danbmil99

It is nearly incontrovertible that perfect (aka absolute) pitch is either 100% innate or picked up in very early childhood. A product like this could easily discourage kids from learning music.

It's also a well-established fact that many of the most famous musicians in history, from the Beatles to Tchaikovsky did not have perfect pitch.

Perfect pitch can even be a negative factor in one's musical training. For example, in musical theater, cabaret, and jazz, transposition is a necessary skill. Singers routinely ask the accompianist (on piano) to move the key up or down to match their vocal range. I have heard anecdotally that perfect pitch actually makes it difficult to transpose, because if you learned a song in a certain key, the transposed version sounds like a different tune.

Wow, lots of words!

And yet it turns

I find it strange that no one talks about consciousness and intelligence from the perspective of evolution.

We have big brains for exactly one reason only: bigger brains bestowed reproductive success upon our species.

Evolution doesn't give a shit about the meaning of 'consciousness'. It just pushed us farther and farther along a trajectory that led to modern humans (and other animals).

This take suggests, then, that consciousness might be an epiphenomenon -- an aspect of the system that comes about outside of the pressure to reproduce and thrive. It arises unbidden, and we don't have any a-priori information as to its purpose or effect on reproductive success.

Put another way: we have a correlation (the smartest things seem to be conscious) but not causation. Consciousness may arise naturally in any system above some intelligence threshold. Perhaps it arises early in the evolutionary cycle, and does in fact have an impact on species success. We really have no way of knowing what is the chicken vs the egg (Smart things become conscious, or consciousness promotes intelligence). Or maybe some smart things are conscious and others are not.

Looking at this from an AI perspective, in some sense it doesn't matter which scenario is true, if all you care about is results. The AI equivalent of "Shut up and compute" (riffing on Feynman's "Shut up and calculate").

Where this gets tricky is when we haul in the baggage of ethics and morality into the picture. Is it OK if our AI system is treated poorly by human standards? If it is conscious, does that imply an ability to suffer, and/or to feel pleasure? If the answer is yes, does that not make the case for considering their moral status?

In the end, we need to decide if the evidence points to AI as being a form of "philosophical zombies", to which we need not attribute moral status, or they are like us -- presuming we are not zombies ourselves!

They said FORTH!!

You can say that again. I went through a 50-75 hour process of interviews, leet-code exams (with tight pencil-down timing), culminating with a long-form project that they budgeted 4 hours for (took me 20+).

I finally had a brain fart in the umpteenth interview and was not offered a job.

Cray cray

Is it possible the chatbot he is communicating with meant literally "I have no API endpoint for refunding your money"? Meaning their use of the verb "can't" was hyper-literal, as in "I have no way of"

Dunno if this is a late-in-life thing or I was always like this, but I definitely need more blue to see blue than most (this test put me at 82%, I think that means I'm in the lowest quintile for seeing blue?) Bright blue still looks mighty blue, but when light is dim, I basically see black where most would still see blue.

Practical ramifications: * Some of my 'black' shirts are blue when it's sunny * Popular desktop themes (solarized dark) have text that is completely unreadable

More like,"AI: DW"

No love for "Sirens Of Titan"?

Has anyone else had the experience of dreading a session with Claude, because his personality is often chirpy and annoying; he's always got positive things to say; and working with him as the main code author actually takes away one of the joys of being a programmer -- the ability to interact with a system that is _not_ like people -- it is rigid and deterministic, not all soft and mushy like human beings.

When I write piece of code that is elegant, efficient, and -- "right" -- I get a dopamine rush, like I finished a difficult crossword puzzle. Seems like that joy is going to go away, replaced by something more akin to developing a good relatioship with a slightly quirky colleague who happens to be real good (and fast) at some things -- especially things management likes, like N LOC per week -- but this colleague sucks up to everyone, always thinks they have the right answer, often seems to understand things on a superficial level, and oh -- works for $200 / month...

Shades of outsourcing to other continents...

What bothers me is this: Claude & I work hard on a subtle issue; eventually (often after wiping Claude's memory clean and trying again) we collectively come to a solution that works.

But the insights gleaned from that battle are (for Claude) lost forever as soon as I start on a new task.

The way LLM's (fail to) handle memory and in-situ learning (beyond prompt engineering and working within the context window) is just clearly deficient compared to how human minds work.

The NYC buses require you to take the kid(s) out of the pram and fold it up. A total PITA

Another kvetch: using car seats in taxis. Maybe it's different now with Uber but 20 years ago the drivers hated it because you have to find the seat belt and secure the car seat...

As others have noted, you sound about 3 months behind the leading edge. What you describe is like my experience from February.

Switch to Claude (IMSHO, I think Gemini is considered on par). Use a proper coding tool, cutting & pasting from the chat window is so last week.

One word: baby carriages up and down stairs

Now that I think of it, if using damped springs, the system would not be reversible. Energy is dissipated through the damping, and the system will increase in entropy and converge on a local energy minimum point.

Another way of looking at it: there are 4 states going in (0 or 1 on 2 pushers) but there are only 2 states of the 'memory' contraption, so you lose a bit on every iteration (like classical Boolean circuits)

Quantum computation came directly out of reversible computing. Look for example at the Fredkin and Toffoli gates.

Nevertheless in a deterministic system you can know a future state without calculating intermediary states.

Exactly wrong. See the halting problem

Very cool! I've often wondered whether one could procedurally generate sounds of objects interacting in a physics engine? This approach seems like a good place to start.

Started a new company.

50.001% of Americans voted for this. FAFO

Claude represents some sort of inflection point or phase change. With all the noise, Claude Sonnet is by far the most impressive model since gpt4.

Here's a thought: laid-off tech workers should encript every database and hold the keys for ransom. Or just until these jokers are nullified.

Using llama 3.2 as an interface to a robot. If you can get the latency down, it works wonderfully

It's incorrect to say that Perfect Pitch means you can pick out any of the 12 tones commonly used in western music. It doesn't mean that; that can only come with training.

The core ability with perfect pitch is to remember a note persistent over many months or years. If you know a song well, and you have perfect pitch, you will almost always sing it in the correct pitch. Not within a semitone; within a percent, enough that if you were singing with the recording, you would not be out of tune.

There is overwhelming evidence that this ability is either genetic or acquired at a very early age. It's a difference between people like the way you can fold your tongue or move your thumb. It's innate.

someone with musical training can use this skill to identify the 12 tones of western music, but that's frankly just a party trick built on the core capability.

Here's the concrete example. My son has perfect pitch. I didn't know this until we were watching a Beatles movie, I think A Hard Day's night, and he asked why the instruments Were Out Of Tune. Later I played the record and compared it with the video, and they were off by less than a quarter tone. The Beatles another musicians in the '60s often used very speed to subtly change the tone and tempo and many Beatles Tunes are at a pitch that lies between the standard a 440 12 lb scale

Not $30M, they raised $400M, and I'm sure if their stuff works and gets adoption they can raise more

Yes

They see themselves as outside the norm, and often it scares them to death. They crave belonging to the 'normie' tribe, and so strive to rub down their sharp edges.

I've known people like this and they make me sad.

rosegarden ftw

my first name at rinse.com

And that would be ..?