maxbendick

What a bizarre README. From the top:

> 3,500-Line Lightweight Agentic RL Framework for Training Agents with Real Harnesses!

Ok, it's a framework. That can mean many things. Let's look at the "Key Features."

> ~3,500 lines of code: We treat simplicity as the first principle.

???

Marx builds on Smith. Would you agree then that Adam Smith is disproven even more and responsible for far more starvation? That would be ridiculous.

Marx actually has a bit about this: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch15.htm...

The most interesting point here is relating machine speed to intensity. Plenty of tech folks are both working longer hours and overseeing more responsibilities thanks to AI. There are other factors at play though (interest rates and AI-addiction, for two).

Can't argue with that! And what a prologue it is.

You've found the right market. There's an awful lot of tech folk who don't read but want to feel like they do.

I gotta rep my favorite though, even if it's typical. "Call me Ishmael." It's not the narrator's actual name - he just feels like an outcast. It sets the pace for the mythic and worldly talk throughout the book. A high bar with complete follow-through. I'm a total sucker for it.

Careful you don't fuck up your hearing with an fx chain mistake.

As a long-time web/app developer getting into game dev, it feels like I'm entering "the big leagues" of software engineering. Tougher problems, more problems, more _interesting_ problems, and problems without prebuilt solutions. Much more fun than making yet another dashboard.

Combining player control, multiplayer, non-player control, and physics is one of the tougher problems. I got it handled (enough) for my project, but I'd be very interested to read the source if Easel's physics engine gets open-sourced.

Theory and practice are both important. A few analogues:

- fundamentals on an instrument vs performance

- low-level graphics programming vs using a game engine

- comp sci vs software engineering

The theory side here gets to the root of things, is valid for any sort of DAW/DSP software, and has the benefit of being easier to teach. Practice is obviously more important though, especially in the arts. It's better to grope in the dark than do nothing.

Living in LA, the LAPD helicopter noise really is incessant.

It's hilarious to hear flying cops try to be intimidating through when dispersing illegal concerts or singling individuals out in non-violent crowds. It's impotent posturing and an obvious waste of money. They really don't need to send 5 squad cars and a helicopter for noise complaints.

I will say though that the loudspeaker on those things are surprisingly clear, even through the buzzing of a helicopter.

As is their right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bartleby,_the_Scrivener

Ah gotcha. My bad, didn't know it was a joke. But I'll still take it as an excuse to post RFK being a fool hahaha.

You really ought to never trust the output of LLMs. It's not just an unsolved problem but a fundamental property of LLMs that they are manipulatable. I understand where you're coming from, but prompting is unacceptable as a security layer for anything important. It's as insecure as unsanitized SQL or hiding a button with CSS.

EDIT: I'm reminded of the hubris of web3 companies promising products which were fundamentally impossible to build (like housing deeds on blockchain). Some of us are engineers, you know, and we can tell when you're selling something impossible!

Love this article. If you'd like a book that works deeply through the topic of commodified humanity, Minima Moralia by Adorno is painfully pertinent here.

He is not a vegan. Here's him drinking raw milk recently: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/PzSe0z6gH0M

Thanks so much for replying. I didn't think it was your intention at all.

The logo is fairly evocative of the SS insignia.

To explain in the clearest terms: unlike the SS insignia, the lightning bolt in the logo has tapering at the bottom. The second element in the logo, the slash, does not have tapering at the bottom. The general shape of the logo is the same as the SS insignia: two diagonal elements side-by-side (which would be all good on its own). The mind tends to see repetition, so it has a tendency to "mix up" the two elements of the logo. The mind also has a tendency to remember similar things. Putting it all together, the logo has a chance to evoke the SS insignia.

I may just be reading too much Theweleit and W. Reich nowadays, but I think you'll get catch some flak for this logo if it becomes recognizable outside the tech milieu.

Imagine typing a description of your ideal self into an image generator and everything in the resulting images screamed at a semiotic level, "you are not the correct race", "you are not the correct gender", etc. It would feel bad. Enough said.

I 100% agree with Carmack that guardrails should be public and that the bias correction on display is poor. But I'm disturbed by the choice of examples some people are choosing. Have we already forgotten the wealth of scientific research on AI bias? There are genuine dangers from AI bias which global corps must avoid to survive.

Definitely Guattari! Anti-Oedipus, which he wrote with Deleuze, is a trip and really wonderful. That's actually how I came across Reich.

Guattari is interesting for pioneering schizoanalysis at the La Borde clinic. He's also one of the most confusing writers I've ever come across, so I recommend the books cowritten with Deleuze over his solo stuff. He's got some whimsy to him just like Reich does.

I agree that would feel pretty artificial, if we understand it the utilitarian way.

But Wilhelm Reich doesn't really follow a utilitarian calculus. I.e., for him pleasure is not the equal yet opposite of unpleasure. Rather, the calculus is one of material tension and release, or intensity, which I think you get at quite well in your example.

And yeah, if Marx, Bataille, and Spinoza are called philosophers, I guess we can call this a philosophical thought as well. Though it certainly reaches beyond the bounds of philosophy into psychoanalysis, biology, and cybernetics.

One of my favorite radical psychoanalysts.

He has a stellar analysis of fascism in "The Mass-Psychology of Fascism." It's almost frightening how prescient he was not only for it's 1933 publication but for our current day as well. I wish more folks would check him out.

His fascination with orgone adds a lot of color to his work. I hope people don't write off his radical analyses for that. Despite the pseudoscience, he does get to the root of things. Great life-affirming stuff.

I'm happy to see people learning the Curry–Howard isomorphism the fun way.

Of course this message comes off as rude. Some open source leaders have immense skill in being nice. Dan Ambramov and Matz (Ruby community's motto: Matz Is Nice And So We Are Nice) are positive examples of a high order.

I might have given up on learning FP without Evan's work on Elm. The Elm community when it was lively oozed niceness, and much of it was thanks to Evan setting a positive example. Yes there were flaws in Elm's leadership, even fatal flaws, but why revisit a message like this?

Maybe it's just an unfortunate example of how, with one message, betraying one's frustration can damage a reputation.

I wouldn't call it fearmongering. The shortage is real and has been happening for months. Those affected are likely aware of it.

Always love to see Tero Parviainen's new projects. Big inspiration for my webaudio tinkering.

I think diving into his personal life can be very useful with Nietzsche. I can't say the same with every philosopher though. Wonderful Wittgenstein quote, btw.

Nietzsche's almost constant sickness helps explain concepts like the eternal return and will-to-power. Always keep an eye out for "health", "cure", and "convalescence" in his writing (great example: the preface to The Gay Science).

Nietzsche's romantic failures also color his works. I skip large chunks because I can't stomach his sexism.

In analyzing political pieces (especially one so concerned with The Enlightenment), it's important to go deeper than content. What moved someone to put so much effort into this thought specifically? Nietzsche, critic of enlightenment, would ask: "which kind of will-to-power is expressed here?"

Steven Pinker is popular among accomplished people, and there's no conspiracy about this: rational optimism just gets that crowd going. Maybe it's because they don't have much better to worry about!

Reading this kind of writing is like eating a bag of candy. I eat one saccharine piece of "{X} good thing has grown by {Y}%", and then I grasp for the next morsel before I've finished chewing the first.

This may very well be true, but only as a post-hoc explanation.

Reactionary politics (all politics, really) have their home at a subconscious level. Politics are ways of feeling and acting. It's an error to think that if the other side had more "common sense", they'd see the light. Even animals have politics. Only the most _surface-level_ politics can be affected through logical explanations.

This is an area that many parties handle differently. Streaming services, artists, labels, and distributors don't all handle translation metadata consistently. There are specs in DDEX for this, but it's a matter of support and doing the translation work AFAIK.

My time to shine! I work in music distribution.

The Apple Music style guide is a great and accessible place to look if you're interested in music metadata: https://help.apple.com/itc/musicstyleguide/en.lproj/static.h...

DDEX is the set of metadata standards used across the music industry: https://ddex.net/

Also worth knowing that not all content on streaming services is music! Some of it is spoken word, ASMR, non-music field recordings, etc. The difference between sound and music is subjective of course though.

On an artistic note, music can of course be presented in an infinite amount of ways. Not all these can be represented (i.e., re-presented) on streaming platforms. Installations and generative music for example. That's ok! To be able to represent all this music (and non-music) requires restrictions, otherwise we wouldn't be able to create programs for it in the first place.

Sometimes restrictions on sound content are to make the streaming services friendlier to use, like the formatting of featured artists in titles. Royalty laws put restrictions on the handling of different roles, like songwriters and composers.

BUT nothing is stopping you from building your own way of representing music digitally, so long as you follow relevant laws.

I can't help but feel too old for this piece post-Trump. Eco succeeds in helping us identify fascism, but this is not the problem.

The story of Eco's friendship with African American soldiers is odd to me. Eco sees them as cultured human beings who brought freedom to Italy. And yet he neglects to bring up the racial unfreedom they faced at home, including their future exclusion from the GI Bill. Is this irrelevant because the US is not strictly fascist?

I mean to say we should not ignore the real psychological and economic forces that fascism is composed of. Eco touches on these forces. But it's not enough to stop at classifying whether a state is fascist or not. The forces that compose fascism are always present in liberal democracy, even if they don't crystallize into a mass movement.

What's most disturbing is that the German and Italian masses were not tricked: they desired fascism (even if it was against their material interests). Infantilizing the masses gets us nowhere in our understanding. [1]

I may be critical, but this is still a great piece from Eco. It's full of insights about fascism, and it succeeds at what it says on the tin.

For further reading I highly recommend Wilhelm Reich's Mass Psychology of Fascism

[1] Ripped this paragraph almost word-for-word from Anti-Oedipus