Any keyboard can type “→” if you set up a compose key :)

Perfect timing. I'm expecting to get my hands on a MOTU MIDI Express XT from my local Guitar Center within the next couple days (I paid for it when it arrived there a couple weeks ago, but they have a mandatory waiting period on used equipment to make sure it ain't stolen), which unfortunately uses some weird proprietary protocol instead of class-compliant MIDI-over-USB — so any use over USB from my PCs (nearly all of which are running Linux, OpenBSD, Haiku, or something other than Windows or macOS) is a no-go. This is okay for my immediate use cases (I just need it to route between some synth modules and controllers, without necessarily needing the PC to do any processing in-between), but it'd be cool to get the PC side of things working, too.

There's an existing out-of-tree Linux driver¹ that looks promising, but AFAICT it only does the bare minimum of exposing the MIDI ports for use with e.g. JACK, and it's also unclear how stable it is and whether it really does support the XT (the README says the kernel panic got fixed, but there are open issues about it; the README says the XT's supported, but there are open issues about that, too). I'd like to be able to create new routing presets and stuff like what the proprietary companion app can do, and I'd also like to be able to use the thing without needing to shove extra drivers into my kernel, and I'd also like to be able to use the thing on my OpenBSD and Haiku boxen, so I've been perusing LibUSB docs since a userspace USB driver that then presents the relevant MIDI ports and some tooling to reroute the MIDI ports as desired seems like something useful. This article happens to be exactly what I've been looking for w.r.t. a starting point for such a userspace driver.

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¹: https://github.com/vampirefrog/motu

I packaged that driver on the AUR, since I’ve got the same device. I can’t get the binary blob to work (admittedly, I haven’t tried very hard) and it’s not high on my list of priorities so I’m okay using it as a dumb MIDI tool.

I could be misremembering but I believe the guitar center waiting period isn't _just_ to make sure it's not stolen (I kind of doubt they're actually doing anything like an investigation) but also because legally their used equipment side of business has to operate like a pawn shop, in that they aren't allowed to sell something they've "bought" until after the window for the pawner to buy it back expires.

I have had significant success using Claude to reverse engineer hardware

Yes Claude is impressive in HW-Development. It knows all those magic numbers and how chips work. i even use it to do development for Power delivery Systems.

hope nothing goes wrong with it

> One merely has to look at current US gas prices to see how utterly silly that notion is!

We could probably slash gas prices by banning oil exports, thus removing domestic oil supply from global market pricing (barring smuggling). The oil industry would probably hate that, though, for obvious reasons.

Ultimately, though, this is yet another wakeup call for why an economy and society built around lighting a finite resource on fire is a bad idea, and hopefully this time around that wakeup call sticks.

> We could probably slash gas prices by banning oil exports, thus removing domestic oil supply from global market pricing (barring smuggling).

To my understanding, you couldn't do this, no. The US is a net oil exporter, but many of its refineries are tuned for processing oil with a chemical composition that isn't found in the US, or not found in sufficient quantity. So the US has to both import and export oil, it can't just replace imports with exports.

> but many of its refineries are tuned for processing oil with a chemical composition that isn't found in the US, or not found in sufficient quantity

How difficult would it be to retune those refineries to process domestic oil instead? In a world where a heavy-handed extreme like “banning oil exports” is on the table, surely doubling down on the heavy-handedness wouldn't be out of the question.

> But proxies aside (which is a big aside), they were fairly self contained until we started hitting them.

That “big aside” is an understatement, on par with ”but CIA-funded death squads aside the US has been pretty hands-off with Latin America”.

Oh absolutely. But being an idiot with proxies isn't really reason to threaten total war. You go after the proxies and maybe hit ports and production facilities in Iran that arm them. Then commit to keep doing that every time the proxies act up. Nobody needs to liberate Lebanon or Yemen. And nobody needs to try and change the regime in Tehran.

Not to mention vaporwave, which typically boils down to “take song, reduce bass, slow down”.

Or vaporwave's inverse, nightcore, which typically boils down to ”take song, increase bass, speed up”.

Indeed, like toiling in factories and mines and farms.

Finding those thousands of matching human-recorded tracks and curating them into playlists seems like a benign use of music-aware ML models.

> We are not fine with mass-producing framed paintings that are "art".

Sure “we” are; we just call them “prints” or “posters” instead of ”paintings”.

I mean, maybe in the sense that any other corporate activity is technically “human activity” because humans happened to be the ones doing the formula-dictated tasks, but it's ultimately the formula at the helm, not the human.

Removing the Oxford comma not only fails to resolve the ambiguity, but introduces yet more ambiguity by implying Ayn Rand to be God.