rafabulsing

Yeah, that's exactly my though every time this argument is brought up. "Obviously this endeavor is not economically viable if I had to follow the rules, so I get to skip that part" is such an astounding line of reasoning.

I dabble in creating mashups from time to time [1] and I see that first hand. One of my first was built around Let's Groove by Earth Wind and Fire. As a funk act, they are as tight as a group of musicians can ever hope to get, and still, the tempo would subtly speed up and down from bar to bar.

It makes things much more challenging to sync up! You can't just speed up the slower song (or vice versa), because even if the averages match, it will still be all over the place from bar to bar. I now have much better workflows to deal with this, but for that first one, I spent a looong time manually adjusting things to get them to fit.

Working with tracks that were recorded to a click (or digitally gridified, as per the article), are much easier to work with. Match the tempos and everything automatically works. Definitely helps creating my mashups...

But I do agree with the post, in that it loses some indescribable human aspect. I love the push and pull of musicians trying to follow each other rather than concentrating on the click. Or even just pushing and pulling against oneself with things like rubato in classical music, sometimes accelerating, and sometimes slowing, at times almost to a dead stop, so as to build a sense of antecip.... pation.

[1] Link if anyone is interested in checking it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP74tMiXBU8&list=PLsj2XVeWwU...

I don't really have anything to say other than the fact that you both don't thing there's a difference between using AI and actually creating something yourself, and that you also don't care for explaining why those are the same thing to you, but you also still feel the need to nevertheless reply anyway... It's fitting, is all.

The thing, which anyone who's ever done any type of art realizes, is that 99% of the time, there isn't really such a thing as a high fidelity image in your mind's eye.

You feel like there is... But the minute you try to bring it into creation, you find out just how absurdly fuzzy it really is. A non-artist might believe that the failure of bringing your mind image to life is a failure of _skill_. That you are just physically incapable of accurately reproducing the thing you're picturing in your head.

While that might well be a factor, it's never the whole story.

That's most clear with writing. Anyone who's ever written anything of substance has had the experience of having what feels like a pretty solid story/thesis/whatever. But the minute you try actually writing, you realize just how fuzzy that idea really was. You have to work and labor at it to make it become something coherent. It's not a limitation in mechanical skill: typing absolute non-sense is exactly the same difficulty as typing the a NYT best seller. The difficulty is in the deciding what to type.

A huge portion of art is in that part of the process. Exploring ways to bring into existence not _the image you had in your mind_, because there's no such thing. But to bring into existence something that makes you _feel_ the same way the fuzzy idea in your head made you feel.

And that's the thing that AI does not, and fundamentally cannot, give you. All the innumerable micro choices your mind does as you try to gradient descend that raw log of wood into the carving of a bear.

Looking at an AI output and deciding whether it happens to match the fuzzy idea you had enough or not, simply isn't the same thing. I'm not even saying that it's not valuable or useful, it certainly can be. But it's fundamentally not _art_. That's the reason Rick Rubin, for all the praise he (deservedly!) gets for all his work, does not describe himself an _artist_. It's just not the thing he is doing. He doesn't create, he evaluates. And if you take that for what it is, that's absolutely fine, great even, when you're as good as he is.

But if you believe the evaluating is, as you put, "seeing what's in your mind's eye at the highest fidelity possible", that's simply untrue. And it _cannot_ be true, because there isn't actually a thing that's in your mind's eye in a way that would allow for that, regardless of whether you're using AI or creating it by hand. Using AI just gives you the illusion that there ever was such a thing.

That's true, but the very feeling that I might be inputting things in a way that might have to be updated later kinda drained my motivation.

I do understand that even if does get replaced eventually, it still was useful for a while, and probably served as the basis for whatever came after.

But still. For whatever reason, in my brain, it just diminished whatever psychological reward I got from adding information to OSM, which is a shame.

It doesn't help that there are multiple ways to map sidewalks in OSM (as a property of the roads themselves, or as standalone paths parallel to the roads).

I got pretty into OSM for a while and that's definitely the thing that eventually put me off... So much stuff has multiple ways to be mapped, and it gets confusing/overwhelming. I understand that OSM has a very malleable data model, and that definitely has many benefits, especially for niche/edge cases. But I do wish the community had arrived at a settled convention for at least the most basic stuff, like the aforementioned sidewalks.

Same! Somehow I had never heard of this. Will have to try and visit someday!

Also, lol @ the name of the river near that site. (For the gringos: "Rego Grande", "rego" officially means ditch/trench, but nowadays it's much more commonly used as slang for butt crack. So, it's the Large Butt Crack river. Which I guess tracks for Brazil :P)

Moises is able to do that! Though it's unfortunately not open source. Result quality can vary as with anything AI, but ime it usually performs ok.

Bret Victor's Magic Ink essay is certainly relevant here: https://worrydream.com/MagicInk/

Respectfully, his graph does not need 3 dimensions because it's a personal spreadsheet he uses just for his own training, so he can just display the data for his exact body weight.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense!

Hah, that's very interesting to learn. I've always thought the little flag was lifted by the mailman, so that the homeowner could tell from a distance that they got mail. Cool that it's actually the other way around.

What exactly is wrong about a solution that perfectly fits the most common use case out there, at a fraction of the cost/complexity?

The vast, vast majority of websites never see anything even close to that, so it's a safe bet unless you have some specific reason to expect it to reach that kind of traffic, or you are dealing with workloads that SQLite really does not handle well, e.g. many concurrent writes. And if your workload is mostly reads, then you probably can use a cache layer, which allows SQLite to go further still.

Huh, had no idea it they had a pack like that! I definitely only ever played it on the browser. I doubt that pack released here in Brazil.

Though that's an interesting point: some games were localized on the Brazilian CN website! Not all, but it's cool that at least some of them were.

Hah, that explains the out-of-left-field theme! I had no idea they were reskins of exiting games. Interesting how child me managed to unknowingly zero in into the games of a single developer.!

And thanks for the game names as wel, although, I must admit that after posting that comment, I did go looking for them, and... Well, let's just say I've found my MixMaster skills to be quite rusty after all this time :p

My favorite three aren't in there. All Dexter's Lab themed, now that I think about it.

One was puzzle game where you had to bounce a laser off of mirrors to pop balloons. The second was kind of a Chip's Challenge kind of deal I think, where you as Dexter were running away from an out of control robot, and had to collect some computer chips or something.

And in the third game, Dexter was running, inexplicably, a record store? Dunno if it was a tie in for a specific episode I don't remember now, but it's quite a funny premise, and a fun game too.

If you worked on any of these games, thank you! I spent so many hours back then on those, and many others.

I still had dial up back then, and I couldn't stay online for long. Eventually I figured out that if I kept the website open, then disconnected (rather than closing then disconnecting, which was what my parents taught me), the games would still work. Which is obvious to me now, of course, but as a 6~7 year old, who had no idea of how any of this worked, I felt like an actual, proper hacker. I literally just had the thought, "wait, what if..." and was promptly rewarded. I've been chasing that high ever since :)

From then on, my evening routine after school was connecting, picking the 3~4 games I wanted to play for that night, letting them load, disconnecting, and playing to my heart's content. If I hacked anything that fateful night, it was my parent's main excuse to get me off the computer!

I had a phone that produced this effect with its torch: https://twitter.com/rmbalt/status/1200397150003302403?s=20

Most homeless people aren't born homeless. Maybe at the point they're at now, yeah, a $500 rent and a $5000 are equally inaccessible.

But for the people on the edge of homelessness, that $500 rent could be the difference that prevents them from going down the death spiral of homelessness, lack of options, drug addiction, etc.

That's an interesting take. Care to say more about HtWFaIP being unhealthy?

In practice it is a problem, because not everyone who needs low latency audio is a professional.

Case in point: just the other week I was trying to get Rocksmith (a guitar game where you plug in an actual guitar with their custom USB cable) working on windows, and I could not do it. The latency was too high for it to be usable.

The community has many workarounds for it, but most involve getting an audio interface and connecting through that. But that really, really shouldn't be needed. I used to play this game on MacOS, and it worked perfectly. It's ridiculous that Windows fails at this.

How come that when people handling uranium decide the rules are nonsensical it's bad, but when people handling bananas decide the rules (that, please note, apply to everyone with radioactive materials), it's somehow A-ok?

For sure it's a very minor impact, all things considered, but an impact nonetheless.

Most people who have the option of buying a Mac and still go with Windows/Linux machines do so because of the software. The hardware is almost universally agreed to be great, and a stronger overall package than most non-Mac options.

So making Mac-like hardware with Windows/Linux software is very much a great value proposition to many people.

I thought I'd be unimpressed by the mirrored version, but I can say that for myself, it really did have a different feel to it.

I've always pictured the boats moving right, sliding down, as if surfing the wave.

The mirrored version makes it clear that, no, they're going against the wave, which makes it that much more of a scary situation!

Now, having noticed that, I see how the position of the rowers in the boat would be enough to deduce that. But still, it goes to show that (at least for me, personally, in this specific case) the mirroring really did bring a more intuitive feel for what the artist was trying to represent.

I do think that there's some loss in translated manga, actually!

When the mangaka is creating the layout, they're conceptualizing the flow not only of the panels, but also of the text inside panels, to be RTL.

Translating the text into a LTR language without mirroring the image, makes it so that your eyes have to zig zag around a bit more, going RTL panel wise, but LTR text box wise.

Compared to the problems that mirroring the art brings, I still think that's best compromise of the options, but doesn't mean it's not an actual impact on the experience, even if a subtle one.

I have wondered before, though, about how had might it be to learn to read mirrored, RLT english. Might be a bit of a challenge at first, but would enable you to read translated manga RTL with no compromises (other than the inherent lossiness of language translation in general).

I've long thought that words such as "unlimited", "infinite" and so on should be legally banned from marketing, or at the very least their use should be heavenly regulated.

_Nothing_ is actually infinite. Everything has limits.

"But X terabytes is functionally infinite for 99.99% of users"

Cool, then advertise that you offer Xtb of storage. Infinite means infinite, and if you offer anything less than that - and you do - then you shouldn't be allowed to say otherwise.

Yeah, I don't mind the static, manually selected ads too much. They tend to be much less annoying, and for better/more relevant services and products.

And as a bonus (for the website owner), they're also much harder to automatically block!

Totally agreed. That one silly gesture is the one thing still keeping me with Motorola, it really has become second nature. It's almost bizarre how I immediately do it as soon as I'm in any kind of darkness. I had to spend a couple of months with a phone from another brand and it was actually really annoying not having that!

That said, the software on my current phone has become bad enough (lack of updates only a couple of years after release, auto installing of bloatware every so often) that I had vowed that my next phone would not be a Motorola, probably I was going for a Samsung (Pixels are too expensive where I live).

But this announcement might just be the thing that keeps me on the Moto train. I'm really hoping this works out.

Minecraft in CSS has been done, actually! https://benjaminaster.com/css-minecraft/

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44100148