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v64

1,896 karma · joined November 10, 2012

well, I'm just this guy, you know?
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v64··on Ask HN: What underrated open source project deserves more recognition?
https://github.com/BespokeSynth/BespokeSynth

BespokeSynth takes the concept of a modular synthesizer and expands it so that the application is less just a synth and more a complete modular DAW. I've used it to create MIDI/audio workflows that I couldn't get exactly the way I wanted in Ableton or FL Studio. It also has a module for doing livecoded audio processing in Python that I'm just starting to scratch the surface of.

Video from the creator covering I Feel Love in BespokeSynth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzYUgPMMpts

v64··on 6174
Relevant reading: What Are Mathematical Coincidences (and Why Does It Matter)? by Marc Lange [1]

[1] https://philosophy.unc.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/122/2013...

v64··on Cicero: The first AI to play at a human level in Diplomacy (2022)
Interesting video from a pro Diplomacy player playing against multiple instances of Cicero and giving commentary during the game [1]. I can see how there would be people that observe AIs engaging in this kind of strategic planning and extrapolate that to how they may behave if they were to cooperatively make plans against us.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5192bvUS7k

v64··on DALL-E 3 Is So Good It's Stoking an Artist Revolt Against AI Scraping
A dated stereotype at this point. The latest versions of Dalle, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney etc. are much better at this. Generation of words (e.g. making signs that say specific things and not gibberish) has also improved.
v64··on Ask HN: Do you upvote? Why or why not?
I upvote things that I learned from or gave me a new perspective on. Reading the comment was a net positive use of my time. This can include comments I disagree with.

Similarly, I downvote things that I don't perceive as a positive use of time for me or for anyone else. Spam, grossly incorrect information, deliberately inflammatory comments meant to elicit a certain reaction, etc.

If a comment was a waste of time for me personally, but I can see how someone else might benefit from seeing it, I'll do nothing.

v64··on Kikkuli: Why do some people from the distant past become memes?
Thanks for sharing this! I also knew the Airplane reference, but assumed it was some kind of non-sequitur or a joke about a Turkish stereotype I was unfamiliar with.
v64··on Chinchilla’s death
The Llama 1 paper [1] was one of the earlier models to question the assumption that more params = better model. Since then they've released Llama 2 and this post is offering more evidence that reinforces their hypothesis.

I wouldn't say it was an oversight by other labs that they missed this. It's easier to just increase params on a model over the same training set instead of gathering a larger training set necessary for a smaller model. And at first, increasing model size did seem to be the way forward, but we've since hit diminishing returns. Now that we've hit that point, we've begun exploring other options and the Llamas are early evidence of another way forward.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2302.13971

v64··on Csound
The electronic musician BT released a track written entirely in Csound: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ve8WaGmyhfI
v64··on Ask HN: Why did Python win?
Many comments have commented on the ecosystem, but I've thought a big reason behind python's success is that it's also a well designed language in terms of readability and lack of surprise. My background was in perl and shell scripting before finding python and the absolute beautiful form of the language (that whitespace is significant in more ways than one!) and its utter insistence that There's One And Only One Obvious Way To Do It (more or less) made programming much more ergonomic compared to the other similar scripting languages at the time.
v64··on A note to young folks: download the things you love
Can't access the site currently, but thankfully the Wayback Machine downloaded it: https://web.archive.org/web/20230829063148/https://birchtree...
v64··on Auditory illusions with examples from Daft Punk
unfortunately as I said in an adjacent comment, I didn't end up making any recordings of this session, but will keep it in mind if I can make it happen again in the next couple of days!
v64··on Auditory illusions with examples from Daft Punk
My setup's DAWless (this was two synths and a drum machine plugged directly into a mixer that was outputting to speakers) and I didn't end up making any records of this session, so I can't provide WAVs, but I can rule out DAW artifacts :)
v64··on Auditory illusions with examples from Daft Punk
Happens all the time. Most common one for me is when you're making a patch on a synth and by chance dial in those frequencies that align with formants (similar to the Robot Rock effect the post mentions).

Yesterday I was working on a bass drum beat, and after adding some synths playing on top of it, I started to hear the bass drum echo. So, my first thought was I had accidentally enabled some kind of reverb or echo effect on it while I was setting up the synths. After confirming I hadn't and isolated the track to ensure the bass drum was sounding as intended, I chalked it up to some weird illusion between the synths and drum that was making it sound like an echo. I know it's not there in reality, but I can't unhear it.

In this case, I went back and added a little echo to the drum to make the effect intentional, which turned out to sound good, but sometimes I'll try to make the illusion reality and it doesn't have the same effect.

v64··on Sync for Lemmy
FYI, this frontend is available at https://mlmym.org/ and can be used with any lemmy site, not just lemmy.world, source is at https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym
v64··on Super sorry to the guy with the username reset on GitHub
Hear hear!
v64··on FBI Officer Speaks at Law School, Lists Food Not Bombs on “Terrorist Watch List” [pdf] (2006)
> Sounds like the best step forward is to reach out to a local property owner for permission.

That's the point of the law. The property owners won't give permission because they would rather the homeless not be fed and go elsewhere. There are already locations where meals are given to the homeless; this is to discourage bringing the food to wherever the homeless may be in the event that they're not wanted there.

v64··on Is technical analysis just stock market astrology?
Mandelbrot (of the set) studied the effectiveness of technical analysis and wrote about it in The Misbehavior of Markets: A Fractal View of Financial Turbulence. This PDF [1] has a summary of the findings.

Spoilers: The math shows TA's bullshit.

[1] https://users.math.yale.edu/users/mandelbrot/web_pdfs/getabs...

v64··on Terence Tao Uses GPT-4 to Study Mathematics
A relevant comic from SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/sad-2
v64··on How to Do Great Work
That's legit and a sign that you're on the right track. I was an early user of lichess when it was getting started and they were always a better experience than either chess.com or internet chess club, it was just a matter of convincing the best players to play there. Hope things grow and I'll do my best to convince my friends who play to give the site a shot :)
v64··on How to Do Great Work
@cdelsolar, definitely consider Patreon. I mentioned in this comment [1] recently about how so many coders are doing exactly what you wanna be doing, working on awesome projects full time, funded by people who want to see you succeed and to get the opportunity to get a behind the scenes glimpse of how you work, get updates about new things you're working on before anyone else, and getting access to beta testing and new features first.

I've worked with Scrabble players in the past on a personal project [2] and can say this is absolutely the kind of thing they'd go for. I had never heard of woogles.io either and will be passing the link on to them as well.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=36525089

[2] https://github.com/v64/fiend

v64··on Being “rockstars”: when software was a talents/creatives industry
>Same thing now days, but replace Java/accounting with React/CRUD. The rockstar code ninja 10x mentality of 2009 is maybe gone for good, but I see more crazy coders doing rockstar level stuff now than ever before. Asahi Linus and alyssa rosenzweig being great examples from the Asahi project, but these people are all over.

To piggyback on this, I see many coders of this level of talent in many different fields all working on their own projects that are sponsored by Patreon or similar, rather than taking traditional employment with companies in general.

v64··on Bitsavers Software Archive (2022)
Don't quote me on it, but I think this would be possible with v2 of the protocol. Changes were made so that file hashes are also part of the protocol (in addition to piece hashes), so versions of the torrent with added files would not change the hashes of the existing files, enabling users with older versions of the torrent metadata to still join the current swarm and get information on the new files.
v64··on Every Mastodon user has an RSS feed
The URLs are a bit different with those systems. https://social.kernel.org/users/torvalds.rss works (and redirects to https://social.kernel.org/users/torvalds/feed.atom).
v64··on The Federated App Problem
>I'm aware that Mastodon can talk to them with some success, but AFAIK it is only optimized to present certain types of content, so if you want Reddit-like user experience rather than Twitter-like one you want Lenny.

This is partially true. I run Pleroma, which is a microblogging server like Mastodon, so Mastodon content that federates to my instance shows up identically to my own posts. On a system like Lemmy, when their posts federate to me, what I see natively on my instance is a person posting a link that links to the originating website. I can see some replies inline, but they're linear and not threaded like on Lemmy. However, unlike what you said, still using my @me@my.domain identity, I can click the link from my instance to the Lemmy instance and interact with the content there natively. No need to create a different subdomain. There's no need to host a Lemmy instance yourself if you want to interact with Lemmy instances. Lemmy on the backend is still talking the ActivityPub protocol and it's only the frontend that alters how the posts are presented, so as long as your server speaks ActivityPub, you can use the same identity.

v64··on Ask HN: Alternatives to Reddit
This is correct. While it's true that running your own instance is far from simple if you don't have server experience, in my opinion it's the ideal way to interact with the fediverse. I run my own instance, so I know my content is regularly backed up and I have access to the entire fediverse (many larger instances will block other instances at the server level for moderation reasons, so users on those servers are unable to see any content from the blocked instance).

As for community, you have to seek out users on other servers to follow in order to bootstrap yourself, but once you've done that, their posts will federate to your instance and vice versa. You can also go directly to other sites and copy the thread link into your instance to interact with it, or if the site supports it, you can log in via OAuth with your own account and interact natively with the content on the other instance.

v64··on Removing support for forwarded ports
Thanks for posting this, was not aware that they offered this particular service and will look into it!
v64··on Removing support for forwarded ports
Not a dyndns or router issue. My ISP blocks ports upstream, so there's no way to open a port on my home IP. I use the VPN to get an open port on a Mullvad IP and tunnel it to my web server.
v64··on Removing support for forwarded ports
Not OP, but it's the only way I can host a webserver off my home connection, as my ISP blocks ports upstream.

After this was announced, I discussed using tailscale with my friends who use the server; some are technical enough to be able to install the client, others have devices that tailscale can't be installed on, so a tailscale subnet router would have to be set up for those devices. If it's what I have to do, I'll do it, but it's so much simpler just being able to have a publicly addressable IP with an open port.

v64··on What number comes next? The On-line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences knows
cinco is a great resource, I'm on volume CCLXXIX and I'm still finding new numbers I've never even heard of like 2,737,829,283
v64··on Things created with GPT-4
There's a waitlist: https://openai.com/waitlist/gpt-4-api

ChatGPT Plus is also using GPT-4 as its backend

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