One can say that stomp boxes follow UNIX philosophy. They do one thing and can be connected ("piped") to make complex sounds. For example, if you want distortion, with some modulation (say, some phaser) and a little bit of a delay, you could build a pedalboard ("pipeline") with those three units plugged one into another:

  guitar | distortion | phaser | delay | amp

BTW. in real life, as - by some weird convention - most of pedals have input in right side and output on the left, it looks like that:

  amp                                        guitar
   ^            .-- phaser <--.                 |
   |            |             |                 |
   `-- delay <--,             `-- distortion <--'

Re the weird convention: When you're a right handed guitarist and you're facing towards your pedals, the lead comes out of your guitar going to the right.

That's irrelevant if your pedals are in an FX loop, but if they're actually between the guitar and the amp, it makes perfect sense to avoid having your guitar lead trail across or catch under your stompboxes.

That's exactly right.

Not a weird convention at all.

But is the UNIX philosophy true bypass?

I think “true bypass” is systemd. It sounds like it’s better, but isn’t always. And the kids love it in their “boutique” distros. :)

This is a neat way to look at it.

Having said that, an effects loop is essentially the unix tee commmand in action, if you could manually enable/disable the tee command without breaking the pipe.

> One can say that stomp boxes follow UNIX philosophy.

I suppose it's the other way around as nix is much newer technology. :)

What's so bad about Boss pedals. I _love_ how they look. Their retro-futuristic vibe (it's genuine vibe, they haven't changed since 80s).

Also wondering what parent means...IMO the Boss form factor is by far the best of any mass market pedals from the '80s. Indestructible footswitch the width of the pedal, thumbscrew for battery compartment access, easy to AC power, large text/high-contrast color schemes & LEDs easy to read on dark stages, (some but not all) knobs big enough to twiddle with your feet.

In comparison - DOD had terrible footswitches and detachable (read: instantly lost) battery covers, and their jacks always came loose if you just looked at them; MXRs from that era typically had non-true bypass switches, no external power jack or quick battery access; the little square Ibanez/Maxon footswitch was harder to hit; and while Electro-Harmonix stuff is/was cool and strange, the build quality was always a crapshoot.

Boss pedals are functional masterpieces, but that doesn't make them aesthetically beautiful. They're ugly as sin. Just like work boots.

I also love Boss pedals, so many pedals now are the same rectangular box in one of two common sizes. At least the Boss ones are unique!

That's assuming that there's a space to pull over, which is often not the case on city streets. Especially, when every AV wants to pull over.

Stopping as close to a curb as possible is still better than stopping in the middle of the line. And much better than stopping on an intersection.

I mean, if we were driving together -- you have the steering wheel, I have the map -- and I say "woah I have no idea where we are," what would you do? I guess you would just drive around until I figured it out, or found a safe spot to pull over...

Also the assumption that the fail-safe _works_. Any of these fail-safes are much more complex than a classical fail-safe.

...and certainly better for your data plan.

> glorified CRUD message board

That's like describing SpaceX as "glorified fireworks"

Did you just compare CRUD to literal rocket science?

But launching rockets isn't rocket science. You build giant steel tube, fill it with some explosives and liquid oxygen, ignite it and, kaboom! you go to space. That's the theory behind it. Now, to put that into actual practice is whole different thing.

The same with CRUD. CRUD is simple, but to do CRUD on ~Facebook~ Meta scale, that's a different thing.

Meta-scale CRUD is fancy, to be sure. But the craft behind it is still not on the same level as building things that can, you know, blow up on the lauchpad. Or break apart up at 46,000 with you a schoolteacher and other crew members inside. While the nation watches. Stuff like that.

Whole nations _have_ been blown up by Facebook though.

Yup, they did (despite the perorations in the sibling comment). Precious.

> There is nothing about Electron that constrains it to a single window, what a weird idea.

Yet, for some reason, almost none of Electron apps that I'm aware of uses more than one window.

Yeah, same here!

Multiple windows <3

I look at the screenshots and think "we're living in the ~future~ 1996"!

I scribble important stuff on my calendars. So replacing them every year is a feature, not a bug!

> Because there isn't that much else to do as a teen.

Whoa, that's a bold statement!