ofalkaed

The Octopus Carwash is one of my early memories from trips to the twin cities, probably the first time I have seen it or thought about it in 40 years. Kind of weird to stumble on that after all these years, I opened the link curious if there would be anything from my Minnesota childhood but did not expect that.

PureData is a good example.

Believe you have to do that anyways unless you are going to create full language bindings as tkinter and the like do. I don't know the Tk API in full but I don't believe it provides ways to create widgets, just interact with them more directly. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable will fill in the gaps here, I learned what I needed of the Tk API and called it good.

>you can have Tk (as long as your Cobol allows you to call C).

No C required, you can just connect to the UI through a socket and often skip the FFI completely. This is my preferred way to use Tk and I don't even consider anything else unless there is a reason. Working this way also has the nice side effect of making the application UI agnostic.

That is absolutely true of the chatbots we have access to but I suspect there are people working towards these ends, including all the big names in the field, major win for their company if they manage it. But even then, I have yet to see a model that could naturally handle subtext and context, they struggle even when dealing with programming languages where these things are far simpler than they are in human language.

There is also the problem with how easy it is to back them into a corner where they start acting in very unnatural ways. This would arise when challenging them on their humanity and most people would pick up on it and craft their challenges around it until it fell apart because that is how people work in such adversarial situations.

Within a few minutes of picking up a guitar my fingers start to stiffen up, I crack them and then all is well, been doing this for 30 odd years now and the joints of my hands are some of the few which don't cause me problems at this point in my life. I never could crack my knuckles before I started playing guitar and if I stop playing for a few weeks, I cease being able to crack my knuckles.

These articles on knuckle cracking never seem to say anything but state, but sort of maybe could be but your aunt is almost certainly wrong unless or maybe in certain exceptions. For the majority of people I think we crack our knuckles for the same reason we often stretch when we get up, it relieves a tension that needs relieving.

>You'd think that LLMs fulfill this, but I do wonder if a clever human could still discern between them given their particularities.

While LLMs are very capable of appearing human in general conversation, the test is that they are trying to convince a human that they are human, which is not something that is in their training data and I suspect they would go about things in very odd ways from an actual person, especially when challenged by an actual person. It is still very easy to back LLMs into a corner where they fall into very unnatural patterns and in my experience challenging them on their "humanness" (or anything) backs them into that corner.

LLMs also still can't use context or subtext in natural ways and even people who are terrible with purposefully exploiting context and subtext, generally have a natural ability that they developed to use and parse them. In a short conversation that is not adversarial, this is not an issue but falls apart as the length of the conversation grows or they start getting challenged.

LLMs just don't play with ideas and conversation like we do, they don't riff on it and go with the flow without care, picking up on subtexts and contexts and manipulating them the way people constantly do without effort until they find themselves on the edge of a cliff looking into the void and debating if they should jump. If we are put into the situation of proving we are human (in an academic test sort of way) we will play with it and have fun with it, and we will find ourselves on that cliff looking into the void, debating if we should expose ourselves and admit things we normally wouldn't. We pick up on this when people do it, even over the internet, their way of stating things changes and their subtext falls away or drastically changes; I have never seen anything approaching this in LLMs.

It takes no effort to play LLM or not, you don't need to know anything about the topic or put anytime into reading and understanding the submission, just find that em-dash and you can turn every discussion into meta slop.

They don't need to be on the ground to release as a rule, there are just situations which make it very difficult or impossible for them to release without being on the ground. The bald eagle courtship would be suicide if they could not release while in the air. For light loads they are quite good at releasing stuff in the air and will pass nesting materials and food to each other while in flight.

https://youtu.be/gGjPrX84SMU

Interestingly, it is not always the case that birds can drop what they catch. I never knew this until I watched an eagle struggle to shore after it caught a fish that turned out to be too large for it to fly off with or do what it needed to do to be able to release the fish until it got to land. I have no idea about the swimming ability of an eagle but they certainly can't swim when they have a large fish in their claws, it was quite the struggle for that eagle to get to shore.

https://www.raptorresource.org/2021/01/22/racheting-raptor-t...

Link for with the video not sped up to make it seem more dramatic. Personally, I found the real time video to be more dramatic and impressive.

https://www.wionews.com/trending/giant-iceberg-flips-violent...

I have never liked split keyboards but I might if each keyboard was also a mouse with its own cursor, it seems fun to develop the skill to work that way. Would also be useful at times if the the Thinkpad trackpoint and trackpad could each have their own cursor and I could leave one somewhere. Or maybe a cursor stack like pushd/popd, registers would probably work better; instead of virtual desktops just give me one massive desktop with cursor locations I can jump between, switch to cursor 3 it saves the location of the current cursor and jumps.

Apparently so, he does not seem to be giving me any choice in the matter.

Jokes are downvoted not because of a lack humor but because if we reward making jokes we will have to scroll through dozens of jokes and all of their responses to get the actual discussion. Voting is about keeping the on topic and worthwhile discussion at the top with everything else buried beneath it.

Of coarse they are going to pick Steam and Netflix and social media just like 20 years ago they picked reading Harry Potter, majority of people want to use their time alone towards connecting with people and they put that time towards things which will help them connect with people. At least 99% of the books I have read I have not gotten to discuss with someone on a meaningful level, even if I met someone who has read the book I just read and loved there is a fair chance they read it years ago and can't say much about it, there are just too many books.

I wish things were different but the logistics of it are not in my favor. If I were to sit down after work and watch the baseball game, I would know that millions of other people are doing the exact same thing and I will be able to discuss it at work tomorrow. You can't do that with books, not even with current best sellers, which do offer better odds but even with those you are not sharing the moment with millions of people who are also just as alone as you are.

I was 17 before I met someone with who there was a real bond through literature, and they went on to family and work and all that. But that is fine even if that relationship has never been replaced because my interest in literature has never been about socializing, it has been about literature.

In the early days of the guitar it had tied gut frets, it was microtonal by nature and you could move the frets for different temperaments. Then in the 19th century things changed and the guitar got fixed metal frets, ever since people have been trying to figure out how to have the benefits of both. 1852 is the first attempt that I know of.

https://collectionsdumusee.philharmoniedeparis.fr/search.asp...

>almost as old as guitar-family instruments.

They are as old as we can trace it back, vihuela/viola de mano were multi-course, as was the baroque guitar which developed from them. The romantic guitar brought us single string courses and in the guitar family double courses died out other than in a few nooks and crannies. I don't think this has any effect on what TFA proposes and the author is well aware of this bit of information, but it has been years since I read it and maybe I am forgetting something?

Beckett directing the play in question.

https://youtu.be/FqpjddXaw4E

https://youtu.be/Q77jgal4Gto

His em-dash usage is not clearly defined and distinct from other punctuation marks, it introduces a fair amount of unintended ambiguity. It is easy enough to understand but a few times I had to stop and try and figure out if there was some nuance and intent behind it all.

>And—well, here,

That was especially egregious. And! but—well, here, I guess, if I had to guess—which I don't(but I will)—the purpose of his essay seems to be, that; unintended ambiguity is good and really quite nice from an aesthetic standpoint. David Bently Hart seems to be the anti-McCarthy and falls into all the same traps as McCarthy, just walks into them backwards and blindfolded through a parentheses and a digression instead of jumping in head first.

Tree squirrels are big on digging, they bury food for later retrieval and eat a good amount of terrestrial foods. You regularly see them on the ground even in dense forest. Flying squirrels stick more to the trees but their gliding ability means dense forest is not a requirement for avoiding the ground.

I agree and even when they offer something new, they stick close to well established topologies generally just adding in more. I don't need 8 flavors of filter that I have to scroll through with a single button, just give me one or two good ones. Great that you are giving me four envelops but if they all trigger at the same time it is not that useful, provide some other way to trigger them or give us a trigger delay. Distortion after the filter? why? put it before so I can shape it, I can apply post filter distortion outside the box if I want it and there it can take advantage of the envelope's dynamics. But thanks for giving me a tincan reverb and a delay that can't be clocked by the LFOs or even synced.

There are so many simple things they could do to greatly increase what these synths are capable of, but they don't.

Oh, and give me a way to wipe the memory or at least a bank of empty patches so I don't have to delete a preset every single time or make an empty patch to save over the presets or make a file of empty patches on the computer that I can copy over through midi.

I could go on, 30 years of hitting my head against the same walls. I am almost at the point of building my own synth and a bela and a pi-zero would make it pretty easy to do, but I haven't quite gotten irritated enough to do it, would rather spend that time making music.

Neither TFA or this thread are legally binding, there are no consequences other than some fun and maybe finding something new to read.

Barlow?

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8683/8683-h/8683-h.htm

I wouldn't actually vote for him but I don't think he should be forgotten and he should be mentioned in such a discussion. I would probably say Stein, solely for The Making of Americans.

It would be more accurate to say they are prioritizing the ears of the average person, HF hearing starts its decline in our teens. But this is an age old industry standard that had been the standard because of limitations of recording, the mediums, transmission, reproduction, and the quirks of our ears. There has only been a brief period in the history of recording where we really used this range, and during that period we saw a resurgence of the old mediums and a great deal of talk about their "warm" sound, part of that sound being the removal of those high frequencies. It is not an accident that almost no instruments produce much of anything above 16khz, the instruments evolved with how we hear and the fact that most everyone has either decreased sensitivity or no hearing above ~16khz.

Going from memory these are all pre OS8? Scrolling through I expected to see a massive change when OS8 hit but I don't think this ever gets there. My memory might be faulty, but I did recognize the various flavors of 7.x. Surprising to see how long the OS6 aesthetic kept on. It was fun to scroll through and all the memories. Surprising how strong of an effect these icons had on me.

Felt a little betrayed to see it used powershell scripts to make the website.

How do you know he did not follow his own advice? Metafiction becomes a cheap trick if you are not upfront about it, you either make it clear from the start or end up in "it was all a dream" territory.

Second chapter becomes the first chapter if you throw away the first chapter, should you also throw that away? I guess Zeno would approve. Vonnegut's advice and most if not all of the common advice given to aspiring writers has truth in it but it tends to be too pithy for its own good. The first chapter needs to lay the groundwork for everything that follows and this applies for everything from genre and essays to the complicated and experimental works of literary fiction. Why should the reader care?

Vonnegut is ultimately pushing back against the old saw of the captivating first sentence, many aspiring writers fall into the trap of trying start their book by trying to captivate the reader at cost of laying that foundation; if I can just word this opening paragraph perfectly, the readers will be hooked. It is a fairly dishonest way to go about things. Everything the reader needs to know about what you are writing needs to be covered in that first chapter or paragraph or chapters or section or whatever metric applies to what you are writing, the trick is that you need to present it in a way that does not spoil everything to come.

If you get fixated on captivating the reader with the opening, tossing the first chapter and reworking the second is decent advice, but it might be better to just rework the first. All of these pithy bits of writing advice have truth in them and have a great deal to teach you but far too many aspiring writers tend to accept them as dogma.

I go out of my way to avoid icons everywhere possible and mostly have lived icon free since sometime around the turn of the century. I despise icons, but these old Mac icons do tug some strings, I don't hate them and may even like them, I absolutely have some serious nostalgia for the days when they were a part of my life.

Presidents signing stuff into law is almost always a publicity stunt (politics), once passed it becomes law in 10 days regardless if the president signed it. The exception is if it passed during the last 10 days of a session; president has to sign for it to become law so congress can know before they leave Washington. The pocket veto being a veto of inaction, president does not sign or veto a bill that was passed in the last 10 days of the session and just forgets about it in his pocket or wherever.

Many sources including government sources like to pretend that the president must sign a bill into law but it is not the case. Most of how the "news" reports on this stuff is purely political and has no connection to reality.

That is not something inherent in guitars themselves, it is the norm in steel string guitars and the fan-braced/Spanish guitar but mostly because that is the norm for all those mass produced guitars which make up the bulk of guitars. On steel string you can often greatly decrease this quality just by switching to flatwounds, this is part of the flatwound sound, it shifts the timbrel content into the players technique but if you want much timbrel content with flatwounds you need heavy strings and a high action, and the hand strength and technique that sort of setup requires.

Before the rise of the steel string and the Spanish guitar, guitars tended to be more even across their range and also had less bass which helped even them out, and now that sound is what we are used to. There have always been niches that wanted that more even sound, but for most that just makes it more difficult to play all that music that developed around these quirks, so they remain niches.