acjohnson55

My wife does. Every time she uses my Mac, she tries to scroll with touch.

I also always felt that the Touchbar would have been a much better idea on the bottom of the screen, rather than on my keyboard.

> You don't direct the action of an LLM - you make requests and it acts on its own, without your energy or continuous direction. This request/automation cycle is not wielding, it's not control, it's not continuous, it's without feedback.

There are certainly many ways of using coding agents, but the way he describes it is not my approach. There's a huge amount of direction and feedback.

I don't know if I'd call it a tool so much as a modality of building software. Within the modality, you have everything from truly unsupervised YOLO coding to something far more structured. To an extent, it's similar to how you go about setting up standard operating procedures to get teams of humans to do work at scale.

I'm really sorry you have gone through that. I have been pretty deeply depressed a couple times in past, to the point of considering suicide. What I share with people is that in those periods, it truly felt like things weren't going to get better and I was just going to be in emotional pain indefinitely.

But gradually, things got better in my life. I have had so much joy in the 20 years since. I still have bad days sometimes, but on the whole, I feel such a sense of gratitude.

I can't promise anyone that their own situation will get better. I can only say that my experience is that it is possible.

I used to use a TI-89 in high school, which had a calculus-enabled CAS built-in. It was really handy for checking my work and for working on components of problems. And if you're in a class where the work is more applied math, like physics, it's really helpful so that you can think of the overall problem without getting bogged down in the computation.

For sure. It still seems pretty speculative, but that's the game.

> Decision models have the potential to have an even larger impact on the Real World than LLMs have to this point (which is obviously quite large). But the model itself matters less than the product experiences you build around the model, and its very likely that the incumbent labs are treating the area as something more like "oh yeah I guess we can ship that and then forget about it" rather than investing in what building business processes on decision models looks like.

I agree that the potential is enormous, but I'm not sure why it would be Typesafe who figures out the best way to develop and package this capability. They have a bit of an advantage in the amount of time they have been thinking about this problem specifically, but I think it's a big leap to say that they will be able to dominate the category.

Correction: I meant west Asian.

Yeah, one of those Scotsmen is my ancestor, along with the enslaved woman he raped. And then he enslaved his own child.

Look into:

- the Mau Mau in Kenya (https://radiolab.org/podcast/mau-mau)

- prerevolutionary Haitian society from the Black Jacobins by CLR James (https://politicaleducation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/CL...)

- what King Leopold of Belgium did to the Congo

- what happened to Rapa Nui (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCyzrie_les)

- Heart of Darkness on British imperialism in the Congo

The cost of the socio-economic mobility provided to lower classes in colonizing societies was absolutely staggering. Unimaginable cruelty, suffering and destruction was visited upon the native populations.

> Which is why these countries are so much more prosperous when outsiders rule them, supressing the clan systems for anything more meritocratic.

That's generally not how colonization worked. Quite often, colonization intentionally created the large scale tribal identities. Allegiance to clans grows because of deep suspicion of extractive governments put in place by outsiders.

Europe didn't exist as a cultural concept at that time. There was Rome, but that was a Mediterranean empire with hugely significant southern European, east Asian, and north African components. Citizens and elites came from all parts.

Eventually, we get a Europe united under Christianity, but I wouldn't call that fully developed until the end of the Viking age.

Do you know anything about whether their post-Evernote acquisitions have played out similarly?

Okay, so if they don't police themselves, then they're full of crap. But then what?

David Sacks holds an advisory role in the government. If all of this stuff goes belly up and all he was doing was tweeting, then he is not only full of crap, but failing the citizens he's supposed to be serving.

The book Seveneves is about civilization confronting impending doom from the moon exploding. I never finished the book because I felt it was depressingly realistic.

You might enjoy this unfinished project of mine: https://fakestory.acjay.com/

It's the culmination of years spent chasing an explanation of where all this stuff came from.

Highly informed by Tymoczko, who was mentioned in a sibling reply, and a bunch of other thinkers on the topic.

This is the case for me. I finally got diagnosed last year and prescribed Ritalin this year, and it has been transformative in aiding me in getting out of ruts/stalls.

For families, do children also cost $500/mo?

This is so sad to hear. Prof. Liu was my advisor when I did my masters degree. He was so encouraging and welcoming, and a fantastic teacher.

One of my favorite memories was when I was discussing my first semester schedule with him. I was interested in taking a high level signal processing course. I asked him if that was OK, considering I had never taken the prerequisites.

He laughed and responded, "if we accepted you to this program, it's because we thought you can do pretty much whatever you want. So maybe you'll want to go to the library and read a textbook, but sure, you can do it."

And so I did. It was tough, but I pulled it off, and it taught me I had a gear I never had to exercise up until that point.

He was a great guy.

Something I've been worried about for years is the proliferation of technologies that give ever smaller numbers of people with smaller amounts resources the ability to impact billions of people, in potentially irreversible ways. Combined with automation, this is a recipe for disaster. We're clearly lacking in the ability to regulate and govern ourselves, and real world market forces (as opposed to the hypothetical free market) encourage reckless aggressiveness at the level of companies and countries.

Although, I must admit, as a doomer, I'm pleasantly surprised things aren't already worse than they are.

Airplane was an awesome product, but I think that was basically just an aquihire. I don't think Airplane had built a sustainable business.

Wow, well, that's one of the more f'd up things I've ever read about. Not sure what else there is to say.

I don't think a redundant recognizer algorithm is required to explain minor.

Centuries before we had major and minor tonality, we had the diatonic scale.

Through the Renaissance, thirds began to be accepted as stable consonances, and from that, you get tertian chords (triads and seventh chords from stacked thirds, and their inversions). In the diatonic scale, you only have 3 types of tertian triad: 3 major, 3 minor, and 1 diminished. The diminished triad was not accepted as a stable consonance.

In another post, I summarize the history of the development of major tonality out of the convention of the authentic cadence: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49095594

I have come to believe that minor tonality is quite simply a result of "what if we used a minor chord as the tonic, instead?" Note that the minor chord already existed and had been in use for quite some time. The conventions of minor tonality (the tonal use of Aeolian and Dorian modes, minor key signature, the raised seventh degree, relative and paralellel key conventions, etc), however, developed as a contrast to major tonality.

I'm not discounting your neurological explanation, I haven't read your whole paper yet, but just pointing towards historical contingency as another way to see it.

I would actually invert that and say that melody and rhythm are the most fundamental aspects of music. A harmonic progression with no sense of melody or rhythm is quite boring.

Harmony is derived from composing music with multiple melodic parts. This is most obvious with counterpoint, but even pop/rock music can be seen this way. The essence of pop/rock is a melody and bass line as the two primary parts, and the rest of the instrumentation often plays harmonies that imply inner voices.

The primacy of the major scale happened many centuries after the diatonic scale came to be predominant in Western music. The primary development that led to major tonality was the acceptance of thirds as stable consonances. As that happened, the Ionian mode (previously little used) began to stand out because it happens to have a tritone (B and F) surrounding its tonic major third (C and E). This is the core feature of the authentic cadence which gives us the tension <-> resolution progression that characterizes tonal music. Tonal music practice and theory develop in all sorts of interesting ways, spilling out from that basis.

The transitional period where this happened is roughly in the 1600s.

Yes, not having had the time to read TFA or the paper you shared yet, it immediately stands out to me that the bibliography of the latter paper is far more comprehensive.

If you want to go way deep, check out Tymoczko's first book: https://dmitri.mycpanel.princeton.edu/geometry-of-music.html

It's a challenging read, but extremely thorough and enlightening. Tymoczko wrote a follow up that extends and reformulates his theories, but I haven't gotten through it yet.

I also jumped straight to the bibliography to look for those two. Not seeing any reference to their work is disappointing and makes me a little pessimistic that digesting the entire piece will be worthwhile, as a scientific piece. He references Helmholtz, but his theories have been surpassed for more than a century.

But hopefully I'll get around to reading this at some point. It's one of my favorite topics. I wrote up my own attempt to explain the Western music system here: https://fakestoryofmusic.com

I've also been working on something smaller that focuses on major/minor tonality, specifically. But it's further from being in a place where I want to share it.

Apparently, they do

Found the robot, y'all