Yeah the guitar amp and vintage HiFi markets keep a few types (mostly power triodes and pentodes but also preamp valves and even a couple of rectifiers) in production, largely in the former Eastern Bloc. There's a few people on YouTube making their own too.
I’m so far from an expert it’s not even funny but I’m a hobbyist for old valve (tube on the other side of the Atlantic) electronics. You need an industrial base to make semiconductors but if you can do flamework with glass and build a good enough pump that opens the door to amplifiers, radio, telecommunications, and even crude computers which in turn opens the door to a lot of creature comforts and social improvement that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.
Thanks! I know what you mean, you’re right the flow will improve with practice especially when I’m properly used to playing with a click track which I’d not done until recently.
Vintage audio is the best, I’m planning on building a Mullard 5-10 hifi valve amp from the 1950s in the relatively near future as my second valve project (a micro-power valve AM radio transmitter is my current work in progress). The parts are spendy especially the transformers but valve/tube stuff is just so cool and the fact you can just build a 70 year old design using datasheets of the same vintage and have it work just as well now is so refreshing to my programmer brain that’s used to stuff going out of date when you blink. Also I’m a magpie for glass and glowing things.
The downside is of course that the voltages involved tend to be rather unpleasant, the 5-10 design calls for 250 volts off the top of my head and some amps use 500+. Also they’re unspeakably inefficient by modern standards, it’s essentially a statement of ‘I’m putting rule of cool over sensible cost-sensitive engineering and you’re going to love it’ which I’m very here for.
Where I’m from if you’re out on bail or not (and what conditions are attached) is up to the court or the police depending on where you’re currently at in the justice system, you don’t pay anything regardless of your wealth.
I prefer this system as the reasons whether or not someone ought to be bailed don’t really have a lot to do with wealth usually so it seems unfair to make it a factor, but I can certainly see the reasoning to put a number on it as I suspect it does dissuade people breaking their bail conditions.
Congratulations! Must be a weight off your mind, medical bureaucracy is an unpleasant prospect at the best of times. Wishing you a successful surgery and a smooth recovery!
There really needs to be granular NSFW settings on Lemmy, or more correctly I need to improve my Rust so I can go and implement it myself instead of bitching about it!
I’m not anti-porn but I don’t want it mixed in my normal content. Other non-sexual NSFW stuff is fine 24/7, artistic nudity is fine 24/7, but I don’t want to see outright porn unless that’s what I’m specifically looking for!
Scared people for the most part. While I’m not American myself I grew up in an adjacent (Calvinistic Baptist) worldview and I cannot emphasise enough how much fear plays a role in that worldview. It’s pretty much a socially transmissible anxiety disorder in my experience, the evangelical worldview is ironically very well evolved to spread from one person to another because it directly hijacks your scepticism by upping the stakes too high for your brain to process it properly. You’re not allowed to express the fear though because that would be evidence you’re not really saved.
I’m not making excuses for them at all, I mean I’m very aggressively pro-LGBT rights and I grew up in that world so it’s definitely possible to escape it. What I am saying though in the spirit of ‘know your enemy’ is that in many cases these people from age five upwards will have been taught they are utterly disgusting in the eyes of god and deserve after they die to forever be tortured gruesomely beyond the power of English words to express because they were born human and are therefore guilty of original sin. These people see themselves as having been measured by the supreme creator of the universe and been found personally, individually beneath contempt. The only way you can escape your completely just fate of being eternally consciously tortured is if God predestined you to be saved and you’re one of the limited few that Jesus’s sacrifice actually applied to, in this world most of humanity exists only to be burned for the glory of God and if you ever fall away from the worldview you were never saved to begin with.
Again, I’m in no way excusing their bigotry which I loathe especially deeply having seen it at closer quarters than most. This is what we’re dealing with though from a purely practical point of view, if you or I are wrong then we’re just wrong but if these people are wrong then they will suffer a fate many times worse than death. This is why encounters with evangelicals are really intense for the most part, and why they’re so needlessly horrible from a secular perspective. While they’d never admit it in a million years the ideology is pretty trauma-driven for many of its adherents whether it’s the fear of hell, fear of losing their entire community even though they don’t believe any more, fear of rejection over some stupid theological difference (this lot make the revolutionary left look broad-church by comparison when it comes to factionalism) or any of the other fears that sound completely insane outside of that community but subjectively are very real.
Microsoft literally used to make it part of their OEM agreement that manufacturers couldn’t bundle their machines with anything but Windows, you’ve paid for it in the form of reduced competition in the OS market.
The other half of this scam is the piss-poor public transport in a lot of countries, here in the UK if you’re not a Londoner the government could not care any less about carrots only sticks to get people out of cars.
I'd buy a nice house somewhere a bit wild and in the middle of nowhere on the south coast of either England or Wales, something old with character and a big garden with a good pub nearby. I'd also buy a classic wooden sailing yacht and put enough funds aside to maintain her as well as kitting her out for serious passage-making. When I'd done that I'd figure out how much money I need to make work optional for the rest of my life and how much would keep my family comfortable in an emergency, as well as a small 'shit hits the fan' fund kept in something you don't need electricity to access like gold just in case. I'd then donate the rest to charity, the bulk to enviromentalist lobby groups and charities directly helping people (the RNLI comes to mind for example) but also to a few niche causes like keeping the ailing pirate radio ship Ross Revenge afloat and starting a breeding programme to save the highly endangered otterhound. I'd also like to have a few documentaries made, and I'd drop a few content creators I like some donations too.
Honestly all I really want to do is go sailing and not have to deal with the rat race, I don't want to live an oligarch's lifestyle and I definitely don't want the sort of attention and arseache that money would bring you. That money would be far more effectively used for good in the hands of others so I'd end up donating the majority of it, I suspect on the order of 80% of it at least.
'A big table lookup' isn't what's going on here, go and look up what backpropagation and gradient descent are if you want to know what's actually happening.
Can confirm, I write Scala at my current workplace and spend my days over the moon about the fact I’m not writing Java.