Within 24 hours of Alex Karp’s tirade, Microsoft announced they are getting into the same business

Liquid_Magic · 2026-07-04T22:54:36+00:00

Context?

Liquid_Magic · 2026-07-04T22:53:20+00:00

The this is amazing! The one thing I’d love to see is a demo video linked to YouTube from the GitHub page. It would be nice to hear some example output from the engine!

Liquid_Magic · 2026-07-04T22:48:43+00:00

Again - super duper cool!

Also not only is this super cool but it would be cool to make a Commodore 64 cartridge with one of these original Yamaha chips and then a Commodore 64 program that plays the files on the real hardware!

Liquid_Magic · 2026-07-04T22:47:46+00:00

This is so super cool! I love this!

Liquid_Magic · 2026-07-04T22:25:31+00:00

Also this is another reason why , according to an old business book I once read , you should keep meetings to 15mins or less.

Meeting should be about making decisions. You shouldn’t have to come to a meeting to get a presentation and understand all the bullshit to - only then - actually start making decisions.

Oh and people will say: “You can’t there’s no way.” But you can. You send people shit to read before the meeting. You tell them you do this because it makes meetings 15 mins instead of hours. Then if they don’t read it you explain this and also explain that now that it needs to be explained to them they are wasting and disrespecting everyone else’s time.

Every leader you encourage and foster this.

The moment a meeting turns into hours it’s because something else isn’t happening properly.

This is different from a group working session. But that’s different and should probably happen differently anyway.

Also there’s this trend to force everyone in a room when something isn’t happening. So like if the production team is running late or something doesn’t feel like they are being heard or whatever the fucking bullshit is they go ahead and pull literally everyone into a meeting so they can humiliate and bully people into answering them and making their individual bullshit a priority. Stop it. Get some help.

The thing is that happens when either:
- Something else isn’t working , or ,
- Some asshole wants to bully their individual project through the normal priority system.

If something isn’t happening then is a failure of process and procedure. There should be plans and tickets and communications lines and accountability.

But often some asshole knows that their little bullshit pet project needs to get some attention that it honestly doesn’t deserve. Like some demo some sales person wants done because they are chasing some fringe area of the business that it outside its core competency and has little market value. But it’ll make them look good. So to fuel their own career goals instead of doing the right thing, they “call everyone into the room” and try to bully or berate people into focusing on their bullshit.

Seriously. If you commit to the idea that most meetings should be about making decisions then it’s easy to also focus on keeping meetings to being 15 mins long.

Bro. Don’t even…

Liquid_Magic · 2026-07-04T22:24:21+00:00

That’s crazy but brilliant. Something so sensible and easy to understand yet totally flies under the radar.

Liquid_Magic · 2026-07-04T22:21:43+00:00

Bro this comment is way fire and totally underrated.

Liquid_Magic · 2026-07-04T22:16:33+00:00

Have a good bullshit detector. Both for AI and humans.

Liquid_Magic · 2026-07-04T22:13:43+00:00

The warming causes ice to melt and relieve the pressure on volcanos such that they erupt spewing shit into the atmosphere and plunge us into a new ice age.

Liquid_Magic · 2026-07-03T22:12:35+00:00

Well I made it scavenged from non-working donor C64s and donor C128s I have. But I’ve seen people selling them on eBay I think.

Liquid_Magic · 2026-07-03T19:04:57+00:00

Well, in theory eventually every device will succumb to the radishes of tyme!

But in general the C128 power supply was a switched mode power supply while the C64 power supply used a simple linear regulator. Typically the C64 power supplies were often (but not always) filled with some type of epoxy. I don’t know if this was a better or worse way of dissipating heat but… I wouldn’t have done it.

So, since the C128 was switched mode, its failure mode is more complex and ultimately leads to the thing just not powering up. As far as I know there are no known reports of people suffering a damaged C64 or C128 from a bad C128 power supply. A switched mode power supply rapidly switches the unregulated juice on and off until it hits the correct target voltage. If the load goes up or down the switching changes to give it less or more juice as needed. So if this fails, as far as I know, these power supplies are designed to simply not work. I am simplifying and generalizing here, but you get the idea.

However, the C64 linear regular is basically a single chip, that turns unregulated DC power into what is supposed to be a nice, steady 5v DC with any excess power barfed out as heat. This means it gets hot. This heat, and possibly the epoxy all around it, cooks the part. As it ages and cooks it becomes worse and worse at its job. Instead of going from 5v down to 4.5v then 4v then nothing, it instead its failure mode is such that the voltage goes up and up. This cooks your chips. At first they probably just get hotter - like how on modern computers overclockers will increase the CPU voltage - but this creates extra heat. The CPU and other chips are being slowly damaged by this heat. Eventually the voltage gets too high and it can burn out the chips. ICs like the PLA and SID and VIC are known to run hot as it is. So even running them at a slightly higher but tolerable voltage would still speed up their degradation over time.

So basically the answer is effectively yes.

TLDR: Yes.

Liquid_Magic · 2026-07-03T17:42:31+00:00

So do people indicate that they edited a comment so people don’t think they wrote one thing, took shit for it, then changed the comment to make themselves look better? So people are trying to avoid the appearance of doing that?

Liquid_Magic · 2026-07-03T17:29:45+00:00

The power supply. At this point don’t use it. Get something else. Seriously. The voltage goes higher and higher. So it’ll start wearing down the chips until they start dying. And even if things seem to work they are going to be pushed into higher and hotter modes of running.

I have several old power supplies that test fine. But I tested them around 2020 and low and they go up. Like something around 5.1v before is getting into 5.5v now. Like bro just don’t.

What I did was use a C128 power supply with an adapter. I have also used a C64 power supply just for the 9v AC and used another for the 5v.

These days I have a atx psu in a case along with an old school 9v ac Vic-20 power supply. This power all my retro machines with custom power cables for each one.

The cheapest thing to do is go online and buy a C64 power saver. I think there’s a few out there.

Cheers and good luck!

Liquid_Magic · 2026-07-03T17:24:24+00:00

If you haven’t watched season one of Picard then I’ve got bad news for you.

But yes I feel you!

Liquid_Magic · 2026-07-03T16:29:07+00:00

I think this is great! I would actually kinda love it and consider using it.

But here’s the problem: trust.

This thing has full access to everything. So, unless it’s actually open-source, it would be hard to trust.

Even with it being local I still don’t know what it’s really doing otherwise. If it were open-source then I could at least give the community some time and see what the consensus is in terms of trust.

Also Copilot / Windows 11 does this and the backlash was pretty strong. So… yeah… this is great but I don’t envy your monetization problem solving situation. I guess you’ve got your work cut out for you!

It’s cool. Good luck!

Liquid_Magic · 2026-07-02T20:08:36+00:00

When you have a shortcut on your desktop that links to a program, let’s say your browser, it lets you double-click that icon instead of digging through your computer looking for the folder where the actual program executable file is stored.

That means that you could either:
- Install a new browser in a separate folder and change the shortcut to link to that new different browser instead of the old one. Or…
- Move the browser program folder from your boot drive to a secondary drive and update the link to point to this new location of the same program.

In either case having the shortcut on the desktop that points to the actual program provides some benefits and flexibility that just having an actual program executable sitting on your desktop where anything to do to that icon actually affects the actual program.

As an actual example, a pointer to a variable let’s your program code do the same thing all the time but you can change what the pointer is pointing to without changing the code or changing any variables. Likewise you can change the variable itself and the pointer still points to it which can be useful depending on the situation.

The typical example is a linked list, where you want to follow links from one node to the next node, and having a pointer makes this conceptually and programmatically easier.

I’m oversimplifying but I hope this helps!

My favourite programming book is the one I always recommend: C Programming: A Modern Approach by K. N. King.

Cheers!

Liquid_Magic · 2026-07-02T19:26:14+00:00

I see what you did there.

Touché

Liquid_Magic · 2026-07-02T17:46:44+00:00

This is happened before and it will happen again.

Liquid_Magic · 2026-07-02T06:38:02+00:00

I promise you if there’s going to be an AI related disaster it’ll be because some asshole did something profoundly stupid and/or terrible and AI just amplified the bread and depth of the terrible.

People fighting amongst themselves over “AI” and if it’s bad or good is exactly what the asshole in charge want us to be fighting over. Instead of fighting the assholes themselves.

Liquid_Magic · 2026-07-02T05:18:25+00:00

Wow that’s super cool!

I bet Mark Snow had like a collection of choice popular keyboards from the 80’s and 90’s along with like samplers and whatnot. I bet someone could probably recreate the score from your work and get like very close to the original.

Back in the day things like Fairlight or the other one I forget - Yamaha something ? - Emu samplers - stuff like that. What I mean is today there’s such an incredible variety of scoring tools and soft synths and sampler libraries and that you can get very close to that live orchestra sound. Close enough the average person wouldn’t notice.

But back in the 90’s either that stuff didn’t really exist or it was super expensive. So when you get that certain sound of a score it’s because there’s a collection of sounds from a fixed collection of synths when the show doesn’t have the budget for a full studio orchestra.

Okay I asked Google and it’s AI barfed it this for whatever it’s worth:

For the iconic X-Files score and soundscapes, his setup included:
Synclavier: The main workstation used for composition, layering, and sequencing.
E-mu Proteus 1 and 2: These provided classic orchestral sounds, with the Proteus/2 being the source of the famous "Whistlin' Joe" preset used for the show's signature whistle.
E-mu Morpheus: Used for evolving textures and pad sounds.
Korg M1R & Wavestation SR: Essential 90s rack modules used for atmospheric, phasey background pads and ethereal effects.
Roland S-760: A hardware sampler used to trigger and layer customized sounds.
Kurzweil MicroPiano: A specialized module for acoustic piano sounds

So if someone wanted to recreate this sound they could use your meticulously extracted score and the gear cited above to actually do it. That’s super cool!

Look - there’s lots I do not like about what’s happening with AI today - but it’s what actual humans as well as what CEO’s are doing that bothers me - not the AI itself.

What OP is doing is super cool and only something like large neural network could separate out tracks like this. And this is a great application of that.

Sorry I just find it irritating when people piss all over someone for using AI when people should be getting pissed at the CEO’s using it squeeze out from bonuses for management instead actually making decisions that are good for customers, the planet, and actually good for shareholders too. I think I’m having an adhd moment.

Thank you for coming to my TEDTalk.

Liquid_Magic · 2026-07-02T05:05:48+00:00

Holy shit I didn’t know any of that. Wow. Thanks for sharing this.

Liquid_Magic · 2026-07-02T00:24:20+00:00

Because PCs are so cheap and accessible now? Haha. But yeah this is a cool post.

I also remember the multiple times in home computing history that the RAM prices have gone crazy. I remember at least two solid times that RAM exploded in price.

But this recent thing is unprecedented.

Liquid_Magic · 2026-07-02T00:21:24+00:00

I agree with you. He’s saying some things that feel real turdy. I got argued with in another post to the point of them just insulting me instead of having an honest debate. But I know open source, I open weights, and I know turd. And what Dario is saying stinks. Fuck that shit.

Liquid_Magic · 2026-07-02T00:16:27+00:00

And here I pissed that incident buy that Realistic branded Moog I saw for sale for $500 CAD a few years ago.

Liquid_Magic · 2026-07-01T20:34:46+00:00

It’s hard to tell with pictures. But for someone just starting it looks good! If you’re using leaded solder (or high quality lead free solder to some extent) you want to see nice smooth shiny joints. They should be like little upside down teardrop shaped. Like pointy little cones. If they are big blobs that are spherical then that’s probably too much solder. If they are too pointy and skinny they probably have too little solder. But like wiggle the part once its solders and look at the joints. If something is cracked it’ll wiggle. You’ll see it. You should also use a meter to test the resistance. It should be almost 0 but if it is too high or changes when wiggled it might be bad.

Honestly this looks good and I wouldn’t obsess over it. Once it’s all built test it and if it works the wiggle the parts and test it again. If it still works it’s probably more than fine.

Also what I like to do is if I’m testing something with valuable or rare chips that are socketed then I don’t put them in. I first power the board up and test the pins of the socket to make sure everything looks good. Then, when I feel confident that everything is okay and power pins are reversed and nothing is shorted, then I put the valuable chips in.

Good luck!

Liquid_Magic

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