ssalazar

It looks most similar to a Rhodes piano-type electromechanical keyboard, where tuned metal elements are somehow actuated and then sonified with a guitar pickup. Unlikely theres any FM which would require independently digitizing each of the resonators and just generally a lot of complexity that doesnt seem warranted.

The similarity in timbre isn't coincidental though -- FM is noted for its ability to emulate complex timbres like bells/metallic tones (such as electric pianos) that are challenging for more traditional subtractive synthesis architectures.

Many people who get into software development before 2010 or so have easily spent hundreds of dollars on dev tools of a similar nature.

Sharing my experience if it helps. I graduated in 2006 from Princeton CS, cum laude, with no job offers from any tech company. This was even before the global financial crisis of 2007-2009, so I didn't really have an excuse. I was lucky enough to be hired in the CS lab where I did my senior thesis work, as a research assistant, to continue some of the work I did for my senior thesis.

At the time it felt like a humbling experience to still be hanging around campus after already having graduated, but now I look back on those times fondly. The work I did then was on an open source research project that ended up being a cornerstone of my future career, that people still bring up when I meet folks at conferences or other industry events. Eventually I picked up an internship in San Francisco, and from there the job opportunities poured in. I've had a rich and colorful career since, and am currently the CTO of a small-ish tech company in the music space.

Your best bet is to continue investing in work that is in public that you can point to for employers and friends. Its easier said than done to frame a perceived failure as an opportunity, but thats the only constructive way to get through it; looking back, thats exactly been my experience.

This blog post (and blog in general) has some detailed descriptions of different control laws, how they are activated, and how they contributed to the conditions of this particular crash: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/trial-by-fire-the-crash-...

The above post is focused on a Sukhoi jet, with some comparison to Airbus' design, but they also cover Airbus in another post: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/the-long-way-down-the-cr...

Lmao no, what Ive described is a reasonably competent junior engineer.

> very fancy search engines

This is a common misunderstanding of LLMs. The major, qualitative difference is that LLMs represent their knowledge in a latent space that is composable and can be interpolated. For a significant class of programming problems this is industry changing.

E.g. "solve problem X for which there is copious training data, subject to constraints Y for which there is also copious training data" can actually solve a lot of engineering problems for combinations of X and Y that never previously existed, and instead would take many hours of assembling code from a patchwork of tutorials and StackOverflow posts.

This leaves the unknown issues that require deeper reasoning to established software engineers, but so much of the technology industry is using well known stacks to implement CRUD and moving bytes from A to B for different business needs. This is what LLMs basically turbocharge.

I didnt make it past the long list of id() misuses, but its a rookie mistake to confuse referential equality with value equality, and when doing so youre in for a bad time.

For those who aren't already familiar, James Burke in Connections has a great summary/rundown of this technological progression from Jacquard loom to census tabulator to computer punchcard, starting around the 36 minute mark here (though the whole video is worth watching).

https://youtu.be/z6yL0_sDnX0?si=NtyyybZSGCKmktdG&t=2150

The Agency on Showtime also prominently features the Barbican as the protagonist's residence with a number of great exterior shots.

Im saying, lets see some actual reasoning behind the extrapolation rather than "just trust me bro" or "sama said this in a TED talk". Many of the comments here and elsewhere have been in the latter categories.

Thanks -- this is what I mean by evidence, someone with actual experience and skin in the game weighing in rather than blustering proclamations based on vibes.

I agree they improve productivity to where you need fewer developers for a similar quantity of output than before. But I dont think LLMs specifically will reduce the need for some engineer to do the higher level technical design and architecture work, just given what Ive seen and my understanding of the underlying tech.

Im using them fine. Im refuting the grandparent's point that they will replace basically all programming activities (including architecture) in 5 years.

Thanks -- this is much more thoughtful than the persistent chorus of "just trust me, bro".

I code with multiple LLMs every day and build products that use LLM tech under the hood. I dont think we're anywhere near LLMs being good at code design. Existing models make _tons_ of basic mistakes and require supervision even for relatively simple coding tasks in popular languages, and its worse for languages and frameworks that are less represented in public sources of training data. I am _frequently_ having to tell Claude/ChatGPT to clean up basic architectural and design defects. Theres no way I would trust this unsupervised.

Can you point to _any_ evidence to support that human software development abilities will be eclipsed by LLMs other than trying to predict which part of the S-curve we're on?

This author presumably understands but buries the lede that for an endowment of $15 billion a university would typically only spend 5%, or $750 million, annually. So "a mere $400m" is over half of the annual funds from the endowment (not including tuition income and donations) that might be available to a university with such an endowment.

It should be relatively obvious that spending into the principal of an endowment is not a sustainable practice over the long-term for universities that are operating at the scale of centuries.

Some of this is probably driven by mobile usage and unifying the experience between mobile <> desktop. But the truth is a team almost certainly tested this and measured an improvement of some topline performance metric. (Hacker News articles comparing YT before and after screenshots is not one of their topline metrics.)

Its not offset, its amortized. Your effective flour / pizza is (300 + 300) / num_pizzas. The total marginal flour expended will go up as you make more pizzas, but the effective cost will actually go down as the upfront cost is amortized over lifetime usage.

I'm ambivalent about Severance, though folks here may appreciate that it has many excellent establishing shots of the magnificent Bell Labs Holmdel Complex.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bell_Labs_Holmdel_Complex

Counterpoint: I don't want a boss who is so detached from the rest of life & society that they have copious free time on nights and weekends to practice coding.

Double digits, in binary, at least

You dont have to imagine! Thats less than a sixth of a percent of the entire US federal budget :)

I have no specific insider knowledge, but a decade+ ago they bought a company called the Echo Nest that was developing some of the best audio signal analysis algorithms around, I assume much of that influenced their recommender system.

Nowadays, they have a quite busy research department so I would imagine that recommendation is quite fancy indeed: https://research.atspotify.com

> This means there might be something universal about octave and fifth

There is! At least for the kinds of instruments that are conventionally used in Western music. The harmonic series arises naturally from the physical properties of a string or wind instrument (e.g. violins, guitars, pianos, flutes, brass, organs, etc). As a very rough description of the physical phenomena, the tones we hear arise from a full spectrum, atonal excitation (like a pluck or a reed flapping) bouncing back and forth along the length of string or tube, which is basically a one-dimensional "waveguide". Frequencies that are aligned with the harmonic series naturally reinforce themselves, in the same way that putting energy at the top of the arc of a playground swing has more of an effect than in the middle.

Notably, musical instruments that are not strings or tubes, or more general sound-producing bodies, have more complicated patterns of sound waves dispersing through them, and don't typically follow the harmonic series. Pitched percussion, drum heads, or bells have more complicated harmonic spectra than the standard harmonic series (as they are generally thought of as 2D or 3D waveguides where cancellation/reinforcement patterns are less straightforward), as do less musically conventional sounds like knocking two rocks together or striking an arbitrary surface.

> By this definition, the end of the line is a totally passive consumption of endorphin-inducing pablum that blots out the real world.

Doesn't seem all that different from 99% of media consumption thats existed in my lifetime.

Copyleft / GPL licenses require copyright law to have any threat of enforcement. Otherwise anyone could just ignore the terms of a copyleft license and use open source under any terms they wish.

Fair point. Even with the valuations exactly the same, Snap's case demonstrates resilience to "American tech giants making life tough for statups."

In the specific case of Stripe, Ill gladly take a larger bureaucratic moat in exchange for PCI compliance. The cryptocurrency world is rediscovering this tradeoff all over again.

That doesnt materially change anything I said. They made it to IPO without getting swallowed or beat by a tech giant, they won.

This can cut both ways. Even after the recent massive dip, Snap's valuation is an order of magnitude greater than Facebook's notorious buyout offer. Twitter's Fleets feature lasted less than a year, and Im not sure that their Clubhouse-"inspired" feature has gained much traction. Its not clear that even Facebook will be able to disrupt Tiktok's momentum. Slack exists and is successful despite consolidated offerings from the tech giants (Google famously has a double-digit number of chat apps).

Generally, startups have drastically less internal momentum, bureaucracy, tech debt, or politics to contend with and are much better positioned to push fresh ideas, and be responsive to customer needs rather than fitting a larger corporate narrative. But its fair to say that if a startup idea is really just a feature idea (even a really good, well-executed feature idea, like Calendly) and doesn't scale its ambition beyond that, the best outcome to hope for is a buyout, and at worst being built internally by a giant.

On the other hand, its never been easier to start a software business thanks to incentives from the tech giants. Google Cloud is basically free to start up and gain traction with. Granted, there may be downsides to this, but not having to think too hard about infra opens up a lot of opportunities at the same time.

Even higher end brands like Samsung are pulling stuff like this. Market forces demand constant growth, and in a saturated market this means some business unit manager will keep adding more invasive advertising as long as people keep buying the TVs.