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Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, "diabolical" overstates it. It isn't a wicked problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem

Kinda funny but I am a fan of green LED light to supplement natural light on hot summer days. I can feel the radiant heat from LED lights on my bare skin and since the human eye is most sensitive to green light I feel the most comfortable with my LED strip set to (0,255,0)

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I'd actually argue it has some wicked problem characteristics. The input space is enormous (all possible audio), perception is subjective and nonlinear, and there's no objective function to optimize against, only "does this feel right?". Every solution you try reframes what "good" means. It's not as hard as social planning but is way harder than it sounds, no pun intended.

Ever seen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oNyXYPhnUIs ? There are a lot of things people might think feels right.

(Note both the scanner in front of KITT and the visual FX on his dashboard when he speaks, which changes from season to season.)

fta: The biggest unsolved problem is making it work well on all kinds of music.

The wickedness comes from wanting something that works just as well for John Summit as the Grateful Dead as Mozart and Bad Bunny.

But it seems like you could cheat for installations where the type of music is known and go from there. The other cheat is to have a "tap" button, and to pull that data and go from there.

mental note: the thought "it can't be that hard" when obviously it is sent me down a rabbit hole for a couple of hours

isn't it the exact same problem than "making a good movie" or "making a good book" ? this is just thoroughly subjective.

When the author says:

> Every commercial audio reactive LED strip I've seen does this badly. They use simple volume detection or naive FFTs and call it a day. They don't model human perception on either side, which is why they all look the same.

well no, if they sell, then they are doing just fine until someone comes up with the $next $thing

Fidget spinners also sell.

.. anything wrong with them?

I believe it's not a "problem." It's expression, like a painting. Every work of audio reactive LEDs is a reflection of the designer's intent, constraints, biases, imagination, and the context in which it was designed. Like painting, there are technical chops, the craft, like the first half of the article, the lag, the mapping of frequency and amplitude, etc. But once those are mastered the road becomes wide open. That's the "what makes someone tap their foot?" the article asks.

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