arafalov (u/arafalov)

arafalov commented on ACE-Step: A step towards music generation foundation model github.com/ace-step/ACE-S... · Posted by u/wertyk

l72 · 4 months ago

I want to play something on my keyboard (the only instrument I am slightly ok at) and then be able to tell it to play it with a saxophone and describe exactly how I want it played. I don’t need an AI to create a song for me, I need 100 session musicians at my disposal to create the song I want. I am very excited about having that type of ai.

arafalov · 4 months ago

You sound like you are just talking about virtual instruments, which are getting better and better.

Something like this maybe, doing the virtual instruments (VST/VSTI) review for saxophone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43909398

arafalov commented on Generate audiobooks from E-books with Kokoro-82M claudio.uk/posts/epub-to-... · Posted by u/csantini

calgoo · 7 months ago

Audible has thousands of books available "for free" with their membership that are all AI generated. I was the same in the start, but after listening to a few, it really comes down to the voice used. I spent 8h on a plane listening to 1 book, and there was maybe 5 occasions where i had an issue with the voice; and i think all where just "AI weirdness", similar to chat LLMs messing up simple sentence structure or image generating LLMs adding an extra finger.

arafalov · 7 months ago

The one I tried, had a lot of issues. It was a music theory book and it did not know how to pronounce C# (it kept saying C 'hash'). It also referred to, but did not read out the diagrams, or tables.

So, it was not just the voice, but the quality control pipeline that was missing as well.

Maybe it mostly works for old plain text books, but if nobody is checking.....

arafalov commented on Generate audiobooks from E-books with Kokoro-82M claudio.uk/posts/epub-to-... · Posted by u/csantini

vanderZwan · 7 months ago

Your point is a valid one, but I want to add to it that it is also a matter of expectations and how one listens.

Years ago, when I was dating someone who spoke Russian as one of her native languages, we had to do a funny compromise when watching films together with her parents: they didn't speak a word of English, so we'd use the Russian dub with English subtitles.

I noticed that the Russian dub was just one man reading a translation in a flat voice over what was happening on the screen, no attempts at voice acting or matching the emotions. Usually the dub would have a split second delay to the actual lines, so you'd still hear the original voices for a moment (and also a little bit in the background).

At first I found it very jarring, but they explained that this flatness was a feature. You'll quickly learn to "filter out" the voice while still hearing the translation, and the faint presence of the original voices was enough to bring the emotional flavor back. The lack of voice acting helped with the filtering.

This turned out to apply to me as well, even though I don't speak Russian! My brain subconsciously would filter out the dub, and extract most of the original performance through the subtitles and faint presence of the original voices. Obviously the original version would have been a better experience for me, but it was still very enjoyable.

Of course a generated audiobook is not a dub, as there is no "original voice" to extract an emotional performance from. But some listeners might still be able do something similar. The lack of understanding in the generated voice and its predictable monotony might allow them to filter out everything but the literal text, and then fill it in with their own emotional interpretations. Still not as great as having proper story teller who does understand the text and knows how to deliver dramatic lines, but perhaps not as bad as expected either.

arafalov · 7 months ago

Here is the rest of that story.

When the foreign movies started to filter into the Soviet Union's illegal movie theatres, you would get 3 or 4 movies playing at once in one room. There would be a TV in each corner of the room and 4 or 5 rows of plastic chairs in front of it in an arch.

ALL of the movies were being revoiced by the same person. So, if you were sitting in the back of the 5th row, you were potentially getting the sound from an action movie, a comedy, a horror movie and a romance at the same time. In the same voice.

You learned to filter really well. So, if that's what they were trained on, watching a single movie must have been very relaxing.

arafalov commented on Generate audiobooks from E-books with Kokoro-82M claudio.uk/posts/epub-to-... · Posted by u/csantini

october8140 · 7 months ago

All these AI text to voice models seem to ignore emotion. It always sounds like a robot.

arafalov · 7 months ago

Try this one https://www.hume.ai/ - I found the demos (voice to voice) interesting.

arafalov commented on Valve Makes All Steam Audio SDK Source Code Available Under Apache 2.0 License phoronix.com/news/Steam-A... · Posted by u/LinuxBender

henriquecm8 · 2 years ago

I am starting to learn gamedev, in specific I would like to make a stealth game.

Ever since I first read about steam audio, I've wondered if it would be possible to use the sound propagation to determine if a npc has heard a sound. There are probably better ways to do this. And not always the most realistic approach is the best approach.

But I've always found that some games are very inconsistent about how npcs hear you. Sometimes you are in a closed room and make very little sound, and they hear you from outside, other times you are in an open place and they don't hear anything. It seems like some games only check the distance to sound origin, without taking occlusion/attenuation into consideration.

arafalov · 2 years ago

I am - very slowly - learning Unreal and they do seem to have such functionality. E.g. https://dev.epicgames.com/community/learning/tutorials/5Ed/u...

Since they have a full sound engine built-in as well, I suspect they deal with attenuation, et al correctly.

arafalov commented on Ask HN: Should I medicate my ADHD? · Posted by u/websitescenes

arafalov · 2 years ago

If you had been diagnosed, it may be worth giving it a try. You may be able to convince a doctor to give you a one-month supply of fast acting pills to evaluate the results, based on old diagnosis. This will give you more than enough baseline for much more detailed discussion and/or action clarity.

I don't have ADHD (or think I do not anyway), but my wife (late 30s) has been diagnosed as an adult and started taking Vyvanse six months ago.

This is fast acting, slow release, non-accumulative medecine. Her doze kicks in within 20 minutes and slowly tapers off over the day. There is probably some minor residual effect crossing into the second day, mostly because if she takes it for many days stright, she needs a day or two break.

Her taking Vyvance saved our marriage and she is feels that the person she was before taking Vyvance is "gone". The day she took the first doze, she wrote about 20 pages of notes of what was different. Off-pill, she could not write 20 pages on demand, online in full hyper-focus mode. The pill is less effective now, but it sure still makes a difference.

I think having "on pill" and "off pill" perspective on the same issue by the "same person"(you/her) can help break a lot of bad patterns where the person thinks their position is the only valid one. Suddenly, they get a range of options from the "inside of their head". It also allows her to still have access to traditional creative ADHD super-powers (off-pill days) but then balance it with productivity of on-pill days.

As an anecdote. Before the pill if we would walk up to a traffic light blinking green with 20 seconds left - she would refuse to cross. Just too worried about not having enough time. Probably not ADHD itself, but one of co-morbidities. But also maybe not having enough focus to make a snap decision. On pill, she will cross with 5 seconds left. Because she has the focus and the drive.

As another anecdote. Our arguments/negotations (pre-pill) would be like floating on a stormy sea, always changing direction and shape of the argument. And even if we reached a conclusion, it would only be about the very last point discussed, ignoring the journey. The first serious discussion "on the pill" felt not that dissimilar, but at the end she turned to me and said "So we discussed these 6 things (named 1, named 2, ...) and agreed on X". I was blown away, as I was very used to the old ways.

Books I found more helpful than others:

* Melissa Orlov's book about ADHD and marriage: https://archive.org/details/adhdeffectonmarr0000orlo * https://www.amazon.ca/ADHD-2-0-Essential-Strategies-Distract... - this one, among other good bits, includes a table of all ADHD medecines and their effects, including a comment that off-brand Concerta (I believe) does not actually work

P.s. She also feels that Focus Factor non-prescription pills work partially (she discovered these pre-pill and still uses them on off-pill day). I am reserving an opinion and provide a link purely to clarify the brand, as the name alone gets lots of matches: https://www.focusfactor.com/products/focus-factor-original?v...

arafalov commented on Show HN: I built a transit travel time map map.henryn.xyz... · Posted by u/ng-henry

arafalov · 2 years ago

I want very similar to this but for shopping without a car.

Like, if I want to buy something big from Walmart or Costco (to keep to generic shop names) and it does not matter if I am on a train/metro/subway for 10 minutes or 20 minutes, but it totally does matter number of transport switches of bus->subway) and walking is really bad.

So, it would make sense to go to a very distant shop, but that is right opposite the direct train.

Does anything like this exist (for any city really)? The algorithm must be quite similar, but with different graph steps weighted differently depending on method of movement.

arafalov commented on Wireshark Is 25: The email that started it all and lessons learned along the way blog.wireshark.org/2023/0... · Posted by u/ingve

arafalov · 2 years ago

This tool (Ethereal at the time) was absolutely invaluable to my job as Senior Tech Support of Weblogic family of products. I even got clients to run it and was able to provide solutions like "your large JDBC connection pool had all its connection silently dropped by a network firewall (that client was not aware of) and that's why you having 1 hour transaction delay on first one in a morning. Every pooled connection had to timeout and reset". And "Internet Explorer would abort a TCP connection for already-cached resource and that generates non-standard network level errors on your IBM server' Weblogic installation"

I lost half of my hair on that job. Without Ethereal, I am sure I would have lost all of it and a lot more of my sanity too.

arafalov commented on The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done (2020) newyorker.com/tech/annals... · Posted by u/irtefa

Scarblac · 2 years ago

For me it's the other way around.

"Next Action" never worked for me because some things are only a few actions total, but others are hundreds and need to be done sequentially all before the end of next month. By looking only at next actions the difference wasn't clear enough.

Whereas weekly / monthly reviews work very well for me to see patterns in what works and what doesn't, see where I need to spend some time planning, etc.

But I do this in a "bullet journal" type of setup, not the "getting things done" method.

arafalov · 2 years ago

GTD has support for that with its "Project Support" documents, higher-level reviews, multiple Next Actions for same project, etc. I feel it does cover the situation, and you can still do it just when you run out of obvious things to do or stop for the day.

The "Next Action" is really just to ensure you know what actually can be done and when and not just have the project (e.g. "Buy car") as the action.

arafalov commented on The Rise and Fall of Getting Things Done (2020) newyorker.com/tech/annals... · Posted by u/irtefa

arafalov · 2 years ago

The article was oddly unsatisfying.

For me, GTD's biggest contribution was the focus on "Next Action". Which was mentioned exactly once in the article. I struggle with the perfect lists and I just can't get the Weekly Review figured out. But looking at some project and figuring out the exact Next Action (and sometimes associated Critical Path) is ridiculously valuable.

I've read a bunch of other productivity books. They have different ideas and approaches, but all of the practical ones seem to have this moment "and figure out the smallest, actionable thing you can actually do on that". But often, that bit is not front and center of the methodology. I suspect in the "3-day master course" for those techniques, they would actually practice such focus. David Allen just really put that front and center, explicitly.

Similarly, the Cognitive Behavior Therapy also uses this "Next Action" idea to get the person to move forward.

In that sense, I felt the article failed to truly look behind the curtain and just focused on a rise and fall of individual movement influencer. I did not see any mention of Lotus Notes (David Allen's own preferred solution), active GTD LinkedIn group, etc.