lol, punny on two levels, I like it ;)

Centrists wouldn’t like me, I’ve been told I’m “not boring” so there goes any hope of a centrist grifter career

I normally don’t like AI stuff but this guy uses AI tools to make fun videos and you might like his Democratic Penguin’s Republic series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ8qGOe2K0o

Sorry, guess I’m scabbing on you all because nobody pays me, I just do it for the love of the game.

I did, long ago, dream of exiting the rat race so I could fulfill my dream of being a left-wing demagogue getting paid to spit fire in the faces of the powerful. Alas, I had no idea how to get started, then I read something by Nathan J. Robinson, the most prolific socdem essayist ever, where he said all his work gets him about $15K in profit a year, and I concluded that my dream would not come to pass. Man is at least 10x more prolific than I could be, writes less confrontational and therefore more accessible and publishable stuff, and is the editor and owner of a magazine. All for not enough to live on in any big city? Shit, the problem is that the left is the side of the people who don’t have money. Only way to make a good living doing politics is to work for the right wing which I obviously couldn’t so because while I may be a spineless cuttlefish, I still have a hard aragonite core that cannot bend and betray my principles.

Cute cute cute cute cute!

I specifically want the audio processing toolbox. I actually still don’t even really understand what Simulink is, I don’t get the concept of “graphical based programming” since to me programming is typing text that tells a computer what to do.

But I like Matlab :(

Interesting. Many people reporting similar problems with that one, but someone in June claims to have had success with the very version of 2025a I tried!

It appears Matlab took down their installers for every version of Matlab other than 2025b. I wonder if that’s why now I can’t install these. But I don’t understand, it’s supposed to work offline.

It’s for a musical project. I wanted a very specific effect applied to some vocals I sang. I couldn’t find any tools that did what I wanted, asked on various forums over the years but every pre-built tool someone recommended failed to achieve the effect I was imagining. Out of frustration I ended up writing something myself in Matlab to postprocess a vocal line I recorded and I quite liked the results! (And I know I could have used Python for that but I like Matlab.

Up to this point Matlab was just a personal preference. But then I decided I wanted to experiment with applying that effect in real-time, which would mean creating my own audio unit and throwing it into my DAW, and went looking for ways to make one. Turns out Matlab’s got a command for it since 2022b! https://www.mathworks.com/help/audio/audio-plugin-creation-and-hosting.html. so if I could get my hands on it, that would be by far the easiest and quickest way to experiment more with it.

I learned a couple days ago that there are open source tools designed for making AUs – Cabbage, Faust – but I’ve never used them. Since I already have the Matlab code and am familiar with Matlab, I thought it would be nice to just use that toolbox for a quick first pass. It probably wouldn’t take long to port it to pyhon, but I’ve found no Python libraries that can generate an audio unit (without wrapping around what’s in the next sentence, which is extra work). There’s a C++ library called JUCE that can but I find C++ frustrating and don’t have a good dev environment set up for it anymore.

The musical project, by the way, is a mix of a shitpost and a passion project and will never see a cent of earnings, so I cannot justify paying Mathwork’s high prices.

That looks super cool but I do think I specifically need Matlab since that’s what I’ve prototyped some ideas in already (I have an old crack but there are some new specialized toolboxes I want to use or at least try out which require a new version of matlab which these cracks claim to have and I don’t see an equivalent in SciLab).

Basically, if I can get a new crack of Matlab working to use the new toolboxes, I can rapidly iterate through and test some ideas. If not, I was going to have to dig into some other open source tools which is going to be way more effort.

*people can construct, not you specifically. But maybe you, I don’t know.

Are you going to read or think about the comment or are we done here?

You can construct a trolley problem to justify anything you want. It’s about the constraints that the person who posed the question chose. You don’t really get to choose in a trolley problem. The constraints choose for you. In the real world, our options are not so constrained and the outcomes are not so clear. As such it is useless for actually figuring out what to do.

The trolley problem is a useful basic philosophical experiment to get people to think about things and reflect on constraints, assumptions, and values. And often the best response is in fact “fuck these constraints and assumptions!”

So the trolley problem is not bullshit, but it is very very often misapplied in a bullshit or bad faith way, for example last year in the US I saw a lot of liberals uncritically and unironically appeal to “the trolley problem” to rationalize voting for the party that was committing a live-streamed Holocaust. They were using it to absolve themselves of the responsibility to think about and own their moral judgements, and that is the sort of misuse that a lot of people balk at.