mcnamaratw

Of course there were analog 'computers' but vacuum tubes were also used to realize digital computers in the early days.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum-tube_computer

Maybe we agree, maybe we disagree. You got specific works and authors? That would help a lot.

Don’t be a d**k. Lots of literary fiction is perfectly readable for normal humans. Lots of what isn’t accessible is just not that enjoyable to anybody. I’m happy to debate … but only using specific examples. Authors and titles.

The example of noise music came up elsewhere in the discussion. It’s an important example. Most people won’t ever like it. You fill the pipeline with noise music, 99% of us will literally listen to anything else, or to nothing. I like a little bit of it, but in general I’m simply not going to acquire that taste.

“This is fundamental misunderstanding of literature”

No it is not. It is a central and vital part of literature.

Wound you like to have a friendly debate, each of us using quotations from any fiction writers we like?

Great example. It is absolutely a matter of taste. Sadly noise music doesn’t support a lot of full-time jobs compared to writing songs more or less the way the Beatles did. Which was all new and stuff, but not completely foreign to what Stephen Foster did.

We can try to reinvent writing, or we can focus on writing. But one may come at the expense of the other.

Then why is Kurt Vonnegut still so popular?

What is that stuff? Is Kurt Vonnegut that stuff?

Folks, downvoting the comment above is literally destroying what you claim to support.

Of course that’s punishing, though 75% may be closer than 90%. But I don’t buy it as the root cause. Where is the new Susanna Kaysen or Lionel Shriver or Laurie Moore or Barbara Kingsolver?

But that’s new. Until ca 1970-2000, people read literary fiction because it was high quality, much more than because it was unrelateable. O’Hara, Salinger, and Franzen were not writing about the outer edges of human experience.

That’s the old standby argument, and it may be right. I can’t really read John Barth or George Saunders the way I can read Richard Russo or Lionel Shriver or Kurt Vonnegut or Michael Chabon or Barbara Kingsolver. For me the experimental writers are very unpleasant to actually read. David Foster Wallace is just inside that frontier for me, and I can enjoy IJ. Bernard Malamud was pretty dark but I could hang in. But Paul Auster … I love what nonfiction writing I’ve seen, but the New York trilogy is so dark and Spartan it makes Joy Division look like disco.

Nitpick: I finally gave up on Pynchon, but is he really postmodern??

It’s really not accurate to say that a photon has no position at all. How would a photodiode work? You have to be careful with this stuff. https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/492711/whats-the...

Not all of that is true. Who played with the un-updated CD version?

Sure. But inventing something better is not reinventing the wheel. Those are two completely different activities.

I’m sorry but you’re mistaken. The wheel was invented thousands of years ago.

Yeah. Ok. You want the fine print? Reinvent the wheel … for your own learning and fun. Or invent a different kind of wheel.

Don’t reinvent the wheel on a tight deadline while the rest of the team does useful work. Don’t reinvent the wheel and then expect to be rewarded or respected as if you had really invented something.

No, dB are always power gain.

Kind of agree. But pervasive downvoting by folks who don’t understand the subject is a form of forum rot. The risk is only that we expose the rot. Not such a terrible risk, because either the owners notice and fix the problem, or the forum continues to rot. In the latter case karma points wont be desirable in the long run.

Dale Gribble

The economic boom isn’t helping everyone.

The book is from basically the “experimental music” school of electronic music. The idea was/is that music will be completely transmuted by electronics and computers, leaving traditional music behind. Here “traditional music” means almost everything people actually listen to, from orchestras to GarageBand electronica to pop.

The claim may be a bit aspirational right now, but in theory “electronic music” subsumes all music. Or enlarges music so much that traditional musical ideas are special cases, not necessarily relevant.

I’m trying to pitch this properly as a very cool concept. But I no longer believe it will happen in my lifetime.

Thanks. Agreed, that could have been a good point to mention that Laplace transforms are more or less the same as Heaviside’s method. As I read it, the article leaves the opposite impression instead.

Great. Possibly missed the opportunity to point out that Heaviside’s method is more or less the same as Laplace transforms.

Good point, your suppliers need to get singular too. And sales. And management or investors.

Just on the naive math level, a simple growing exponential has no singularity at any finite time. I’m sure Vinge knows that but some of those dudes don’t seem to.

EDIT Rest in peace. Fire Upon the Deep was great.

It’s cool that you’re a native speaker, but the typical HN commenter is at a much higher level of proficiency than that.

Irony notice. This comment contains irony.

Nobody knows anything better than HN, ever.

It’s easy to forget this, but what we’re calling AI is chat bots.

Why? MIT could just rein these people in, and the reputational damage would stop right away.

In 20 years, expect daily stand-up Programming Motherfucker meetings.