skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Music is about a bunch of people in a room sharing a feeling and a beat and creating and enjoying something beautiful. People are addicted to their media feeds, their screens, their ragebait and clickbait, and do you know why? Because they don’t have real people, friends, in the room sharing real time. Music can do that, AI is a perversion of it.

The latest wave of capitalism is that they have successfully invaded our personal relationships and replaced and monetized them. Let’s not do that to music too.
Tech billionaire Paul Graham is the establishment.

Miss when his essays were actually about hacking!
There's also an absolutely massive difference in audio quality between a HomePod or Sonos anything and a proper amp + speakers.
Respectfully, confidently asserting someone else's mental state or their motives is a mistake. Because there's no way for you to know, it backs you and others into an intellectual corner that is entirely unnecessary and lowers the level of discourse, in addition to being unhelpful when people are experiencing actual psychiatric crises.
I fear you are right. Remember they ask $25/monthly for 1 website on pressable, I can run Wordpress open source for 5x month on Linode, and there are ready made installation on docker, digital ocean and so on…
> Any non white male person in charge of an organization that makes a mistake will be labeled a “DEI Hire” accurately or not.

This isn't restricted to tech.

"I'm French when I score, Arab when I don't" - Karim Benzema.
60 or 70 years ago.
The entire thing is an exercise in complaining about a thing that goddamn near everyone agrees is bad, then using that to complain about a much larger movement that probably aims to address a lot of legitimate issues, in such a way that you can always retreat if challenged. There's a memed name for this tactic, and it's extremely on display here.

"Well of course by 'the woke' I only meant the ones I'm talking about, and since I'm choosing what that means let's just say part of the definition includes that they think racism is an even bigger problem than it is—whatever amount you think it's a problem, they think it's a bigger one, so even you think they are wrong! So as you can see I wrote precisely and correctly and you're an idiot who can't read."

But in fact it's all nonsense. This whole essay is a bunch of mealy-mouthed gibbering, because it relies so heavily on that kind of thing. It's either saying something boring that 99% of people already agree with, or it's expressing the more controversial (and dumber) thing that's getting everyone here worked up, but accusations of the latter can be deflected by claiming it's only doing the former (in which case, why bother writing it in the first place...?)

Essays like this are one of the few things LLMs are already entirely capable of replacing us for. Bad ones that mostly lack actual content, and don't even really need to be right because they're constructed such that they can't be wrong.
How much self expression is there in an artist having engineers and producers completely define their sound, and in most cases having songwriters that produce the skeleton of lyrics/melody?
I wish AI companies' CEOs would leave creatives alone. They really know nothing about artists' journey, struggle, development, ups and downs... the whole story that makes artists interesting and lets fans connect with them.
Styles can absolutely become wack, if the context they're used in becomes wack.
> Most things, at this point, are largely fixed,

Loading the app and getting a state where you can play back something on Android still steals me way too many seconds multiple times a day.
Yet both of you align to the same answer: replacing us employees with Indian remote workers is less likely for a number of reasons.

But that said, you're also both ignoring relocation of the enterprise as a whole: employ Indians in India.
Just love the way Matt keeps responding to everything in a passive-aggressive tone with a smarmy smile.
PHP integrates with the server. It does not have the spawn a new process per request like CGI
The point is it makes sense, at scale, with the existing systems in place around subsidies (corn) and price protections (sugar).

> switching to sugar is unlikely to change the consumers buying habits.

If this is the case, why has it not happened yet? The argument "the cost delta is not material enough to matter" comparing corn syrup to sugar, but the evidence based on participant actions leads us to conclude that is not the case.

Edit: @gruez: I agree with regards to consumer demand for the foods in question, I was refuting the point "It's not like sugar is expensive. No more than a few cents worth in a 2L bottle of soda."
Another data point: behind the iron curtain quite often both parents were working. Yet the situation got very different form the States, so I'm not sure that's the big cause of shit.
https://log.schemescape.com/posts/programming-languages/futu...

"Future-proof programming languages, part 3

March 3, 2023

SDK size (measured on x86_64 Alpine Linux), as a proxy for simplicity

Just looking at SDK size, Rust is an outlier. Even compared to a similarly complex language like C++, the Rust SDK is absolutely huge.

Even after allowing for a build tool, custom linker, and standard library, the Rust SDK is disappointingly heavy.

The other languages show some interesting results: JavaScript and C# appear to be the most bloated, closely followed by SBCL (a Common Lisp implementation).

If I'm just looking for a simple and fast language, that would leave C, Go, and Zig.

C is almost certainly future-proof for another decade or two and the SDK is reasonably sized.

I don't like Python."
Try this: go out and take some sounds off the internet, don't pay the people who recorded those sounds and make a synthesizer out of them, and sell it. Let the people whose recordings you stole know what you did, and see how that works out for you. The lawsuit will be straightforward.

Now, go out and take those same sounds off the internet, don't pay the people who recorded those sounds, and use them to train an AI, and sell it. You're still a thief, but now it's much harder to prove you're a thief, and lots of AI investors will invest money making sure that courts decide you're not a thief.
I have an extroverted colleague and they really like to chat and make events and go for walks and ....

These people probably are miserable in a remote only setting.
They make a lot of money “on the float” by holding onto funds and investing them until you cash out.
The problem is how to reduce how often actual
sexual harassment happens. "Taking it more
seriously" is a very vague and ineffective
way to do that.

Why do you perceive some sort of conflict or paradox between "taking it more seriously" and coming up with an effective way to prevent it?

I mean, that is "taking it more seriously."

a definition of "harassment" that is highly
subjective and doesn't necessarily correlate
very well with actual harassment.

I swear, this whole topic is just an ouroboros of people talking over each other about vaguely defined terms.

You complain that "wokeness" has a "highly subjective" definition of harassment that "doesn't necessarily correlate well" with reality.

"Wokeness" itself is an incredibly vague and amorphous term, primarily wielded by those who oppose it. It barely exists except in the minds of its opponents, and certainly does not have some kind of governing body or like, official position on harassment or anything else.

If you feel that some specific person or institution is doing a shitty job of addressing harassment, or if you have some specific ideas of your own, those would be great things to bring to the table.

But accusing a vague and amorophous thing about being too vague and amorphous about another thing is... man, please, stop.
Yes of course, Apple doesn't have to follow it's own rules.
Even if she put in the exact same effort for the company, if she worked from home she might not have a multi-hour commute every day, which could still translate to more attention being paid to the six-year-old.
I'd be tempted to fill it with water with something dissolved in it to make it more conductive (and probably more viscous), and include LEDs whose brightness and/or color reflects the conductivity at their location. The rationale being, why should I do all that math when Nature will do it for me?
The tradeoffs between automation and empowerment are tricky to navigate.
That app update screwed me up for weeks. Feeling that sweet sweet vindication right now
Jeez, at least summarize it or state your personal take-away first.

If you're going to dump text, I think it's good etiquette to frame it with what you think that text is doing for the discussion so it's not just an exercise for the reader.
Opinions are like noses… everyone has one, but most are unremarkable.

In the age of digital soapboxes, everyone feels their opinions are relevant - and many people try to leverage virtue signaling to get audience appeal, as followership has become a metric for quality.

This feels the case. I think that if we look hard enough we could be offended by everything and anything. And I think the heightened sensibility to be offended these days correlates negatively with overall societal intelligence.

Intelligent people have flexible mindsets to discuss and hence not so open to sensibility. People who follow others people mantras, not so flexible and reject what they doesn’t fit in their views.
Woz planned to add floating point support to his Integer BASIC. In fact, he included a library of floating point ROM routines in the Apple II ROMs, but he didn't get around to modifying Integer BASIC to use them. He ended up working on the floppy disk controller instead.

When he finally got around to doing it, he discovered two issues – Integer BASIC was very difficult to modify, because there was never any source code. He didn't write it in assembly, because at the time he wrote it he didn't yet have an assembler, so he hand assembled it into machine code as he worked on it. Meanwhile, Jobs had talked to Gates (without telling him) and signed a deal to license Microsoft Basic. Microsoft Basic already had the desired floating point support, and whatever Integer BASIC features it lacked (primarily graphics) were much easier to add given it had assembly code source.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_BASIC#History

I was thinking about this the other day, I wonder if anyone has ever tried finishing off what Woz never did, and adding the floating point support to Integer BASIC? The whole "lacking source" thing shouldn't be an issue any more, because you can find disassemblies of it with extensive comments added, and I assume they reassemble back to the same code.
A 500W amp is probably a class A and can't really be made more efficient. It would still be 500W in 2024. Decades ago there were more efficient setups too, though of course now they sound better and also have lots more features and connectivity.
Yeah, I believe the firmware on all compatible devices was auto-updated to the new architecture and apparently they can't go back to the old firmware for some reason. What a mess.
Do people that love Chipotle actually hate burritos? It's Sturgeon's law all the way down.
> The decline of coupling and fertility is the greatest challenge of the 21st century

She says this as if the decline were a problem.
Even as a Sonos owner and former fan who detests the app, I doubt the app is the reason for declining sales. Competition is.

Sonos has been around for many years now. When it launched, smartphones weren’t dominant. To control a Sonos you had to buy a controller specifically for it. It had its own wireless networking because WiFi wasn’t dominant. To use it with WiFi you needed to buy a separate bridge.

Online music services weren’t a thing like they are now. Music collections were on your local hard drive.

Back then the main competition for Sonos was paying a pro to hard-wire a speaker system into your house. I saw one of these about five years ago. Built into the wall in the kitchen was a cassette tape deck.

All that has changed. Now there are wireless speakers from JBL, Apple, Amazon, Bose, Google, and at least a dozen others. There’s Bluetooth. There’s AirPlay.

The Sonos app was ok for its time, but it’s an outdated model now. But at least the app used to be good at controlling Sonos. Now it’s not even great for that.

Without that outdated app model, there’s no reason to buy Sonos. Just pick from…anybody else. Many are cheaper and sound just as good. They don’t rely on an app, which is good-just use Airplay or Bluetooth.

As bad as the app is, it’s not a trigger of the decline of Sonos. Is just a symptom of it. The company has no future. Thus its release of headphones that don’t even integrate well with the Sonos system. These are just as pointless as its speakers.

I doubt Sonos is around in a few years’ time.
Art is an expression and representation of its creator. AI can neither self-express nor self-represent, so it can’t make art. It can create pretty images or pleasing melodies, but it’s still not art.
For those not familiar with servlets, this means serializing every single request to the server that hits that servlet. And a single servlet can serve many different pages. In fact, in the early days, servlet filters didn't exist, so you would often implement cross-cutting functionality like authentication using a servlet.

TBF, I don't think a lot of developers at the time (90's) were used to the idea of having to write MT-safe callback code. Nowadays thousands of object allocations per second is nothing to sweat over, so a framework might make a different decision to instantiate callbacks per request by default.
Someone should tell Wise. My list of payments has the logos of TfL, ASDA, Tesco, Sainsbury and others next to the payments.

Apple Maps also uses the logos when you bring up location details.
> 500W

Amplifiers are quoted in peak output, not average (and play some games with other parameters e.g. resistance) to capture bigger-number-better sales. A 750w system will consume nowhere near 750w at typical listening volumes (just like your 750w PC doesn't use 18 kWh every day.)
I was just saying it's either ayahuasca or a divorce the other day. It's major divorced dude energy.
Well they don't have to worry, because the RIAA is incredibly litigious and if the AI produces an existing 5 note progression and someone shares it, that's considered copyright infringement.
From what I've observed, "woke" is just the latest pejorative used by the American political right. Before woke, there was "PC", "SJW", and I'm sure others that were before my time. Before too long, woke will dry up and get replaced with the next term that's broadly used in the same way.

The biggest difference that I've noticed with "woke" is that it seems to have made its way outside of online culture and into the real world, so it's possible that it will have more staying power.
> Or is CGI still a thing and a possible alternative for shared webspaces?

I think I just threw up a little, in my mouth...

I don't think there's a viable alternative to PHP. The nerds here, hate it (and they aren't really wrong). I hate it, but it is undisputed God Emperor of Cheap Hosting. There's nothing that even comes close, for simplicity, speed, robustness, cost, and ubiquity. There are millions of pages of support, years of support forums, and hundreds of thousands of people that can work with PHP at an expert level. Despite the hate, PHP is a mature, modern language, still very much under development, and supported by many corporations. Much of the primitive stuff it started with, has been replaced (I think, rather clumsily, but it works).

The simplest hosting solutions have LAMP ("P" being "PHP"), and there are millions of LAMP servers out there. Every single one can run WP, simply by uploading a few files, creating a MySQL DB/User, tweaking a config, and Björn Stronginthearm's your uncle. Or, with things like WPE, you can click on a button in your control panel dashboard.

Also, non-HN-readers can manage just about every aspect of a WP server, once it's set up. People have made careers from that.

This sucks.

I run a couple of sites. I use WP, because it means that I don't have to waste much time, managing them. I could definitely switch over to a static generator (what I would use, if I didn't do WP), or even write my own sites, using handcoded HTML (I have done that, and have even written my own CMSes, in The Dark Ages). I just don't want to have to do that. The moment I walk away from WP, I am sealing my own fate. It will make it ten times as hard to push the sites over to someone else to manage.

I am an indifferent (at best) Web designer. Almost every person here, could probably code circles around me. That means that working on Web sites is painful and slow, detracting from what I'm actually good at.

This sucks.
Unless you’re playing REALLY loud, I don’t think you are anywhere near 250 or 500W of consumption. I would guess it is the maximum rated power?

Even with quite old and inefficient amp + speaker combo, 30W of sound is usually a lot(!).

Tube amps are an exception. They can be very power hungry, but it’s difficult to buy such tech today compared to class D etc.
> I got that for the goofiest of reasons: so I could feel like Indiana Jones when I was taking notes for my Diablo game.

Nah, that's the coolest of reasons \m/
There's something so dull at this point when people mention "impact", "billions of people", etc. Just another thirsty CEO trying to extrude money from the system. Who can blame him. Idk, it's just boring is all I can say.

But I don't think he's wrong necessarily. A friend of mine always said, "The artist of the future will only have to point." I imagine things will continue to progress towards that until we arrive there, wherever that is or whatever it flips into.

In other words, I don't know where it's going, but it's definitely going there.
good, my company will keep remote work and easily scoop up good people because we're not ones to make excuses about 'better office collaboration' or whatever the current joke is to help the real estate out
Signaling is bad because anyone can signal anything they want. Everyone should be judging either other based on actions not superfluous signals. And yes, maybe you should think twice if you see a swastika tatoo on someone, people change and are multi dimensional.
Totally true. A company and its leadership are free to set the rules and expectations. It’s their company, not yours. You (we) might not fit in a new iteration of “their” company
Also, in exchange for the strong compensation and benefits that I believe lots of us in finance, tech, etc enjoy - we might have to give acquiesce back on some things.
I cannot find any of his work in high-resolution but those diagrams are exhilarating. Thank you.
Differentiating IP/copyright/code rights and infrastructure hosting is definitely an important aspect of the feud.

In a perfect world, open source projects would never use private infrastructure (and would certainly not privilege any particular private infrastructure!).

That said, the ability to 'open source' infrastructure (read: have hosting provided by a non-profit or similar attached to the open source project) has always been more difficult (financially, legally, and practically) than simply commiting a license file.
I am unable to connect your sentence to what I said.
Which country are these myths from?

We have our share of problems with bikers and drivers (I am both) but none of them are even remotely close to the list.

I would say that the one that is annoying is that drivers do lt like bikers, and vice versa (and both have good and bad reasons for that)
With isso for comments!
You're welcome. But until then your comment has nothing of value for me to digest that is relevant to the conversation.
> people don't like making music

Speak for yourself. I find practice extremely soothing in a strange way: it requires utmost attention and awareness of body while also maintaining a critical ear and a willingness to continually problem solve. Also, you need a lot of persistence to grind out enough repetitions to build muscle memory. This sort of skill/competence-building is very grounding for me.

And that says nothing about actually playing with other people, or improvising.
I would love to see a version with wireless charging, though that might be tough with the all metal enclosure, perhaps it could be done through the front/screen section.

Also, adopting the screen off function Apple watches use could be a cool addition, for that it would need a light sensor. On an Apple Watch, you can switch the screen off by simply covering the screen with your hand.
>If you speak out about the injustice you are deemed a far right extremist and a raciest and given a harsher sentence than the pedophiles that are raping children.

I would like to see a source for this.
What free speech? Facebook always reserved the right to control what is published on their platform. Facebook has never been about "freedoms" of any kind, why is this recent news surprising in the least?
The company I work for experienced this. The SaaS solution we depended on suddenly got very pricey. New pricing
model and all. The sales reps were completely inflexible. It got so uncomfortable that I got to develop a replacement. When we were (gradually) moving over, they lost interest and let us off with a mild increase, and from this year on, we won’t be needing them at all.
That’s a bad framing. Testosterone makes you less likely to place consensus above all else, which is what you want from a leader. Some will mischaracterise that as risky.
You want to try to explain fixed point math to someone who is for the first time discovering the concept of a "variable"?
I too have switched to Kirby, should have done so years ago, it’s great to work with and fast out the box.
Cartoonish displays of "wokeness" are stupid and corrosive. But I would argue that people who are loudly "Anti-woke" could also be described as "self-righteously moralistic [people] who behave as if superior to others". Both sides are impenetrably convinced that they alone are the arbiters of what is "good" behavior. In fact, I would go as far as to say that the far ends of "Woke" and "Anti-woke" people have far more in common to each other than they are to people the middle.

Ultimately, I think the problem is we separate ourselves along easy to define lines like left vs right, white vs non-white, bike vs car, and let the loudest assholes on either sides dictate terms.
Top Flaws in Mainstream Reporting of the Seed Oil Debate – Jeff Nobbs
A nice overview. In short, I would describe an AI Engineer as someone who integrates existing AI tools and libraries into a reliable system that is fielded in a production environment. They also must know how to tune AI components and assess them for performance, decline/drift, and failure. Most AEs have a MS or less (CS, data science, statistics, etc), since it's not really a research role. Finally, AI Engineers don't invent AI tools or fix what's missing/broken within them. That's the role of an AI scientist.
I live in Europe (Germany) and we have no wokeness here. Saying something sexist or racist isn't a big deal. Some people will think you are an asshole and that's it. Our leftists go to the US and come back ranting about how oppressive wokeness is.
I'm a minority myself and have experienced my fair share of racism. But I have no desire to push for somebody to get fired for making a racist joke or some such thing. I will just lower my opinion of them and move on with my life. I don't want to live in a country where a wrong word at the wrong time might mean you're fired.