Oooooh, that's a blast from the past! I used to use LiteStep for about 6-9 months in 2000, before I started using GNU/Linux.
At the end, I had really beautiful (to my eyes, back then) and very functional desktop, but something went wrong when I made backup before installing SuSE Linux 7.0, so months of vigorous customizing were lost. :-(
But it was fun while it lasted. There were a number of alternative desktop shells in the Windows 95/98 era.
I'm a little sad to see i386 go, but I understand the reasoning. Lots of Linux distros have gone down the same route, and I don't there hasn't been a new PC sold in the last 15 years that wasn't 64-bit.
But I am happy to read about the unification of freebsd-update and pkg.
Other than that, I don't find anything in the release notes to excite me, just more of the same goodness. Which is fine by me, I appreciate the reliability.
I vaguely recall there was a case a few years back where a patient had been cured of HIV. But they had effectively their entire immune system wiped out by radiation therapy or something along those lines, and then received a bone marrow transplant from a healthy donor. So not something that could easily be replicated in many patients.
Still, that is big news, considering how many people have died from HIV, and how many still live with the virus. Treatment has come a long way - I remember how it was practically a death penalty in the 1990s; but a complete cure would be so much better than depending on medication for the rest of one's life. I don't think this is the breakthrough, but it is proof that search for a cure is not futile.
Definitely not. Five year survival rate for stem cell transplants is about 50%. People with HIV now have effectively normal life expectancies provided that they're treated. Even if this worked reliably, it would be _very_ much a case of the cure being worse than the disease.
How much of that low survival rate is due to the condition they received the transplant, though? Conceivably a patient with "just" HIV might do better than one with eg. leukemia and HIV.
That said, IIUC the whole stem cell transplant procedure is unpleasant enough that it still might not be worth it.
"The major cause of death is relapse, which accounts for approximately 40% of all deaths, followed by infections at 25% and graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) at 20%."
A good friend of mine died from a C. Diff infection in the hospital after a bone marrow transplant. It is very risky, especially with an imperfect match.
That said, you can help make it less risky! This used to be called "Be The Match", not sure why they renamed it but you could save someone's life by registering to be a donor:
I donated bone marrow through Be the Match (before they changed their name). It was painful, but I highly recommend the experience to folks whenever it comes up.
You get to save the life of a stranger AND they give you a t-shirt. Win win!
I think its been done a few times [1]. Crudely put: try to wipe out as much of the immune system then replace with stem cells from a donor. Previously they used donors who had a gene mutation that made them HIV resistant, but this was with 'normal' genes. But a stem cell transplant may have worse survivability than HIV for many people
There is at least one documented case of someone using anti-retroviral therapy, getting their viral load down to undetectable, stopping the therapy and remaining undetectable for years without continued therapy. They use the word "remission" rather than "cure" because there are fragments of viral dna that remain in your cells and it's possible for a "reservoir" of inactive virus to exist and activate, so there will always be regular testing involved in any attempt to eliminate the virus entirely, but whether it technically counts as "cured" becomes a nearly-moot point when one is able to live the same way that someone who has never been exposed lives save for the testing.
I know what you were getting at but I think it’s important to point out that people don’t actually die from HIV they die from AIDS which is caused by HIV.
Why would it not be? It's like the distinction between "a crocodile" and "being mauled" or "a credit card" and "crippling debt"; while they may frequently co-occur, either can exist without the other. Further, recognizing that they are distinct allows you to build causal models, which are vital to taking productive action.
Various other viral (and even less commonly, microbial) challenges, though it's rare. HIV is special in this regard because it's the only example (so far as I know) that's transmissible.
Max Richter, John Cage, Tangerine Dreams, Klaus Schulze, Gavin Bryars, Richard Chartier, Asmus Tietchens, Tomaga, Boards of Canada, Stars of the Lid, William Basiniki, Joanna Brouk, Pauline Oliveros ...
Drone Zone on SomaFM (free internet radio) was how I discovered a lot of that stuff. Although they don't play the old classics as much these days, it's still good and they have a few similar stations there https://somafm.com/player24/station/dronezone
I generally find Deep Space One more appropriate for most of my coding, though I used Drone Zone a lot many years ago.
I've been supporting SomaFM for more than 20 years now, and am so grateful for it. Not just the ambient stuff, but Secret Agent and several others too.
I guess I agree (used to be a massive 90's EBM collector together with my ex, though I kind of got out of the loop of EBM end of 00's / start of 10's). Seeing a Woob album from 1994 recommended a few comments below <3 for CBL, I do like the track ~42 degrees.
How we used to find music: go to the record store every week to listen to whatever you couldn't afford, look at P2P networks at people who like similar music as you, and browse their collections. Eventually, use Discogs to search. Or simply talk with other people (at parties, on the internet) who also like the same music.
How we can find music nowadays: Spotify (and such). I mean, seriously. Their suggestions can open you up to a plethora of new artists. If you then look at the top 10, chances are you'll like some of their work. I found a lot of music this way, for all kind of genres. As Valve's Gabe used to say: piracy is a service problem. Though I am not sure Spotify is so good for the artists, given they earn pennies via that.
..and it is still nowhere to getting and downloading and listening 24/7 to every new release (or, well... trying to), using SMB to the NAS (which automatically gets the releases from a scene FTP) and Winamp locally to add some .m3u files.
I recommend Stair (2:22:22) by datassette for focus and ambient background. The artist recorded the sound of downtown Chicago overnight from his hotel and then processed and mixed this together with processed sounds from MS-DOS strategy game soundtracks from the 80s. Brilliant.
Not OP but I also often to listen to ambient while programming. A couple recommendations would be "Music for Nine Post Cards" and other works by Hiroshi Yoshimura, and "Music for 18 musicians" and others by Steve Reich.
In fact, the use of loops described in this article reminded me of what Reich called "phases", basically the same concept of emerging/shifting melodic patterns between different samples.
I'll second Max Richter's Sleep. Timeline by Edith Progue might interest you too. The later is my favorite xcalm down" CD even before Max Richter's, when I'm too restless to sleep.
And maybe Glitch (music) might be of interest as a starting point, especially the "Clicks & Cuts Series" which gave me a lot of pointers to interesting niche artists.
Biosphere - Shenzhou and Cirque, Stars of the Lid - The Tired Sounds of The Stars of the Lid are favorites of mine. I would also include everything by Microstoria which is not ambient but it works to the same end.
A good place for experimental music is ubu web, in fact Brian Eno is also over there[1].
Edit:
Also if you're a programmer and what to learn a new programming language, then check out SuperCollider[2]. You can use that to create your own ambient sounds. SC has a great library for creating user interfaces along with creating sound.
For a good intro the Sleepbot Environmental Broadcast radio is well worth listening to. Also their write up on how and why they produce the broadcast is really interesting.
A lot of great recs in this thread, but I'll a couple others I didn't see listed yet:
Mort Garson: Mother Earth's Plantasia
Hiroshi Yoshimura: Surround
Satoshi Ashikawa: Still Way (Wave Notation 2)
Shameless plug... Search BirdyMusic.com in Spotify/Apple Music/YouTube Music to hear some ambient music algo generated based on realtime Birdnet detections and weather in my backyard.
i have a 5hr playlist on spotify called lost in the sea of ambien which happens to have many of the artist recos here. title is a reference to haruomi hosono who said he got lost in the sea of ambient in the 80s after leaving ymo.
Yeah, everything's interconnected as Tangerine Dream got to work on GTA V soundtrack. There is this note about that track on Wikipedia:
The track "5:23" is included in the 2008 video game Grand Theft Auto IV and appears on the soundtrack album The Music of Grand Theft Auto IV. In the digital release it is listed as "Maiden Voyage". This track is very similar to, but does not credit, the song "Love on a Real Train" by Tangerine Dream from the Risky Business soundtrack. They had remixed the song for a then upcoming Tangerine Dream remix album but had their effort rejected so released it as 5'23 instead.
I've never really understood the appeal honestly. I feel it's more of a "masterpiece" in a historical sense, because it was an early electronic / ambient work which no one had really heard before and that gave it a huge cult following. Which is understandable, but outside of that, I don't see how it's any more interesting than basically any other ambient work of which I would say there is much much much better. Robin Guthrie comes to mind...
I don't see it a masterpiece in the same way I see Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue" is. The reason? Because I don't think there is a better Jazz album, ever, where as with Eno's early Ambient work, I think it was surpassed very quickly.
That said I'll give it another listen today and see if I can hear the magic.
I run OpenBSD on two old laptops at home, two virtual machines, and one old former SOHO router/firewall appliance. So far I've upgrade all but one laptop, and once again I am impressed how painless the process is these days. And how reliable. One laptop has been running OpenBSD since 6.8-ish, and it's never given me any problems.
I used to use Fossil years ago, and I was happy with it. Then for work reasons, I had to start using git, and magit was what made switch from Fossil for my private stuff, too. I almost never resort to the git's CLI directly these days.
The only pain point is that last time I checked (2020), it was painfully slow on Windows, but as I haven't touched Windows (other than doing a bit of tech support for my parents) since then, that is not a problem for me.
I vaguely recall looking at the slides from a talk on OpenBSD's approach to this topic, which came down to (paraphrasing from hazy memory) "if it can be disabled, people will disable it; if it needs to be configured, people won't configure it".
As an owner of two i386 systems (both netbooks built around Intel's Atom N270), that run Debian, I am a little sad. I understand the reasoning, and I won't deny it is a very niche platform by now. But I had hoped Debian, with a history of supporting a wide range of platforms, would keep i386 going for a while longer.
Fortunately, bookworm will continue to receive updates for almost 3 years, so I am not in a hurry to look for a new OS for these relics. OpenBSD looks like the natural successor, but I am not sure if the wifi chips are supported. (And who knows how long these netbooks will continue to work, they were built in 2008 and 2009, so they've had a long life already.)
EDIT: Hooray, thanks to everyone who made this possible, is what I meant to say.
On the rest, I use mutt+msmtp+mbsync, slrn, sfeed, lynx/links, mocp, mupdf for PDF/CBZ/EPUB,
nsxiv for images, tut for Mastodon and Emacs just for Telegram (I installed tdlib from OpenBSD
packages and then I installed Telega from MELPA).
Overall it's a really fast machine. CWM+XTerm+Tmux it's my main environment. I have some SSH
connection open to somewhere else at the 3rd tag (virtual desktop), and the 2nd one for Dillo.
One sits in my bathroom so I can browse random Wikipedia articles while I'm, uh, busy. The other one sits on my nightstand and plays audiobooks/podcasts when I'm going to sleep.
So nothing critical. But something they are still good at, and being very small makes them a natural fit for these use cases.
I can't speak for the other poster, but I like the idea a lot. Having tools with specific purposes means I can avoid using my phone for everything. No matter what games I play to remove notifications/interruptions/etc. it's always a distraction and easy to be distracted from whatever I originally intended to use the phone for.
I do use the phone for audible, but I started both uses before I had a smart phone (I was very late to the game), and I am a creature of habit. Plus the netbook has a bigger display, more storage, and a real keyboard (again, creature of habit).
OTOH, when coding, I consider FILE to be effectively opaque in the sense that it probably is not portable, and that the implementers might change it at any time.
Yes, it would not be sane to depend on implementation details of something like this.
But the sad reality is that many developers (myself included earlier in my career) will do insane things to fix a critical bug or performance problem when faced with a tight deadline.
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