veli_joza

Great read.

TLDR Shannon's approach to creativity and few mental tools for problem-solving:

  * simplify by eliminating everything from the problem except the essentials; cut the problem down to size
  * seek similar known problems, find analogies and apply solutions to your problem
  * try to restate the problem in just as many different ways as you can
  * generalize the building blocks by trying to apply them to broader class of problems
  * structurally analyse the problem - break it down into sequence of smaller mental leaps
  * invert the problem and see if it's solvable by retracing from solution to the start

Just to follow up on the first issue: my laptop has a touch screen. The framework I use (Love2D, which is built on SDL2) can detect this and receives multiple simultaneous touches.

In Harmopark the touchscreen is detected, but multi-touch doesn't work. Therefore I had to use touchpad.

Auto-voicing is complicated and it's very culture-specific. One good implementation is this: http://www.sealab2021.tv/etcetera/choir/

Besides already given references, here's two more:

https://shiverware.com/musixpro/harmonic/chords.html http://www.altkeyboards.com/home

Now I've spent some time with harmopark, let me share some thoughts.

Experience is somewhat clumsy on laptops without mouse. Maybe in 'select mode' the left click could also toggle selected nodes. On tablet the interface makes more sense.

I like how easy it is to enter a progression and generate a musical loop. Harmonic table is great choice for working with chords.

Arpeggios sound great. With a bit of reverb and delay there are some nifty soundscapes in there. The synths themselves could use some improvement.

Sound settings could perhaps be pulled out of modal into main page? I had fun fiddling with settings, I'd like them to be more accessible & exposed.

It would be nifty if 'explore harmony' chords could be dragged onto progression track. Maybe clicking a chord in that modal could make it a active selection and than it could be dragged from selection info.

Thanks for sharing this with us. It looks great already and I'll drop in occasionally to check for updates.

Somewhat related - here's my hexagonal musical instrument for Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.castlewrat...

Unlike Harmopark's focus on composition and music theory features, my app is all about preforming music in real time.

I've been down that rabbit hole. Math and music aren't really in such harmony as advertised. Yeah, equal tuning gives your instrument ability to play in any key, but it will always be slightly off.

For more enjoyable tuning, your frequency ratios should actually be fractions of small integers. For example, note E to note C ratio should be 5/4. This is called "just intonation", you can hear some examples on youtube when compared to equal temperament described in article. It sounds much better to trained ear, but doesn't work for changing keys.

It would be nice for your digital instrument to be aware of key you are in (much harder than it sounds) and to re-tune all notes into just intonation. This would give you best of both tunings.

I solved easy 4, but easy 7 looks impossible. Very addictive puzzle game, BTW.

Edit: easy 7 solvable and now my wife is addicted too.

This text made me angry. Don't like bunch of smart people volunteering their knowledge and experience with others? Feel free to ignore them, don't shit on them to feel better.

> Some rando is excited because

This is where I stopped reading. Digital toxic waste.

One Night: Ultimate Werewolf is always popular with bigger crowds. It's streamlined version of Mafia game, with convenient phone app that acts as moderator.

One match lasts no more than 10 minutes, but no one ever wanted to stop after just one game. The game never gets old. There are different roles and variants to mix things up, but even with same setup the player strategies will evolve and develop.

Very impressive indeed. I dug around and found his tweet: "uses a neural network I trained on choral pieces to generate the harmonization for your melody"

[0] https://twitter.com/daviddotli/status/1075068713936830464

Looks and works great. I would put in some control over sustain, without it melodies drown in cacophony. The easiest way would be implementing ASDR envelope where key release triggers R phase.

The article and this video don't describe the same algorithm. As stated at the end of article, "this is not true perlin noise! Hugo's algorithm is not based on gradients like Perlin Noise is. Instead it is what's known as value noise, which is essentially blurred white noise."

I actually missed the built-in noise function and instead used the same library you linked to. I tried switching to built-in C++ implementation just now and it was actually slower.

The Lua library for simplex does some FFI trickery and avoids crossing Lua/C++ barrier. Mike Pall is credited in comments, so I guess I'm not surprised it's faster.

The SDR they talk about in article introduction is specifically using cheap USB TV tuners in combination with open source software to capture various signals. The list of applications is really impressive: https://www.rtl-sdr.com/tag/applications-2/

It's not bad planning, it's about being _first_ on market. Yes there's lots of BS about 5G, but it's still filling the headlines. Also, island-wide field test makes sense before commercially deploying new tech.

Huge thanks for introducing me to hg_sdf! It's just what I need for my project [0]. I found few similar resources ([1],[2]), but this is vastly more useful.

[0] https://github.com/jmiskovic/arbo

[1] http://jamie-wong.com/2016/07/15/ray-marching-signed-distanc...

[2] https://www.scratchapixel.com/lessons/advanced-rendering/ren...

I'm also drawing a lot diagrams and the best tool I found is yED. You have to input diagrams manually (no hand sketching), but it's fast and resulting diagram is impressive. Just learn the keyboard shortcuts. For example, with Ctrl+W you can quickly create new connected block, and with arrows you can navigate existing blocks.

Very interesting project. Few questions:

Even though flash is memory-mapped, running code from flash will still be order of magnitude slower than executing from RAM. Speaking of which, it would be interesting to know how much of flash is consumed by minimal example of AtomVM.

Are interrupts supported? Can AtomVM go into deep sleep and wake by interrupt?

Erlang has it's own VM, the BEAM. How does BEAM relate to AtomVM?

From what I understood, Erlang achives it's reliability by supervising and restarting crashed modules. Is this functionality also part of AtomVM?

Could you point out what the problems were, and what technique did you replace it with?

Here's my take. Back in 80s there was no established concept what video game was supposed to play like, so developers experimented much more than today. Some of those experiments didn't belong to any established genre (Seven Cities of Gold, Civilization, Harvest Moon) but managed to get huge following.

Modern remakes aim to bring back same spirit and open-endness of those games, but with UX improvements, more streamlined gameplay, multiplayer and other nice features we came to expect from games.

Another improvement over classics is more open development process with fascinating dev logs, creators requesting feedback and with suggested changes making it into future version.

Good for them. They manage to increase revenue without increasing production, and they refuse to be evaluated based on production numbers. Still, 46 million devices just in the last quarter? And investors want it increased?

Corporations cannot change anything on their own if they operate in capitalistic economy. They are doing exactly what's expected of them to maximize the profit.

If you change your lifestyle significantly, you are not just a blip in statistics. Your actions rub off on other people, your vote supports the right people, and with enough time you help the right mindset to prevail.

Besides, presuming you are not climate change skeptic, what other rational choice do you have?

A bit weak article for HN frontpage, but it's good enough to start the discussion.

Yes, the cost of producing quality content will drop drastically. Yes, local improv groups will start making epic space operas and detailed historical reenactments.

One thing didn't get mentioned - interactivity. If you're creating content in real time, you can customize it to specific audience. You can respond to audience questions, give more screen time to favoured character and even alter the plot based on voting. What about crowd-sourced animated content?

The technology is already good enough (check Adobe Character Animator), but we sill need a good digital theatre software.

The code is not yet presentable, but it's open: https://github.com/jmiskovic/arbo

Very interesting project! I'm also building something like this. I'm also using constructive geometry to build a scene, but I'm using tree hierarchy instead of graph of nodes, and primitive form of ray-tracing to produce output. Few days ago I managed to get recursion to work. Graphics programming is insanely fun!

I remember some 15 years ago when I played few hours of tetris on fastest mode to see if I would be able to learn it. At first the game would last 3 seconds, but I managed to bump it up to some 10 seconds before becoming overwhelmed. It was fun exercise of learning process where rules and winning metrics are well defined.

That night while falling asleep, my mind was still playing tetris. I visualized the game vividly and could actually play it in my mind. Only later I learned this is actually called The Tetris Effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetris_effect).

IMO the point _should be_ to educate, and not to belittle readers. The list looks very interesting, but it's too terse to take away anything from it.

I'm surprised you feel that way. Lua seems like a perfect choice for pico-8. Its syntax is friendly and concise, and it's maybe simplest language to embed, with tiny footprint. Almost all other languages I know of would be a worse choice. Scratch would be nice, but graphical editor is harder to integrate. What's more suitable language in your opinion?

5ms is bit on the low side. If you're playing from guitar amplifier that's 4 meters from you, you get 12 ms latency just from sound propagation (and most amps introduce additional latency). As extreme example of what the brain can compensate, church organ players have to deal with 100ms+ latency and they still manage to play Bach.

Completely agree. Hardware itself doesn't introduce any noticeable latency, it's just whole lot of buffers at various software layers because audio stuttering and power consumption is always prioritized over latency. Some devices actually support low-latency in audio drivers by conforming to Android Professional Audio. I haven't yet gotten chance to test any of those devices if improvement is noticeable.