Scale Space Cymatist, a cymatics instrument whose creator is facing homelessness

2 pointsposted 6 hours ago
by hobscure
(setzstone.itch.io)

4 Comments

codingdave

5 hours ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"...please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."

Feel free to tell a story in a comment, like you did, but trying to tell the story in the title makes it clickbait, which aside from being against the guidelines is likely to cause less engagement, not more. (And that isn't even getting into the problematic aspect of cherry picking one person who needs help when there are hundreds of thousands of others who also need help to avoid homelessness every day.)

hobscure

3 hours ago

I understand the point about the title, and I’m happy to keep the story to a comment instead.

I’m less convinced by the second point, though. Of course homelessness in general is horrible, and I don’t think this person is somehow more deserving of help than the many others in the same situation. But I happen to know his work, have spoken with him, and am in a position to potentially help amplify it. The fact that I can’t help everyone doesn’t seem like a good reason not to try to help one person when the opportunity presents itself.

That said, I understand that HN has its own norms around submissions, and I’m happy to respect those.

codingdave

2 hours ago

Think about the scale of that. If 100K users all posted the story of their one or two friends that needed help, HN would be overwhelmed with such things.

It is the same reason you cannot take a pretty rock from a national park. It seems small, but if a million people did it, you'd wreck the park.

Don't wreck the park.

There are other places to share such things, especially since you linked to a reddit post that already covered this situation. Adding it to HN doesn't really amplify it beyond that.

hobscure

6 hours ago

I came across Scale Space some time ago and ended up talking with its creator, setz. He sent me an early build of Cymatist to test with my own music, and I ended up making a video of my workflow with it. I've followed the project since.

I'm posting it here because I genuinely think the software is interesting - I've actually used it - but also because I learned today that his personal situation has become pretty dire.

Cymatist is a real-time cymatics / particle instrument built around WebGPU and three.js. Rather than just making conventional audio-reactive visuals, the particle simulation can be explored and it's parameters can be mapped to music. It can apparently run up to a million particles and is packaged as an offline-capable browser application. It's great to play around with sober and not sober.

The creator, setz, has roughly 20 years of experience in UX and web/design work based in Chicago. Despite that, he's been unable to find enough work. Today he posted that he expects to become homeless tomorrow. He's tried rental assistance and other aid, has a social worker, and is currently asking whether anyone around Chicago might have a spare room or basement where he and his older dog (Doxl) could stay.

I'm in the Netherlands, so there isn't much I can practically do for him locally. But looking at the quality of what he's built, it felt absurd to just watch this happen without at least putting his work in front of more people.

Have a look at Cymatist first. I think it's an interesting piece of software in its own right. But if it happens to be useful or interesting to you, right now seems like a particularly good time to buy it.

His post about the situation: https://www.reddit.com/r/ScaleSpace/comments/1vxfvf7/scale_s...

Cymatist: https://setzstone.itch.io/cymatist

And perhaps more importantly: if anyone here knows of UX research, interaction design, creative technology, visualization, or related work that might fit someone who builds things like this, that could be worth considerably more than a one-off donation.