice here. How is AI likely to impact the fields they're most interested in? How quickly might this go? What regulatory barriers are there? How might the portions they especially enjoy change as a fraction of the overall work?
Maybe either hold off on having kids or have them earlier than otherwise. If we were trying to decide whether to have (another) kid I'd want to think about how much of wanting to have a kid was due to very long term effects (seeing them grow into adulthood, increasing the chance grandchildren, pride in their accomplishments), how I'd feel if children conceived a few years from now had some (embryo selection) or a lot of (genome editing) advantages, how financial constraints might change, what if I never got to be a parent, etc.
Postponing medical treatment that trades short-term discomfort for long-term improvement: I'm a bit more willing to tolerate and work around the issues with my wrists and other joints than I would be in a world where I thought medicine was likely to stay on its recent trajectory.
Investing money in ways that anticipate this change: I'm generally a pretty strong efficient markets proponent, but I think it's likely that markets are under-responding here outside of the most direct ways (NVDA) to invest in the boom. But I haven't actually done anything here: figuring out which companies I expect to be winners and losers in ways that are not yet priced in is difficult.
Avoiding investing money in ways that lock it up even if the ROI is good: I think it's plausible that our installing solar was a mistake and keeping the money invested to retain option value would have been better. I might prefer renting to owning if we didn't already own.
What are other places where people should be weighing the potential impact of near-term transformative AI heavily in their decisions today? Are there places where most of us should be doing the same different thing?
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2024-11-09 21:00:00
In my bioinformatics work I often stream files between linux hosts and Amazon S3. This could look like:
$ scp host:/path/to/file /dev/stdout | \
aws s3 cp - s3://bucket/path/to/file
This recently stopped working after upgrading:
ftruncate "/dev/stdout": Invalid argument Couldn't write to "/dev/stdout": Illegal seek
I think I figured out why this is happening:
New versions of scp use the SFTP protocol instead of
the SCP protocol. [1]
With scp I can give the -O flag:
Use the legacy SCP protocol for file transfers instead of the SFTP protocol. Forcing the use of the SCP protocol may be necessary for servers that do not implement SFTP, for backwards-compatibility for particular filename wildcard patterns and for expanding paths with a '~' prefix for older SFTP servers.
This does work, but it doesn't seem ideal: probably servers will drop support for the SCP protocol at some point? I've filed a bug with OpenSSH.
[1] "man scp" gives me: "Since OpenSSH 8.8 (8.7 in Red
Hat/Fedora builds), scp has used the SFTP protocol for transfers by
default."
2024-11-07 21:00:00
There are so many important efforts to make the world better that are significantly limited by funding, and it would be great if we could have a culture where significant and thoughtful giving was normal and common. It's hard to build that sort of norm if people keep their giving private, however, and so I've long been an advocate of being public about your giving. I list my donations (jointly with Julia) and have taken Giving What We Can's 10% Pledge (also jointly with Julia).
In July GWWC suggested people put the "small orange diamond" symbol (🔸) in their usernames on social media to show that they've pledged. Here's how the EA Forum describes this on the profile editing page:
This digital symbol reminds me of the physical Symbolic Beads of Raikoth. In an older Scott Alexander post he talked about how his fictional society attempted to redirect humanity's natural competitive status-signaling in a more productive direction than yachts. The symbol also has something in common with wedding rings, showing that you have taken on a serious commitment. To the extent that it helps promote a norm of substantial and effective giving, that seems pretty good!
And yet despite being on the board of GWWC USA I haven't put it in my username, even on the EA Forum where it would be most relevant. I'm not sure if this is the right call, but some things pushing me in this direction:
Usernames with symbols in them feel like they're signaling something I don't want to signal, just by the inclusion of emoji. Something like "I'm a very online person who keeps up with fast-moving discourse".
Relatedly, it feels like this is not what the username field is for. If I'm interacting with someone on some topic unrelated to my advocacy it feels intrusive and uncooperative to be bringing it into the conversation.
While effective giving is one thing I would like to see more of, this is really a large category. I could see including symbols showing that I'm an advocate for allowing people to build housing, giving kids more independence, applying your career effectively, increasing immigration, etc. But I don't want to be "Jeff Kaufman 🔸🏗👣🛝💡🌎".
For now I've decided I will go ahead and add this to my name on the EA Forum where it's most relevant and I most understand how it will be perceived, but I won't add it to my username elsewhere. If you'd like to try to convince me to do otherwise, please go ahead!
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2024-11-06 21:00:00
Open Philanthropy (OP) is the largest grantmaker who is moving money to the things I think are most valuable, including (disclosure!) my work at the NAO. There's been a lot of discussion in the effective altruism community about where this leaves smaller donors, and where they might have a comparative advantage. For example:
OP recently announced that due to changes in Good Ventures' (GV) strategy that they'd be recommending less funding in several areas. This seems to have included work on wild animal welfare, invertebrate welfare, digital minds, and gene editing, though I'm not aware of a public list. If you trust OP's prioritization more than GV's and/or you think these are valuable neglected areas, you could help make up for this shortfall.
Some kinds of work offer PR risks, either to OP or to OP's other grantees. Many individuals are better placed to take on these risks.
Money donated directly to US political candidates is restricted on a per-person level, and goes farther than unrestricted "Super PAC" donations. Individual donors have a strong advantage here.
Some kinds of policy work don't have regulations that restrict funding, but are still restricted in practice. For example, an advocacy organization could be more effective when it can demonstrate broad-based support, or could be tarred by the support of billionaires like Moskovitz and Tuna.
For policy and politics in other countries the effect is even stronger: in some cases it's illegal for OP to make these kinds of grants, while in others it's just politically counter-productive. On the other hand, small-scale donors contributing to political efforts in their own countries is generally seen as the way politics is supposed to work.
This is not a complete list [1] but I do think it has the biggest reasons. Overall it seems to me that if an independent donor is funding something OP would be happy to fund, ideally the donor would find somewhere they could do better.
Despite all this, I've generally not felt like our family's donations have taken advantage of our position as independent donors. Mostly we've contributed to Funds, and while some of these relative advantages don't apply there (they don't need to convince GV to make grants) most still do.
I think the main reason we haven't done better here is that investigating and comparing donation opportunities is a lot of work. Julia and I both work full time on things we think are pretty important, and this is the kind of question worthy of significant thought. Sometimes people suggest donor lotteries as an improvement here, but aside from my general qualms I think even if we won we wouldn't want to take time away from our full-time work to get into grantmaking. [2]
If you're giving away extremely large amounts of money it makes sense to hire full-time grantmakers to allocate it (which is essentially what OP is). If you're a bit smaller than that but still quite large then there are multiple efforts (ex: Founders Pledge, Longview) that offer customized advice. But I'm not aware of any projects that aim to advise what we might call "Small Major Donors": people giving away perhaps $20k-$100k annually. I think this segment is primarily people earning to give, but it would also include some people (hi!) who see most of their impact as coming via their work but still donate a signficant portion of their income.
This would need to be a model with lighter-weight advising than would make sense in targeting larger donors, and getting the balance right would be tricky. You could end up with people feeling like with the scale of their giving they ought to be getting significant custom research, not understanding how much that research costs. On the other hand, to be worth running it would need to be able to out-perform funging against OP or donating to Funds.
Does something like this exist, and I just don't know about it? (Which would be bad, since the target market isn't all that large and would include me.) Alternatively, does this seem like something that would be worth someone starting? I'd love to have something to recommend to people earning to give, and to use in thinking through my own giving.
[1] Another thing I considered adding is that you may know about
especially strong opportunities in your personal network. Whether the
specific people running a project are the right ones for the effort is
a critical judgement in funding early-stage work, and grantmakers
often have much less information than you do. But grantmaker-grantee
relationships, including and perhaps especially prospective ones, are
quite fraught, and I (weakly) think that overall the social effects of
turning so many personal and professional relationships into
prospective grantmaker-grantee relationships is harmful on balance.
[2] There's also a significant difference between the ideal of a donor lottery and donor lotteries in practice. The standard argument assumes that money you might win in the lottery is as unrestricted as the money you put in, but actually whatever organization sponsors the lottery needs to agree that your donation is appropriate. Since many things worth doing are 'weird' (grants to individuals, investments in for-profit enterprises, funding your own charity, actions with PR risks, ...) this can significantly reduce the upside of winning a donor lottery.
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2024-10-31 21:00:00
There are a lot of fun things about halloween, with costumes, neighbors, and sweets, but maybe the part I like best is the trading. Two kids sit down, each with a bucket full of candy. After a while they get back up, each with a better bucket than they started with. This feels like it shouldn't be possible: isn't there some sort of law of conservation of candy?
But of course it is possible: not everyone has the same preferences. We each start with some candy we aren't the ideal person to appreciate. Which also means the more different our preferences are, the greater the benefit of trading.
Don't just copy the preferences of the people around you: figure out what you actually like.
Fight culture that encourages mocking people for complementary taste.
In real life we don't swap around a fixed pool of candy, we can make more candy.
2024-10-30 21:00:00
Cross-posted from my NAO Notebook.
In April we released released a tool to model the efficacy of different approaches to stealth pathogen identification. The tool's interface is pretty rough, which I'm not super happy about, but there just aren't that many people in the world who need to simulate the performance impact these design choices.
A month ago we published estimates of RAi(1%) for influenza in municipal wastewater, and ended that post with:
In response to this work we plan to update our metagenomic biosurveillance simulator in two ways:
We'll switch the simulator's RAi(1%) from using the mean of the distribution to sampling from the full posterior distribution. Because our posteriors sometimes span several orders of magnitude, this change should better capture our uncertainty.
We'll replace our preliminary influenza A RAi(1%) point estimate of 3.2e-8 with an option to choose each of the four above distributions, with medians of 1.4e-8, 1.4e-8, 2.8e-9, and 7.0e-10.
Overall we expect these changes to make our projections higher variance and somewhat less optimistic, but not to have a large impact on whether this approach to novel pathogen detection is practical.
With Dan's help I've now made both of these changes (#6, #7, #9), and additionally:
Stopped assuming uniform coverage along the genome, and instead use the distribution we've observed along SARS-CoV-2. (#5) While it would be better to generate estimates from a wider range of pathogens, everything else we've looked at in our samples has too much genetic diversity for it to be easy to make these estimates. Now that we've done some spike-ins, however, I think it ought to be possible to use the highest concentration spike-in sample to get second estimate, though I haven't tried this. The overall effect of this change on our estimates should be to increase variance while slightly lowering median performance.
Updated the pricing we see for the NovaSeq X 25B and switched pricing to per-lane, based on the pricing we're seeing from sequencing providers. (#10) It's great that sequencing is continuing to get cheaper!
Let's compare what the two simulators say for one weekly NovaSeq X 25B run, generating approximately 2e10 read pairs (SARS-CoV-2, Flu A)
Note that lower is better here: the charts show the fraction of people in the monitored sewershed who have ever been infected by the time we raise the alarm.
| Scenario | Cumulative Incidence at Detection | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25th | 50th | 75th | 90th | ||
| Old, SARS-CoV-2 | 0.24% | 0.48% | 0.84% | 1.40% | |
| New, SARS-CoV-2 | 0.53% | 1.20% | 2.90% | 6.50% | |
| Change in Sensitivity, SARS-CoV-2 | -55% | -60% | -71% | -78% | |
| Old, Flu A | 0.46% | 0.84% | 1.60% | 2.70% | |
| New, Flu A | 1.00% | 2.50% | 5.70% | 14.00% | |
| Change in Sensitivity, Flu A | -54% | -66% | -72% | -81% | |
This makes sense overall: the changes were expected to both make the simulator less optimistic and increase the variance of its predictions, and that's what we do see.
2024-10-27 21:00:00
One of the inputs of my rhythm stage setup has been a breath controller, which let's me gives me a continuous controller. I use it for a few different things, especially when playing music that's farther in the electronic direction:
Setting up to play a "techno contra" last weekend, however, I realized my breath controller was broken. It seemed like something was wrong with the sensor: only very large pressures would do anything, and it was inconsistent. Maybe a little bit of dirt got inside? I tried taking it apart, but the sensor looks to be sealed:
I might get a new sensor and try to fix it, though with the big surface mount pads probably only if I can get access to hot air rework equipment. And this was definitely not something I'd be able to do in the half hour before the dance.
I thought some about what role the breath controller fills in my sound, and the main thing is an electronic-feeling off-beat pulse. This is something I'd made my system able to do a while ago, but hadn't liked because it was too rigid feeling. I had the idea of sending it out via the talkbox, however, and it ends up sounding like this:
It's not the same, and I do still miss the breath controller's ability to add a more complex rhythmic component on top of my keyboard playing, but it's new sound I like and something I expect I'll keep playing with even if I fix or replace the breath controller.
2024-10-25 21:00:00
When I was growing up most families in our neighborhood had the daily paper on their lawn. As getting your news on the internet became a better option for most folks, though, delivery became less efficient: fewer houses on the same route. Prices went up, more people cancelled, and decline continued. I wonder if we might see something similar with the power grid?
Solar panels keep getting cheaper. When we installed panels in 2019 they only made sense because of the combination of net metering and the relatively generous SREC II incentives. By the time we installed our second set of panels a few months ago net metering alone was enough to make it worth it.
Now, as I've said a few times, net metering is kind of absurd. The way it works here is that most of my bill is in proportion to my net consumption: if I use 100kWh but also send 100kWh back to the grid I don't pay anything for transmission or generation. I can use the grid as a giant battery, for just a $10/month grid-connection charge.
As more people run the numbers and install rooftop solar, I expect there to be increasing pressure to limit net metering, either for new installs or for everyone. But even if net metering were completely phased out it wouldn't solve the problem: as people draw less from the grid the company either needs to raise their per-kWh rates or their per-customer charges. Raise the former and installing solar becomes even more attractive; raise the latter and people start thinking about disconnecting entirely.
Solar is getting cheaper very quickly:
And so are batteries. It's going to make sense for a lot of houses to go over to solar + batteries. And if batteries are too expensive for the longest stretch of cloudy days you might have, at least here a natural gas generator compares favorably.
Wait, really? This was pretty surprising to me, but here's the sketch. My marginal cost of electricity is currently $0.33/kWh [1] vs $0.06/kWh [2] for natural gas. Now I can't charge my laptop with raw gas, which means burning the gas in a generator, and since that's well under 100% efficient I'm not actually getting a usable $0.06/kWh. While a power station could be up to 63% efficient, for a home generator maybe I'm looking at something like the 23% efficient Generac 7171, rated for 9kW on natural gas at full load. Or maybe something smaller, since this is probably in addition to batteries and only has to match the house's average consumption. This turns my $0.06kWh into $0.24/kWh, plus the cost of the generator and maintenance.
If trends continue it looks like we may be pretty close to mass defections from the power grid, which would then accelerate because the utility would need to keep raising prices to cover the same infrastructure with fewer subscribers. This could be especially bad for customers who rent, and so aren't able to install their own system, and people who don't have the savings or credit for a big up-front cost. On the other hand, it's downstream from a more efficient system overall, and maybe we can sort out the distributional impacts?
[1] Here's how that breaks down:
| Charge | Amount |
|---|---|
| Generation Service Charge | $0.1565 |
| Distribution Charge | $0.0782 |
| Transmission Charge | $0.0405 |
| Energy Efficiency Charge | $0.0311 |
| Net Meter Recovery Surcharge | $0.0162 |
| Other Charges | $0.0096 |
| Total | $0.3322 |
[2] $1.5512/therm / 28 kWh per therm = 0.0554/kWh.
2024-10-24 21:00:00
A few weeks ago I posted about how I was thinking about a pedalboard. I've now made one!
Before:
After:
It folds up slightly and fits in a standard rolly suitcase:
Not pictured: I later added padding on all six sides.
Here's the pedalboard by itself:
You can see the bundle of wires to the left that go to the keyboard and bass whistle box, and the wires to the right that go to the electronic drumkit's brain.
I really like how much faster I can set this up and strike. I now need less than five minutes instead of maybe half an hour.
What I wasn't expecting before I started this project, though, is how nice it is when playing. My feet can easily reach the buttons, without even stopping playing kick with my left heel. This is way better than when the pedals sprawled all over the floor and didn't stay put.
I started by cutting a piece of 3/4" plywood to the largest size I could fit in the suitcase I usually travel with. Then I played around with pedal layouts:
I realized I could fit the talkbox in the middle, and expand my effective space with a folding panel:
I put down velcro:
And cut away unused parts to save weight:
Here it is all together:
Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, r/pedalboards, mastodon
2024-10-22 21:00:00
Let's say you run a non-profit, and you and some of your co-workers are there for EA reasons. The EA Forum is going to be hosting a Marginal Funding Week and you're trying to decide whether to post an appeal. How do you decide whether you're ready to raise funds from the EA community?
At a high level, I think you should go ahead if you can explain what you'd do with the money and are willing to share the details that will let people determine if your overall case is strong enough. As a community I think we should generally have higher standards for projects that have been running longer, and for ones trying to raise larger amounts of money.
New projects, both in the for-profit and non-profit world, generally get off the ground with the engagement of a small number of funders who are comfortable with the risk-reward tradeoffs of early-stage work. Sometimes these funders are highly engaged and provide advice and connections, other times they're giving some start-up funds and hoping it works out, but either way they're taking a substantial risk of failure on each bet in the hope of getting some hits.
In the for-profit world societies worry that most people not being sufficiently sophisticated to make this kind of investment, and generally draw some sort of line between accredited investors (who can be assumed to know the risks they're taking with early-stage ventures) and the rest of us (who might be dazzled into putting our life savings into a scam). To sell your stock to the general public you need to first disclose a lot of information about your business: detailed financial statements, risks, what you'll do with the money, etc.
The non-profit world is pretty different: while you do have to make some limited information public, the disclosure requirements are relatively minimal. There's no obligation to share facts that a reasonable donor would want to consider.
While I wouldn't advocate extending public-company-level regulation to the non-profit world, this is a place where the EA community has historically tried to shift norms in the direction of more transparency, and I think we should continue to do this:
One of the biggest flaws of the non-profit approach is how much weaker the feedback loops are than in for-profit work. There are many ways altruistically-motivated work can become disconnected from the ends it's intended to advance. A culture of sharing and critically evaluating this information can help keep organizations focused, and keep the money going to the organizations that can best apply it.
If we become a community where people can raise substantial funds by simply saying they're EAs working on an important problem we'll end up with lots of people who make the right noises but don't actually put funds to good use.
Even if most people reading an appeal don't think hard about whether it all checks out, having this information out there allows dedicated independent people to make comparisons and share their results. This amplifies both effects above.
The things I'd most like to see in public funding requests are:
What will you do with the money? Not just what do you do in general, but what will you be able to do if you raise these additional funds. Note that describing the work you'd do on the margin means that they work you're describing is, well, marginal. If instead you made the case for your strongest work, the work that you'd only cut if your funding dropped off dramatically, this would lead donors to overestimate the benefit of funding you and so allocate their funds less well.
What's your track record? Funding early-stage projects typically involves a good amount of evaluating the team as people, figuring out how much you trust them to take your money in a new direction. But if you're "going public" this kind of interpersonal evaluation breaks down: you can't have dozens of EAs on the Forum booking slots on your calendar to get a sense of whether you seem to know your stuff and be the kind of person who will execute well on your vision. Instead, point at concrete accomplishments.
What is your financial situation? What are your main expenses and sources of income? Anything people wouldn't expect? How much money do you currently have? How long is your runway?
Additionally, it's pretty valuable to also share:
Why is this worth doing? While this isn't information donors can get only from you it's probably something you're especially well positioned (and incentivized) to provide. What problem are you addressing? Why is it important? How will success at your planned efforts improve the situation?
Where does your work fit in? What are the other organizations trying to solve this problem? Why are you taking your specific approach? Are some of these other groups a better fit for donors with certain outlooks or values?
What are the key risks? What are the most likely reasons you might fail to make progress? Could your work actually be harmful? If there are major uncertainties on your path to impact, what are they and how are you addressing them?
What's your longer-term model? Are you hoping to be philanthropically funded indefinitely? Is this funding that will get you to a place where you can instead convince governments, private companies, or consumers to fund you or others to do this work? Is this the kind of project that needs long-term investment to be worth it?
How can people tell if you're succeeding? If you're posting again in Fall 2025 saying that you had a great year and asking for money for 2026, how will we be able to tell whether you actually had a great year? This is closely related to "what will you do with the money?", but instead of focusing on impact it's focusing on evaluation: how will you and others be able to tell if your efforts are working. Are there specific milestones you expect to hit? Measurable outcomes we'll be able to observe?
If you're not ok including this information in your funding request, or at least answering these and similar questions as they come up in the comments, then it's worth considering whether you're in a good position to solicit funds from the community.
Another consideration in making a public request for funding is that by putting your org out there like this you're opening yourself up to more criticism. Asking the EA community for funding is, in some sense, quite audacious: it's a claim that your organization is one of the very best ways to turn money into a better world. That's a high bar and the EA community can be a critical group! I think on balance EA's critical outlook is positive: if I make what I think is a solid and relatively complete case for my work, and other people who've thought hard about how to make the world better don't think it measures up, that certainly hurts, but it's an important check. The history of non-profit work includes many people who've overestimated the value of their work and would have been able to have much more impact if they'd taken a different approach.
On the other hand, it's easier to criticize than than do, and it's important to nurture transparency by recognizing when people are sharing information they could have kept internal. It's important to recognize that there are real people with feelings behind each organization, who in many cases have poured a substantial portion of themselves into these vessels for positive change. We need the critical side of our culture to keep us focused on impact, but we need to balance it with empathy, kindness, and a sense that we're on one big team pulling together.
Comment via: facebook, lesswrong, the EA Forum, mastodon
2024-10-21 21:00:00
When I think of the ideal place for sleeping it's something like, peaceful, dark, and quiet. The chaotic bright loud stage of a contra dance is pretty far from this, and yet generations of kids have curled up behind their parents and fallen asleep:
It's a good idea to make them a nest they can crawl into when they're feeling sleepy:
A keyboard case can work well, especially a fuzzy one:
It's worth thinking about what this will be before you leave the house so you can bring something comfortable.
Pictured: much more bedding than required for this purpose, because this is the car packed for vacation. I don't have a good picture of the car packed for playing dances.
If you forget (or believe them when they insist they'll set up their bed when they're ready for it) they might go to sleep less comfortably:
Or less comfortably:
Or much less comfortably:
Headphones and a story tape can help:
You want to make sure they've used the bathroom and, ideally, brushed their teeth and put on whatever clothes they want to sleep in, since if everything goes well they'll be asleep until the next morning. When I'm lucky, which is about 75% of the time:
I asked them what they thought:
Lily: It's not my favorite thing? But it's ok, especially if I have an audiobook to drown out the noise.Anna: I like it.
I don't think I would have believed this worked if I hadn't seen it, but it's reasonably common so it must work for a lot of families.
2024-10-18 21:00:00
While this post touches on biosecurity it's a personal post and I'm not speaking for my employer
If you want to prevent airborne spread of diseases you have a few options:
Masks, fans, and air filters are widely available, but what about UV? The CDC recommends upper-room UV, it has a long history of successful use in with TB, and in many cases it's great fit for the space. Look on Yelp, though, and no installers come up:
Maybe people are missing a good business opportunity, or maybe it's the kind of opportunity that's only ok but is worth it for the altruistic impacts of directly reducing spread and normalizing UV? Seems worth finding out!
If you want to read more about how to set up upper-room UV systems, NIOSH has a serious document. At a high level, though, you want rooms that have a high density of people but also a reasonably high ceiling. Then you set up UV fixtures to shine so they clean the air above the people.
(Prompted in part by thinking that the Cambridge Masonic Hall would be a great place for an installation like this: crowded, tall ceilings, ceiling fans for circulation.)
2024-10-17 21:00:00
In general, we don't want our kids (10y, 8y) to hit each other. Learning to control your impulses is an important skill, and resorting to violence is usually a substitute for other skills we're prefer them to practice (understanding what the other person wants, negotiating). Also they could hurt each other.
On the other hand, sometimes the kids enjoy hitting each other. This is very different from hitting out of anger: they're both having fun, they're not trying to injure each other, it's more about force than impact, etc. Even calling both of these activities "hitting" is a bit misleading: a hit intended to inflict pain looks very different than one intended to knock the other off balance or push them farther away on the couch to gain a strategic advantage.
We wouldn't want to prohibit our kids from playing roughly with each other when that's what they both want, but this interacts awkwardly with normal rules. If Lily says "Anna hit me" but this was after Lily said "Anna, lets play a game where we hit each other" then Anna should clearly not go in time out. The way we generally handle this is flagging to the kids when we notice they're doing this ("it looks like you're playing a rough game") and possibly including a warning ("and someone might get hurt"). Then if someone does get hurt, and minor injuries are reasonably common with this sort of play, they know we're not going to punish the other person for it ("you were playing a rough game, and this is the kind of thing that can happen when you're playing rough"). If they were doing this upstairs or somewhere we didn't notice we do our best to figure out what happened ("What were you doing before they hit you? ... It sounds like you were playing a rough game.") but it's not perfect.
One way this could be abused is to use the context of a rough game to escalate to actually trying to hurt the other person. How this works out sounds like something that would vary a lot based on the actual kids involved, but with ours this is rare: I don't see them using rough games as cover for malice. Much more common are issues with not being on the same page about whether they're playing a rough game. We sort that out as best as we can ("Anna, is this a game you want to be playing?") and try to encourage them to do this on their own ("Does it look like Lily's enjoying this?").
I'm also curious how this will change as our youngest (3y) gets into a range where she'll start being able to do this kind of play with her older siblings. She's a lot more fragile than they are, and much weaker, but this might be something where a larger difference in the ability to inflict harm makes it clearer whether actions are in the "rough game" category?
(Julia also touched on this in her "advice for getting along with your kids" post.)
2024-10-15 21:00:00
Lily recently asked me to help them with a song they'd written. They'd written out the lyrics and had a melody, but they wanted me to play backup and help them make a music video. Here's what we ended up with:
Lily started with a hand-written lyrics sheet, but I wanted to follow along which meant getting it typed up:
Have you ever seen the mountain tips
In the moonlight? Oooooh
Have you ever been on the road
Of the years gone by? Oooooh
Have you ever been down the path
Of possibility? Oooooh
Have you ever, have you ever
Seen the moon, ooooh oh the
Moooo–oh-oh-oon, oh the
Moooo–oh-oh-oon, oh the
Moooo–oh-oh-oon, oh
Have you seen the
Oh, all the years gone by
Looking up at the night sky
Even all the days and nights
Are nothing compared to the Stars up so high
Even if you think about
All the nights
Some are cloudy
Some are nice
But they all have one
Thing in common, it's the
Moooo–oh-oh-oon, oh the
Moooo–oh-oh-oon, oh the
Moooo–oh-oh-oon, yeah the
Moon
Have you ever seen all the places in the night
Some are lit by starlight and others are quite bright
But they are all lit by one other light
It's the
Moooo–oh-oh-oon, oh the
Moooo–oh-oh-oon, oh the
Moooo–oh-oh-oon, oh the
Moooo–oh-oh-oon, oh
All the nights
Are lit by
The Moon
Then we sat together as I messed around with chords, figuring out what worked on the piano. Several times I had chords I liked but Lily wanted something else—I deferred since this was their project. We ended up with these chords.
I set us up for multitrack recording (vocals, foot drums, keyboard) and we recorded a bunch of takes. In retrospect I think the song would have come out better if we'd built it up a track at a time: there were things I wanted to fix in my keyboard playing that I couldn't because Lily had picked up on them and was singing differently to compensate. If they want to do this again I'll probably suggest that approach.
With some technical advice from friends I mixed it down to a base track, and then Lily recorded vocal overdubs. They got very into this, and I just left them alone for a while with Reaper to record take after take. After a while I came back and we comped together. We wanted a bit more percussion so I did a bit of egg shaker on top.
Once we had the music finalized we went and got a bunch of footage. I suggested doing the thing where you play the music and sing along to it so the video matches closely, but when we tried this in public places Lily (understandably!) found it too embarrasing. Instead we just recorded a lot of video of them doing things around our neighborhood, and on a small Kingfisher tour in Maine.
We sat down with iMovie and put it all together. Overall, I'm not a big fan of how iMovie's interface works for music videos: audio-video alignment is key but there's no way to lock clips to the audio. But we did it in one pass, selecting what to put next and then moving on, which mitigates this.
I'm pretty happy with how it turned out!
2024-10-14 21:00:00
I often talk to people who don't find LLMs useful. Paraphrasing:
Why would I want to ask questions to a thing that might give me the right answer but might also make something up that fools me into thinking it's right? I've played with them, but they don't seem like they'd save me any time.
My experience with has been that there are some things LLMs are much better at than others and you need to learn where they're suitable, but overall I get a lot out of working with them. I went back over my recent history in Claude, the one I use most, and here are cases where I found it helpful:
In yesterday's post I wanted to list a bunch of posts where I talked about failures, but my recall isn't that great. I pulled a list of titles from my last thousand posts and prompted:
I've attached a list of titles of some of Jeff Kaufman's blog posts. Can you identify some where he probably talks about a mistake he's made?
While some it highlighted were bad examples or not about failures at all, others were posts I would essentially have had to read through pages of titles to find. And I know my own posts well enough that in looking over its answers I could immediately tell which were useful.
I help my dad with sysadmin work for his small B2B SaaS and have a
long-running issue where my edits to
/etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/tomcat9.service
were getting overwritten by automatic updates. I asked how to fix
this and got an answer (sudo systemctl edit
tomcat9.service) that I could then Google and validate.
I had a set of locations in an organism's genome that had a certain property, and I wanted to plot this. This would plot better, however, as a series of runs instead of a set of descrete locations. If I thought about it I could have written a function to convert the data, but I was feeling a but fuzzy and asking the LLM to do it was faster:
I have a list of values in order with gaps: [1,2,3,4,5,6,10,11,12]Looking over the code it was easy to tell that it was doing what I wanted.Could you use run length encoding to convert it to a list of [start, length] pairs?
I've been working on a pedalboard and wasn't sure what methods people typically used to attach the pedals. Claude gave me an overview that was a good starting place for looking more deeply into each option.
I wanted a file format for human-writable machine-readable data that included key-value pairs and multiline strings, preserved formatting when round-tripping, and wasn't YAML (security, coercion, complexity). Claude helped me identify TOML with tomlkit as doing what I wanted.
I often write code that assembles some data and then want to graph it. Pasting the code into Claude along with a request for the kind of plot I want typically produces something close to what I had in mind, and a good starting place for tweaks. It can also be useful for tweaking existing plots: "In the following code the bars for the medians in the violin plots are blue. Could you make them black?", "Could you modify the following plot to lightly shade the period between 2023-12-01 and 2024-05-01, labeling it 'study period'?", "Could you extend the following code to add a trend line for each plot?", etc.
Claude is very strong verbally, so asking it to rephrase things can work well. I'm reasonably happy with my writing in informal contexts like this one, so this is mostly something I use when I'm tired and it feels like words aren't flowing well or if I need to communicate in a voice that doesn't come naturally to me (contracting, military, academic, etc).
I often ask questions like "what do you call it when ..." with a verbose description and then Google the technical terms it thinks I might be gesturing at.
There are still a lot of things it gets wrong, but it turns out there are many areas where I can pretty easily check the output and where something mostly-right is a good starting point.
2024-10-13 21:00:00
In general I'd like to see a lot more of people writing about their failures in addition to their successes. If a bunch of people all try a thing and have mixed results, and only the people with good results write about it, people who don't know about this selection bias or don't realize its extent are going to end up with overly positive views. I've written about some of my mistakes, and I think it would be good if this were a higher fraction of my posts.
On the other hand, once other people are involved this isn't entirely up to me. One place this comes up a lot is parenting: I don't want to write things about my kids that they don't (or won't) want public. This is especially tricky if I write a post about something we've tried which worked well in part because the kids did a good job with it, and then later they stop doing a good job.
I don't have a good solution here. I don't want to go all the way to "if this had come out with my kids looking bad I wouldn't write about it, so I also won't write about it if they look good" because this would exclude a huge fraction of things involving the kids (there are a tremendous number of possible ways kids could do something that would be embarrassing). Sometimes I can handle it with plausible deniability (one of our kids did embarrassing thing X) but often it would be clear to some people which kid actually did it, or it's bad enough that even being in a pool of three is mortifying. Other times I'm able to include some minor negative information, if it's about them when they were enough younger and it's combined with positive information. But mostly I think this will just need to be something people keep in mind when reading my posts, and posts by other parents.
I asked one of my kids what they thought about this issue and they suggested: "only write about things where [sibling] looks bad and I look good, such as [redacted]".
2024-10-10 21:00:00
In 2021 one of the kids in Somerville started Elfland, a miniature community, in a vacant lot. There had been a gas station there which was demolished to build housing, but with construction delays there it was open for a while. When construction resumed there were calls to " defend Elfland", and while the original location closed it's now on the Somerville Community Path just west of Willow Ave.
My kids like it a lot, and Anna and I decided to build something for it. Anna wanted to make a house, and I sold her on making a triple decker. These are three-unit buildings, one on each of three floors, that are common in Somerville and other older Boston-area neighborhoods.
We cut some 2x4s to size and glued them up:
I did the rough sanding with the belt sander, and then Anna did the finish sanding:
We primed and painted together, and Anna put on the doors and windows:
We brought it over today:
Here it is, with Somerville's best grocery store and the Elfland Museum of Hopeful Art:
I'm strongly in favor of constructing more housing in Somerville, though we'll need a lot more than this!
2024-10-08 21:00:00
As I've been playing more gigs with Kingfisher I've been thinking about how to reduce the time I'm spending on setting up and tearing down. It usually takes me about 35 minutes to get everything plugged in, and 20 minutes to get it all packed away again. Cecilia's been pushing me to make a pedalboard; what would that look like?
I do have a lot of stuff by my feet:
The key things are the four velocity-sensitive pedals that I use for drums and bass. I'm playing these nearly constantly, and they need to be positioned just right.
The other things are all helpful, though I use them much less. The pedals on the right are for modifying the sound of my mandolin, while the talkbox on the left can apply to the mandolin or my keyboard overlays. I need to be able to turn these on and off while playing, but the ergonomics doesn't need to be as good.
Here's what it looks like in context:
There are also other components (usb hub, raspberry pi) that I currently stick to the piano but would move to the floor if I had a good place to put them.
I need to measure to figure out the minimum width I can fit these into, but I think it's about 26". I'd really like this to be something I can check for flying with, probably by packing my clothes around it in a regular (<62 linear inches) suitcase.
My normal default would be to figure out the minimum area that would work and use 3/4" plywood, but that seems like it might be heavier than necessary. It seems like it's common for people to use metal ones but these would add height. Which isn't a total dealbreaker, but then I'd need an even taller seat for playing on. I'm also not sure whether the slight angle (usually ~1" over 1') would bother me.
I think my ideal would be close to something like this but upside down: metal construction for a good strength-to-weight ratio, but with the stiffening edge coming up instead of going down so I don't gain a lot of height.
Suggestions?
2024-10-01 21:00:00
The keyboard is a bit of an awkward instrument to travel with. It's quite large, to the point that you have to give up at least one seat in a typical car. What makes this especially frustrating is that I don't actually use the whole 88 keys:
The very lowest notes tend to be boomy, while the higher notes are just not very useful in playing the kind of music I play. I use a bit over five octaves (B0-D6, 31-1175 Hz).
At the same time I've been wanting to have a separate keyboard for taking to gigs. The ideal, really, would be to have an entire duplicate rig, which would halve the amount of setup and teardown involved, since I would only need to set up and pack away at gigs. This is enough extra effort and expense, however, that for now I'm just duplicating the keyboard (and stand).
I decided to get a Yamaha P-121:
It is the discontinued 73-key version of the P-125, which is the ~current version of my P-85. [1] Which made it a bit hard to find one, but there was one new-in-box shipping from Japan on eBay. I was a bit nervous, but it worked out fine.
The P-121 turns out to be very close to what I want: sounds and action very similar to my preferences, Yamaha's build quality and reliability, better condition than my P-85. The main downside is they didn't pick exactly the right keys to drop:
After telling it to transpose down an octave I still do have all the keys I need, but the keys below B0 are really pretty useless while I might very occasionally use keys higher than E6 if I had them.
I strongly considered telling it to transpose down a fourth and lying to myself about what key I'm playing in. In some ways this isn't too different from teaching myself to play trumpet in standard pitch, but I think it would be likely enough to cause trouble when playing other people's pianos that I shouldn't.
This is not an especially careful packing job, but it's really nice being able to put all my gear in back without folding down any seats:
I put a lot of stuff on my keyboard, and I need a way to keep it all from falling off. Because this keyboard is narrower, though, not everything fit. I made a holder for the computer keyboard I use for buttons:
Everything else just velcros on:
The box on the left is a box I made a few months ago that combines my custom switch box and my embedded whistle synth.
Here are the current p121 settings I use:
For a case, I ordered a cheap 76-key fabric case on Amazon. It's a bit floppy because it's designed for a fatter keyboard, but there are velcro straps inside that hold it securely. I did have to tie a pair of knots in each strap to keep it from flopping around.
[1] Technically, the P-125a is the current version, but all the "a"
means is that they removed USB audio support.
2024-09-26 21:00:00
One thing I like about renting cars when I travel is that it's an opportunity to get a sense for a car that's a lot more detailed than what you'd get with a test drive. Traveling to DC for work a few days ago, I took the opportunity to rent a 2023 Chevy Bolt. This is the second time I've rented an electric vehicle, and overall it was the inverse of my experience renting a Tesla:
With the Bolt, everything was fine except charging.
With the Model 3, the only good part was the charging.
The car acted like a car, which is what I want. No overly minimalist design where I can't find anything, no automatic wipers that fail to detect spray from the road, and especially no too-smart cruise control with phantom braking. Just a car.
Charging, on the other hand, was terrible. Part of why I got an electric car at this time is that I knew I was going to have a lot of extra time on the way to the airport. I stopped at an Electrify America station, but while it showed up on the map as having multiple spots empty when I started driving, when I got there they were all full. I downloaded the app while I was waiting, which showed a spot empty because someone who'd finished charging was still hanging out in the spot (after disconnecting). When a spot freed up, though, I pulled in. I used the app to start a charge, plugged it in, and waited. A lot.
It was a good thing I only needed to put 5kWh (7%) in to get the car back up to 75% for the return, because after spending ages in the "initializing" state it took 13:12 to put in 5.09kWh.
The charger was marked 150kW, but my understanding is the best the Bolt can do, in ideal conditions with a battery below 50%, is 53kW. And the 23kW I saw is about typical for a Bolt getting to 75%:
If I was going to be able to keep the car somewhere I could plug it in overnight, and rarely drive it enough in a day that I'd need to recharge while out this would be fine. Not a great fit for needing to charge back up to return a rental, though. Since moving electricity to a car is a lot easier than moving gas to a car, it seems like the way this should work is rental companies setting up their garages for charging and advertising that you should just bring the car back at whatever level is convenient.
2024-09-25 21:00:00
When I'm doing exploratory work I want to run many analyses. I'm usually optimizing for getting something quick, but I want to document what I'm doing enough that if there are questions about my analysis or I later want to draw on it I can reconstruct what I did. I've taken a few approaches to this over the years, but here's how I work these days:
For each analysis I make a local directory,
~/work/YYYY-MM-DD--topic/. These contain large files I'm
copying locally to work with, temporary files, and outputs. When
these get too big I delete them; they're not backed up, and I can
rebuild them from things that are backed up.
Code goes in a git repo, in files named like
YYYY-MM-DD--topic.py. Most of my work lately has been
going into an internal repo, but if there's nothing sensitive I'll use
a public
one. I don't bother with meaningful commit messages; the goal is
just to get the deltas backed up. If I later want to run an analysis
similar to an old one I duplicate the code and make a new work
directory.
Code is run from the command line in the work directory, which
means that in my permanent
shell history every command I ran related to topic
will be tagged with ~/work/YYYY-MM-DD--topic/.
For example, the code for the figures in my recent NAO blog
post on flu is in 2024-09-05--flu-chart.py
and 2024-09-12--rai1pct-violins.py.
This approach optimized for writing over reading, but maintaining
enough context that I can figure out what I was doing if I need to.
I'll usually link the code from documents that depend on it, but even
if I forget to it's pretty fast to figure out which code it would have
been from names and dates. Running git grep and histgrep
get me a lot of what other people seem to get from LLM-autocomplete,
and someday I'd like to try priming an LLM with my personal history.
Often something I'm doing moves from "playing around trying to understand" to "something real that my team will continue to rely on". I try to pay attention to whether I'm getting to that point and then start taking care of the code properly, in an appropriate repo with meaningful commit messages etc.
2024-09-24 21:00:00
Lily recently wrote a song, and I've been helping them record it. I got us set up to record four tracks (vocals, drums, keyboard x2) and we did a bunch of takes:
Most of the takes are full-length, but after we got a really nice version of the end we did some rounds with just the beginning because there was a part where we weren't quite together on a transition.
What I'd like to do now is edit this into a single composition, after which we'll probably do some overdubbing. The problem is everything I can find assumes your takes are already time-aligned because you recorded to either a click or a scratch track. The ideal flow for what I have would be:
Treat each take as a single unit, like a section of multi-track tape.
Edit together pieces from different takes into a approximately right overall piece.
Tweak the placement of cuts so that different tracks can switch between takes at slightly different places, based on what each instrument is doing at the time.
Is there good tooling for this? I'm using Reaper for my DAW, but could consider using something else if it made this flow better.
2024-09-23 21:00:00
When I initially switched the computer portion of my rhythm stage setup over to a Raspberry PI I went with a 32GB SD card because that's recommended. But I don't need very much space for what I'm doing and a bigger SD card makes copies slow: the cheap cards I've been using take me over an hour to write with my Mac's card reader.
I recently made some changes to my setup, removing support for bass whistle on the PI (now that I have an arduino-based version) and adding support for more foot-bass options. This normally means round of re-imaging all of my SD cards: I have a bunch of them because SD card corruption is probably the most common reason my system breaks [1], and it's easy to have extra cards. I'm pretty sick of 82-minute waits, however, so I decided to go down to four-GB SD cards.
I imaged a card with Raspberry
Pi OS Lite (64-bit), started setting it up, and immediately ran
out of space. Turns out apt-get update and apt-get
upgrade can use a lot of space. After apt-get
purge and apt-get clean, however, I had about
300MB to spare. It would probably be possible to get a lite
distribution to go a lot smaller than this, since the only actually
large thing I need is the sound font, fluid-soundfont-gm
at 145MB, but this seems to work fine.
Regardless, it works great, and I can now image a card in 15min:
$ time sudo dd if=~/Desktop/rpi-4gb.dmg of=/dev/disk4 7782400+0 records in 7782400+0 records out 3984588800 bytes transferred in 877.723067 secs (4539688 bytes/sec) real 14m41.556s user 0m3.299s sys 0m28.741s
[1] This used to happen a lot, but now mostly doesn't. The hardware
hasn't changed, so I think the reason it has stopped happening is that
my Raspberry PI is no longer responsible for the bass whistle. My
MIDI router doesn't write to the file system, and doesn't read beyond
initialization, while the bass whistle version used the file system to
persist settings across reboots.
2024-09-22 21:00:00
One of the things I like most about contra dance is how it works with a very wide range of skill levels, including having one of the best learning curves of any dance form I know. As a community we are pretty committed to the idea that people should just be able to show up and start dancing, no lessons required. Which is why I'm very excited about a new "Becket first" approach I've been seeing from several callers.
Contra dance has several common starting formations, which are traditionally taught as:
Proper: one line of Larks, one line of Robins. It's "proper" because everyone is on their own ("proper") side.
Improper: start proper, then within each couple that is going to be going down the hall ("active" or "ones") the Lark and Robin swap.
Becket: start improper, then circle one place to the left.
These days, proper dances are uncommon, and most are improper or Becket. While some callers still use the older approach of getting people to line up proper and then asking the ones to cross over, at this point it's more common to just teach improper as the starting formation and have people start that way. But what if we go a step farther, and start with Becket?
This allows introducing the common duple minor ("hands four") dances to halls where the average skill level wouldn't support an improper dance:
Tell people to find a partner and make two long lines facing each other. Then to slide left or right until they're across from another couple and can take hands in a circle of four.
Call a dance leaves the dancers back where they started.
To progress, slide left. This is a lot easier than the "pass through", "California twirl", or "star left" that you tend to see in easy improper dances.
This lets you choose a dance that doesn't depend on roles, and during the progression each couple is connected and so is more likely to stay together.
Luke Donforth started a discussion on the Contra Callers List, and here are some role-free examples people shared. I've put them roughly in increasing order of difficulty.
Becket
| A1 | (8) | Long lines forward and back while sliding left |
| (8) | Long lines forward and back | |
| A2 | (8) | Star left |
| (8) | Star right | |
| B1 | (8) | Circle right |
| (8) | Circle left | |
| B2 | (8) | Partner dosido |
| (8) | Partner swing |
Becket
| A1 | (8) | Circle Left |
| (8) | Circle Right | |
| A2 | (8) | Star Right |
| (8) | Star Left | |
| B1 | (8) | Partner Dosido (on the side) |
| (8) | Partner Swing | |
| B2 | (8) | Neighbor Dosido (across the set) |
| (8) | Long lines forward and back while sliding left |
Becket
| A1 | (8) | Star left |
| (8) | Whole set circle right | |
| A2 | (8) | Whole set circle left |
| (8) | (Back in your hands four) circle left 1x | |
| B1 | (8) | Partner Dosido |
| (8) | Partner Swing | |
| B2 | (8) | Long lines forward and back |
| (8) | Star left 1x, slide right to next star |
Note that this one progresses "backwards", sliding right.
Becket
| A1 | (8) | Petronella (balance and spin to the right) |
| (8) | Petronella (balance and spin to the right) | |
| A2 | (16) | Partner balance and swing, end facing down |
| B1 | (8) | Down the hall, turn as couples |
| (8) | Up the hall, bend the line | |
| B2 | (8) | Long lines |
| (8) | Promenade across the Set, turn as a couple and progress |
After doing a few of these you could stick with Becket and introduce roles to let you bring in additional figures that add variety. But what if you had a crowd that was ready for something with a higher piece count but you weren't introducing roles yet? I had a go at writing something:
Becket
| A1 | (8) | Long lines forward and back while sliding left |
| (4) | Pass through across | |
| (4) | Turn alone to face back in | |
| A2 | (8) | Petronella (balance and spin to the right) |
| (8) | Petronella (balance and spin to the right) | |
| B1 | (4) | Balance neighbor across the set |
| (4) | Pull by right, pull by left with partner along the set | |
| (4) | Balance neighbor across the set | |
| (4) | Pull by right, pull by left with partner along the set | |
| B2 | (2) | Turn over your right shoulder |
| (4) | Partner right shoulder round | |
| (10) | Partner swing |
I don't know if there are real situations for the weird combination of constraints that led to this dance, but it was a fun exercise!
