cerol

A couple of years ago, I took a "Music and Computers" course at my undergraduate computer science program. I had known the professor for a while, and he had some incredible projects under his belt. He had built a full fledged Hammond-like MIDI synth using an Arduino Due, all the way from writing the code, and building the stainless steel casing. I took that as an inspiration for my final project, and tried to build a FM synth using ESP32.

I based my project on the Yamaha DX7, which is an amazing feat of musical engineering. I had to write the code, wire together a MIDI Input, and an audio output (using a DAC). It was one of the coolest projects I've ever made, although I did not get too far.

At the core, all you're doing is generating sine waves. Digital Synths in the 80s would not have the computation power to actually compute sine waves, so what you have to do is precompute the values of a sine wave, and store it in memory [0]. Also, you don't get floats, so it's all fixed point arithmetic [1]. FM Synthesis is essentially a carrier wave and a modulator wave [2]. The DX7 goes beyond that with the concept of Operators, which can be mixed and matched in an Algorithm [3].

I managed to make it produce notes, which were in tune. I started making the envelope (attack, decay, sustain and release), but that's where I got stuck and eventually abandoned it.

[0] https://github.com/fercgomes/churrosfm/blob/master/src/Table...

[1] https://github.com/fercgomes/churrosfm/blob/master/src/Oscil...

[2] https://github.com/fercgomes/churrosfm/blob/master/include/A...

[3] https://djjondent.blogspot.com/2019/10/yamaha-dx7-algorithms...

The city my dad lives near Porto Alegre already suffered twice due to extra tropical cyclones. Something that I heard only few times in my childhood.

One thing I noticed is that local governments (and their respective climate departments) are being much more vigilant and proactive with climate events. And we are in a way paying much more attention to the frequency of climate events. Trying to correlate your own experience of "frequency of events" is a very tricky thing, since we can pretty much condition ourselves to rememeber pretty much anything we want.

Back in the day there were tropical storms and cyclones, and we just moved on. But now local governments will proactively cancel school days if there is a even a hint of a heavier storm. Which is great, but it does mess with our ability to actually estimate frequency of events.

It's a great service but honestly I think they just got lucky with how they named it. It's short, easy to pronounce and very memorable. Were it to be called anything else, I'm not sure it would've caught on.

Most people in this thread are either in North America or Europe, so options for managed services like Fly exist, and they are plenty. But for people in South America, what options are there for a Heroku-like service? I don't want users shooting off requests halfway across the globe and back when there are many datacenters a couple of miles from our users. I just don't have the time and resources to manage VMs and scaling issues. I need a zero friction "./serviceX deploy" experience.

Fly seems unreliable, but they offer a deploy region close to me. Does anyone have know of any alternatives?

I'll just come out and say it. I absolutely loved Toy Story 4.

I watched TS1 and 2 as a kid, and I remeber loving it and rewatching dozens of time. Then TS3 came out, with Andy going to college, around the same time I was going to college.

Toy Story 4 was an absolutely stunning movie, both in terms of photography, and underlying message. In my opinion, it is about growing up, finding out who you are, and letting go. They ended the franchise in the best way possible.

Am I the only one who thinks this is a really bad idea?

By offloading your cognitive tasks to an AI, even though you now look smarter, you're becoming dumber in the long run, because you're never really challeging and exercising your intelect. This book[1] goes into a lot of detail about how rote memorization and recall is essential to critical thinking (you have a limited working memory, and the way by which you're able to critically think about complex subjects is by chunking, which only works with concepts you've previously memorized). If you just stop exercising your recall and critical thinking, they'll get weaker and weaker.

I feel that already with ChatGPT. Before, whenever I needed to learn some programming concept, I'd have to search vast amounts of resources to learn it. By being exposed to many different points of view, I always felt that what I had learned stuck with me for much longer. If I just ask ChatGPT, I get the answer faster, but I also forget faster. It's not learning.

Learning, with capital L, is not supposed to be easy. It's supposed to be hard. Education is about making what is hard a worthwhile pursuit. The people who get lured into thinking they'll be smarter if they plug themselves to the matrix will be shooting themselves in the foot.

For me, relying on OpenAI to function cognitively is like relying on Google to turn my lightbulb on. It looks cool, but it doesn't make any sense.

[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4959061-why-don-t-studen...

Can someone provide a guide on how run LLaMA on a fairly average CPU/Nvidia GPU?

You may like it, but it's not healthy in the long run.

I disagree. Not all marathon runners are made equal. Talking about the long run means an extreme training routine that is consistent through a long period of time.

The vast majority of marathon runners are casual runners, rarely logging more than 40km a week. And after a while most simply stop or reduce significantly their training to casual (in terms of intensity) but consistent training.

AFAIK, most research about negative effects of marathon running is related to professional athletes, who have a career in running. Endurance athletes usually start from a very young age, and peak at around 30-40. That's 20 to 30 years of extreme training. And the key aspect here is oxidative stress, which means they are aging faster. There's also a risk that your heart will change in shape to respond to a greater demand, and that may lead to conditions such as arrythmia.

I think I can speak for most of the amateur athletes I know. We're all well aware of the risks. There's just no point in not taking them.

Just to give some context, I've been a marathon runner for 7 years. I have a PB of 3:24, and I'm training for a sub 3 hour marathon right now (logging around 70 - 120km per week). I run 6 times a week, and work out at the gym 3 times a week. I consider myself to be in my all-time peak athletic shape right now.

I don't mean to be rude, but this comes from years of people picking fights with me about exercising and easy ways to get fit.

You're looking for an easy way out. There isn't any. Or there shouldn't be. If you want to really stick to an exercising habit, you have to either do something you really love doing, or just pick something and stick to it. If there isn't some sort of physical activity you love doing and could potentially do effortlessly, you have to start from scratch.

That means putting in the work and becoming disciplined. Building a habit. Which means you have to work against yourself so you can, in the future, be in a position where exercising is at least neutral and effortless. Only then will you know whether or not you'll enjoy it. Never before that. If you have an open mind and patience, you probably will.

You could also just keep trying several other options, until you find sometimes that you seem to enjoy. But chances are you'll probably get tired of it soon.

I'd honestly advise you to work on habit building skills rather than trying to find something you'll be able to do effortlessly, just like that. If you pick something, stick to it, be patient, study it and put your mind to it, I promise you, you'll eventually start enjoying it.

Funny this is on HN's front page, given that only a couple of days ago I had this dream I got stuck in an elevator and started to smash the doors trying to get out. I woke up and I had just smashed the bedroom window with my bare hands.

I have pretty bad sleep habits, but never had that happened to me (AFAIK, given that I live on my own). That day I was sleep-deprived (3 hours of sleep on the night before), and had exercised a lot (I'm an athlete).

I'm only 27, but I'm still a bit freaked out about the possibility of this being an early sign of some neurodegenerative disease.

And what is probably even worse: being enslaved by a fear of punishment that never existed in the first place.

Now yes, you can quickly make generic background #20233 with it or simply something weird that would fit into some bad dream. If you need something specific and coherent though? Yeah, this will be very hard.

The demos look amazing because there is no acceptance criteria. Anything gets hailed as "groundbreaking" because is process is novel. Which is a completely different scenario from what you expect from someone actually being paid for making art.

I'll believe it when I see it.

I'll second that.

Hell. Even ATMs haven't automated bank tellers yet. Nor has Kindle replaced physical books.

Just another chapter of the whole automation shtick.

I don't think there's been any industry that's been ended by AI yet, and yet people are strangely confident that art is going to be the first.

Any time now.

It's slow progress, but we can dream of a day where getting a cancer diagnosis is not a death sentence, but rather something like HIV. Not really curable, but with the right treatment, you can live a fairly normal life. You die with cancer, but not of cancer.

Anything that "easily explains" cancer should be thrown right out as unscientific.

Thank you.

As someone who's recently lost a loved one to cancer, I've lost count of how many times I've wanted to choke people for coming out with these "simple cancer theories".

I mean, as I said, those were some rules I learned while training. I never really raced, so I don't know how those apply in that situation.

I should've given some more context. I'm from a South American country, we used to train in a road that goes around a fairly big park, so it makes a +- 3km rectangular lap. We rode on the lane closest to the sidewalk, so we could pretty ride past the traffic lights.

It's a pretty busy road during the day, but during "training hours" (19:00), there's less traffic. Still a lot of cars, and there's a bus stop along the way, and not every bus driver respects cyclists (they'll overtake you, then stop in front of you). There's a particular section where there's a major road that merges within our lap, and there's almost no working public lights, and the road is full of potholes, and there's a broken pipe somewhere, so the potholes are always full of water.

So yeah. If you're riding in a fairly big peloton, NEVER go aero. It can literally kill you. I've seen it happen.

Yes, it was a typo. Thanks.

Although I'm a marathon runner, I've dabbled in speed cycling many times, and rode in a "pro" peloton (amateur pro) for a while.

There are a couple of rules you end up learning.

1. When you're leading a peloton, never go aero (when you lower your upper body so you're "cutting the wind"). Always keep your eyes on the road ahead, looking for potholes.

2. Whenever you spot a pothole, call it. Shout "pothole", loud and clear. As you go around it, point to it for the person behind you.

3. When someone in front of you shouts "pothole" and points to it, shout "pothole" and point to it, recursively.

4. Never break abruptly in the middle of a peloton.

5. For maximum efficiency and safety, your front wheel should a wheel's distance from the rear wheel of the bike in front of you.

6. If you need to do anything that is somewhat abrupt, like leaving the peloton, always warn, loud and clear.

but I can't help think this is just a terrible way to invest

Picking a company to invest in only half the job, choosing how much to invest is the other half.

It's a terrible way to invest if you put all your money into it. QC "changing the world" is a tail-end event. You allocate according to the risk.

Project Nimbus is a joint effort of Google, Amazon, and the Israeli government that provides futuristic surveillance capabilities through the use of advanced machine learning models.

Nimbus training documents emphasize “the ‘faces, facial landmarks, emotions’-detection capabilities of Google’s Cloud Vision API,”

The "training documents" he mentions are basically a GCP manual. [0]

"facial recognition, landmarks, emotions, ..." These are ML 101. Does my face have a second degree equation pointing up? Happy. Is it pointing down? Sad. It's like the car dealer rambling about the leather seat that reclines, when you're only interested in the horsepower. It's a sales pitch.

This reminds when the Intercept made a whole piece about the brazilian DMV's "dystopian system" that could "integrate multiple data sources" just to say it was a SQL join.

[0] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/22119705-core-infra-...

This is how I think about it.

It's insurance money. If you're a manager of a big company like IBM, Microsoft or Google, you have to align your current product portfolio and future portfolio in such a way that shows your investor that your company will keep growing, even if your current products are stagnant.

You can surely say Quantum computing won't do much in next 5 years. But what about 10 years? 20 years? 30 years? The farther you look into the future, the bigger the probability of having a huge tech breakthrough that could give the company who has it a massive edge on the market.

Even if you have a chance of 1% of having a sort of transistor revolution from QC, it becomes a race to the bottom. If Google starts researching it, IBM will follow suit, and so will Microsoft. If in 30 years this turns out to be a big deal, no one will be 30 years behind.

There are companies doing this already, but with their current CCTV systems. You don't even have to buy equipment, just the software, and you get e-commerce metrics for brick and mortar stores

Totally unrelated. But this guy has an amazing OS-from-scratch tutorial [0].

[0] https://github.com/cfenollosa/os-tutorial

It might sound unrelated, but many years ago I moved to Europe, coming from a South American country. Having spent many years "at home", I never bothered much with how we looked like, physical features that you could say stereotypical. But then I moved to Europe, and suddenly I could spot people from my country from miles away. After years and many places travelled, I still cannot describe in words what we look like, but I know it when I see. It's a gut feeling.

At least with the photorealistic prompts, there is always this feeling of "this doesn't look right". Right now it's easy to pinpoint what it is. Usually is a completed distorted face. But they might get better at this. But probably there will always be that "uneasy feeling".

I might have been to young to actually have noticed it. But from what I remember, in 2014 Google didn't have the reputation it has now.

Whatever they do, let's hope they don't decide to stick a camera in it (for AR purposes), or it could be another Google Glasses fiasco.

Everything's a cycle.

Part of me thinks "this is really cool, it's all moving really fast", but the other part of me thinks "this is moving too fast, aren't people missing something?".

It feels like everyone's so desperate to create or predict the next AI unicorn, that no one's paying attention to the fundamentals. Gives me weird dotcom bubble vibes.

I still cannot see how this can fundamentally change the fashion industry. Fashion is not about design, it's about generating desire to buy. You hire models and influencers to showcase your items, so people think they can be just like them, you just have buy the same piece of clothing. AI doesn't change that. You could totally have a niche for AI-generated clothing, but that's it.

Besides, clothes are a physical item. AI can automate the generation of a "blueprint", but it is still heavily constrained by the physical result. It would be mostly hit and miss. Feels more efficient to have designer use their experience to create sketches that would actually look good in real life.

All in all, I am amazed as much as I am skeptical of the entire synthetic art revolution going on. It's been what? A month? It's too soon. Aren't we jumping the gun?

Whatever happened to boring opinions? "Hmm that's amazing, but we'll see what happens, it's too soon". I'm yet to be convinced of how, beyond being an overall better tool, synthetic art will fundamentally change businesses.

So yeah, StableDif is great for commercially constrained environments

For me, that's the big insight.

Not just SD, but any synthetic media. My take? The "upcoming revolution" is not one of a boss firing their artists and making prompts themselves. It's a shift from addictive art" to subtractive art* in commercial environments.