cerol

I based my project on the Yamaha DX7, which is an amazing feat of musical engineering. I had to write the code, wire together a MIDI Input, and an audio output (using a DAC). It was one of the coolest projects I've ever made, although I did not get too far.

At the core, all you're doing is generating sine waves. Digital Synths in the 80s would not have the computation power to actually compute sine waves, so what you have to do is precompute the values of a sine wave, and store it in memory [0]. Also, you don't get floats, so it's all fixed point arithmetic [1]. FM Synthesis is essentially a carrier wave and a modulator wave [2]. The DX7 goes beyond that with the concept of Operators, which can be mixed and matched in an Algorithm [3].

I managed to make it produce notes, which were in tune. I started making the envelope (attack, decay, sustain and release), but that's where I got stuck and eventually abandoned it.

[0] https://github.com/fercgomes/churrosfm/blob/master/src/Table...

[1] https://github.com/fercgomes/churrosfm/blob/master/src/Oscil...

[2] https://github.com/fercgomes/churrosfm/blob/master/include/A...

[3] https://djjondent.blogspot.com/2019/10/yamaha-dx7-algorithms...

One thing I noticed is that local governments (and their respective climate departments) are being much more vigilant and proactive with climate events. And we are in a way paying much more attention to the frequency of climate events. Trying to correlate your own experience of "frequency of events" is a very tricky thing, since we can pretty much condition ourselves to rememeber pretty much anything we want.

Back in the day there were tropical storms and cyclones, and we just moved on. But now local governments will proactively cancel school days if there is a even a hint of a heavier storm. Which is great, but it does mess with our ability to actually estimate frequency of events.

Fly seems unreliable, but they offer a deploy region close to me. Does anyone have know of any alternatives?

I watched TS1 and 2 as a kid, and I remeber loving it and rewatching dozens of time. Then TS3 came out, with Andy going to college, around the same time I was going to college.

Toy Story 4 was an absolutely stunning movie, both in terms of photography, and underlying message. In my opinion, it is about growing up, finding out who you are, and letting go. They ended the franchise in the best way possible.

By offloading your cognitive tasks to an AI, even though you now look smarter, you're becoming dumber in the long run, because you're never really challeging and exercising your intelect. This book[1] goes into a lot of detail about how rote memorization and recall is essential to critical thinking (you have a limited working memory, and the way by which you're able to critically think about complex subjects is by chunking, which only works with concepts you've previously memorized). If you just stop exercising your recall and critical thinking, they'll get weaker and weaker.

I feel that already with ChatGPT. Before, whenever I needed to learn some programming concept, I'd have to search vast amounts of resources to learn it. By being exposed to many different points of view, I always felt that what I had learned stuck with me for much longer. If I just ask ChatGPT, I get the answer faster, but I also forget faster. It's not learning.

Learning, with capital L, is not supposed to be easy. It's supposed to be hard. Education is about making what is hard a worthwhile pursuit. The people who get lured into thinking they'll be smarter if they plug themselves to the matrix will be shooting themselves in the foot.

For me, relying on OpenAI to function cognitively is like relying on Google to turn my lightbulb on. It looks cool, but it doesn't make any sense.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4959061-why-don-t-studen...

I disagree. Not all marathon runners are made equal. Talking about the long run means an extreme training routine that is consistent through a long period of time.

The vast majority of marathon runners are casual runners, rarely logging more than 40km a week. And after a while most simply stop or reduce significantly their training to casual (in terms of intensity) but consistent training.

AFAIK, most research about negative effects of marathon running is related to professional athletes, who have a career in running. Endurance athletes usually start from a very young age, and peak at around 30-40. That's 20 to 30 years of extreme training. And the key aspect here is oxidative stress, which means they are aging faster. There's also a risk that your heart will change in shape to respond to a greater demand, and that may lead to conditions such as arrythmia.

I think I can speak for most of the amateur athletes I know. We're all well aware of the risks. There's just no point in not taking them.

I don't mean to be rude, but this comes from years of people picking fights with me about exercising and easy ways to get fit.

You're looking for an easy way out. There isn't any. Or there shouldn't be. If you want to really stick to an exercising habit, you have to either do something you really love doing, or just pick something and stick to it. If there isn't some sort of physical activity you love doing and could potentially do effortlessly, you have to start from scratch.

That means putting in the work and becoming disciplined. Building a habit. Which means you have to work against yourself so you can, in the future, be in a position where exercising is at least neutral and effortless. Only then will you know whether or not you'll enjoy it. Never before that. If you have an open mind and patience, you probably will.

You could also just keep trying several other options, until you find sometimes that you seem to enjoy. But chances are you'll probably get tired of it soon.

I'd honestly advise you to work on habit building skills rather than trying to find something you'll be able to do effortlessly, just like that. If you pick something, stick to it, be patient, study it and put your mind to it, I promise you, you'll eventually start enjoying it.

I have pretty bad sleep habits, but never had that happened to me (AFAIK, given that I live on my own). That day I was sleep-deprived (3 hours of sleep on the night before), and had exercised a lot (I'm an athlete).

I'm only 27, but I'm still a bit freaked out about the possibility of this being an early sign of some neurodegenerative disease.

The demos look amazing because there is no acceptance criteria. Anything gets hailed as "groundbreaking" because is process is novel. Which is a completely different scenario from what you expect from someone actually being paid for making art.

I'll second that.

Hell. Even ATMs haven't automated bank tellers yet. Nor has Kindle replaced physical books.

> I don't think there's been any industry that's been ended by AI yet, and yet people are strangely confident that art is going to be the first.

Any time now.

Thank you.

As someone who's recently lost a loved one to cancer, I've lost count of how many times I've wanted to choke people for coming out with these "simple cancer theories".

I should've given some more context. I'm from a South American country, we used to train in a road that goes around a fairly big park, so it makes a +- 3km rectangular lap. We rode on the lane closest to the sidewalk, so we could pretty ride past the traffic lights.

It's a pretty busy road during the day, but during "training hours" (19:00), there's less traffic. Still a lot of cars, and there's a bus stop along the way, and not every bus driver respects cyclists (they'll overtake you, then stop in front of you). There's a particular section where there's a major road that merges within our lap, and there's almost no working public lights, and the road is full of potholes, and there's a broken pipe somewhere, so the potholes are always full of water.

So yeah. If you're riding in a fairly big peloton, NEVER go aero. It can literally kill you. I've seen it happen.

There are a couple of rules you end up learning.

1. When you're leading a peloton, never go aero (when you lower your upper body so you're "cutting the wind"). Always keep your eyes on the road ahead, looking for potholes.

2. Whenever you spot a pothole, call it. Shout "pothole", loud and clear. As you go around it, point to it for the person behind you.

3. When someone in front of you shouts "pothole" and points to it, shout "pothole" and point to it, recursively.

4. Never break abruptly in the middle of a peloton.

5. For maximum efficiency and safety, your front wheel should a wheel's distance from the rear wheel of the bike in front of you.

6. If you need to do anything that is somewhat abrupt, like leaving the peloton, always warn, loud and clear.

Picking a company to invest in only half the job, choosing how much to invest is the other half.

It's a terrible way to invest if you put all your money into it. QC "changing the world" is a tail-end event. You allocate according to the risk.

> Nimbus training documents emphasize “the ‘faces, facial landmarks, emotions’-detection capabilities of Google’s Cloud Vision API,”

The "training documents" he mentions are basically a GCP manual. [0]

"facial recognition, landmarks, emotions, ..." These are ML 101. Does my face have a second degree equation pointing up? Happy. Is it pointing down? Sad. It's like the car dealer rambling about the leather seat that reclines, when you're only interested in the horsepower. It's a sales pitch.

This reminds when the Intercept made a whole piece about the brazilian DMV's "dystopian system" that could "integrate multiple data sources" just to say it was a SQL join.

[0] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22119705-core-infra-...

It's insurance money. If you're a manager of a big company like IBM, Microsoft or Google, you have to align your current product portfolio and future portfolio in such a way that shows your investor that your company will keep growing, even if your current products are stagnant.

You can surely say Quantum computing won't do much in next 5 years. But what about 10 years? 20 years? 30 years? The farther you look into the future, the bigger the probability of having a huge tech breakthrough that could give the company who has it a massive edge on the market.

Even if you have a chance of 1% of having a sort of transistor revolution from QC, it becomes a race to the bottom. If Google starts researching it, IBM will follow suit, and so will Microsoft. If in 30 years this turns out to be a big deal, no one will be 30 years behind.

[0] https://github.com/cfenollosa/os-tutorial

At least with the photorealistic prompts, there is always this feeling of "this doesn't look right". Right now it's easy to pinpoint what it is. Usually is a completed distorted face. But they might get better at this. But probably there will always be that "uneasy feeling".