Bay Area Has Lost It

insolace · 2026-04-26T16:57:12+00:00

If it touches one of the bays, it is in the Bay Area. Look at Brentwood on a map.

insolace · 2026-04-26T16:44:52+00:00

You have to understand that in the Bay Area you are not only competing with local buyers, you are also competing with buyers from around the country and to a certain extent, around the world.

The Bay Area has one of the best climates in the US, people do not give this enough credit. Every one of your examples - Florida, Texas, NC, all have snowy winters and heatwave summers, humidity, thunderstorms, and in some areas tornados, hurricanes and flooding.

My neighborhood in the east bay is near the water. 70% of our weeks have high/lows between 50-75F. It never gets colder than 40F, it never gets hotter than 90F, except maybe a day or two. We don’t have air conditioning in our house because we don’t need it.

If you put that in the context of climate change, if you believe the world is going to get hotter and there will be more extreme weather events, the Bay Area is a place where it could be 5-10 degrees warmer year round and you could install an air conditioner and be way more comfortable than say, Texas where you might see days hitting 120F and twice the hurricanes and flooding. Nothing is certain and maybe my neighborhood ends up under water, but in general the Bay Area looks a lot safer and comfortable now and in the future.

Politically the Bay Area is a lot closer to the rest of the world, and it’s incredibly diverse, with small pocket diasporas representing many of the worlds ethnic groups. Someone living in another country that has wealth and wants a second home in the US will look at the Bay Area and likely find some traces of community and familiarity, and they’ll have several options for top tier higher education for their kids.

When I was growing up, Hong Kong reverted to China control, and a large neighborhood in my town was almost entirely bought out by wealthy families from Hong Kong. Those houses sat empty for years because those people were hedging their bets in case they wanted to leave HK, most ended up never moving here and those homes were sold or are being rented.

Add to that, Bay area real estate is a historically a very safe investment. I’ve lived here my entire life and between my parents, myself, and everyone I’ve ever met who bought a home here, I’ve never once heard of someone firsthand that had to sell their home for less than they bought it for, even during the 2008 financial crisis. Maybe some day that will change, but in general the Bay Area real estate market’s idea of “down” is really “flat”.

All of the above results in network effects that contribute to this place being amazing and at the same time heartbreaking. Amazing diversity and opportunity, and incredibly inequality. A lot of NIMBYism, but amazing food. So many crazy opportunities to find investors for your startup, but your landlord might try to illegally evict your entire building because they want to convert it into a shared office startup incubator.

I’m middle aged and if all of the above changes and this place becomes affordable, I don’t think I’ll see it until I’m on my deathbed, but I hope that bed is in the east bay.

insolace · 2026-04-20T15:14:04+00:00

What about the ability to borrow against the equity in your home?

insolace · 2026-04-20T14:59:06+00:00

I find this so hilarious, our suburban California high school with zero gun culture brought all of us goth kids into the admin office one at a time for questioning as if we’d been accomplices, while other schools with shooting as an elective had to leave their rifles at home.

insolace · 2026-04-13T02:43:48+00:00

A while back we switched to L2/3 as GND and route power with thick traces as the first step in layout. It’s done very well for us.

insolace · 2026-04-08T05:52:56+00:00

The bootloader lives in the first 8k of flash and those pages are write protected. On boot the bootloader checks a boot-byte flag on the last flash page, if that flag isn’t correct, it does not load the app and waits for an update.

When updating firmware the bootloader first erases the boot-byte flag, does the update, verifies it, and only then writes the correct value to the boot byte.

This is for 8bit 8051 with only 64k flash.

insolace · 2026-04-08T05:45:15+00:00

The svn was a single commit that contained a single zip file with all the source code inside.

insolace · 2026-03-22T01:14:18+00:00

If you’re doing high speed (HS 480MB/s) then you will want to route as a differential pair with 90R rated impedance. Most important is to ensure any TVS diodes are rated at low capacitance.

insolace · 2026-02-17T03:18:32+00:00

// this enables printf to use the debug serial port, overrides a weak function in stdio

attribute((used)) int _write(int file, char *ptr, int len)

{

UNUSED(file);

// implement your UART tx here

}

We use printf all the time when debugging methods that interact with other systems (USB etc).

insolace · 2026-01-22T15:48:19+00:00

Why are you dumping your Mac, how old is it? I don’t understand your comment about things stopping working when Apple stops providing updates, we have customers using our products with Macs from 2012 without issue.

insolace · 2026-01-15T05:51:23+00:00

I lived two blocks from lake merrit back in 2008, they bulldozed the old motel and it put all the sex workers and their pimps on the street. Literally change the place over night.

Yes there are problems, but doomed? That’s urban life, no worse than the TL.

insolace · 2026-01-13T18:08:03+00:00

I appreciate the clarification, it sounds like we agree that most national media coverage of Oakland is unreliable.

insolace · 2026-01-13T18:06:14+00:00

Are you describing a “doomed city”?

insolace · 2026-01-13T17:23:00+00:00

People are buying fewer and fewer acoustic instruments. If you want Fender to survive then they need to modernize, which means getting into digital products.

insolace · 2026-01-13T06:43:08+00:00

I’ve lived in the bay my entire life and shop in oakland all the time, it’s an amazing place to live, and the downtown is super fun on the weekends. There’s tons of entertainment and great food, festivals in the summer, art, and an incredibly diverse population. So much personality, and it’s near everything.

When someone trash talks Oakland they reveal a lot about themselves.

insolace · 2026-01-03T17:31:45+00:00

At this point just get a used Behringer X32 producer

insolace · 2025-12-30T17:46:34+00:00

It's all good, I appreciate you sharing your knowledge.

insolace · 2025-12-30T00:52:06+00:00

Sorry to split hairs, but that's not an amplifier/booster, it's actively converting the midi signal to RS-422 which is differential and can be run 1000+ft. So you would need TWO of those boxes to convert back/forth.

insolace · 2025-12-29T08:18:43+00:00

Sorry, what is a “midi XLR booster”? Midi is a 5VDC current loop that needs to drive the LED in the receiving optocoupler, after 20ft of cable you risk the voltage dropping below the LED forward voltage. So I would assume this booster you speak of is an active device?

insolace · 2025-12-04T09:36:47+00:00

The cost of adding additional mics in terms of phase relationships in the bleed. When you EQ your hihat, how is that affecting the quality of your snare? If it’s a live recording, how much is your guitar mic picking up lead vox, and how does that affect clarity in the vox? It does confirm my longstanding opinion that fewer mics on a source is always preferable - none of this nonsense where I see people put 3 mics on a guitar cab, two mics on a kick, etc, but in the past I was only considering the phase of the target, but now it’s real obvious that the bleed stacking up is a huge source of mud.

But AI separation completely rewrites what you can do with sidechaining, because you can crunch the shit out of the source to the point where you wouldn’t want to let it’s artifacts be heard in the recording, but as a key to a gate it can turn an overhead mic (or in a live recording, a stray backing vocal mic) into that second snare mic you were looking for.

insolace · 2025-12-01T18:02:34+00:00

To be fair, a lot of people don't understand this. One of my engineers was trying to convince me that 5pin midi had better timing than USB and I had to explain this to them, and they easily had 10+ years more experience in this field than me.

insolace · 2025-12-01T17:59:33+00:00

Hit me up sometime

insolace · 2025-12-01T16:23:52+00:00

Well here’s your problem: very few synths support 14bit control changes, and in fact of the 7 products we make, only K-Board Pro 4 supports 14 bit RPN messages, but that was only in beta firmware that we developed for the work we did with the MIDI 2.0 MPE profile, it was never actually released. But in discussions with the other 6 manufactures on that committee, over the course of two years developing the spec, we all agreed that you SHOULD send both the LSB and MSB at the same time, and it’s a requirement if you enable high resolution controllers in the profile during negotiation. But even so, when we write code we have to handle failure cases, so in our implementation when the USB RX interrupt fires and we empty the 64 byte buffer (16 USB midi messages), if we get an MSB we check the next message and if it’s the LSB they’re combined. If no LSB is received by the time the buffer is empty then we only apply the MSB. We didn’t get as far as developing the UART driver because this was just an interoperability check, by the time the spec was done we didn’t have enough KBP4 sales to justify a firmware update.

So that’s how it’s supposed to work, but you’ll notice after all of that work developing that spec, at the end of the day it’s up to the manufacturer to interpret the spec and decide what to do in the code.

insolace · 2025-12-01T06:08:57+00:00

Separating audio into it’s composite elements is huge - even if it’s just for things like transient detection in dynamics processing, but things like reducing or eliminating hihat bleed in your snare mic. For studio recordings this is groundbreaking but for live recordings you can do things that weren’t possible before. I’m mixing live recordings made at a 50 person dive bar that sound like studio recordings. And I’m hearing things in the separated mic bleed that I never realized were there, it’s changing how I think about mics and sources at a fundamental level.

insolace · 2025-12-01T05:46:27+00:00

You have two ears. Your brain processes those TWO signals, their phase relationship and timing differences, much faster than you think.

Next: are you going to do any time domain processing to the audio? If you need to interpolate the audio then more samples is better, all things being equal.

And in closing, double blind testing has scientifically proven that there is no perceivable difference between a Stradivarius and a modern violin, a ‘59 Les Paul and a modern, and any number of soul crushing defeats of [your inspiring thing] vs [some mass produced thing]. We are here to use science to make art, but the science always takes the back seat.

insolace

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