2026-11-11 21:00:00
When I was reading about the history of contra dance for my college thesis I learned that Jack Perron (who wrote the New England Fiddler's Repertoire with Randy Miller) used to play for dances with a Stroh violin. This is a violin that uses a membrane and horn for amplification, instead of a resonating wooden body, which is more directional and (unfortunately not much) louder. There's a recording but I haven't been able to find a copy.
The idea of a Stroh violin seemed fun, especially when playing for Morris dancing or outdoor contra, and a few years later (~2009) when I realized it was possible to buy one I got very excited about it. I tried to buy one from Lark in the Morning but when they went to look on the shelf to send it to me it wasn't there. I did find one on eBay, though, and spent 11 weeks of my discretionary spending on it ($422.73):
You can see it's very awkwardly shaped, and it was a bit hard for the seller to ship:
Am trying to find suitable packaging for this item. Can find a large box that will fit the violin with lots of padding but not the bow. May have to look at sending the bow separately in a postal tube. Will get back to you when I have some idea of costs.
Overall, it is not a good instrument. Some is that this specific one isn't very good (tuning pegs slip), some is that Strohs in general are very tinny, but the real issue is they're not actually very loud. The whole appeal for me was that this would allow a violin to hold its own with accordions in supporting acoustic outdoor dancing, but it's just not that much louder than a normal violin. I'd misunderstood what people meant when they said "2x louder", because I didn't yet understand how loudness is perceived logarithmically.
That said, it has gotten some use over the years. Here's my sister playing it for an outdoor contra in Davis Sq:
And one time I tried to make a counterweight for it with rocks (this didn't work well and I took it apart later):
Mostly it hangs on the wall, people ask me about it, and then they ask me to stop playing it.
2026-11-10 21:00:00
With how quickly AI is going basically all futures are weird in some ways. I've been thinking about how this affects me personally, and "try as hard as possible to keep AI from getting us all killed" is pretty high on the list. For me this mostly looks like donations and pandemic deterrence, but I also put some time into thinking about disasters. There are ways AI might go very well, or very poorly, and then there's the "messy middle" where we muddle through and things might fall apart some in the meantime.
The big things here are making sure you have enough water and food for a while, along with critical medications and the standard "prepping" recommendations. But lately I've been thinking about what you might do for other risks, such as engineered pandemics, mirror bacteria, or fire suppression outages. And today, EMPs.
An EMP is an electromagnetic pulse, and a strong one could destroy a lot of electronics. The most likely way we get one in the near future is a high-altitude nuclear detonation. This could be part of a nuclear war, or fighting around an AI takeover attempt.
It's not totally known what effect an EMP would have on stuff. The initial pulse ("E1") is very short and the voltage it induces is proportional to the length of the conductor it hits. The power grid (famously involving long conductors) would be seriously damaged, especially the massive and hard to replace transformers. Unplugged electronics, however, are pretty safe: no long conductors to get high voltages.
The best source I've found on EMPs is the 2008 Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack. They simulated nuclear EMPs and looked at how a wide range of common things were impacted. Generally things were fine as long as they were off and unplugged.
On the other hand, this was all tech from two decades ago, and it's possible that things have changed. Many things now have more resistance to electromagnetism in their design (shorter conductors, more PCBs vs wires, more shielding) but some electronics are more voltage-sensitive (ex: switching transistors from silicon to gallium nitride, smaller transistors generally). One category I'm especially worried about is equipment that's never fully off, because it has a permanently attached battery. For example, I have some LiFePO4 batteries and these have a built in battery management system: an EMP might be able to break this in a way that can't be fixed without opening up the system and disconnecting it, which is pretty risky.
Overall, I think it's pretty likely that for EMP resistance it's enough to leave your equipment off and unplugged. Unless you're excited about testing Faraday cages, make sure your stuff stays unplugged and you can stop reading now.
What if we're wrong and in the past 20y equipment has become more vulnerable to EMPs than we expected? What if you didn't do the research above until after you went and got a galvanized trash can, a noise generator, a radio receiver dongle, and some conductive tape?
The standard way to protect against electromagnetism is a Faraday cage. If you put something inside a metal box, as long as there aren't gaps in the box the electromagnetic field stays outside. A large mass-produced metal box is an Oscar-style galvanized trash can. How much would it help to put our stuff in that? And would it help more to seal the gap between the lid and the body with metallic tape?
I set up a cheap broadband radio-frequency noise generator with a 29" telescoping antenna, powered by the 12v power supply from an AirFanta 3Pro. Since I knew this needed to work inside a trash can, I used my Anker SOLIX portable power station instead of the wall. I also put a cardboard tube around the antenna and put the base in a cardboard box, so that it wouldn't touch the body of the trash can. The goal was to block electrical connections, without affecting the radio signal.
To pick up the signal I used a Nooelec NESDR SMArt v5, attached to my laptop. This has a very similar antenna, and I set it up a ~foot from the noise source antenna and parallel:
I compared this to the same setup with a trash can around it:
I tested both with the lid on, and with the lid on and also seam taped:
Technically I'm measuring in the "wrong direction" since I would be very surprised if an EMP were initiated inside a trash can in my basement, but shielding works the same in both directions so this doesn't matter. How much noise gets out in each of these tests tells us how the configuration changes how much of a pulse would get in.
I had Claude write the software and run the measurements. It steps the radio receiver from 24 MHz to 1.7 GHz (its full range) and records power in each 100 kHz slice. We tested:
Here's what I found, in dB. Every 10 dB is a factor of ten, so 30 dB means only 0.1% of the power got through:
| Band (MHz) | Limit of detection | Lid off | Lid on | Lid taped |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 25–50 | 20 | ≥20 | ≥20 | ≥20 |
| 50–100 | 21 | ≥21 | ≥21 | ≥21 |
| 100–200 | 29 | ≥24 | ≥25 | ≥25 |
| 200–400 | 29 | ≥28 | ≥29 | ≥29 |
| 400–800 | 35 | 19 | ≥31 | ≥30 |
| 800–1200 | 45 | 18 | ≥43 | ≥45 |
| 1200–1700 | 47 | 22 | 29 | ≥46 |
A "≥" means I couldn't detect the source at all, so we just have a lower bound on the reduction, determined by our ability to distinguish the source from background (limit of detection).
Notes:
A lot of this is lower bounds. The receiver only has about 45 dB between noise and overload, and less than that at radio station frequencies.
The lid does leak at the seam. At the highest frequency (1.2–1.7 GHz) it's ~29 dB, with dips down to ~20 dB, and there was also a very narrow leak at 339 MHz where the can did ~nothing. The lid makes good contact with the can most of the way around, but there are four spots, evenly spaced, where the rim has ~1cm gaps to let the lid flex. I think these are the most likely culprit, though I haven't confirmed it.
Taping the seam fixes the leak. Once I taped all the way around I didn't detect the source at any frequency, including the problem frequencies above.
The "lid off" test isn't realistic. The wall of the can is between the source and receiver, but a real EMP could come from above.
The largest issue with this test is that most of the problematic EMP is below 100 MHz where my test is weakest. Short antennas don't work well down there, there are strong broadcast signals to compete with, the dongle can't go below 24 MHz, and Claude tells me that with the antennas a foot apart we're testing electric field blocking more than magnetic field blocking. [1]
Still, we already have very good reasons from physics to expect the can to work very well at low frequencies. The steel wall itself is effectively opaque at these lower frequencies, and the question is the seam. Gaps leak less as the wavelength gets longer relative to the gap, and Claude estimates (from physics) 30–60 dB with the bare lid and 50–80 dB taped in the 1–100 MHz range.
Overall, while I'm still not sure a Faraday cage is needed, if you do want one a taped trash can should work very well.
[1] I did try one more test: I set the receiver to the strongest AM
radio frequency I could find (WBZ at 1030 kHz),
set it to play loudly through my laptop speakers, and closed the lid
with the whole assembly inside. I couldn't get this to work very
well, though, I think because I have an antenna that's a terrible fit
for AM. I did see a lower bound of 40 dB of attenuation putting it in
the can, but that was even with the lid open. I may try more later
and see if with a better antenna I can measure the lid effect. Still,
40dB is likely plenty.
2026-11-09 21:00:00
Eleven years ago I was on the Red Line (not the section that's a trolley), and found myself in a variant of the classic moral dilemma. I wrote about it on Reddit at the time:
Hi! I'm the person who pulled the brake. What I saw:The train starts pulling out of the station. Someone begins shouting that their arm is caught in the door. I look over, see that the door is closed somewhere between their elbow and wrist, but it's not clear exactly where with their jacket on. People, including me, start shouting to pull the brake, but no one does. The train keeps accelerating, and it looks to me like once we get to the end of the station they're going to lose their hand. I get to the back of the car and pull the brake.
After the train stops, the man manages to pull his arm into the train, with his bag still on the outside. If he'd let go of his bag I think he would have been able to do this sooner, but he was panicking as I suspect most people would with their arm half out of the train like that.
I was pretty shaken up, and didn't end up blogging about it, but it came up again at one of our effective altruism dinners. This got me thinking about ways that philosophical problems do and don't translate into real life.
In this situation the stakes were lower than in the traditional trolley problem, and the situation is closer to Scanlon's Transmitter Room (What We Owe to Each Other, quoted jokingly here). The worst case was someone's arm being badly injured, maybe permanently. On the other side was delaying the whole line for an hour, perhaps losing ~4 years of waking life in total (~25k people * 1hr / 16 / 365 = 4.3y). But were these the real stakes?
I now think his arm probably wasn't caught in the door. That's what it looked like to me, and I was very sure at the time, but people who were closer disagree:
I was in the car too -- I could tell that it was just his bag in the door, but in a split second, I was having a hard time telling how big his bag was, and I wasn't about to guess how wide the tunnels were since he wasn't letting go of his bag when the train started moving. I'm glad u/cbr ran to pull the brake -- I was one of the folks yelling to passengers to hit the call button to get the T to stop, and everyone at that end of the train just seemed to freeze. —zapdot
And:
I think what the above poster is saying is that there was a lot of miscommunication inside the car. I watched it happen from the outside and I never saw the dude's hand in the door. I saw him pulling the bag with both hands then I saw the brake come on. —dizzyrags
This illustrates a major way philosophical problems can fail to translate to real life: we're always acting under uncertainty, without knowing the consequences of our options. People understand this, and often "fight the hypothetical", but needing to make decisions when you really don't know whether you've read the situation correctly is a key part of real life morality. We need to make decisions that are robust to us having misinterpreted the situation.
(When Julia found herself in "drowning child" situation it was similar: the hard part was assessing the world, not whether to act.)
The other big way this differs from a textbook thought experiment is that it's not clear that the "inaction" case actually would have avoided a train delay. If I'd been right about his arm, I expect once the accident happened he would have been screaming even more, and I or someone else would have pulled the brake anyway. Which might well mean a worse delay, since now there's an injury involved too.
Which illustrates another way that intuitions built from philosophical problems can lead us the wrong way: this didn't occur to me at the time. It's hard to think very far ahead in an emergency, but morality problems often suggest a frame of mind where we have time to fully reason out the likely effects of each of our options. If I had thought this through it would have been an additional point in favor of pulling the brake. Or maybe I would have thought even further ahead: "if I do not pull the brake, I will become a famous example of a calculating (derogatory) utilitarian. I MUST NOT DO THAT."
Another thing I learned is that the suggestion Cialdini makes in Influence (quoted in Yudkowsky's Bystander Apathy) to point to one single person and ask them for help doesn't reliably work. When this happened I wasn't near the brake and I pointed to the person next to it and shouted something like "you, the brake!" They didn't, so I ran down the train and did it myself.
One philosophical idea that did transfer to real life is the Unilateralist's Curse. Perhaps the reason no one else on the train pulled the lever is that they all correctly perceived that the person was only in danger of losing their bag and not their arm. The one person (hi!) who came to a different conclusion still delayed the train for everyone. I don't think that was fully what happened here, since others were also shouting to pull the brake (though they were not independent observers). But since the "it's ok" position was harder to communicate, I think part of what happened was what we could call "expressivity bias", where an idea that was harder to express lost out, combined with it just being very hard to integrate diverse viewpoints under time pressure in a stressful situation.
As someone who had often speculated about philosophical problems, the experience of being in one was very stressful, and it's not one I hope to repeat.
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2026-11-08 21:00:00
I have very strong views on lying to kids: I think you both should and shouldn't do it. "Lying" covers a range, including saying things that hurt your kids and your relationship with them, and others that help them grow into an appropriately skeptical adult. The distinction is whether I'm leaving them believing something false.
For example, if my kids were asking for ice cream and I thought they'd already had too much sugar, I might be tempted to say "sorry, we're out of ice cream." Or if there's an ice cream truck and I think it's overpriced I might be tempted to say "sorry, I don't have any cash on me." But I'm not willing to say something false with the goal of causing them to believe something false. [1] In addition to that just being wrong:
It's important that the kids know that I'm fundamentally on their side, and lying for my convenience would burn trust when they'd eventually figure it out.
Kids are building a model of what is and is not ok, and "out of ice cream" and "no cash" lead them in the wrong direction.
Instead I would say "sorry, you already had candy" or "the ice cream costs more than I'm willing to pay" (which opens the door for them to offer to spend their allowance). Maybe they fuss, but they generally don't: I try hard to be predictable so this won't be much of a surprise to them, and they know I won't give in to extended fussing.
On the other hand, some false things I might say [2] about ice cream:
In all of these I'm saying a thing I think is false, but, very importantly, I'm not going to let the conversation end with them believing something false. Either they will realize it's false immediately, or I'll need to accept that my playfulness was miscalibrated to their perception and disclose the lie.
This builds the skill of thinking about whether things you hear are true. If I only ever said true things to them we wouldn't be able to practice that. This does need to be matched to their ability: a very little kid will push back on "you're made out of ice cream, and I'm going to eat you up!" but not "we can leave the ice cream out as long as we want, it won't melt."
It also functions as a good jumping off point. If I suggest they pour their ice cream on the floor when they're done with it, that lets me reinforce or explain good behavior. This could go different ways with different kids, with age being a large component. Thinking about how this might have gone with my kids:
Age 7:
Me: When you finish your ice cream, remember to pour it all over the floor!
7yo: That would make a mess. Leftover ice cream goes in the sink.
Age 5 [3]:
Me: When you finish your ice cream, remember to pour it all over the floor!
5yo: That's silly! It goes in the trash.
Me: Actually, leftover ice cream goes in the sink. It's going to melt, and get all liquidy, and liquids go in the sink.
Age 3:
Me: When you finish your ice cream, remember to pour it all over the floor!
3yo: No!
Me: Why not?
3yo: Food doesn't go on the floor!
Me: Where does it go?
3yo: I don't know.
Me: You give it to me, and I put it in the sink.
Age 2:
Me: When you finish your ice cream, remember to pour it all over the floor!
2yo: Ok! [immediately pours ice cream on the floor before I can clarify that this was a joke]
Which does illustrate something important: you really do need to be a good judge of the kid you're interacting with. These depend on the kid knowing the actual rule well enough that you can play with it. I only want to say "let's juggle ice cream" to a kid who knows enough not to try, but if they do know then me being silly about it reinforces the "don't juggle ice cream" norm and signals that I trust them enough to know they wouldn't do it.
The final reason I say false things to kids is just that papa trolling is fun for both of us, as long as I don't do it too much. [4]
It is a bit weird to be both very strongly opposed to lying to kids and also say false things to them many times a day, but "am I leaving them with a false view" cleanly separates the harmful and beneficial cases.
[1] This means we don't tell the kids that Santa
or the Tooth Fairy exist. But we do explain the overall
situation, with how for some families it's a game the parents play
with their kids, so that we don't have our kids going around spoiling
it for other families.
[2] The first draft of this post had "everyone can have ice cream except Nora" but then I checked with her and it wasn't clear she would have understood it to be joking about unfairness. Then I asked her about "when you're done with your ice cream, put it down your sister's back" and she got it right away.
[3] After writing this post I tried it with Nora, age 5.4:
Me: Nora, I wanted to check that you know something. When you're finished with ice cream, it's important to pour it all over the floor.
Nora: No! [laughs]
Me: Why not?
Nora: Because then you and me and Mama would need to clean it all up!
Me: What should we do instead?
Nora: Just leave it alone.
Me: So the cats can knock it over?
Nora: No, put in the... sink... trash... hmm...
Me: Does ice cream go in the sink or trash?
Nora: [whispers] For real, can you tell me?
Me: Leftover ice cream goes in the sink, because it melts, and liquids go in the sink.
Nora: [confidently] You carry the ice cream over to the sink, put it in the sink, leave the bowl in the sink, and then you're done!
[4] I do some of this with adults as well, as a big part of my sense of humor. It's not a considered approach to building skepticism, just what comes naturally. I think some of this is from my upbringing, in a very "questioning is a form of respect "culture (influenced by both the Quaker and Jewish sides of the family).
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2026-11-07 21:00:00
I recently finished the largest set of changes I've made to my rhythm stage setup in 4.5y. The basic interface is similar, but I have a lot more flexibility, more control, more options, and it's easier to travel with. My favorite part is the speech recognition for calling chords.
I started off playing mandolin and piano, and then over the years added progressively more expressive footdrums. I added a breath controller. I built out a complex but expressive system where these different interfaces could interact to let me produce a coherent rhythm section. After a frustrating experience moving from one Mac to another and wanting to simplify, I moved from the Mac to a Raspberry Pi, set it all up as a pedalboard, and then again as a lighter pedalboard.
During the last year and a bit, however, I haven't been tinkering. It did what I wanted, in a reliable and portable fashion. And it was hard to modify: the pedalboard was static, and the Raspberry Pi code wasn't easy to get at either. Which was fine, and probably good for me! I just played a lot of gigs (23 Kingfisher, 3 Free Raisins, 3 Dandelion) and got better at it.
But then it started breaking. My whistle synth box didn't always come up, the drums sometimes needed an external DI, and a USB sound card snapped. Flying back from Atlanta my gear suffered rough enough treatment to bend a USB B connector, and it was clear my system needed some love.
I started with the most urgent portion: the whistle synth. I had Claude port it over to my laptop, where I turned it into a Mac app. This also let me add several more voices, and a mute option that never made loud clicks (I'm not really a hardware person).
This project made me realize that AI getting capable meant that the tradeoffs around laptop-vs-embedded had shifted. I could have everything on my laptop, and without needing to put painfully large amounts of time into programming it could all be fully defined in code instead of manually-configured GUIs. Having it on my laptop would make it easy to apply models to modify and improve it, and open up a lot more lexibility.
I decided to move as much as possible over to the laptop. This meant no more Raspberry Pi, whistle synth box, physical switches for signal routing, and computer code instead of guitar pedals. I moved from:
To:
Four fewer pedals, three fewer DIs, two fewer power bricks, and no little computers. Saves ten pounds: 32lb to 22lb. The Mac weighs ~3.5lb, but I'm traveling with it regardless.
Of these savings, 3lb (2.7lb of talkbox + 0.3lb of power supply) was from giving up the talkbox. I liked how this simplified my setup, including less complex audio routing, but after playing Moondance both Cecilia and I really missed it. So I added it back:
A large benefit of moving to the Mac is I can now see what I'm doing. I control my rig with an external keyboard, covered in little labels that remind me what each key does:
For example, before playing Trip to Moscow I would probably press FB (footbass), S (make footbass play synth bass), FX (breath-controlled keyboard overlay), set the drums to custom kit 63 (electronic kit), and then press L (keyboard velocity-insensitive bass overlay) and change the keyboard to epiano2 when we got all electronic. And press JH (breath-controlled bass-following low bass) at some point partway through for more ability to pulse the offbeat. Without a monitor, I needed to keep this all clear in my head, which was especially important since many settings are modal or interact. I usually didn't mess up, but partly because I tried not to dial in anything with too many presses.
Now I can just represent the state on my monitor:
This is also very helpful for showing which voices apply to which instruments. Previously I needed to remember that on FX (breath-controlled overlay) the B key would give me a supersaw, while on Dc (chord drone) the B key was a different voice (I forget what). Now I can choose a set of voices for each instrument that are the ones that sound best with this kind of control, without worrying about how I'll remember which button gives me which sound.
This is basically all "what I had before, but easier to control". Which is good, but the real payoff comes from making it much easier to extend the system. I've done a lot here, with extensive help from Claude Code, and it's going to take me a bunch of time to learn how to play these new options well.
A big one is that because I now route my mandolin through the system I can replace pedals with code, add more effects than it was worth carrying pedals for, and write effects that consider what other things in the system are doing. This includes using the breath controller as an expression pedal, or tonal effects that care about the active chord. Demo video:
I also added speech recognition, where I can turn things on and off vocally, and even call chords. For chord calling I had Claude make me a custom speech recognizing system for the numbers one through seven (Nashville numbers) trained specifically on my voice and optimized for minimizing latency (decision in 40-170ms). It also runs Apple's in parallel, primarily to allow learning from mistakes but also to handle numbers the custom one misses and any non-number commands. Here's a video from earlier today, showing how I was still working to improve both my call timing and the code that triggers the changes; you can hear that many changes are off by a beat:
Here's a short updated video after a bunch of work this afternoon and evening to make number calling more reliable (af196263f). This involved adding a prior that chords run for a multiple of 2 beats on a grid implied by previous called chords, better word boundary identification, and a bunch of parameter tuning where I made recordings as I worked with it. I'm much happier with it now, and the two mis-timed changes in the video below are me calling early (0:59, 1:15):
I'm also trying to figure out new things I can do with the breath controller, and one thing I've been playing around with is percussion:
Other stuff:
Vocal effects, including ones like a vocoder that care about the currently active chord. Not sure I like any of these enough yet to use live.
Cecilia needs to hear my mandolin playing, but gets plenty of computer overlays in the monitor wash already. This was a problem with talkbox, which can be fed by either the mandolin or computer. Now that it's all running through my box, though, I can make talkbox go to the mandolin output channel if mandolin is included, and to the computer output channel otherwise.
I auditioned and added a lot more voices. Including adjusting which voices are available for which instrument by replacing some that didn't work with that instrument's method of articulation. I don't know if any of them are worth it yet, though: I still mostly do the small number of things I like.
I added French Canadian feet back into the system, after discarding them when I switched to the Raspberry Pi. They're no longer samples, but synthesized, which lets me use how hard I stomp or the breath controller to adjust how hard the hit is. I like these a lot, and used them live to good effect at the one gig I've done since this change.
I also added a "stompy feet" option which is feet with a bassier kick, a "bare feet" option with sounds synthesized to imitate my own bare feet, and a "hand drums" option which was a Claude "happy accident" that sounded interesting enough to keep. I'm not sure I'd actually use either of the second two, though.
When used stand-alone, the Focusrite 2i2 takes in a mic (whistle bass, calling chords) and mandolin and gives two channels (computer and mandolin + feet, though really it's "doesn't go to Cecilia's monitor" and "does go to Cecilia's monitor"). I've also added integration for my custom 1818VSL mixer, in which case you skip the 2i2, run the mic and mandolin into channels 1 and 2, and all my processing happens automatically before the mixer sees channels 1 and 2. Kind of an automatic effects loop.
I added recording to the custom VSL mixer, including logging MIDI signals and keyboard presses so it's easier to evaluate later (or tweak if we wanted to turn recordings into another live CD).
I'm toying with starting to run our own monitors by default with the VSL, since it has enough output channels to pass my normal outputs to the sound board and then also give a mix to each of us. I'd use XLR Y-cables on the other inputs so the board would also get a full copy of everything.
Outputs can now be stereo, in case we wanted to switch to in-ear monitors. But I really like stage wedges for feeling connected to the dancers: being responsive to them in the moment is, to me, a big part of the appeal of playing live for dancing. And it would be a fourth thing connected to my head (after the mic, talkbox tube, and breath controller) making me even more borg.
My keyboard (Yamaha P-121) includes USB audio support, and I already have it connected to my computer over USB for MIDI purposes. Using this stream avoids several lossy steps, and I've made the VSL mixer bring it on as an "input 9" when available. Sadly if I'm ever working with someone's P-125a keyboard, the "a" means that they dropped the USB audio feature.
I added a bunch of features with technocontra in mind (kick ducks, pads, weird effects) but I don't think I like any of them even for technocontra. Not sure yet.
I tried a version where whistling picks a chord, but didn't end up liking it at all.
One cool thing about a whistle-controlled synthesizer and speech recognition is that I can do both of them at once on the same mic: they're very easy to tell apart.
Overall, I'm still mostly playing live with only a small portion of the possibility space I've built for myself with this instrument. Some of this is that a lot of things that are possible turn out not to be very effective in a noisy dance hall, or just don't sound good anywhere. Some of this is that there are some very neat things that it's possible to do that I haven't practiced well enough to take advantage of. And some is that I just forget to try some things live.
When I switch to pedals choosing bass instead of being drums it now switches to a preset that's a better fit for that, so I press one button ("DCN": drum chooses note) instead of several ("DCN", "FB", "D", "v", "+", "+", "+", oct up).
This post took me way too long to get out, both because I keep adding to the system and because I'd rather make demo videos once I'm good at controlling the system. Since that kept resulting in not publishing, I've lowered my threshold to get something out. I can always follow up as I do more, and several of the ideas above would have been better as their own posts.
The code is all on github if you or your agent would like to look:
2026-11-06 21:00:00
Reading the comments on my post on junk I was surprised to see the extent to which people's relation to rarely used possessions varies.
Some people forget rarely used possessions, and get minimal benefit from having them stored. When they need something, they don't know whether they already have it, and the effort to maintain an index [1] wouldn't be worth it. Ben writes:
I end up with curtains I don't need. I decide to store them for the future in case they are helpful. Years pass. I need new curtains. I have forgotten the ones I kept, so I buy new ones and put them up. Months later I find the ones I kept while looking for something else.
Other people know exactly where everything is, and can walk down to the basement and make a beeline for a tiny thing they put down there years ago. Sarah writes:
I can remember where I put a specific doohickey that my brain labeled as "this could be useful" years later with very little recall effort; something will come up that actually matches the need for the thing, a little triumph, and I go to the spot where I buried my acorn and get it.
I'm somewhere in between, though closer to Sarah. I usually remember what I have stored when it could be relevant, though I'm less good at the where. One strategy I use a lot is to imagine I'm putting the object away, and I'll even walk the path. Wherever seems good now has a good chance of being the place that seemed good when I actually did have the thing to put away. Other times, though, I have no idea whether any of my stuff might be useful for a problem or project, and I'll just wander around the basement looking for ideas.
Then there's another way people vary, which is how much having stuff, even out of sight, weighs on them mentally. For some people, including me, it's mentally costless. Just like it's not a problem that I "have" 2,615 blog posts, or that I've read hundreds of books, I don't think about the objects in the basement when they're not relevant. To others, however, "excess material is like a pressure on my mind until it's properly stored, sold, donated, or otherwise disposed of." And some find this so burdensome that they don't believe it when we say it's not.
The "burden" axis probably leads to minimalism fads: people with a "burden" disposition like to write and share self-help books on how to avoid it. But maybe an even bigger contributor is cultural holdover. When objects were more durable and people were less wealthy, keeping things in case you needed them someday was very helpful! So some of us inherited strong "keep things" culture. But someone living in an apartment has a small amount of valuable space, and using it to store things you probably won't need is not worth it. Plus, if you're moving every September 1st, it's even less worth it! [2] Pushing the culture to update is probably valuable, even if the advice doesn't suit everyone: it helps people get out of patterns that are a bad fit for the way their particular brain works.
I am curious what leads to this range of dispositions, though, and how people distribute along the "remember where stuff is" and "having stuff is a mental burden" axes.
[1] My grandfather took this a different way: he had a very thorough
index. It was pages and pages of small items he happened to have in
his basement, along with exactly where to find them. Each shelving
unit, dresser, or bookcase had a letter; each shelf or drawer had a
number. You could look through it in alphabetical order:
...
Vacuum tubes, Q3
Varnish, B10
Velcro, J2
Viola Case, G8
Violin Carving Tools, D3
Violin Rosin, J12
Voltmeter, Q1
...
Most summers we'd visit for a ~month, because my aunt was a teacher with summers off and could watch the group of cousins. We'd have the run of the house, and would often make projects from things in the basement. We never asked what we could use, and I suspect we made a mess of his system, but he didn't seem to mind.
[2] Even though accumulating low-value stuff works well for me dispositionally, I didn't do very much of it until we bought a house which had an unfinished basement.