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๐ Max/MSP: A visual programming language for music and multimedia
Max, also known as Max/MSP/Jitter, is a visual programming language for music and multimedia developed and maintained by San Francisco-based software company Cycling '74. Over its more than thirty-year history, it has been used by composers, performers, software designers, researchers, and artists to create recordings, performances, and installations.
The Max program is modular, with most routines existing as shared libraries. An application programming interface (API) allows third-party development of new routines (named external objects). Thus, Max has a large user base of programmers unaffiliated with Cycling '74 who enhance the software with commercial and non-commercial extensions to the program. Because of this extensible design, which simultaneously represents both the program's structure and its graphical user interface (GUI), Max has been described as the lingua franca for developing interactive music performance software.
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- "Max/MSP: A visual programming language for music and multimedia" | 2020-02-17 | 128 Upvotes 65 Comments
๐ Enshittification
Enshittification, also known as platform decay, is a way to describe the pattern of decreasing quality of online platforms that act as two-sided markets. Enshittification can be seen as a form of rent-seeking. Examples of alleged enshittification have included Google Search, Amazon, Bandcamp, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter.
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- "Enshittification" | 2023-12-12 | 28 Upvotes 16 Comments
- "Enshittification" | 2023-10-23 | 18 Upvotes 1 Comments
๐ Reservoir computing
Reservoir computing is a framework for computation that may be viewed as an extension of neural networks. Typically an input signal is fed into a fixed (random) dynamical system called a reservoir and the dynamics of the reservoir map the input to a higher dimension. Then a simple readout mechanism is trained to read the state of the reservoir and map it to the desired output. The main benefit is that training is performed only at the readout stage and the reservoir is fixed. Liquid-state machines and echo state networks are two major types of reservoir computing. One important feature of this system is that it can use the computational power of naturally available systems which is different from the neural networks and it reduces the computational cost.
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- "Reservoir computing" | 2018-10-18 | 99 Upvotes 20 Comments
๐ The Count of Monte Cristo is inspired by a real framing-revenge plot story
Pierre Picaud (French:ย [piko]) was a 19th-century shoemaker in Nรฎmes, France who may have been the basis for the character of Edmond Dantรจs in Alexandre Dumas, pรจre's 1844 novel The Count of Monte Cristo.
In 1807, Picaud was engaged to marry a rich woman, but three jealous friends โ Loupian, Solari, and Chaubart โ falsely accused him of being a spy for England (a fourth friend, Allut, knew of their conspiracy, but did not report it). He was imprisoned in the Fenestrelle fortress for seven years, not even learning why until his second year there. During his imprisonment he ground a small passageway into a neighboring cell and befriended a wealthy Italian priest named Father Torri who was also held in the fortress. A year later, a dying Torri bequeathed to Picaud a treasure he had hidden in Milan. When Picaud was released after the fall of the French Imperial government in 1814, he took possession of the treasure, returned under another name to Paris and spent 10 years plotting revenge against his former friends.
Picaud first murdered Chaubart or had him murdered. Picaud's former fiancรฉe had, two years after his disappearance, married his former friend Loupian, who became the subject of his most brutal revenge. Picaud tricked Loupian's daughter into marrying a criminal, whom he then had arrested. Loupian's daughter promptly died of shock. Picaud then burned down Loupian's restaurant, or arranged to have it burned down, leaving Loupian impoverished. Next, he fatally poisoned Solari and either manipulated Loupian's son into stealing some gold jewelry or framed him for committing the crime. The boy was sent to jail, and Picaud stabbed Loupian to death. He was himself then abducted by a vengeful Allut, who seriously injured Picaud while holding him captive. Picaud was eventually found by the French police, who recorded his confession before dying of his injuries. . Allut's deathbed confession forms the bulk of the French police records of the case. The detailed description of Picaud's experiences in prison, which could not have been known to Allut, were supposedly dictated to him by the ghost of Father Torri.
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- "The Count of Monte Cristo is inspired by a real framing-revenge plot story" | 2021-07-13 | 19 Upvotes 5 Comments
๐ Ovelgรถnne bread roll
The Ovelgรถnne Bread Roll is the remaining part of a bread roll originating from the Pre-Roman Iron Age of Northern Europe, which was found in 1952 during archaeological excavations in a loam mine in the Buxtehude district Ovelgรถnne in Lower Saxony, Germany. The piece of bread is the oldest surviving viennoiserie and formed bakery product from Europe. The find, along with a reconstruction, are in the permanent exhibition of the Archaeological Museum Hamburg in Harburg, Hamburg.
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- "Ovelgรถnne bread roll" | 2018-07-07 | 10 Upvotes 1 Comments
๐ Road Diet
A road diet (also called a lane reduction, road rechannelization or road conversion) is a technique in transportation planning whereby the number and/or the width of travel lanes of the road is reduced, often to achieve a reduction in crash rates.
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- "Road Diet" | 2026-01-04 | 19 Upvotes 4 Comments
๐ Surface-conduction electron-emitter display
A surface-conduction electron-emitter display (SED) is a display technology for flat panel displays developed by a number of companies. SEDs use nanoscopic-scale electron emitters to energize colored phosphors and produce an image. In a general sense, an SED consists of a matrix of tiny cathode ray tubes, each "tube" forming a single sub-pixel on the screen, grouped in threes to form red-green-blue (RGB) pixels. SEDs combine the advantages of CRTs, namely their high contrast ratios, wide viewing angles and very fast response times, with the packaging advantages of LCD and other flat panel displays. They also use much less power than an LCD television of the same size.
After considerable time and effort in the early and mid-2000s, SED efforts started winding down in 2009 as LCD became the dominant technology. In August 2010, Canon announced they were shutting down their joint effort to develop SEDs commercially, signalling the end of development efforts. SEDs are closely related to another developing display technology, the field emission display, or FED, differing primarily in the details of the electron emitters. Sony, the main backer of FED, has similarly backed off from their development efforts.
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- "Surface-conduction electron-emitter display" | 2019-11-18 | 26 Upvotes 9 Comments
๐ Link 16
Link 16 is a military tactical data link network used by NATO and nations allowed by the MIDS International Program Office (IPO). Its specification is part of the family of Tactical Data Links.
With Link 16, military aircraft as well as ships and ground forces may exchange their tactical picture in near-real time. Link 16 also supports the exchange of text messages, imagery data and provides two channels of digital voice (2.4ย kbit/s or 16ย kbit/s in any combination). Link 16 is defined as one of the digital services of the JTIDS / MIDS in NATO's Standardization Agreement STANAG 5516. MIL-STD-6016 is the related United States Department of Defense Link 16 MIL-STD.
๐ K-anonymity
k-anonymity is a property possessed by certain anonymized data. The concept of k-anonymity was first introduced by Latanya Sweeney and Pierangela Samarati in a paper published in 1998 as an attempt to solve the problem: "Given person-specific field-structured data, produce a release of the data with scientific guarantees that the individuals who are the subjects of the data cannot be re-identified while the data remain practically useful." A release of data is said to have the k-anonymity property if the information for each person contained in the release cannot be distinguished from at least individuals whose information also appear in the release.
K-anonymity received widespread media coverage in 2018 when British computer scientist Junade Ali used the property alongside cryptographic hashing to create a communication protocol to anonymously verify if a password was leaked without disclosing the searched password. This protocol was implemented as a public API in Troy Hunt's Have I Been Pwned? service and is consumed by multiple services including password managers and browser extensions. This approach was later replicated by Google's Password Checkup feature.
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- "K-Anonymity" | 2021-04-06 | 32 Upvotes 1 Comments
- "K-anonymity" | 2018-08-10 | 136 Upvotes 11 Comments
๐ Largest Corporate Earnings and Losses of All Time
This page lists the largest annual and quarterly earnings and losses in corporate history. In general terms the oil and gas industry is the one generating both largest annual and quarterly earnings. In contrast, both the annual and quarterly losses are more distributed across industries.
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- "Largest Corporate Earnings and Losses of All Time" | 2019-11-19 | 13 Upvotes 2 Comments