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bondarchukon First, make me care

I think "Just… start with the interesting part first" is quite different, and actually much better advice than "make me care". I'm more than done with stupid hooks and attention grabbing techniques, just plainly and honestly state at the outset what the point is of what will follow.

bondarchukon Hypnosis with Aphantasia

Very interesting! Also interesting how unquestioningly "thoughts" are equivocated with "internal voices" in both the press release and the paper.

bondarchukon 'Askers' vs. 'Guessers' (2010)

Any type of culture is "fundamentally" exclusionary if you don't know how it works. Let me guess which culture you're from :)

bondarchukon Hypnosis with Aphantasia

Also, the metaphorical "little voice in the back of your head" that tells you what you're about to do is a bad idea.. Apparently people really hear that too? It would be nice to read about the differences between genuine hallucinations and mental imagery or sound from someone familiar with both. Obviously there are differences but people just get offended or simply weirded out most of the time when you ask.

Also you might find it interesting to read Jaynes' Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. It's evidently controversial and not a viewpoint to uncritically adopt wholesale, but it does get you thinking about mental visualization/audiolization vs. hallucinations etc... and contains some intriguing historical anecdotes.

bondarchukon Hypnosis with Aphantasia

I think it's weird to call an aspect of mental functioning a pathology simply because it's not the majority, regardless of any impairment in normal functioning. Depending on how you slice definitions many many things are in the minority.

Those studies, well, I'd have to see them. There's the risk that people for whom (e.g.) memory is accompanied by imagery automatically assume that imagery is required for memory. Vague correlations with social functioning can be drawn for nearly anything.

Regarding dementia: obviously the disappearance of imagery in someone who used to have it is very different from someone who never had it.

bondarchukon Hypnosis with Aphantasia

When the negative feelings are described (interpreted!) as resulting from a supposedly pathological condition, for example. Also, when negative feelings result from the idea that a certain issue is pathological. And when you put these two together in a loop you have a pretty clear dynamic of pathologization, I'd say.

Of course it's hard to argue with the bare fact of someone feeling something, but everything surrounding that such as the attribution of the causes, potential solutions, and the terms in which feelings are described are all open to debate.

bondarchukon Hypnosis with Aphantasia

Well, even the idea of "diagnosis" in this case implies that there is something wrong. I saw the whole idea of aphantasia/variations in mental imagery enter the mainstream over the past ~decade, it's really disheartening how people just can not ever accept that there are differences between people without immediately branding one type as good and the other as bad.

bondarchukon Hypnosis with Aphantasia

>the (sometimes subliminal) states of confusion, frustration, shame, and inadequacy aphantasics feel when asked to visualize

Wow, take it easy.. This whole pathologization of "aphantasia" really leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

bondarchukon Article by article, how Big Tech shaped the EU's roll-back of digital rights

GP was not about America changing but about Europe.

bondarchukon 4k tons of potatoes to be given away for free in Berlin

To be honest it sounds like you (and some other commenters) are just rationalizing because the concept of giving stuff away for free is too much at odds with your world view. Maybe some is going to waste but surely less than would go to waste if they destroyed all of these.

bondarchukon AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

I really disagree with the level of glee you display in predicting that artists will be replaced - that said, this:

>Soon you will have to grapple with the reality of what really drives your enjoyment of media, and part of that will be realizing that the human-ness never mattered at all.

is a good point that many media consumers will at some point have to come to grips with. There is a sense, almost accelerationist, in which the machine-generation of vast amounts of enjoyable media (let's not pretend none of it will be enjoyable) forces people to reconsider what drives their engagement with art/entertainment, what value there really is in sitting still for 2 hours to watch a movie or listen to music no matter how good. (As you can see all over this comment section most people have staggeringly naive ideas about art)

bondarchukon AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

Music is not inherently time-consuming to make, people can jam out a tunes at one minute per minute and bandcamp is full of those.

bondarchukon AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

...and now deviantart is deader than dead because overrun with slop.

Anyway I don't think your case is really so bad. As long as the creator at least has put in the effort to listen to their own stuff from beginning to end at least once (yes that's a low bar), you're already miles ahead of people who'd auto-gen 100s of albums and slap them on there in one go. Music is more inherently rate-limiting than image generation where only half a second or less is needed to take in an image superficially.

bondarchukon AI generated music barred from Bandcamp

>Another is transitioning between vocals and instrument in the same melody line. Like a humanesque voice holding a steady note at the end of a verse which seamlessly transitions into a saxophone sound and proceeds into a solo. Or vice versa, an instrumental morphing into a voice.

I think there's something cool here, seamless morphing between sounds was one of the things they were trying (and failing, obviously) to do at IRCAM way back when. Finally we might be able to morph in something approaching perceptual space.

(and glitch is always interesting too, of course)

bondarchukon Mozilla's open source AI strategy

Many things that are not browsers are genuinely useful and important, this alone doesn't mean Mozilla should be doing them.

bondarchukon LLM poetry and the "greatness" question: Experiments by Gwern and Mercor

>Why is this a criteria?

Because defining "good" as "made by a human from the human society" is the easiest way to be able to go on and "prove" that "LLM poetry is not good" (these are scare quotes). She says she used this definition in "over thirty years of reading, teaching, and writing poetry" (this is an actual quote) but I highly doubt she would've found it necessary 30 years ago to define "good" as "made by a human" with this level of explicitness.

Edit: having read the whole FA, the closing sentence makes much more sense (and is also completely at odds with the definition of greatness given earlier):

"Operationally, greatness is measured when tastemakers put them in anthologies so that generations of readers can read them, tear out the ones that resonate, and tape them to their refrigerators."

bondarchukon Richard D. James aka Aphex Twin speaks to Tatsuya Takahashi (2017)

Sure thing, Jake

bondarchukon "They Saw a Protest": Cognitive Illiberalism and the Speech-Conduct Distinction [pdf] (2012)

Can we really conclude that people "see" what they say they see? I think most people would not think twice about saying "protesters did not block the road" when in fact they know full well protesters blocked the road and they really mean "protesters blocked the road and that's good actually".

bondarchukon Photographing the hidden world of slime mould

>If you shrink yourself down to the size of a mite, and take a walk through the forest, this is how you would see slime mould.

Thanks for explaining the concept of close-up photography in terms I can understand. :D

bondarchukon Richard D. James aka Aphex Twin speaks to Tatsuya Takahashi (2017)

"I don't like it, therefore everyone else who likes it must be only pretending"

bondarchukon Richard D. James aka Aphex Twin speaks to Tatsuya Takahashi (2017)

http://www.audiosynth.com/files/sc-users-archive/v01.n223

http://www.audiosynth.com/files/sc-users-archive/v01.n224

http://www.audiosynth.com/files/sc-users-archive/v01.n225

http://www.audiosynth.com/files/sc-users-archive/v01.n226

http://www.audiosynth.com/files/sc-users-archive/v01.n227

(note I am not personally claiming this is RDJ)

bondarchukon Richard D. James aka Aphex Twin speaks to Tatsuya Takahashi (2017)

>Was it confirmed that eric hard jams was actually him?

Nope. By then RDJ (the actual person) was of course known for using anagrams so it would be an obvious thing to do for any troll.

bondarchukon Richard D. James aka Aphex Twin speaks to Tatsuya Takahashi (2017)

Yeah BT lol.

bondarchukon Meta's ads tools started switching out top-performing ads with AI-generated ones

If they were universally hated it would be easy to outlaw them through democratic means. Yet bring this up to the average person and they'll quickly find 500 reasons why it shouldn't be done. The only reasonable conclusion (sad as it may be) is most people don't actually hate ads.

bondarchukon What an unprocessed photo looks like

Everyone knows what is meant by a real vs fake digital photo, it is made abundantly clear by the mentions of debayering and white balance/contrast as "real" and generative fill as "fake". You and some others here are just shifting the conversation to a different kind of "fake". A whole load of semantic bickering for absolutely nothing.

bondarchukon Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

idk man, I get it's nice if things are clear for you, but it's misplaced IMO to have this level of entitlement over people speaking their mother tongue in their own country

bondarchukon Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn

Or.. english-speaking people forget not everyone speaks english. If you go to another country you have to learn a bit about how things are done there, ask for help, etc.., most people consider this a normal part of traveling.

bondarchukon William Golding's Island of Savagery

Since when does "proving the book utterly false" apply in any way shape or form to a fucking novel? HN in charge of reading books...

bondarchukon William Golding's Island of Savagery

Wow, it's almost as if we were dealing with a piece of fiction.

bondarchukon We invited a man into our home at Christmas and he stayed with us for 45 years

All of that may very well be but correct reasoning is a prerequisite to talking about any of these points.