I always loved the story of the "three-sided" Monty Python record, where the B side had two parallel concentric grooves, causing different tracks to play depending on where the needle was dropped. I always wondered what kind of equipment went into producing it.
From what I know about record manufacturing, creating the lacquer master would involve adjusting the angle of the groove to allow for two concentric grooves to be laid, along with some care in creating that master. But once it’s done, the manufacturing process is handled through a stamping process (so a vinyl record isn’t cut, it’s pressed with a metal die that’s created from the lacquer master through electroplating).
You’d cut it normal equipment, with very wide groove spacing. Start the two grooves 180 degrees out of phase. They’ll never intersect.
You could do it with more than two grooves, just to having them at 360/n degrees apart. You’ll just have to make the groove spacing wider as the number of tracks go off. Of course that comes at the cost of playback tine.
When I was a kid, we had a "record producer" board game and the randomizer was a 45rpm record with three concentric grooves. You did a needle drop and it said It's a Hit, It's a Flop, or Break Even.
De La Soul's 12" Single for "Me Myself And I" also has its second side cut with two grooves. The hype sticker says, "3 Sides." Each time you put the needle down you have a 50/50 chance to hear the song you're trying to hear. :-)
The same goes for the 1994 first pressing of Marillion's Brave.
Side 4 has a double groove, which would give you either The Great Escape + Made again (a sort of a happy ending) or The Great Escape + 20 minutes of water sounds (which can be interpreted as the sad ending).
> Yes, the AI may have produced the recommendation but a human decided to follow it, so that human must be held accountable
It is common and a mistake IMO to rely on the AI as the sole source for answers to follow-up questions. Better verification would have humans sign off on the veracity of fundamental assumptions. But where does this live? Can an AI model be trusted to rely on previous corrections? This seems impossible or possibly adversarial in a public cloud.
That has been the case for a vast swathe of time across history. It hurts because we had a nice couple of decades where it seemed that, not only was this not the case, but that we were directionally accelerating away from it.
I love the accessibility and diversity of large city living in the US, but it is definitely the exception to the rule. The US is hoping for technological breakthroughs in self driving electric cars to bail us out from the sprawl we've created.
I had an idea once for connecting an old 8-bit computer to the modern web by connecting to a text-based web browser running on another device using the terminal. Maybe one day when I find more time.
I have a Framework laptop. It was expensive for the specs, but I really appreciate the philosophy of openness. I have replaced both the keyboard and battery, which was easy and painless. At least for Dell, I don't think Framework's target market is a fit for acquisition like Alienware's was. Although, Dell is big enough that they could probably build a competing brand themselves. It would be great for consumers if they did.
I am pretty sure that my previous attempts at a Linux desktop have failed because I would tweak my setup by installing packages and updates until I broke it and needed to reinstall. But I want my machine to be indestructible and "just work". Waiting day(s) to diagnose and fix an issue just isn't worth it. I have been contemplating a switch to Linux again. This time, I will embrace a LTS distribution and virtualization so that my tinkering doesn't break things. I always want a safe level to fall back to.
Also, I would enthusiastically pay for a support subscription. I know they are out there. Which companies/organizations have the most positive impact in the open source community?
Not a popular opinion, but RedHat (now IBM) funds an enormous amount of critical open source. They pay people to contribute to hundreds of upstream projects. And RHEL is 100% focused on stability. Sounds like a good match for your priorities / goals.
It has been a few years, but for example breaking the display, bluetooth, power states/sleep, or wifi. Or subtly messing up dependencies of various other packages that I was trying. I just don't want the overhead of system administration.
These days I mostly use VMs or WSL. But I am thinking that I want my host OS to be Linux.
Immutable saves you from packaging issues but configuration always has to happen to some degree. To help there maybe use file system snapshots (btrfs) to rollback changes.
From what I remember, trying to fix configuration was mostly to recover from whatever broken state package/distro updates caused. Thanks for the Silverblue suggestion. In recent years, I enjoyed using Pop!_OS, at least on VMs.
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