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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nice! I think you can approximate timing somewhat, by making your web server create the "jpeg" on the fly and send it to the client in timed chunks. The source could even be a webcam, so the "jpeg" would go on forever.
Could great works substitute for having a scene? After all, writers have been inspired by Dostoevsky without being part of the same scene as him, and often without being part of a scene at all.
If people can move freely, and there's no price mechanism to allocate housing and construction, there will be problems. So "taking the market out of real estate" is a very big ask. In the USSR you couldn't freely move to another city, you needed to get government approval on the basis of a job change. People complained about this registration system all the time.
Your heart is in the right place, but I want to push back a bit. Zoning is a red herring, sure, but landlords and airbnb are a red herring too. The truth is worse. The natural bloc for restricting housing construction and increasing home values is all homeowners! Everyone with a mortgage, too! Maybe the fight is still winnable, but we need to see clearly what we're up against.
You're simplifying to the point of nonsense. Freedom you say? How about the freedom to have a say in government of the place you're living in? That seems a pretty fundamental freedom. When the rich folks of a town vote for planning restrictions and the vote goes through, that's an expression of freedom.
Sure, we both don't like it. We both agree it has bad consequences. But what I'm trying to say is that there's a real want backed by serious money. One way or another, it will create a market (maybe a shadow market). Rich folks will always want "no poors in the neighborhood" and will keep trying to find ways to spend money to ensure it. They'll never give up.
That's why I'm trying to think of solutions that don't require arm-wrestling one market vs another. For example, if we somehow created jobs elsewhere so that poor people wouldn't have to fight rich people for city air, then maybe that could work too.
Yeah. There's an even simpler way to formulate it: different types of goods require different mixes of market vs planning. For example, video games can be an almost completely free market. Food too (as long as it's checked for public health concerns). But things like water supply or power supply seem to have their own gravity, which again and again leads to more centralized solutions: see the Wikipedia pages for "natural monopoly" and "public utility". And then there are goods like policing, which should absolutely be centralized.
I don't know by what general rule we can tell which goods require how much planning, except empirically. But it's strange that the consensus that actually exists (more market for some kinds of goods, more planning for other kinds) isn't talked about much, and people just prefer to argue about fundamentalisms in a vacuum, as if all goods behaved the same.
Well, the planning restrictions don't just come from nowhere. People pay for them (with their lobbying time, lost rent and so on) because they want them. There's a market for "no poors in the neighborhood", an unpleasant market, but a market nonetheless.
Add to that the fact that there's plenty of cheap housing in places with no jobs. So, what should we do? Should we fight against the "no poors in the neighborhood" market in rich cities? Or should we make more jobs appear in other cheaper places instead? I don't know the answer, to be honest.
I think you and the parent comment are both wrong. The right analogy is something like a new species, which consumes resources and makes more of itself. The species is "AI", or "AI-empowered organization with a handful of humans on top", whichever way you like to think of it. It doesn't have to be winner-take-all, there can be many such things running around. But the point is humans can't compete with such things and will lose resources to them. Something like Factorio, with the "players" building automated production chains everywhere, and the planet's native critters (us) not very important as workers or consumers, simply pushed out whenever we interfere.
> At every commit, you need handle the possibility of a serialization exception and retry the transaction.
Yeah, but it seems so strange to me. Imagine if a database simply executed all transactions serially. Then there would be no serialization anomalies (though it would be slow, yada yada). So it seems serializable isolation presents a facade of serial execution, but only like, half a facade. You have to deal with the leak in the abstraction yourself and it's surprising to everyone who hears about it for the first time. I wonder why this choice was made.
Huh? I know nothing about cars, but to me there's an obvious difference. If I saw the top car in the street, I'd say "wow that's nice"; while the bottom one just looks like a regular car. The top one looks like it went to the gym, the bottom one looks like it was puffed up through a straw. Idk if that justifies a 20x price difference, but that's my immediate reaction.
I'm not sure. It might be a real person, just writing in an LLM-like hackneyed voice. Anyway here's three specific paragraphs from the post, each exhibiting that voice and the "rule of three":
> Throughout all of these experiences, and so many more than I have time to share, it was the human connection that made it special. The laughter that helped me get through a hard problem. The sleepless nights that reminded me I was not alone. The selflessness of others to get on stage or behind a camera and teach people they didn’t even know, often for little or no cost, just so that others would be enabled to build and have an influence.
> They don’t laugh with me when my code fails to compile after I swear “this is the one.” They don’t help me develop an understanding of my software, so that when someone says “how does this work” I can pour my heart out with passionate explanations. Most importantly, they don’t turn their head and smile and participate in the inexplicable elation of saying “we built this!”
> I desire to connect with people. I long for the days where I was vulnerable and shared my struggles with engineers who charitably stepped up to support me. I miss taking what I learned from those struggles and sharing them back out as a blog post or presentation, encouraging the next person to overcome the same challenge.
I think this post is either LLM-written, or written in a standard blogpost style of today which is increasingly becoming LLM-like. Sam Kriss had a good recent post pointing out some of the "tells": https://samkriss.substack.com/p/if-you-let-ai-do-your-writin...
Whoa there. What's wrong with "undercutting labor markets"? Last I heard, when a profession (e.g. doctors) decides to limit the number of practicioners in order to charge a higher price to the public, that's a bad thing. It benefits the people currently employed in that profession now, but it hurts others who wants to join, and it hurts the public who wants to get the service (e.g. healthcare). The sum of hurt is greater than the sum of help. Cartels are harmful; they don't stop being harmful just because there are borders involved.
I mean, it's one thing if you think immigrants commit more crimes or use more taxpayer money. These are both false, but at least the argument could hypothetically work. But if you say that even perfectly law-abiding, non-welfare-using, good-work-performing hypothetical immigrants shouldn't be allowed in because they would "undercut labor markets", that's plain nonsense. Such nice hypothetical immigrants should be invited in large numbers and everyone would win from it.