riprowan

I don't disagree with you that a well-tagged music repository would be useful - indeed this is the goal of the music genome project - but am trying to point out that the typical requirement for "tagging" music is well beyond almost any individual user. Songs need to be tagged by genre, subgenre, style, mood, tempo, instrumentation, vocalist style, intensity, scale, key, and many more categories in order to adequately be able to mine the database and return results that the typical user would find useful. Then the user would have to be sophisticated enough to form queries that would return useful results. Maybe "uptempo" would be a meaningful result for you but a cross-section of all uptempo music would return unacceptable results for pretty much everyone else.

Who wants to follow Van Halen's "You Really Got Me" with the Endaro Mahaanubhaavulu? Answer: nobody. So you need to define genre. OK, you select "Rock". Now "You Really Got Me" is followed by "Non E Per Sempre." Oops. Still the wrong genre - and also the wrong language.

So you specify "English" words and try to tighten the genre. Now this is harder: is Van Halen "hard rock" or "metal" or "glam rock" (answer: could be any of the above). Pick the wrong one, and you'll accidentally expunge "You Really Got Me" from your listening experience, or include a bunch of Poison and Tesla songs, and you really hate those bands because you think their lyrics are dumb.

Uh-oh. Now you need a way to categorize the thoughtfulness of the lyrics.

The fact is that the requirement that most listeners have is something much more intelligent than a database search. If you've attempted to use the music genome project to find music, you'll know what a difficult process it can be. The music it returns is extremely hit-or-miss - and it is exquisitely tagged. By the way, I do think that the music genome project will solve your particular requirement "show uptempo music from Dave Matthews Band."

I'm not saying it's not possible. I'm saying it requires next-gen AI to (A) adequately categorize music on all needed dimensions and (B) assist the user in forming meaningful queries.

I'm also saying that the experience of radio broadcasting over the last 50 years is that listeners almost always want something that feels extremely familiar and highly curated....

I think you overgeneralize industrial meat production to all forms of ranching.

There are huge areas of the USA that are not amenable to farming but which can be ranched. Raising cattle on these lands does not necessarily consume any water, food, or arable land that would be productively used otherwise. This form of ranching serves many purposes, one of which is to simulate the effect of millions of grazing animals roaming free over the prairies as they did for millennia until about 150 years ago. Another is to eliminate the need for antibiotics, which are not required when grazing animals are not confined and fed a corn diet, and when sick animals are much more easily culled.

There is such a thing as sustainable ranching, just as there is such a thing as sustainable farming. The trick is to incentivize the right kind of ranching. Unfortunately, your suggestion would probably produce more unsustainable ranching, as it would lower margins across the board such that only the industrialists could turn a profit.

To accurately assess the long-term cost/benefit of GMOs vs organic farming, one would need to understand the long-term externalized costs of each.

We understand the long-term impact of organic farming. We do not understand the long-term impact of many GMOs.

The answer is that "cool" and "happy" tags won't find the music you want. Vivaldi's "Spring" and Bobby McFerrin's "Don't Worry Be Happy" and "C'Mon Get Happy" by the Partridge Family are all "happy." As is "Sailing" by Christopher Cross and Charlie Pride's "Kiss an Angel Good Morning."

Turns out that what most people really want when they say "I want to be able to sort/listen to my music by tags" is something that feels like a curated playlist, where the songs naturally work together one-after-another without being jarring, usually within some music category if not within a narrow genre.

> technically possible to get better sound quality than digital

This is simply not true, provided you're not comparing new vinyl on a great turntable to a 64Kbps MP3 from 2001.

You may prefer the sound of vinyl - and that's totally OK - but by any objective standard, "quality digital" reproduction is far more accurate than "quality vinyl" can possibly be - regardless of the vinyl playback technology you want to throw at the argument.

Couple this with the fact that most people listen to vinyl on shit turntables they bought at a clothing store and have no clue how words like "elliptical," "tracking force," or "anti-skating" figure into their listening experience....

On Twitter you can banter around with famous people you'll never meet in real life and who won't friend you on Facebook.

Dev stops. That's reality. If you hand-wave it away, your tellers go down, and you, the CIO, lose your job.

Not all software is under your direct control. Once business processes achieve a stable working state, it is imperative that they maintain uptime, sometimes in excess of six-sigma uptime.

Imagine your business is NASA. Are you going to let mission systems auto-update 18 secs before launch?

Italy cleaner than Germany

libel is already punishable, so judges already have the role of deciding true vs false statements and applying damages when harm is done.

while I don't dismiss your concern, I just wanted to point out that this is not some sort of wholly-unprecedented government authority.

for perspective, libel (publishing false damaging information) is already punishable

so the judicial system already has the "ministry of truth" responsibility, whether or not that bothers you

Also the news today reports "Apple Working with Consumer Reports on Macbook Pro Battery Issue" [1]

Reading between the lines:

"Apple Pressures Consumer Reports to Change its Story"

You don't need to "work with" Consumer Reports to fix the issue. Just fix it.

Why "work with"? Does Consumer Reports have engineers that will help Apple understand the problem? Is Consumer Reports an isolated incident that just needs some tech support to help them understand the computer? Smacks of whitewashing to me.

[1] https://www.cnet.com/news/apple-working-with-consumer-report...

The "standard" for high end audio processing is Pro Tools HD/HDX, which does cost this much in its fully-fledged form.

Users can run a CPU-only version of Pro Tools called HD Native which (along with its competitors like Logic, Sonar, etc) are useful and powerful programs. However they lack the power and depth of plugins available for the hardware-accelerated version of ProTools (and other hardware-accelerated plugins like UAD).

I think the Holy Grail is and has always been to "go native" and get rid of these sorts of accelerator cards as money is better spent on the general-purpose devices that retain their utility better. But we still aren't there yet - when you load up even the best CPUs with lots of convolution processing, too much latency is introduced. So yes, I think there's at least a niche market for the $15K general-purpose computer that truly represents a "bottomless pit" of audio processing power.

I haven't even touched on video editing or 3D rendering, both of which can be even more CPU intensive. When you add all these niches together, they still look like the original power-creative niche Apple was targeting 10 years ago with the Mac Pro and the Macbook Pro, and we still want more power.

Part of the goal is to establish an arms length relationship to lower legal liability.

What if Apple hadn't built the Mac but had gone all-in on the Apple ][gs years earlier?

I remember teaching classes in 1992, when Apple was clearly the engineering leader. How the tables were turned by 1997.

Can't tell if sarcastic or serious.

What if I'm one of the tens of millions of people who do CAD, photo editing, and A/V production?

> Honestly, a team that did nothing but update the MacPro every few months with the latest hardware can't cost that much, especially compared to Apple's coffers. Unless they are so blinded by the need to have huge margins. They don't need to change the industrial design for every iteration.

I think you hit the nail on the head there.

I bet everyone on this thread would have been happy if Apple had just revved the Macbook Air and Macbook Pro lines instead of rolling out a whole new product concept in the MB and MBP:

MBA 11" & 13" - rev the guts, upgrade to Retina display w/thinner bezels, upgrade Thunderbolt port to USB-C / Lightning

MBP 13" & 15" - rev the guts, upgrade Thunderbolt to USB-C / Lightning

No new MB or MBP redesigns needed. Tons of money saved. Happy customers.

>the critical features of OS X that aren't replicable with a reasonable amount of effort on other systems?

the apps

So one way this fraud is committed is by consuming the content (youtube videos, spotify plays, etc) and taking in the direct revenue streams.

The bigger picture is virality. Nobody wants to watch your video with 100 views. Same video with 10M views, now everyone has to watch it.

The music business has been doing this so much for so long that it's to the point where I automatically distrust everything that's "popular" as having been gamed.

The problem is that while this might work great on a large scale, it breaks down at the individual level: why would I want all that ad-clicking activity associated with my account / cookie / IP?

Fair enough to make the comparison perhaps a poor one. However I don't think that people do yoga in saunas, but rather remain seated, correct? The point I'm getting at is: isn't the question "what's the net rise in body temperature?" In hot yoga, the room isn't as hot as a sauna but you're exercising strenuously, so that the body becomes about as hot as you can safely heat a body, kinda like a sauna.

It's entirely possible that everything you say is true, however, the jeering tone and sweeping generalizations are the opposite of the sort of polite, rational discourse that seems to be constantly missing in these discussions.

> DoSing the network doesn't require you deanonymize them, merely that you can fill most of their anonymous routes with traffic

At best if you're "successful" then you merely take all the current Bitcoin users and scatter them into a hundred different competing and more anonymous cryptos. Oops.

In the south we have fire ants. The thing about fire ants is that if you disrupt the nest you had better kill them all, because if you mess with a nest today, in a few days you'll have 5 nests to deal with. And so on.

Crypto is like fire ants in this regard.

Thank you. Someone should point this out to the people developing Bitcoin :(

Sure, there might be other avenues of attack, but filling up the blockchain as OP suggested isn't a good one.

I'm going to take a very unpopular position in the name of rational discussion in the hopes that this forum can hear the message.

For the record, I am of the opinion that anthropogenic warming is real. However, I think it's wise and even scientific to be skeptical of solutions implemented primarily because "we have to do something" in the absence of diligent logical and cost-benefit analysis, which I'm not sure has always been communicated to the public.

Here are the assumptions you must accept in order to go from "hey, it appears the Earth is warming and it looks like it's mankind's fault" (a statement I think most everyone can agree with) to "here is the plan for action."

Some of these assumptions are fairly solid, others maybe not so much. Some are quite controversial, intentionally, to stimulate discussion. I will reiterate my intent here is not to be a denialist but to present the argument of a stone-cold realist.

1. Assumption: we can accurately measure whether the earth is getting warmer or not.

This requires us to accept that the proxy data (ice core samples, tree rings, etc.) are sufficiently reliable to provide a good baseline for comparison on geologic scales, and that the timeline of climate change data that these sources provide is adequately large to be meaningful. (1,000 years versus 1 billion, for example)

I think most people here will agree that the proxy data are good.

Now that you’ve proven that the Earth is in fact getting warmer, we have to ask if

2. We can accurately assess the cost and benefit of global warming

Perhaps global warming produces net long term benefits to humankind. Humans tend to alwayss adopt a "change is bad" posture - however, with climate, "change is inevitable."

I know this is a very controversial hypothesis - most people wouldn't dare to ask the question - but we must. Why should we assume that the current global temperature is optimal for life on Earth or even human habitability? We might find that a warmer planet is quite beneficial. If so, we need not bother with solutions, as there is no problem. It's my opinion that the science to date seems content with "any change is bad" but in my opinion that is weak science.

But that's not my axe to grind. Let's assume the analysis is correct, and that global warming produces a net cost to society in general. Now, we need to determine if

3. We can accurately assess man’s contributions to global warming

Here is a significant problem for science to solve. It is likely that at least some of the warming we are experiencing is due to non-anthropogenic forces. Should policies be put into place that try to offset these as well as the anthropogenic sources of warming? We ought to have at least some good idea by how much is mankind warming the planet before we put in place policies to offset it.

I'm not sure we really understand that, but let's say we do. Now the question becomes how well...

4. We can accurately model and predict how changes to man’s behavior will affect the warming trend

Many changes have been proposed with obvious economic and social consequences. How will those changes affect global warming? Is it conceivable that we might overshoot? Or perhaps the combined effect of available changes is completely negligible. If we don’t know the impact of a particular change, then we’re really just shooting in the dark.

Let’s assume we can, in fact, measure the impact of particular changes on the climate. Now, we must presume

5. That we can meaningfully lower man’s impact on the climate through a coordinated global effort

Perhaps we discover a few changes that, if made, would reduce or eliminate man’s effect on the climate. Could these changes be implemented globally? It is unlikely that a few local changes would have significant impact, and global changes are very hard to implement.

Let’s assume #1 through #5 are demonstrable. We have now demonstrated that global warming is real, that it is bad, that man is causing it, that there are a set of changes which will result in a meaningful solution, and that these changes are globally feasible. I don't think we know all of those things, and that's a problem, but let's say we do know them.

Now we need to demonstrate to some degree of satisfaction:

6. That the global efforts at combating anthropogenic global warming have a net quality of life and economic benefit around the globe. In other words, the costs of remediation are outweighed by the benefits.

It is entirely possible that humanity could embark on a set of policy changes that would have very bad consequences for humanity while having negligible consequences on climate change. This possibility is greatly increased by a "we have to do something!" mentality.

Again - my argument is not intended to present a denialist story. I actually think that anthropogenic warming is real, I personally support some of the policies to combat it, and I personally try to minimize my impact on the planet in my own small way. My argument is only intended to provoke discussion about the difficulty in responsibly getting from "we have a problem" to "here is the solution."

Seems like you could do a great confirmation study with participants in Bikram / hot yoga where the temps are 105F for 90 mins with ~50% humidity.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say the sauna cohort and the Bikram cohort are two extremely different sets of individuals with lots of different behaviors, so if the same effect was found in regular Bikram yogis a lot of variables might be able to be eliminated.

> For a relatively small cost, the blockchain could be flooded with bogus junk to DoS.

It's certainly possible for a government to pay to consume the available space in a blockchain with a very small capacity limit such as Bitcoin has, but I think you miss the very important dynamics that undermine this attack vector - namely that such an attack is a wealth transfer from the attacker to the defender. This is antifragility at its finest.

Let's say that some acronym-agency decided to "spam" the blockchain as you suggest.

The result would not be a "DoS-like" disruption to the mining or node network itself, but just an increase in the cost to make a transaction (we've seen this in the so-called "spam attacks" on the Bitcoin blockchain in the last year). Beyond a certain transaction cost, the demand for space in the blockchain will just diffuse to a competing crypto with cheaper transactions and be harder to trace. Oops.

Moreover, in the meantime, the attacker is simply transferring his wealth to the miners in the form of artificially high fees. The miners will happily accept the attackers money and use it to build more mining capacity. If blocks stay full, eventually miners will decide to mine larger blocks, raising the cost of the attack. How polite of the attacker to pay the mining network to build out capacity to handle his attack!

The result is that all the activity you hoped to suppress just diffuses to other cryptos and becomes harder to track. Meanwhile the attacker is subsidizing a better mining network. That's a bad attack.

Relaxing (or removing) the block size constraint doesn't help the attacker. With a higher constraint, the attacker must spend more to fill up the blockchain, raising the cost of the attack and increasing the wealth transfer from the attacker to the miner.

Bitcoin clients like Bitcoin Unlimited that would make the limit a dynamic variable create a whole new wrinkle for the attacker: because such a limit is an emergent network property, the attack cannot even really be accurately planned or budgeted - the attacker literally has to hit a moving target.

But let's say our attacker doesn't care about plan or budget. As the attacker fills space on our "Unlimited" blockchain, blocks could bloat to the maximum size tolerated by a supermajority of the node network - the "emergent" blocksize limit. This is exactly the same size the "preplanned" blocksize limit would eventually ratchet up to in a sustained block-filling attack, the only difference is the mechanism used to raise the limit.

IOW, if you think this "spam attack" through - regardless of the block size limit - the network will automatically adjust to make the cost of the attack as expensive as possible, minimizing the disruption to normal users and maximizing the wealth transfer from the attacker to the miner.

The fact that blockchain "spam attacks" are actually wealth transfers from the attacker to the mining network is the primary reason why these events cannot even be correctly viewed as "attacks" - these are paying customers!

A blockchain spam attack is exactly like trying to shut down Starbucks by planting a million stooges at every store to purchase lattes so that regular customers can't shop there. Starbucks gets rich from all the money the attacker is feeding it, and organic demand for coffee just shifts to other stores.

TL;DR I think there's no such thing as a blockchain spam attack - the worst that an attacker could do might be to raise transaction prices on the Bitcoin blockchain and keep them artificially high for long enough that demand for Bitcoin transactions eventually collapses and (counterproductively for our attacker) goes to other cryptos.

You should consider by how much bitcoin or some similar crypto could strengthen the Hawala system. It's a marriage made in heaven.