I have a degree in math and a degree in cs. I fucking love nonsense.

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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • Vigier is pretty famous for making fretless guitars but they are also pretty pricey afaik. It’s not particularly hard to convert an existing guitar if you have any glass workers in your area willing to cut a mirror board.

    I did roughly this way back in 2009 on a cheapo strat clone with a bolt-on neck:

    1. Have a piece of mirror cut in the shape of the fretboard on the current neck.

    2. Remove the frets from your old fretboard with pliers.

    3. Fill the fret slots with wood filler.

    4. Sand the whole thing down flat.

    You can remove the fretboard entirely to swap it with the mirror board if you like, but sanding the whole thing down to the desired height seemed simpler to me at the time. You also retain vaguely useful “guide” marks from where the fret slots used to be with this approach.

    Note that the height/width of your new board needs to play well with your nut/bridge height and whether or not you removed the old board. You also want a piece of mirror thick enough not to crack.

    1. Epoxy the mirror board to the neck.

    2. Sand off any excess epoxy and buff the sides smooth.

    This approach worked okay for me at the time. I don’t recall any exact materials or measurements I used since I did this over a decade ago. I mostly just winged it and tried to use common sense.

    I will say the whole process is pretty finicky. A lot of small things contribute to playability in general. Choice of strings (roundwound, flatwound, different gauges), nut/bridge height, truss rod adjustments, neck shims etc. There’s also the worry of cracking the glass from an overzealous truss rod adjustment and effectively breaking the whole neck (though this never actually happened to me).

    The main issue I noticed playing fretless electric is that sustain is reduced. On a typical electric guitar the string vibrates between the metal fret and bridge materials (ignoring the nut). These materials are fairly hard, but on a fretless instrument the string vibrates between your much softer finger tips and the bridge. Perhaps a compressor pedal or some type of sustainer system would help?

    If you pay attention to vigier recordings they tend to do really well with sustain. So their typical setup might be worth researching and trying to mimic.

    For a toy DIY project to experiment with it’s fairly fun, but I wouldn’t expect anything game changing. Getting a nice sounding + nice to play set-up is challenging and involves a lot of nitty-gritty details.

    As a side note, you could technically stop at step 4, though you’d probably want to sand things to a particular radius rather than flat. This is a common approach bass players take to convert fretted basses to fretless basses. There are many guides on how to do this online.

    Disclaimers: This was something I did nearly 15 years ago as a teenager after reading quite a lot of random internet posts on it. Don’t use my rambling as a source if you decide to try this. Use a real guide (there are many for fretted to fretless bass conversion guides that would apply for the first 4-ish steps for example). I am not responsible for gear you break or money you waste.

    You could also just buy a slide for cheap if you’re into that.





  • If you subscribe to classical logic (i.e., propositonal or first order logic) this is not true. Proof by contradiction is one of the more common classical logic inference rules that lets you prove negated statements and more specifically can be used to prove nonexistence statements in the first order case. People go so far as to call the proof by contradiction rule “not-introduction” because it allows you to prove negated things.

    Here’s a wiki page that also disagrees and talks more specifically about this “principle”: source (note the seven separate sources on various logicians/philosophers rejecting this “principle” as well).

    If you’re talking about some other system of logic or some particular existential claim (e.g. existence of god or something else), then I’ve got not clue. But this is definitely not a rule of classical logic.








  • Because if the majority of people following a particular religion reject a prior view as false or wrong, then arguably that view is no longer part of the religion.

    Religions aren’t crisp, unchanging, monolithic entities where everybody believes the same thing forever. If we’re talking about judaism in the sense of the views and practices jewish people actually subscribe to, then that seems like we are referring to beliefs they actually hold in a mainstream/current sense, not beliefs they previous held but now reject?


  • Operating System Concepts by Silberschatz, Galvin and Gagne is a classic OS textbook. Andrew Tanenbaum has some OS books too. I really liked his OS Design and Implementation book but I’m pretty sure that one is super outdated by now. I have not read his newer one but it is called Modern Operating Systems iirc.