Note: Generally "dark" (as opposed to "bright") means emphasis on the lower frequencies, which is a good description for brown noise, but they aren't formally the same. Formally, brown noise refers to a power distribution that drops ~6 dB per octave, and I have no idea how strictly apple's "dark noise" matches the technical specifications of that.
When away from my instruments - guitar and piano - visualizing playing whatever pieces I'm working on is enormously valuable in that when I return to the instrument my retention is significantly improved compared to when I don't visualize my playing. I'm pretty sure this has been tested in RCTs, but I don't have them readily available.
I get this. Often I'll watch a film that seems just "so so". Then, I'll read a review and gain a new appreciation for the film. I'll see things in the film I'd previously missed and understand it in new ways.
Richard Brody of The New Yorker and Ebert's website are particular favorites of mine.
There is reverse of this - have some movie you liked a lot in the past, and show it to somebody who hasn't seen it, ie a date. Suddenly I'll notice little impurities, small missteps, lack of depth of some character or logical error in some reasoning. Maybe the subconscious eagerness to please them and share the experience I've had changes perspective.
>in effect asking for more units of money than actually exist in the whole system.
Depends on how you define the 'whole system'. If I borrow $100 and make $110, the latter didn't appear out of nowhere. The lender, too, could have turned that $100 into $110.
Why shouldn't they be compensated for that opportunity cost?
If I understand right, it is allowed to invest like a partnership, where you make $110 together out of your $100 and your partner's effort. But you must be exposed to the downside of failure just like your partner.
The opportunity cost point is fair enough if one is thinking in terms of two concrete individuals. The illustration I offered was meant at a more abstract level, the two persons standing in for the creditor side and the debtor side of a closed economy taken as wholes. In that framing the issue is not whether a particular borrower can put the money to productive use (clearly he can), but that the system as a whole is being asked to generate more units of the circulating medium than currently exist within it. Even when real value is created, the monetary claim still exceeds the monetary stock. Settlement then requires continuous expansion of the money supply, continuous transfer of existing assets toward creditors, or periodic default. That structural pressure is what I was trying to get at.
I suspect the deeper difficulty is the “bond” in bonds themselves, the ongoing compulsion that interest introduces. Once interest is attached the debtor is under continuous obligation to produce additional claims simply to keep the accounts from breaking. Traditional writers on the Christian and Islamic sides generally preferred arrangements that avoided this continuous pressure. A pure discount (as with discounted Treasury bills and similar instruments) prices the time element once, up front: the creditor advances a smaller sum and later receives the larger face amount. The cost is paid at the beginning rather than levied as a recurring claim that must be met out of future circulation. In that sense the time value is acknowledged without the mechanism that forces the system to keep generating more monetary units than presently exist.
This still seems off to me. If I were a potential creditor in such a closed loop system, and I was told I absolutely could not charge interest due to these monetary supply constraints, I would either just stop lending entirely or I would demand something that isn't strictly denominated in money to make the risk I'm taking on, etc worth my capital outlay.
But then eventually, if the system were sufficiently complex, I'd probably tire of whatever complicated barter system we have already going on, and then it's likely some third party would step in offering something that's totally not money, dude, trust me, it's just like a handy clearinghouse of IOUs for people engaged in the trade of these non-monetary favors for favors...
Some people who hold or offer such IOUs might then take the bold step of calling them non-exclusive, as in I will mow the lawn of whoever happens to have my "one lawn mowed" voucher, I just happened to originally give it to this first guy, I have no idea what he did with it after that... Other people realize this "non exclusivity" deal actually makes the voucher strictly more valuable, you can do more things with it than you could otherwise... You see where I'm going with this. It's not passing my sniff test.
That phrase is smuggling in a LOT of work that systems like CAGED help to simplify. I say this as someone who has played guitar for decades and slept on CAGED for too long.
100% agree. CAGED is extremely underrated. The starting premise is so simple, that most intermediate players go "yeah, yeah, sure...that's cool but it's not very insightful". It's when you start hanging all the basic (and probably more) scale/arpeggio patterns off it that it starts to become more and more valuable.
LilyGo/TTGo also has some interesting knobs with some unusual features features (force feedback or LCD touchscreen on top of the knob, depending on model) but again I don't have firsthand experience and these might take some DIY
Surprised Loupedeck hasn't come up here. The Live and CT both have weighted main dials with real damping — which is what made the PowerMate feel different from a regular rotary encoder, more than the software integration ever did. Pricier than most of what's been mentioned, but the closest I've found to the tactile feel.
Everything in the sub-$50 range (Drok, generic Aliexpress encoders, etc.) works fine for mapping to volume or scroll, but they all feel like plastic clicky knobs. Fine for utility, not for fidgeting.
Some are calling it the most obvious trend of all computing. And that was before the agentic age super put its finger on the cosmic scales of justice+hacking.
There was a poster on HN a while ago that recommended¹ the Drok USB volume knob because it can be reconfigured to send keystrokes or mouse actions. Just Google for "configure drok usb volume control knob" for instructions. I reconfigured mine to send mouse scroll events for scrolling through documents.
Is "Dark noise" the equivalent of "Brown noise"?
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