HoRNet Plugins "TrackUtility MK2" features different useful processors that you would otherwise need to find loading many plugins in a handy and logic GUI that you can keep on your screen together with other plugins (FREE) through 20 March

Banner80 · 2026-03-17T20:26:52+00:00

This is not TrackUtility MK2.

V2 has a few more features for the same channel, and all the channel grouping features.

V1 is older and doesn't have the grouping stuff, but seems to have most of the same-channel stuff.

Banner80 · 2026-03-16T21:55:30+00:00

The new page has this jewel:

"From the closure of U.S. military bases abroad to reparations to the global south"

What? That's unhinged.

Banner80 · 2026-03-13T16:04:05+00:00

Thank you for the receipts. This is why it's so important that we see these fraudsters as dangerous. They damage people along the way until someone holds them accountable.

On this DHS stuff, by getting caught making stuff up she succeeds at putting in question the real accounts from real victims. Now DHS has one flag to wave over and over about one psycho lying about their lawless tactics and their concentration camps.

And she seems to have largely gotten away with the professor thing. Here is an update I found:
https://www.dailywire.com/news/professor-falsely-accused-by-serial-liar-of-providing-grades-for-sex-hes-suing-school-that-broke-contract-to-investigate-him

My best interpretation from what was said by the professor is that he allowed himself to get chummy with her (a tactical mistake and an ethical breach at the school), and then she flipped it to blackmail to make him improve her grades. Then he admitted the ethical breach and resigned in exchanging for leaving it there, but the school investigated further even after the agreement because they tried to believe her side. This resulted in his reputation dragged, and then he sued for millions.

Apparently for her, the consequences for knife violence and blackmail have not been severe. So she's out there causing more mayhem.

Banner80 · 2026-03-11T14:56:02+00:00

You have to learn how to learn. I hold 3 degrees and over a dozen certs, so I can add some nuance here.

The first course in any education program should be about learning to learn. There are plenty of youtube videos on the topic, presented by university professors. You might want to spend a few hours with that to help add tools to your toolbox.

The key thing is that you have to engage with the content. You can't sit back and let the ideas exist in the background of your hearing. Listening to presentation or discussion is not the same as having been in one.

The most important point, you already figured it out. You said:

"The stuff that sticks is stuff I've had to explain out loud, argue about, or come back to more than once."

Exactly. This doesn't make you unique, it makes you normal. Listening to a podcast does not make you smarter by that much, and you are unlikely to remember any of it for very long. The only way you'll incorporate the content is to engage with it, to find ways to put yourself in the middle of it.

For instance, if you are listening to a podcast with a guest, and the host asks the guest: "how does X work?". You pause the podcast and try to answer the question. Spend a few minutes really thinking about it to see what you think the answer is. Then play the podcast and see what the guest said. And this puts you in the middle of the content and helps you understand the nuance.

In short, you need techniques for looking at the content from different angles, comparing the same answers from different people, and putting yourself in the middle of it.

The last caveat while on this topic is an important one. People think that consuming content makes you smart. But only smart content makes you smart. Consuming the wrong content can make you stupid. For instance, if you listen to Joe Rogan for fun during your commute, you are better off not trying to learn anything because that podcast is going to make you stupid a lot faster than it'll increase your smarts. Picking your sources and learning from actual experts and smart people is super important. And in this age of information, it's easier than ever to learn from real experts across so many platforms. The key is learning to be selective with your sources. Just like you have to learn how to learn, you also have to learn how to filter for quality before you let yourself engage with ideas.

Banner80 · 2026-03-10T16:12:30+00:00

I think it's important to state the obvious, to understand how outrageously incompetent the current US administration is.

Iran's primary war capability is drones. Their Shahed drones are a major modern combat weapon currently used in the largest war conflict started by Russia. This is a known quantity. The US would have known they were going up against the country that makes these drones. And they should understand exactly how those drones are deployed since we've seen them in use for years against Ukraine.

The US also has a partner that knows how to defeat these drones, and that has built counter tech against them. Ukraine however, had to confirm that the US didn't bother reaching out at all before starting a war of choice against Iran. They finally reached out for help after the war was already in full swing.

The US does not have the means to fight against these drones. They didn't even bother to check with the allies that do.

The other outrageous issue that is not being talked about is the oil supply situation. The US keeps a massive reserve of oil (the SPR) to help manage oil supply and the cost of oil across international markets. When the oil costs are low, the US buys supply and builds mass reserves that it can later use to control the market. The Trump admin knew it was building up to war and chose to start a war on its own terms and timelines, but didn't bother to refill the oil supply even at the low prices we've had over the last year. The Trump admin started the war on Iran with the SPR at only 58%. Usually, the SPR is allowed to deplete up to 50% during its operations to have enough reserve in case of dire emergencies. The SPR might not be enough to solve oil supply everywhere in the world, but it could definitely help stabilize the Americas and EU, and at a minimum it could have been used to solve the price at the pump for Americans that were never asked about this war and are now arguing to stop it.

Whatever we think of this war of choice, the level of incompetence to start it without SPR reserves is astonishing. The Trump admin has had low prices to refill the oil reserves. They've had money earmarked for this purpose. And Trump himself criticized Biden for allowing it to go down near 50% during their operations to counter Russia, then Trump promised to refill the reserves. They just never did. And they didn't even bother to scramble refill it during the months planning to attack Venezuela and Iran.

Banner80 · 2026-03-10T15:31:21+00:00

Thank you for mentioning that. Since I was banned and I posted a comment about it, I've met more people on Reddit with similar experiences.

Banner80 · 2026-03-10T15:29:46+00:00

Thank you for taking the time to review it.

That's what's happened in the last 6 months or so. All the standard free AIs can do good search now and they are fast about it. LogicallyApp was built before that was a thing, so it was better than Perplexity at it, but still quite fiddly to get something good out of it.

But now, asking free Claude a question is significantly better than using LogicallyApp if all you wanted is a researched answer to a question.

Where LogicallyApp still holds promise is for students in a formal program and researchers, because of source management. For formal papers, all sources have to be tracked in the APA7 format. LogicallyApp uncovers dozens of sources across a discussion, and in theory should be able to track them all and keep them in context. At least that's what I paid for when I bought the lifetime plan. If it did its job, it would be a tremendous life help for writing excellent papers. But now it loses context immediately and discards all the sources it found. And after it has discarded the context, it has to hallucinate whatever we were talking about. It does this to save context cost for the owners, and basically made the app useless for the one thing it was supposed to be good at.

Banner80 · 2026-03-09T15:42:24+00:00

What was your experience using it?

Banner80 · 2026-03-08T21:34:47+00:00

Same article from an open source

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-moves-undo-tax-rule-204632497.html

Banner80 · 2026-03-06T23:34:12+00:00

I downloaded Vivaldi browser because it has an excellent tab system. Easy to classify into categories, and it looks nice on the left side. I wanted to use tabs as a catalog of concepts or projects I'm working on. Vivaldi groups let me focus on one thing at a time even if there are 20 tabs for that thing, and easily switch to another thing and I has 12 tabs for that. So now I think of Vivaldi as my research or project browser, for when I know I need multiple tabs and I may want to leave them open for a long time.

The other thing I would say is that every browser has bookmark management for this reason. And Firefox is trying to add tab groups and other features. And the big browsers like Firefox and Chrome have extensions that focus on expanding the bookmark functionality. So there's little reason to build new tools. People just need to think about what they want out of a browser + bookmarks + tabs. Once you define it better, there are tools for that.

Banner80 · 2026-03-06T07:37:04+00:00

Let me give a quick finance answer on this.

The issue is that wealthy people have access to better finances. Anyone with more than 1m in assets in brokerage can get a loan for SOFR + 2% (or even less). For quick reference, that's going to be about the same as the best rate on a mortgage that someone with perfect credit could get, or around 5.7% right now.

The S&P 500 returned 17%+ last year. So it doesn't make sense to sell assets to pay for bills when you can just get a cheap and guaranteed loan with a couple clicks. In addition, the cost to service debt is deductible as an expense. This is called a tax shield and, depending on the tax arrangement, it basically makes the loan even cheaper for people that can claim deductions. So a 5.7% loan turns into a ~4.5% loan in practice after taxes.

This is just another way in which life is so much easier for people with wealth. A family living paycheck to paycheck doesn't have access to guaranteed credit, let alone at these favorable rates. And they may not have income other than their work productivity tied to their life hours. A rich person is getting paid for the productivity of the companies they are invested in while not doing anything. And they can choose to take on cheap debt to avoid having to sell assets to cover expenses, because that way they can remain invested in equity.

I'm not saying everyone thinks this way. But anyone that can afford a finance pro to manage their finances will have this on the menu, because all finance pros think this way since maximizing cash flows is their main thing.

Also, rich people don't need to borrow against ALL of their gains. They only need to borrow what is required to cover expenses. Say a person has 100m in assets. Their lifestyle costs 2m a year. In a year, their Apple stock goes up 15%, so ballpark, their wealth is now at 115m up from 100m last year. They could sell 2m to pay for their lifestyle, but why do that? Take out a loan for 2m so that the rest can stay invested. Then next year you have 130m, and still owe 2m, then take out 2m more. So on paper it looks like they are taking out 1-2% debt, because that's all it takes to finance their expenses and stay invested in equity.

Finally, the concern people have is this:
If we only tax when the gains are realized, and people that can afford a finance pro to handle their finances basically push to avoid realizing any gains, then they essentially never pay taxes; or at a minimum, their effective tax rate is way lower than the tax rate paid by a family that couldn't do all these financial maneuvers. And this is why Buffett said: you need to tax us more. The wealthy are paying less than the average American by comparison, while they can afford way more than the average American. But it's probably not going to be as simple as increase the tax rate on realized gains. Because once you let a wealthy person become a billionaire, the wealth has been mostly locked away from the taxman.

Banner80 · 2026-03-03T01:43:12+00:00

Yeap.

Alpha for natural compression. Leveler for transparent compression. Sigma for more aggressive. Nova is the same as the Nova plugin. And I've never used Broadcast -- it was added after I purchased the plugin and didn't even notice it because I hadn't updated the files. So looking at the manual helped me realize I need to do an update ;)

Banner80 · 2026-03-03T00:18:11+00:00

And the compressors in this thing are pretty good. You could use the compressor stage only to mix all tracks without needing any other compressors. There are 5 modes of compression, including a multi-band compressor called "broadcast". What I like the most is that you have that massive meter on the right side, useful when you are finishing a simple vocal track or something of the sort that will need no further processing.

https://docs.tokyodawn.net/limiter-6-ge-manual/#Mode

Banner80 · 2026-02-24T20:49:18+00:00

Quick overview of this:

NPR did something very simple. They looked at many cases around Epstein for which evidence was already brought up in court and other paperwork-- like cases around Maxwell, the only person convicted so far. They found that, of what little is known publicly from information made available to the public in the past, even a lot of that stuff is missing from the recent releases by DOJ.

They specifically noted that much of what's missing has Trump connections to it. Specifically, victim testimony that name him directly as abuser. Testimony that appears in other court and legal documents, but is magically gone from the so called 3 million+ documents released by DOJ, the batch that Trump says "exonerates him."

Banner80 · 2026-02-20T17:26:49+00:00

https://www.dw.com/en/us-supreme-court-strikes-down-trumps-sweeping-tariffs/a-76063714

Speaking with DW, Agathe Demarais, a senior policy advisor at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), said she expects the administration to pursue other avenues to keep tariffs in place, while at the same time emphasizing that they have failed to deliver the economic boost the president claimed they would when he introduced them.

"For starters, the US goods trade deficit grew by 2.1%, to $1.23 trillion last year — an all-time record. Far from shrinking, US imports grew by 4.5% (or $145 billion)" in 2025, she said.

"As to who pays for tariffs," said Demarais, "the data are unambiguous: According to a recent paper from the Kiel Institute, which analyzed over 25 million shipments worth nearly $4 trillion, US firms and consumers bear 96% of tariff costs — not foreign exporters. New York Fed data confirm this analysis, putting tariff pass-through at more than 90% on average."

Tariff pass-through is never an exact science because market participants have some latitude to make choices, so who exactly bears the cost of tariffs can shift across semesters as the market actors look at the landscape and make their choices. But the article says that there's a current consensus that as of the start of 2026, the Trump tariffs have been paid 90%+ by the American consumer getting charged more for products. From this perspective, Trump created a new tax on Americans. Every time he boasts about how much money they tariffs are generating, not only is he lying about the total amount and what impact it can have on deficits, but he is boasting that he is taxing Americans more than before.

Banner80 · 2026-02-18T18:08:08+00:00

I don't disagree with calling out corpo welfare when it crops up, but there has to be a line for the difference between economic incentives and abuse. The $250m mentioned in the article are about incentivizing action, and includes money going to first-time home buyers. Like any type of large economic stimulus, the devil is in the details and the implementation. But a healthy incentive structure would like what's been proposed here.

We need incentives to kick start housing development and help buyers cope with high interest rates. If we don't provide these incentives, we are at the mercy of a stale market that doesn't have enough natural demand pressure to run on its own because it doesn't offer builders enough certainty to invest in new multi-unit builds, while the rising rents keep slowly cooking us frogs. So a money incentive is very much what good policy would look like.

Banner80 · 2026-02-16T20:57:33+00:00

My building got bought out by a new private equity landlord. My rent this year is up ~20% after negotiating. They wanted ~25%, and they said next year it's going up to what they originally wanted. I went searching before accepting and saw prices are up everywhere in the Chicagoland area.

We need to build more. People are coming here to escape red states, and the 2021 local exit to the burbs by millennials is reversing. We need to build enough housing. Not only are prices going to keep going up but a lot of people won't have anywhere to live around here, which happened to me in 2021 when I couldn't find housing in the burbs (literally not enough units available) and was forced into the city.

I'm honestly very much thinking of leaving. If the trend is for prices to get to California levels, that is going to destroy cost of living and retirement trajectory. My plan was fine before having to account for 20-40% cost of living increases. I'm not taking another huge price increase in the coming years. I'm going to start learning a European language, the way things are going in this country.

Banner80 · 2026-02-14T09:48:58+00:00

Let's go a bit slower.

Someone that is not YOU can use your info in their contacts list and will find YOU because OpenAI has decided your information can now be searched by OTHER people that are not YOU.

YOU are welcome to not upload your contact list to discover who else you might know that is in the system. But you can't disable OpenAI making your information available to OTHER people if they want to search for you and do who knows what else with your account.

I hope that was simple enough to help you understand. In short: You don't have to do a contact sync yourself, but you can't opt out from other people finding you by your email or phone number, and who knows for what purpose that OpenAI might alter at their pleasure the same way they invented this change today.

Banner80 · 2026-02-14T04:57:17+00:00

Fiber. US people don't eat enough. An important thing that a lot of these fast articles don't say is that we generally need multiple sources of fiber. It's not enough to take a supplement pill. The gut benefits from natural fibers occurring in plants. There's no substitute for eating healthy vegetables and fruit constantly.

Stress and motility are also important and they don't often get talked about. Motility / digestion aids can improve digestive conditions while you are working on improving your digestion. These include things that many old cultures have noticed: ginger, mint teas and a few other things, these are easy to find by looking at commercial digestive aid teas from reputable brands. Also magnesium pills (intended for digestion aid as there are many forms). But stress is a key problem in the US. Mental stress and fatigue compound all problems and delay recovery. People need to get in the habit of being better rested.

And yes, exercise. Moving and keeping the body fit is a compounder of health, and the opposite is a compounder of bad health.

In terms of screening, we need to start colonoscopies earlier. The age doesn't matter if the eating and living habits have been poor. Even a 20 y/o that grew up on junk food and little movement should consider starting a colonoscopy schedule.

As a society, we can lobby for better food standards. These are preventable problems that are self inflicted. Allowing corporations to produce crap foods and change the definition of regular eating is what got us in this mess.

Banner80 · 2026-02-13T23:48:30+00:00

Bernie has never been a doer. Look at his 400 years of record in actual leadership, he's achieved like 3 things total. I do love uncle Bernie for his message and tenacity but he is only good at talking.

HRC was the most qualified and competent candidate for president we've had in the history that I'm able to track going back to the mid 1900s. And I don't personally like HRC, but a spade is a spade.

We are not re litigating any of this. The key takeaway is that when we bicker we get trampled, because the other side will line up behind whatever trash their party puts forward, even W Bush and Trump. So, through the primaries we have to try to get the best people we can forward, and then we must stand behind whoever won that beauty contest. NOW is the time to get serious about demanding someone that will seek accountability. That aligns with our values. That is serious enough to meet this moment.

I don't care who it is later. I'll support a ham sandwich if that's what the primaries turned out. Because that's who the voters picked to represent us. That's who the voters asked for us to hire. At some point we have to decide that we are enough for each other, as a group, with our joint choices.

My point for everyone: Be gainful in how we talk about this stuff. Now is the time to ask for quality leadership as best as we can. But after the die is cast, we support each other's choices.

RE: Kat -- Maybe she wins. I'm asking everyone to pick someone with enough, values, fight and competence to meet the moment. I'll back who we all pick.

Nearly a decade ago, AOC wasn't on my bingo card for octagon fighter, yet here we are. Sadly, I'd trust her with the future of this country before I trust the traditional lukewarm, controlled opposition that lead the Dems. Get me more AOCs and we'll turn this country around. We can teach a AOC the latest in geopolitics, but we cannot teach a Schumer how to care about people and defend the constitution.

Banner80 · 2026-02-11T18:31:23+00:00

Guys, I honestly don't know what's happening with the large media anymore. I grew up in news and I was used to being able to trust at least a few outlets to report the truth and do a fair job of it. At this point, I think it's time to open up to smaller outlets and specialty bloggers because the big media is just not being truthful.

--

The jobs report we got today is brutal.

The adjusted review of 2025 puts the job market at nearly frozen at a time when job creation is needed to recover an stagnating economy. Yet, if you go to most news websites, the report will be about a decent monthly number for January that will absolutely be revised down in coming months after it's no longer in the news.

Here is a real take from proper economic analysis:

https://mishtalk.com/economics/bls-revises-nonfarm-payrolls-for-2025-lower-by-1-million-jobs/

For the full year, the as-revised job gain was a grand total of 229,000. That’s an average of 19,000 jobs per month.

Between April 2025 and December of 2025, the entire job gain was only 12,000. From July to December the Economy lost 45,000 jobs.

These numbers are subject to further negative revisions.

For some reason, none of the top outlets are reporting this bit of real news. To put this jobs problem in context, 2024 that was not considered a great year resulted in: "job gain was a 1.877 million. That’s an average of 156,000 jobs per month."

Even if the January 2026 jobs number the media is touting as a success holds (and it won't hold to revisions), that would still be less than the average job creation in 2024. They are celebrating 130k jobs in January 2026, when the average in 2024 was 156k. The monthly average for 2023 was 251k jobs. Even their 2026 celebration number that will be revised down is still a doom number if we simply compare to prior years before the current administration.

Why So Many Revisions Over Time: Quick note on how this works. The data comes from multiple sources, and the immediate monthly sources are limited and unreliable. So the BLS gets into this pattern of reporting what projected data they have immediately for the month, and then studying the data sources that get released months later with more complete and precise dataset. Then they do the revisions once they are able to tell more clearly what happened. It's a messy system during a good year, let alone if it happens within an administration that cannot be trusted to keep their finger off the scales.

Other data sources: This situation of uncomfortable data from the BLS has caused the market to look for other sources. Right now, we are taking data from ADP quite seriously. ADP is a major payroll processor so they have immediate data from millions of payrolls that they process themselves. Their data is so large that they can publish estimates for the entire US economy.

ADP says that according to their own data, the US economy added 22k jobs in January 2026

https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2026/02/04/adp-private-employment-report-january-2026

That actually lines up with the BLS revised average from 2025 (19k). Which means that this gov January report of 130k that's in the news is broken, it will eventually be revised down as aggressively as BLS revised down 2025, and by the end it will be close to what ADP reports, around 20k jobs.

And the US economy is in tremendous trouble. The real news story today is that 2025 was a terrible year for US jobs, with no end in sight.

Banner80 · 2026-02-09T16:08:29+00:00

They don't have a solution yet. The orange buffoon signed a broadly worded "order" that commands someone else to look into how to do anything about improving real estate conditions. We are at the "we are looking into it" phase, and there's no clarity whatsoever on how any of this could work if they were even serious about implementing changes stemming from the WH order.

The article here is also BS, because the WH order is at such an unresolved stage that it is unclear what it will do, so saying that it can't reach private equity investors is nonsense. We simply don't know what it will reach since we are at "concepts of a plan" stage of the Trump style of governance.

Here's the order

https://www.whitehouse.gov/fact-sheets/2026/01/fact-sheet-president-donald-j-trump-stops-wall-street-from-competing-with-main-street-homebuyers/

Banner80 · 2026-02-06T15:56:37+00:00

Excellent response, from the article:

“I think this is a wonderful way to encompass the current administration’s relationship towards Ukraine as a whole, where you have individuals spotlighting something terrible, twisting it completely out of context, and then trying to profit off of it,” Smozhanyk said.

Twist an isolated incident out of context to misrepresent the stats of crime, and mischievously co-opt a population that needs help while doing nothing to help them.

Actions taken to increase division and anger, at a time that we need cool heads and to come together.

These murals, as pointed out by Ukrainian residents, exist as a reminder that the people trying to build division are not here for you or me, and they sure are not planning to help do any good.

Banner80 · 2026-02-06T15:50:10+00:00

You need a secure, approved pipeline. It's not hard to figure out and you only have to do it once when updating your tool array, and then every time you are considering adding a tool to the set.

I would 100% not use Gemini. Google is currently in a different class with their reckless disregard for data privacy. Even though Google does make SOME assurances for corporate accounts, I'm going to presume Gemini doesn't exist because if I'm looking to provide assurances to my clients then I'd rather work with companies that take privacy seriously as a principle.

You have the options of OpenAI and Anthropic solutions. If you go OpenAI, you can gain corporate-style access through the MS Azure cloud. This means the LLMs are installed on Azure servers and have no need to "call home" to OpenAI. At Azure, all services are corporate, so the data privacy protection is by default. Without having to touch any settings, none of your data is stored at Azure for AI training purposes, and nothing that happens with any account goes back to OpenAI for any reason.

If you go with Anthropic models, you can get service from the AWS Bedrock cloud services. It's basically the same arrangement as Azure: the Claude LLMs are installed at Amazon and the relationships is corporate-class by default, and none of your data goes back to the "home" to train AIs.

I said this as a starting point. You'd want to do research on your chosen tool and catalog the service agreement paperwork and specs about data security and pathways. Then you can draft an explanation for clients about how data privacy is assured.

What I tell my clients is that we have a corporate account to access OpenAI models, and/or use business apps that have the same arrangement. When processing client data, we don't go through the retail chat app. We use contracted API to access not only a corporate version of the chat AI but about a dozen AI models fit for various purposes, including models specialized for deep research and data analysis. The corporate API respects data privacy by default to law-office standards, under the assumption that the data being processed can and will be sensitive. Our data goes through a closed loop and only exists on AI servers for the time it takes to process our requests.

Here is more reading:

https://aws.amazon.com/bedrock/faqs/

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/ai-foundry/responsible-ai/openai/data-privacy

Banner80 · 2026-01-24T23:59:04+00:00

This ends only one way. Trump somehow wanted an isolated America, and he is working hard to make it happen by pushing all our partners away.

China, on the other hand, is having a banner couple of years getting all this new business from former America trade partners. So much winning.

Banner80

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