cannam (u/cannam) - Readit News

cannam commented on Fleurs du Mal fleursdumal.org... · Posted by u/Frummy

pierrec · 8 months ago

I love how this site immediately confronts you with the differences between translations, which quickly reveals how much skill and creativity can be in the translations themselves. Especially for poetry, a good translation is not just an imperfect copy, it's an artistic work where the authorship is shared between the original author and the translator.

I'm sure Baudelaire himself would have a few things to say on the topic. His translations of Edgar Allan Poe's works are notorious examples of art in translation. If you've got the French level, they are very much worth reading even if you've read the originals.

cannam · 8 months ago

In 1968 a British newspaper ran a competition for English translations of "Spleen - Je suis comme le roi..." The poet Nicholas Moore - motivated by a belief that translating poetry was impossible and the project futile - sent in 31 different entries, by post, under false names and with varying levels of absurdity. He didn't win.

You can find them at https://www.ubu.com/ubu/pdf/moore_spleen.pdf, or in his published Selected Poems, along with an essay (written afterwards) about translation. Worth looking out.

(I particularly admire the sarcastic one that begins "I'm like The Winner of The Competition / The one who wrote the strong, rewarding phrase...")

cannam commented on I wrote to the address in the GPLv2 license notice (2022) code.mendhak.com/gpl-v2-a... · Posted by u/ekiauhce

bombcar · 8 months ago

Legal size folders exist and are widely used by people who use ... legal size paper.

Legal folders can be great to be able to print letter-sized things on, then you have an area at the bottom to write notes and stuff.

cannam · 8 months ago

I'm just about old enough to remember (in the UK) foolscap paper, an imperial size also a bit longer than A4. You never see it any more (at least I don't) but foolscap sized box-files are still readily available. I guess a slightly bigger box than you need is not usually a problem.

cannam commented on Show HN: Mandarin Word Segmenter with Translation mandobot.netlify.app/... · Posted by u/routerl

ipnon · a year ago

Awesome! Your Chinese must be pretty good now. Do you still have the Perl source? How did you even devise such a project in 1998?

cannam · a year ago

There's a link to the Perl code hidden in the third para of text ("The [Perl source] for this script is available...") Of course a big reason it still works is that it was written for Perl 5, which is still current!

What that link doesn't give you is the dictionary files I used as input for the preprocessing step - which of course were also 1998 vintage. There are copies on the server (https://all-day-breakfast.com/chinese/cedict.b5_saved, https://all-day-breakfast.com/chinese/big5-PY.tit)

My Chinese got somewhat better, then a lot worse, then a little bit better again - obviously mostly to do with whether I was actually using it, which on the whole I haven't been. But back then I was really working on it and I just wanted something to help - there were a few useful resources I knew of (CEDICT obviously, and Rick Harbaugh's zhongwen.com was mindblowing at the time) and this seemed like a way to glue them together that I actually knew how to do.

Writing learning tools is obviously not the same thing as learning though.

cannam commented on Show HN: Mandarin Word Segmenter with Translation mandobot.netlify.app/... · Posted by u/routerl

cannam · a year ago

This was my attempt at doing something a little bit like it, 27 years ago. It's mostly interesting as a historical artifact - certainly yours is a lot more sophisticated and much much prettier! This one just does greedy matching against CEDICT.

https://all-day-breakfast.com/chinese/

What is kind of interesting is that the script itself (a single Perl CGI script) has survived the passage of time better than the text documenting it.

Besides all the broken links, the text refers throughout to Big-5 encoding, and the form at https://all-day-breakfast.com/chinese/big5-simple.html has a warning that the popups only work in Netscape or MSIE 4. You can now ignore all of that because browsers are more encoding aware (it still uses Big-5 internally but you can paste in Unicode) and the popups work anywhere.

cannam commented on Guitar chord karaoke with Vamp, Chordino, and FFmpeg (2022) dylanbeattie.net/2022/09/... · Posted by u/davekiss

keymasta · a year ago

What a cool thread! I like how you put the specifics of your workflow and especially details of the commands you used! Particularly with the vamp commands, because as you say, they are somewhat inscrutably named/documented.

I started dabbling with vamp as well a couple years ago, but lost track of the project as my goals started ballooning. Although the code is still sitting (somewhere), waiting to be resuscitated.

I have had an idea for many years of the utility of having chord analysis further built out such that a functional chart can be made from it. With vamp most of/all the ingredients are there. I think that's probably what chordify.com does, but they clearly haven't solved segmentation or time to musical time, as their charts are terrible. I don't think they are using chordino, and whatever they do use is actually worse.

I got as far as creating a python script which would convert audio files in a directory into different midi files, to start to collect the necessary data to construct a chart.

For your use case, you'd probably just need to quantize the chords to the nearest beat, so you could maybe use:

vamp-aubio_aubiotempo_beats, or vamp-plugins_qm-barbeattracker_bars

and then combine those values with the actual time values that you are getting from chordino.

I'd love to talk about this more, as this is a seemingly niche area. I've only heard about this rarely if at all, so I was happy to read this!

cannam · a year ago

> I think that's probably what chordify.com does [...] I don't think they are using chordino

I think they were initially using the Chordino chroma features (NNLS-Chroma) but a different chord language model "front end". Their page at https://chordify.net/pages/technology-algorithm-explained/ seems to imply they've since switched to a deep learning model (not surprisingly)

cannam commented on Guitar chord karaoke with Vamp, Chordino, and FFmpeg (2022) dylanbeattie.net/2022/09/... · Posted by u/davekiss

cannam · a year ago

Oh this is very nice, I hadn't seen it before. A few random thoughts:

- The Vamp Plugin Pack for Mac finally got an ARM/Intel universal build in its 2.0 release last year, so hopefully the caveat mentioned about the M1 Mac should no longer apply

- Most of the Vamp plugins in the Pack pre-date the pervasive use of deep learning in academia, and use classic AI or machine-learning methods with custom feature design and filtering/clustering/state models etc. (The associated papers can be an interesting read, because the methods are so explicitly tailored to the domain)

- Audacity as host only supports plugins that emit time labels as output - this obviously includes beats and chords, but there are other forms of analysis plugins can do if the host (e.g. Sonic Visualiser) supports them

- Besides the simple host in the Vamp SDK, there is another command-line Vamp host called Sonic Annotator (https://vamp-plugins.org/sonic-annotator/) which is even harder to use, equally poorly documented, and even more poorly maintained, but capable of some quite powerful batch analysis and supporting a wider range of audio file formats. Worth checking out if you're curious

(I'm the main author of the Vamp SDK and wrote bits of some of the plugins, so if you have other questions I may be able to help)

cannam commented on Talking over a wall changed my direction as a programmer thecodist.com/how-talking... · Posted by u/fagnerbrack

wlindley · a year ago

It's a program. "App" is a word, short for "Application Program," publicized by Apple for its handheld computers that masquerade as (and are euphemistically called) "telephones." "App" effectively means "proprietary closed-source program that talks to proprietary walled-garden programs running on someone else's computer, and acts as a spy sending all your sensitive data to who-knows-where."

No-one ever called a real program an "app" before that, did they?

cannam · a year ago

> No-one ever called a real program an "app" before that, did they?

Yes. Apple called them apps in the 80s, at least on the Mac - this is Apple II but it's plausible they were also referred to as apps there?

For my part I read the title as "Taking over a wall changed my direction as a programmer" which had me really confused for a while. I'd like to read that article, I think.

cannam commented on The saga of the color brown in the early years of the PC (2023) nerdlypleasures.blogspot.... · Posted by u/susam

cannam · a year ago

The April 1984 issue of the British magazine "What Micro?" (70p from all good newsagents) contained a spoof review of a revolutionary new PC, the "Victori XZ64/4A".

A paragraph in praise of its display reads:

"Now lets move on to the display - and what a display it is. No less than 30 colours are available from Basic: white, off-white, cream, dark cream, light tan, light brown, bamboo, medium tan, medium brown, wood brown, sepia, burnt umber, oxtail, mustard (both French and English), khaki, off-brown, chocolate, dark tan, dark brown, dark burnt umber, burnt chocolate, drinking chocolate, ovaltine, light black, medium black, dark black, brown with a hint of green, brown with a hint of red, and brown with a hint of reddy-green. On some televisions these colours tend to look a little muddy, but with a little hunting around compatible sets can be found. For the purpose of this review I am using a VictoriVision Super Compatible available at most good electrical shops in Taiwan."

cannam commented on A popular but wrong way to convert a string to uppercase or lowercase devblogs.microsoft.com/ol... · Posted by u/ingve

ahartmetz · a year ago

...and that is why you use QString if you are using the Qt framework. QString is a string class that actually does what you want when used in the obvious way. It probably helps that it was mostly created by people with "ASCII+" native languages. Or with customers that expect not exceedingly dumb behavior. The methods are called QString::toUpper() and QString::toLower() and take only the implicit "this" argument, unlike Win32 LCMapStringEx() which takes 5-8 arguments...

cannam · a year ago

QString::toUpper/toLower are not locale-aware (https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qstring.html#toLower)

Qt does have a locale-aware equivalent (QLocale::toUpper/toLower) which calls out to ICU if available. Otherwise it falls back to the QString functions, so you have to be confident about how your build is configured. Whether it works or not has very little to do with the design of QString.

cannam commented on DEF CON's response to the badge controversy old.reddit.com/r/Defcon/c... · Posted by u/mmastrac

Arainach · a year ago

HN comments were dismissive of the Google SRE "no heroes" article recently, but this is a great example of why that policy is in place. Heroism leads to unrealistic expectations until something implodes far more catastrophically than setting reasonable expectations and not killing yourself to make magic would have.

cannam · a year ago

> HN comments were dismissive of the Google SRE "no heroes" article recently

If (like me) you hadn't seen this one, I think it is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41172531

(Some of the top-level comments do indeed seem a bit oddly negative to me)