The first time I saw it, I thought about playing a drumkit and whistling a bassline at the same time, with someone else on guitar and vocals, making a full rock sound with two people. But then I was too lazy to try it.
There been some people doing the whole "one man band" thing with a back pack drum, guitar and harmonica. I bet someone crazy enough could do one instrument per limb + harmonica and maybe even a theremin with some remaining appendage too.
I think looking cool matters a lot in live music, maybe even more than the actual music. Blowing into a harmonica while carrying a backpack full of cutlery looks really dorky. But two people with drums+whistling and guitar+vocals can be made to look cool.
I think it's more than "you need to know them". You need to be a friend to them and do things for them in turn. Play a part in the mutual help network. If many people free ride on it, it dies.
I don't really like the concept of "guests" being applied to people living somewhere for years, working, paying taxes, making families and friends, sending children to school and so on. I think it would be more humane if this concept was minimized, and instead the concept of "no taxation without representation" was applied. Fast track people as much as possible. Maybe one year as a voiceless "guest" is okay for a human being, but not more than that.
My favorite read about cults is this short interview with Richard DeMille about Ron Hubbard: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Library/Shelf/miller/interviews/... The interviewee comes across as extremely level-headed, maybe as a reaction to having been in a cult and escaped.
Yeah. I've seen the same puzzling thing in game development. People don't seem to want to make good games! They want a hat that says "I made a game". That done, they want a hat that says "my game is successful", so they go on subreddits asking for promotion advice. Honest comparison with existing state of the art is seen as annoying; advancing the state of the art isn't seen as a goal at all.
I'm a bit of a victim to this mindset. I don't particularly play many video games, except the occasional one that clicks, but love making small game experiences and similar. I find that gamedev programming is very fun and engaging. Nonetheless, I don't think that I have the combination of skills and creativity (nor game knowledge) to make a game as great as those that have clicked for me in the past ;)
I read somewhere that there are more game engines in dev at any now point in time than there are games. I can believe that.
I think it's OK to do something for the fun of doing it. It's expecting to a) be successful without doing the thing at all and/or b) doing it because you want the success that's the problem.
Go make games that make you smile, share them see if others smile too. Then think about the success thing.
When I was learning DSP, I was surprised by the fact that generating pink (1/f) noise, sample by sample, is not mathematically easy at all.
One practical approach is passing white noise (every sample independent random) through a "pinking filter", which is a sum of a bunch of lowpass filters at different frequencies, so that the sum of their cutoff "knees" approximates the frequency curve of pink noise. Another approach is generating in chunks using Fourier transform from a desired shape. Given the ubiquity of 1/f noise, you'd think there would be a simpler and more direct algorithm, but no.
If you change your Fourier transform approach into a time domain convolution, then you can generate it sample by sample. White noise -> FIR filter, this is a pretty simple and direct algorithm as far as DSP goes. The wiki on pink noise mentions this. I've done the FIR filter approach to simulate 1/f phase noise.
The article makes an interesting point. Like, sure, AI slop is nasty; but also maybe the job itself was bullshit all along (making powerpoints, or coding yet another todo app and so on), and you were only making peace with it by adding a human element which wasn't strictly necessary. Now with AI that illusion is stripped away, and you see the job for what it really is: just how little it means.
A bit off topic, but I'm guessing Aristotle himself would say that chasing "status in the workforce" (as opposed to leisure, riches, wisdom, power etc) is itself a good example of slavish disposition. Status in the bosses' eyes, amirite?
No mention of GANs? As far as I remember, their images felt much more like "sampled from training data" than "averaged from training data". The idea was that you train a "discriminator" that tells generated images apart from real ones, and make the "generator" try to fool it. But somehow it lost to diffusion models, and now all AI imagery looks like slop, when GAN outputs (though imperfect) didn't look nearly as slop. I don't really know what happened though.
Iirc it lost to diffusion models because it was extremely hard to train. Due to the two adversarial networks it was very prone to mode collapse, ie. the generator running ahead of the discriminator and destroying the training signal. Or other various fun ways the two networks could blow each other up.
Is HN showing post and comment times as recent when they really aren't? I see an exchange between Rochus and jefftk "1 hour ago", ending with a "thanks, posted" and that blogpost is from July 25. Today is July 29.
Oddly enough, they do show July 25 on mouseover. The post itself shows as July 24 from two hours ago, and vunderba’s (top) comment shows as July 24 from 1 hour ago. I wonder if an old post got promoted or two posts merged and HN automatically updates comment dates in that case? Or maybe it’s a bug?
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