joebergeron

Naive question: What, practically speaking, is the delta between anthropomorphization of AI, which it seems like you are trying to avoid (fairly so!), and the sort-of animistic stance you seem more comfortable to apply?

I reckon that a lot of folks who might recoil at ascribing human qualities to LLMs would similarly feel discomfort comparing those models to a horse. While it's probably uncontroversial to say that horses are, coarsely speaking, "simpler" in many ways than humans, I suspect most people would agree that they are more complex than i.e., a "stochastic parrot".

Is the difference related to motive, maybe? That humans can have hidden preferences, and their actions can in fact betray their intended ends? That no matter how closely we observe someone, we may not glean any meaningful insight into their true motives? And we feel some (justified) discomfort in conferring this quality to AI? I think non-human animals can exhibit this sort of behavior too (albeit to a lesser degree). To me, it feels like restricting oneself to analogizing AI to a non-human animal in order to keep some distance from ascribing it consciousness may be less effective to that end than desired.

In place of your horse example, would it feel appropriate to liken AI to, say, a compiler peppered with bugs? Program - prompt - goes in, executable - agent actions - come out; mostly what we expect, but occasionally goes off the rails in ways we cannot understand. The caveat there, I suppose, is that we have not until now created a compiler which we cannot sensibly decompile.

Fun to think about.

What a wonderfully humble sentiment, and so plainly said. It's disarming to hear an idea stated so precisely which you've treated largely as subintellectum, despite its truthiness having a foundational effect on how you move about the world [0]. This so perfectly distills my (and I suspect others' here as well) draw toward all things technical. They are all mysteries, whose workings we must largely abstract away for the sake of our own sanity. But they are categorically products of our collective knowledge, and that knowledge is out there for anyone to claim, or to extend! Looking at my surroundings, I see thousands of objects which I could not today begin to re-create myself, and for each object, thousands of questions which could be asked - all of which have at some point been answered, and whose answers await those who are interested to ask. What an endless and delightful thing for the curious! A lovely thought.

[0]: Perhaps this feeling is why Le Guin is such a celebrated author, and I am not ;)

That last point is super important - basic approach is to make a small glob/reservoir of glue on some scrap paper, and keep a box of toothpicks handy to use as applicators to transfer the glue onto the the tabs. When the dried glue builds up on a toothpick end (making it bulky/less precise) just toss it and use a new one. If your goal is to build clean, tidy models with no trace glue or smudging, this is the way :)

The only other glue I occasionally use, and only then very sparingly, is some kind of cyanoacrylate adhesive. Typically "Krazy Glue", in the tubes with the fine/precision tips, though I'm sure any brand will do. I reserve this for bonding together joints of a model that bear a lot of weight (think like, long, freestanding structures attached to the core of the model at a single point; see [0] for an example with structures like this!)

[0]: https://imgur.com/a/papercraft-deep-striker-25kEi

I think sort of "choose your own adventure" projects like that are great, and they also force you to really understand everything you're doing. You can also scale the scope of the "project" to whatever you want; it can even be a sort of iterative process. More importantly (imo) you're left with a bunch of components that he can tinker around with endlessly :)

I'll definitely be trying this out on my decks before my next set :)

Skeuomorphic design, to me, largely feels lazy and unattractive; rather than designing for the new, maybe unfamiliar, medium you're working in, you attempt some facsimile which inevitably cannot live up to the original, either out of lack of ambition, or lack of faith in your audience to understand or appreciate without the anchor of a common metaphor. It lacks idiomaticity - there are particular details, quirks, associated with different mediums that lend themselves to different sorts of designs, and a skeuomorphic design language ignores these. (The same is true of musical instruments. A piece written for the lute, say, played on piano, would feel very different than a piece written for piano, played on piano; what is easy, or possible, on one instrument, is not necessarily as sonorous on another.)

To me, the use of synthesizers to emulate acoustic instruments, where the express intent of the composer/producer/whatever is to evoke the sound of that acoustic original (read: where the creator would prefer the sound of the real instrument), is, at its most generous, telling of a lack of creativity and at worst laziness. (If what you want is expressly the sound of a synthetic imitation for the purposes of your art, none of this applies.) It is a lack of creativity in the case where the creator simply does not have access to "real" instruments they'd rather use, and it's laziness where you have access and ability but opt for something you yourself deem inferior.

Of course, this all presupposes that there is something lost when say, a synthesizer plays a violin patch in an earnest effort by the creator to emulate a violin - where a real violin is actually what's desired. I think this isn't controversial to say, but of course it's a spectrum; I have much less of a problem in cases where the delta is smaller; e.g., simple legato harmonies from a string section can be emulated more convincingly (by orders of magnitude) than some virtuosic cadenza by a solo instrumentalist.

We've been able to fulfill the function of printing very cheaply for what seems like ages now, and we've reached a point where some niche and particularly attuned segment of the population wants a bit more out of the actual form of the printed product, the depth of form that was once common. There is a growing community of people that deeply care about woodblock prints now, favoring their physical characteristics, despite such prints falling out of fashion for a period of time during the heights of industrialization. This group of people understands the value of such craft, and is willing to spend more for it, since the difference in the form of the end product from mass-produced stuff is so stark.

The key thing here, and with other categories of physical goods (e.g. pottery, glassware, furniture, etc.), is that there's an obvious and tangible difference in the form of products produced via traditional means, and those mass manufactured, despite them serving fundamentally the same function.

With software however, I worry that this isn't the case, and the sort of resurgence of interest we see now in products produced by traditional means won't ever translate, assuming that we do move in the direction of more and more software engineering being "automated" by AI assistance. To an end-user of a piece of software, I imagine that there will be very little visible difference in the observable characteristics between fully hand-written and AI-produced software. Indeed, given the same requirements, there ought not be a difference between these two things. It's exactly this delta, however, which drives the passionate and less cost-sensitive enthusiasts to prefer handmade physical goods over manufactured ones. If both the form and the function of AI-produced software is identical to those of traditional software, but the AI-produced software is cheaper, why would anyone go with the traditional stuff? I understand that there are other factors at play here as well (e.g., particularly principled consumers etc.) but really, some combination of form, function, and cost seem like the biggest levers to me, and they seem on the face of it to be pulled toward the direction of AI, for better or worse.

I've since come around to writing everything in full before doing any recording, which has been difficult and a real test of my patience. I'm taken to writing very long (>8 minutes), winding songs with dense arrangements and quite ornate language, and without traditional song structure or repetition. I'm not used to stewing on something for so long before being able to actually record; these days it will take me months from the the seed of an initial idea to recording. Whenever some idea strikes me, or I see or hear something in the world around me that piques me interest or inspires me, I immediately write it down on whatever I have handy. The same goes for musical ideas; whenever some motif or progression pops into my head I record it into my phone. It's taken some courage to get over my own embarrassment of having to leaf through this seemingly juvenile collection of half-thoughts I've amassed, but I've come to realize that of all things that may prevent you from realizing your passions, you shouldn't let yourself be one of them.

Anyways, I've come to love this slow, plodding process of writing. There's a great joy in finding precisely the right word or phrase for a particularly difficult passage.

Another thing that I would probably need in order to use this seriously is compilation down to native-compatible file formats for recording from hardware. Can I e.g., export an NSF for the 2A03, a .MED for Octamed playback, some sort of SAV or LSDSNG for the DMG, etc.?

It's late here, so I haven't given this a spin yet, but will definitely play around with this soon - fantastic work!! :)

[0]: https://www.nesdev.org/mck_guide_v1.0.txt

[1]: https://phlogiston.bandcamp.com/album/nectar

[2]: https://treyfrey.bandcamp.com/album/refresh

The writing is mostly about software projects, but I also document art stuff here as well. Had some fun with the actual site design itself, modeled after a pseudo-file-browser with windows that you can focus, resize, and drag around… hopefully not too unusable. :)

[0]: https://www.joe-bergeron.com/posts/Writing%20a%20Tiny%20x86%...

[1]: https://github.com/Jophish/tiny-bootstrap

Shameless self promo, but I released a tiny album of .xms using Milkytracker back in the day [0] on Disasterpeace’s (composer for Fez, among others) label, which I am still quite fond of. 4mat, of course, was, and is still, a huge influence.

[0]: https://jophish.bandcamp.com/album/distance

For those curious about what metaclasses actually are, I wrote up an article with some motivating examples about this a little while back. Might be worth a read if you’re interested!

https://www.joe-bergeron.com/posts/Interfaces%20and%20Metacl...

This is it, folks.

This article is at once extremely funny to me and extremely frustrating.

Funny, in that it reads like a tabloid magazine article from an alternate reality where the goings-on of our savior RMS is the hottest gossip available, and Emacs is the topic du jour.

Frustrating, from what I perceive to be an impenetrable thickness from RMS and RMS-adjacent Linux contributors/Emacs users. People who use text editors just don't care. (not to imply that they ought to care.) It's not just that Emacs, as it tends to ship, is extraordinarily ugly. It's not just that Emacs is difficult to master, or that it requires knowledge of Lisp to be meaningfully configurable, or that it isn't friendly to new users. It's all of this and many more.

People use VS Code and Sublime Text and Atom and $EDITOR because they're simple on the surface, they're easy to install (you just download it and go), don't need heaps of customization to become useful, don't force the user into learning a completely new set of metaphors, etc. etc. The average developer just wants to write some code.

This quote got it the most right:

   > [...] no Microsoft word user has ever considered themselves to have opened a "buffer". They open "files". They move "windows" around, not "frames." They cut and paste not kill and yank, etc.

People use the alternatives because they simply don't care about the things that Emacs contributors care about. If, down the road, they end up caring, those alternatives do indeed offer plenty of reward for those who take the time to learn; it's just that with the alternatives, the ceiling is presumably much lower than for Emacs. On the other hand, the floor is much higher. With Emacs, the floor is somewhere around the molten core of the Earth.

Meanwhile, you have Emacs core contributors quibbling about rounding edges and custom icons; unable to come to a consensus about all manner of trivialities, when what they really need is a seismic shift in core philosophy. It reeks of impending irrelevancy and a gives profound sense that Emacs is deeply out of touch with what the average person wants, as far as their mission of actually getting people to use the product goes.