fasterik (u/fasterik)

fasterik commented on Schizophrenia sufferer mistakes smart fridge ad for psychotic episode old.reddit.com/r/LegalAdv... · Posted by u/hliyan

wdr1 · 13 days ago

> Time to ban all adverts everywhere. I'm not the only one who is fed up with ads.

This is a terrible idea. Users should have choice & control.

I'll say something that on the surface level seems controversial, at least to HN: Some users prefer ads. And those users should be allowed that choice.

Ads are part of a value exchange. It's disingenuous, imho, to frame the question as "Do you want 'X' with or without ads?" Absent any other criteria most people would naturally say without ads. But I feel it's disingenuous because it overlooks the value exchange.

A better example: Would you prefer Netflix with ads for $7.99/month with ads, or $17.99/month without ads?

A lot of people are choosing the ads tiers. It's the fastest growing tier. Personally, I have the ads-free tier, but I can make that choice for myself. The people wanting the ads tier should be able to make that choice too. I don't see the value in taking it away from them.

I don't deny there are bad experiences. I do think Samsung is making a mistake & damaging customer trust with the refrigerator thing. I likely won't be buying one in the future.

Like anything, advertising can be done well or it can be done badly. I don't use Instagram myself, but I have a lot of friends who love fashion who do & say they're on their to follow brands & find deals. They find the ads a good way to discover some new fashion product & snag a good discount.

Likewise Amazon sent a catalog to my house. My kids are using it to think of what they want to ask Santa. A catalog is basically a book of ads.

fasterik · 13 days ago

This is one of the major political problems of the 21st century, convincing people that many of the problems they see in society are in fact free choices made by individuals, and not necessarily something that needs to be fixed from the top down. The human tendency to impose one's own preferences on others is strong, and it seems every generation needs to learn the lesson anew.

fasterik commented on Schizophrenia sufferer mistakes smart fridge ad for psychotic episode old.reddit.com/r/LegalAdv... · Posted by u/hliyan

cracki · 13 days ago

Time to ban all adverts everywhere. I'm not the only one who is fed up with ads.

I don't see ads, thanks to ad blocking tech in browsers and smartphones. Any time that happens to fail and I get to endure an ad, I am amazed that regular people without ad blocking tech can endure this onslaught.

The time to negotiate a "middle ground" is long past. Let's not even entertain that idea.

An acceptable middle ground could have been designated areas for ads, which you have to seek out to see them. Think of the Yellow Pages.

Ad companies need to be reined in. They cannot control themselves. They are lobbying against all limits and controls. The only solution is to eradicate ads entirely and to make sure that anyone who gets that idea will never get it again.

fasterik · 13 days ago

I tend to think that banning things is almost never the right answer. Who gets to decide what counts as an ad? What's stopping governments from designating speech they don't like as an ad?

fasterik commented on The Absent Silence (2010) ursulakleguin.com/blog/3-... · Posted by u/dcminter

fasterik · 13 days ago

The mistake is thinking of Google as a library. Google is a commercial product. The equivalent of the Library of Congress would be something more like Wikipedia, or the Internet Archive, or Library Genesis.

I certainly think that we should be spending more resources as a civilization on storing and categorizing human knowledge in a more systematic and not-for-profit way. Expecting a for-profit corporation to do that is just a category error. I'm not saying this in an anti-capitalist sense; I'm in favor of for-profit corporations. People have unrealistic expectations about what they can or should accomplish.

fasterik commented on Lie groups are crucial to some of the most fundamental theories in physics quantamagazine.org/what-a... · Posted by u/ibobev

stochastician · 16 days ago

If, like me, you're not a real mathematician but suffered through linear algebra and differential equations, you can still totally understand this stuff! I started off teaching myself differential geometry but ultimately had far more success with lie theory from a matrix groups perspective. I highly recommend:

https://www.amazon.com/Lie-Groups-Introduction-Graduate-Math...

and

https://bookstore.ams.org/text-13

My friends were all putnam nerds in college and I was not, and I assumed this math was all beyond me, but once you get the linear algebra down it's great!

fasterik · 15 days ago

There is also Naive Lie Theory by Stillwell, which is targeted at an undergraduate level. I haven't read it yet, but it's been on my radar for a while.

https://www.amazon.com/Naive-Theory-Undergraduate-Texts-Math...

fasterik commented on How to Synthesize a House Loop loopmaster.xyz/tutorials/... · Posted by u/stagas

Slow_Hand · 16 days ago

I've actually tried all of the approaches that you've mentioned over the years, and - for my needs - they're not that compelling at the end of the day.

Sure it might be cool to use cellular automata to generate rhythms, or pick notes from a diatonic scale, or modulate signals, but without a rhyme or reason or _very_ tight constraints the music - more often than not - ends up feeling unfocused and meandering.

These methods may be able to generate a bar or two of compelling material, but it's hard to write long musical "sentences" or "paragraphs" that have an arc and intention to them. Or where the individual voices are complementing and supporting one another as they drive towards a common effect.

A great deal of compelling music comes from riding the tightrope between repetition and surprising deviations from that scheme. This quality is (for now) very hard to formalize with rules or algorithms. It's a largely intuitive process and is a big part of being a compelling writer.

I think the most effective music comes from the composer having a clear idea of where they are going musically and then using the tools to supplement that vision. Not allowing them to generate and steer for you.

-----

As an aside, I watch a lot of Youtube tutorials in which electronic music producers create elaborate modulation sources or Max patches that generate rhythms and melodies for them. A recurring theme in many of these videos is an approach of "let's throw everything at the wall, generate a lot of unfocused material, and then winnow it down and edit it into something cool!" This feels fundamentally backwards to me. I understand why it's exciting and cool when you're starting out, but I think the best music still comes from having a strong grasp of the musical fundamentals, a big imagination, and the technical ability to render it with your tools and instruments.

----

To your final point, I think the best example of this hybrid generative approach you're describing are Autechre. They're really out on the cutting edge and carving their own path. Their music is probably quite alienating because it largely forsakes melody and harmony. Instead it's all rhythm and timbre. I think they're a positive example of what generative music could be. They're controlling parameters on the macro level. They're not dictating every note. Instead they appear to be wrangling and modulating probabilities in a very active way. It's exciting stuff.

fasterik · 16 days ago

I don't think any of that is an argument against the use of procedural generation, it's just an argument for the tasteful use of it. Partly it also depends on what works in your own workflow. I find that it's an essential component in the creative process of lot of the artists I admire. Autechre is a great example. I think a lot of the pioneers of early IDM like Autechre and Aphex Twin have found ways to incorporate randomness at the micro level, while maintaining control at the macro level over the shape and direction of the composition. I don't see this as competing with traditional composition methods, it's just leveraging code-based tools to give the artist more control over which elements are random and which ones they control.

fasterik commented on How to Synthesize a House Loop loopmaster.xyz/tutorials/... · Posted by u/stagas

Slow_Hand · 16 days ago

I've watched a lot of live coding tools out of interest for the last few years, and as much as I'd like to adopt them in my music making it's not clear to me what they can add to my production repertoire compared to the existing tools (DAWs, hardware instruments, playing by hand, etc).

The coding aspect is novel I'll admit, and something an audience may find interesting, but I've yet to hear any examples of live coded music (or even coded music) that I'd actually want to listen to. They almost always take the form of some bog-standard house music or techno, which I don't find that enjoyable.

Additionally, the technique is fun for demonstrating how sound synthesis works (like in the OP article), but anything more complex or nuanced is never explored or attempted. Sequencing a nuanced instrumental part (or multiple) requires a lot of moment-to-moment detail, dynamics, and variation. Something that is tedious to sequence and simply doesn't play to this formats' strengths.

So again, I want to integrate this skill into my music production tool set, but aside from the novelty of coding live, it doesn't appear well-suited to making interesting music in real time. And for offline sequencing there are better, more sophisticated tools, like DAWs or trackers.

fasterik · 16 days ago

Procedural generation can be useful for finding new musical ideas. It's also essential in specific genres like ambient and experimental music, where the whole point is to break out of the traditional structures of rhythm and melody. Imagine using cellular automata or physics simulations to trigger notes, key changes, etc. Turing completeness means there are no limits on what you can generate. Some DAWs and VSTs give you a Turing complete environment, e.g. Bitwig's grid or Max/MSP. But for someone with a programming background those kinds of visual editors are less intuitive and less productive than writing code.

Of course, often creativity comes from limitations. I would agree that it's usually not desirable to go full procedural generation, especially when you want to wrangle something into the structure of a song. I think the best approach is a hybrid one, where procedural generation is used to generate certain ideas and sounds, and then those are brought into a more traditional DAW-like environment.

fasterik commented on Social media promised connection, but it has delivered exhaustion noemamag.com/the-last-day... · Posted by u/pseudolus

pessimizer · 3 months ago

This is hobby project for a billionaire, not a social media website. It doesn't need to generate a dime. It runs very efficiently because it was coded well (and cared for), but there are salaries paid to people to watch it that are just a gift to the people who post here.

fasterik · 3 months ago

Social media isn't defined by the business model. Straight from Wikipedia: "Social media are new media technologies that facilitate the creation, sharing and aggregation of content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongst virtual communities and networks." That perfectly describes HN.

fasterik commented on OpenAI scores gold in one of the top programming competitions msn.com/en-xl/news/other/... · Posted by u/energy123

NitpickLawyer · 4 months ago

So in the past month we've had

- gold at IMO

- gold at IoI

- beat 9/10 humans in atcode heuristics

- longer context, better models, routing calls to cheaper models, 4-6x cheaper inference for 90% of the top models capabilities

- longer agentic sessions while being coherent/solving tasks (30-90min)

Yet every other post here and there are about "bubble this", "winter that", "plateauing this", "wall that"...

Are we in the denial stage, or bargaining stage? Can't quite tell...

fasterik · 4 months ago

I don't think it's crazy to talk about plateaus, it just depends on what domain we're talking about. Performance on olympiad-style problems doesn't necessarily translate into success in research, or industry, or creative pursuits. We know this is true for humans, then add on to that all the usual problems with LLMs like hallucinations and you can see why some people are still skeptical.

I'm still in the "wait and see" stage. Maybe throwing more compute at the problem will solve it, but maybe not. I would like to see benchmarks that take a more project-based approach, e.g. tell the LLM to go work on something complicated and ambiguous for a week and see what it comes up with.

fasterik commented on Five companies now control over 90% of the restaurant food delivery market marketsaintefficient.subs... · Posted by u/goinggetthem

AndrewKemendo · 5 months ago

Here's the bit on Youtube (I couldn't find an Archive link): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrSAxtIYM08

This is the right conclusion, and I love sharing that video for that reason.

As of 2025 everyone globally has everything they need to make the world a great place for everyone. Instead, people continue to take the lowest energy route for their personal actions, which means they do not even think about the externalities of that purchase from Amazon, the Latte from Starbucks, continuing living in (insert your broken system here), working for some billionaire etc...They just shrug and think "its out of my control, besides I don't have any impact and why should I suffer unnecessarily"

There are millions of examples of individual people who had no education, being actively oppressed and violently attacked changing their situation by either moving or overthrowing their oppressors. Harriet Tubman comes to mind.

It's never been easier to do that, but people would rather not.

The entire "illegal immigrant" concept proves it, people literally spending their entire life savings ($5000) to pay coyotes to smuggle them in horrific conditions so they can be slaves picking strawberries. I know a Houston restaurant owner who did that trek twice from Guatemala, getting deported the first time and he just saved up and did it again. While speaking no english. Tell me again about how it's not possible to do something. Meanwhile the citizens can't be bothered to learn about their own history or you know, do anything.

I've tried to start multiple non-heirarchical anarchist cooperative organizations and the number one challenge is finding people who will put the group ahead of the individual. It just doesn't happen. There are no organizations where that's true. No church, no government, no state, no charity, nothing, nowhere actually meets the test of holistic globally aligned "good."

I read the Medicins Sans Frotiers book long ago, even they were terrible and continue to fight internally [1]. Unions now make most of their money from capital investments [2], which is directly in opposition to their anticapitalist philosophical roots. All of this is because the members don't care and don't have any desire to have less, they all want more forever.

At this point in history, everyone has access to the information they need to make globally holistic decisions. It's not possible to claim ignorance, ignorance is strictly a choice and ultimately a existential personal limitation.

There are no organizations that exist for the benefit of society and they cannot exist because humans fundamentally lack the cognitive ability to think beyond Dunbar's number but their actions have global consequences.

Self elimination is the only possible arc for humanity.

[1] https://healthpolicy-watch.news/inward-technocratic-msf-lead...

[2] https://jacobin.com/2023/02/finance-unionism-union-density-d...

fasterik · 5 months ago

I think there are some organizations doing good in the world. The trend is not as bad as you would imagine.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-livin...

https://www.givewell.org/