Almost. A modem sometimes had a phone jack as well as a coupler, for those cases when the handset was hardwired into the phone and the phone was hardwired into the wall.
We tapped where we could and we were happy. Bonus points if the rotary phone had a lock on it and you dialed out by pulsing the hangup switch.
Often, one could dial out by pulsing the on hook switch on any phone. Ask me how I know. That was such a fun discovery! I did it frequently from many different phones.
The Fourier Transform isn't even Fourier's deepest insight. Unless we're now ranking scientific discoveries based on whether or not they get a post every weekend on HN.
The FFT is nifty but that's FINO. The Google boys also had a few O(N^2) to O(N log N) moments. Those seemed to move the needle a bit as well.
But even if we restrict to "things that made Nano Banana Pro possible" Shannon and Turing leapfrog Fourier.
It's really getting in the way of all the daily AI opinion pieces I come here to read.
More seriously, there are tens of thousands of people who come to HN. If Fourier stuff gets upvoted, it's because people find it informative. I happen to know the theory, but I wouldn't gatekeep.
I remember it didn’t work out well for Randolph and Mortimer. Sam may pull it out, though, if he just sells the DRAM now while the market is still hot.
Instead shoehorning it into an arbitrary symbol salad by gimping its generality, I prefer the one which makes a statement: "What does it mean to apply inversion partially?"
"Transpose this MIDI file down a third" requires neither a specialized data format nor fancy prompt engineering. ChatGPT asked: "A) Major third up (+4 semitones) or B) Minor third up (+3 semitones)" then did it.
I still don't understand how this or the top level comment are related to the post.
I also don't get how you can claim we don't have to 'punch holes in cards to help the machine "think"', and also mention a MIDI file in your next comment. MIDI is much closer to punch cards than the proposed file format in the post.
There are major gaps in platforms slapped together in the VC Party / Ruby era that seem to have unresolvable tech debt. Or perhaps Ruby just attracts the types of people who would rather talk about F1 racecars on Twitter than instruct a few of their thousands of employees to fix the shipping calculator.
Ruby was not designed to be a serious language. It was designed to be fun like PHP but not ugly like PHP. Meanwhile PHP grew up and Ruby grew out.
It's okay to love a thing and realize that it has some unsolvable issues and some people around it destined to keep it that way. Most things are like that these days.
His book "Why None Of My Books Are Available On Audible: And why Amazon owes me $3,218.55" captures the soul, heart, nuance (and grammar) that he repeatedly brings to these issues.
He once sat in his basement for an entire month "playing the DRM off" his record collection. Resulting in twice compressed 128k MP3s and innumerable blog posts.
He set up two computers and manually played low-res DRM-protected MP3 files out of one and into the other for weeks, documenting the process on BoingBoing. He touted this not only as freedom but "preservation."
> He set up two computers and manually played low-res DRM-protected MP3 files out of one and into the other for weeks, documenting the process on BoingBoing. He touted this not only as freedom but "preservation."
I see. When I hear "record collection" I think of vinyl records, so I was quite confused how DRM was relevant there.
Sounds like the analog hole. You play DRM material out the audio port and at the same time capture the input of that and re-encode in a non-DRM format.
We tapped where we could and we were happy. Bonus points if the rotary phone had a lock on it and you dialed out by pulsing the hangup switch.
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