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blehn

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Tidal AI Policy 23 days ago

electronic music is significantly harder for AI to do than a conventional love ballad or a rock song

Why do you say that? I'd argue the opposite

Google is a good bet because if AI continues to boom, they're in a good position (frontier lab, vertically integrated). If the bubble bursts and the frontier labs fail, they might do even better.

Tidal AI Policy 23 days ago

YouTube is already recommending tons of AI-generated electronic music. It's pretty easy to spot: It will have millions of views and the "artist's" discography will only go back to 2025 or 2026. It's usually just singles. The cover art is vague atmospheric AI-generated. The "artist" will have no presence online save for a couple instagram account with a couple posts that are also AI-generated.

After riding in countless Ubers and Lyfts, with drivers who drive all day for a living, I can say confidently that good drivers who grasp the intricacies of driving are by far the exception.

It’s like learning how to drive. It’s a skill for sure but anyone can do it after practice.

The analogy only illustrates the parent's point. Most licensed drivers have been doing it for years and are still terrible drivers, because they never grasp the intricacies of driving — smoothly accelerating and decelerating, smoothing out corners, anticipating light changes, gauging merge distances and timings, using mirrors well, ensuring cars get by when making a left turn in an intersection, etc, etc

It’s a good idea to enable cellular service for those who don’t have adequate access at home.

But then the students with mobile access have an advantage over those who only have home access. And how do you determine who has adequate access at home and who doesn't? Much easier and more equitable to just provide it for everyone.

The business trajectory will be like Uber. A few big companies (Google, OpenAI) will price their AI services at a loss until consumers find it to be indispensable and competitors run out of money, then they'll steadily ramp up the pricing to the point where they're gouging consumers (and raking in profits) but still a bit cheaper or better than alternatives (humans in this case).

You should filter out authors from the input books in the output. If liked a book by an author, surely I'd read more of their work if I wanted to — recommending them isn't helpful. Along the same lines, I think interesting recommendations tend to be the ones that (1) I like and (2) I didn't expect. The more similar the recommendations are to the input, the more likely I already know them, and the more likely to create a recommendation echo chamber.

There's no air traffic after all

No air traffic until their are drone deliveries. What will the sky look like when you take every _individual_ package from Door Dash, Uber Eats, Postmates, Instacart, Amazon, UPS, Fedex, DHL, etc etc etc and put them on _individual_ drones? Even if the logistics could be sorted out, I worry about the quality of life issues it poses for communities, especially with the amount of noise drones make.

NYC handles 3,000 flights a day; it handles 2,300,000 package deliveries a day.

The AI coding trap 10 months ago

There's a divide between people who enjoy the physical experience of the work and people who enjoy the mental experience of the work

Eh, physical and mental isn't the divide — it's more like people who enjoy code itself as a craft and people who simply see it as a means to an end (the application). Much like a writer might labor over their prose (the code) while telling a story (the application). Writing code is far more than the physical act of typing to those people.

Isn't that basically the same premise as Chrome, which already dominates the market? Google even made something called ChromeOS. Arc wasn't really more than a distracting skin on Chromium with a few innovative bits of UI...

Not that Google needs any more cash, but ReVanced has to be the absolute worst defense for maintaining openness on Android. As in, you could have cited the thousands of legitimate apps that have nothing to do with circumventing a pretty reasonable subscription (compared to other media subscriptions out there) for Google's own app.

Pixel 10 Phones 11 months ago

It's slight, but noticeable. The 15 Pro was 187g and felt much lighter than the 14 Pro, it's a shame they added more weight on the 16.

Pixel 10 Phones 11 months ago

Manual transmissions have no practical benefit aside from arguably being easier to repair. A better car analogy is pickup trucks (and cars in generally really) — they've gotten huge over the years, compact pickups have disappeared, and you hear the same arguments about it being a niche audience. The reality is that as soon as something sells well (big trucks in this case), these big corporations go all in on it and alienate large segments. Now 25 year old compact Tacomas are selling for as much as their MSRP and manufacturers (Toyota, Ford, Hyundai) are all scrambling to ship a compact. It's the same with small phones — the industry over-rotated on big phones and as soon as someone ships a good small phone, it'll be a hit and small phones will come back. iPhone Mini was a crippled device compared to the Pro line and it still sold millions. Google and Samsung haven't even tried to make something compact, let alone compact and good.

Counterpoint: I worked there for years and the demand for more people wasn't natural. It came from (1) typical employees not getting much done because they were either not very motivated, not very competent, or stuck in meetings all day, (2) proliferation of people managers who weren't producing anything — product teams of 200 with 50 of them being managers, (3) managers playing the headcount game because it was a path to promotion — all things being equal, who's getting promoted: an L6 manager with 3 reports or an L6 manager with 12 reports? Constant headcount battles

I want to love this but the visual language makes it kind of unusable for me. Why not match the track and train colors to their line color (red for the 123) and then use different visual indicators for train state (stopped, at station, etc)?

For example: Selected: Black fill Normal operation: Color fill with 100% opacity Slowing down: 70% opacity Stopped: striped fill, 50% opacity At station: pulsing opacity

I don't really understand what the search nearby places button is doing. I think the solution would be to allow some sort of OR operator (which seems straightforward), or conditions the act on generic queries (which seems more difficult). For example say you live in NYC and want some nice green space near you. Choosing a single park is too narrow and choosing all parks is too broad. So you should be able to say e.g. "Central Park OR Prospect Park OR Brooklyn Bridge Park OR Fort Greene Park", or you should be able to say "Park, > 10 acres, 4+ star google rating, has tennis court, has bike path"... the point is that not all parks, grocery stores, coffee shops, etc are equal; I need to be able to qualify them somehow.

According to this data, traffic is reduced on the bridges and tunnels but not within Manhattan itself, e.g., going from Hell's Kitchen to Midtown East or Greenwich Village to Alphabet City.

First, it's not exclusively defined by revenue (which is what my first point was alluding to). Second, the underlying assumption of revenue generated is that it's going to the MTA and used to improve public transit and therefore quality of life in the city, which would be a success.

I'm not sure how to reconcile the significant drop in the bridge and tunnel commute times with the apparent non-effect on commute times within the congestion relief zone.

Yeah, I'm not sure what to make of that either but it'll be interesting to see when more/better data comes available. Maybe car traffic getting to Manhattan is reduced but those people are using more taxis and Ubers to get around once they're in

1. The data is obviously flawed, but if there's anything to speculate from it, it's that the actual congestion in lower Manhattan isn't affected that much.

2. So the success of this policy really depends on how much additional revenue it's bringing in for the city and the MTA. The $9 increase needs to significantly offset the loss in toll revenue from the decrease in drivers.

3. There are so many other simple policies that would benefit quality of life in NYC:

- Daylighting — Don't allow cars and trucks to park at the corners of intersections. Huge safety benefits.

- Metered parking everywhere. Why is NYC giving away the most valuable real estate in the world for free? Would be a huge revenue stream while discouraging car ownership in Manhattan.

- Close more streets to car traffic. This is already true on 14th street and it's fantastic. Close Houston, 34th, 42nd, 59th, 125th. This would make buses much more efficient and further discourage passenger car usage