Yeah, I've done this. I've bought records for years but only bought a record player recently. I would want to buy something at the merch table for a small band I like. They don't always have a shirt in my size but they always have records. Oftentimes the records went on loan to friends, which was a nice way of gently spreading my taste.
Good move, gotta watch out for complicated contractual claims in Schleswig-Holstein. Microsoft might ally with the Danes and claim Schleswig, and then we'd have an 1864 situation on our hands again.
This is a common objection I hear raised, so I think it's good that you raised it here. Respectfully, I think there is a lot of rhetorical slippage in your argument.
First, I did not support the very loose amnesty policy, but I also don't support ICE teargassing the grocery store parking lot outside of my old apartment in Logan Square. In any case I don't think one's opinion on the first thing should disqualify them from having a take on deportation tactics.
Second, I think there is substantial ambiguity in what people voted for on deportation. There were lots of promises of deporting dangerous criminals (something that I agree would be a good idea). A subset of Trump voters in 2024 did want to round up migrant day laborers standing outside of Home Depots, and they are getting what they voted for. But I think another large subset believed that there was going to be a targeted deportation of "the worst of the worst". The administration claims to be doing this, but the worst of the worst are very unlikely to be looking for work outside of Home Depot.
Lastly, to your question, I think there are many many ways for the tactics to be more humane (and constitutional). To take just one example, I think the feds should resume allowing Catholic clergy into the Chicago-area processing facility at Broadview to administer the sacrament of the Eucharist.
What is the precise qualification for which illegal alien is permitted and which one is deported?
Opposition should propose legislation that allows migrant workers to easily obtain visas and return home and come back next year. This is how it was until the 1960s when that system was killed.
> What is the precise qualification for which illegal alien is permitted and which one is deported?
I don't think I raised choosing who gets to stay and who gets deported. My big objection to the current sweeps is that they function as a dragnet where they are detaining and questioning anyone who appears Mexican/Venezuelan/etc. Generally American citizens and permanent residents get released within an hour or so, but I still think that is intolerable. For example, there was a young woman who was ethnically Latina, but was adopted by a white family so she had an anglo-sounding last name like Smith. She was keeping papers on her, knowing the sweeps were happening. She was detained and when she presented her papers the agents didn't believe that someone who looked like her could have that last name so they kept her detained for an hour or so. I think that is an erosion of my constitutional liberties and yours.
But to try and get at your question, there are lots of legislative changes I would like to see (like this: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/497...). You may not support pathways to citizenship for long-time peaceful and productive residents. I think it's orthogonal to the current cruel and unconstitutional deportation tactics.
Do you think clergy should be allowed to administer the Eucharist to detainees at Broadview? To me their refusal to allow that is emblematic of how they are deliberately being cruel. (I am trying to answer your questions directly, if you would humor me and answer one of mine.)
There are some who voted for Trump and do celebrate the cruelty on display in Chicago. But I also think many wanted to deport "the worst of the worst" and that is what they thought they were promised. And per the media many consume, that is what's happening. It's an open question on whether the real extent of the crackdown will break through the echo chamber, but from conversations I've had with people who consume Fox News, I really do think a lot of Trump voters will not be ok with the tactics as they are actually being carried out. For example, I just don't think that earnest religious conservatives I know would defend denying the Eucharist to people in the processing facility (https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/11/02/faith-leaders-again-...) and then banning prayer outside the facility altogether (https://blockclubchicago.org/2025/11/07/feds-tell-faith-lead...). When you lay out this (and the many events in Aphyr's post) to them clearly, they really don't like it.
> Can it be brutalist when you have the richness of wood in full display, veins, shimmer and knots all apparent?
Insofar as brutalism is about showcasing the raw building materials, yes, I think this is precisely what brutalism is about. Brutalism often uses concrete, but the big idea is to showcase the underlying material. (And if wood is more beautiful than concrete, great!)
I can't decide to use Rust at my current job, but there are a lot of people on HN for the last ten years telling me that I'm doing it wrong with memory-unsafe programming languages. I still think this is interesting and useful information. Perhaps if I'm making a new company or starting a project, I might choose Rust if it makes sense for me.
A way that I look at Newport's writing is, he's making claims that most organizations are leaving money on the table by not adopting better work methods. I can't unilaterally go Newport-style at my current job. But this is a forum with lots of entrepreneurial people on it, and maybe someone would like to test his theory and smoke the competition by starting a company that values Deep Work/Slow Work/etc.
Can anyone in the know compare and contrast bespoke's feature set with Max for Live? (https://www.ableton.com/en/live/max-for-live/) It also has a circuit diagram-ish UI and supports scripting with Node. Put another way, does Ableton already offer Ableton smashed to bits with a baseball bat?
(fwiw, you have to pay for the $1k suite version of Ableton to get Max, so Bespoke could still be a great alternative even if they do a lot of the same things)
I only found out about Bespoke a few minutes ago, but I will say using Max as a programmer can be incredibly frustrating. I've made a handful of nontrivial M4L devices and have run up into tons of weird decisions, limitations, bugs, and plenty of Ableton crashes. (Caveat: this information in this post is mostly from a couple years ago and might be out of date, I haven't gotten the latest Ableton)
The JS support is really weird. It's only JS 1.6 (from 2005), and had weird glitches (like loading two instances of the same device causing the first device to stop working), and I couldn't get the timing tighter than about 30ms. Ideally you could write code that runs at audio rate.
There's also "gen", which is a Max-specific scripting language that is presumably real-time suitable through a JIT. Unfortunately you need a separate Max license to use it, even the full Ableton Live Suite doesn't give you gen support. You can sorta hack around and use it by manually editing the .maxpat files (which are almost JSON), copying from a device that uses gen, but there are lots of weird glitches going this route.
A list of a few annoying things about M4L:
* Documentation is pretty sparse and/or low quality, and weirdly split into two (help and references).
* All variables are global across devices by default, local (device-specific) variables need the prefix "---", which is barely documented
* Tons of annoying UX issues, like entering an invalid value in the inspector just reverts to the old value. You can't enter an empty string for parameter values, that reverts too (you need to enter a literal ""). Certain functionality is only available depending on whether the device is "locked", so you have to lock/unlock the view all the time if you're working with e.g. subpatchers
* Abstraction is quite annoying to do. There's three different types of patches, and it's not really clear what the difference is between them. Creating subpatches and then duplicating them creates two different subpatches--changes in one are not shared with others.
* ...and a ton of other things. I have a big text document of these gripes I was intending to turn into a blog post, but haven't gotten around to it.
Maybe I'm wrong and there's better ways to do some of these things, but overall my experience learning M4L was pretty bad. If it wasn't the only way to do certain advanced things in Ableton, I'd never touch it again.
I'm also a programmer, and it sounds to me like you're expecting Max to be something it isn't. It's not meant to be a regular programming environment, it was created to be accessible to non-programmers. But you can extend it with C, C++, Java, Csound, Chuck, SuperCollider, etc.
I will agree however that the JS implementation is neutered, probably because they have to worry about support volumes. This is one of the reasons I created Scheme For Max, which unlike the JS object, allows running in the high priority thread, does hot code reloading, and is open source and can be recompiled to your liking. Now that I have Scheme for Max, I love Max (and Max4Live) to bits, they are a fantastic environment, and I do all the coding in S7 Scheme or C. :-)
I really don't think being accessible to non-programmers is the cause of my issues. If anything, I'd say that targeting non-programmers might exacerbate these issues, because those users would be less likely to realize how unintuitive some aspects of Max are, thinking it's because programming in general is difficult.
I didn't touch too much on the specifics in my post, but there are lots of little design oddities I ran into when doing relatively simple tasks. Like creating a multiplexer for messages: the [switch] object has an "empty" channel for input 0 (and regular inputs are 1-indexed), so you'll often need an extra +1 object for the control input. And the inputs of [switch] have no memory, so every time the control changes, you need to send a bang to resend the message in the now-active channel. Or say you want to multiplex signals. That uses the [selector~] object (why not [switch~]?), and has the same +1 issue as [switch]. But what if you want a short crossfade when switching inputs to avoid harsh transients? "Good luck" is all I'll say here.
I'm not generally trying to do anything super-complicated with Max. I have indeed used the C extension API when it makes sense (building a wavetable synth), and it was OK. I still contend that the main visual programming environment is not very good, for programmers and non-programmers alike.
...anyways, all that said, Scheme For Max looks really cool :)
I spent some time figuring out nicer ways to work with it in order to build an Octatrack-style parameter crossfader for M4L, it provides some abstractions and setup to make using Typescript with Max a bit more pleasant. Still plenty of limitations but I was able to get my device working pretty well in the end. Apologies for lack of docs!
Yeesh, thanks for sharing all this. I would eagerly read that blog post!
I've gotten really into Ableton this past year and I've been curious whether I should get into Max for Live. Being a programmer and looking at their marketing materials, it seemed like it should tap into the right parts of my brain. But seeing your comment now ... maybe not the right move. Especially because I'm not looking to accomplish anything special, I just want a sandbox to play with digital audio concepts.
I would recommend the Cipriani and Giri books and plain old Max (or Pd). They have written the best introductions to playing with digital audio, full stop. Best computer music books made, IMHO.
No problem! Maybe I'm just being too negative, after all there are lots of people having fun creating stuff with it (and I like having the devices I've made). But there was definitely a big impedance mismatch of what I had in my head vs. how to implement it, so I wouldn't personally use it for any exploratory sandbox-y type stuff.
