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I became aware of the evil and set reminders in order to spend one hour every Saturday to google-detox. I think I will be completely degoogled in a couple of weeks.

I just couldn't resist: https://i.imgflip.com/4kyf7g.jpg

Hey thank you! I really appreciate you taking the time to checking it out! Yes, I am working to improve the UI, I spent most of the time working on the back end, on the actual scripts. There lies my strength, I guess. I am not a very good graphics or web designer, and I plan to work with a UI person in the future. Stay tuned, I will make this app work also for English speaking cities!

Many people would not consider anything that's made by a "DJ" to be music

Deaf people?

Specially when your bedroom light fail because of bad wifi or when your roomba's AI doesn't recognize your cute dog's poop.

I am laughing at this. He is describing it as if it were a steampunk device.

This is like rearranging someone's kitchen for them "because it's more efficient"

This randomly reminded me of the time I let my friend use my laptop, only to find out the next morning that he had changed all the colors and styles of my windows xp with a gimmicky "mac skin". So infuriating.

Wow, Flickr is still around

It was very entertaining to follow r/sysadmin's threads about this weird issue, until the guy found out the source of the problem.

Interesting, I can have an LSP try this. So, if it's not OCR, what is it? What is it doing?

Excellent

I´m having a blast changing all the parameters. Really uncanney valley feelings. Some women come up very attractive, looking like Jessica Alba. How can I react to a face of a person that don't even exist?

On a second thought, I don´t mean that the controls behave randomly. I understand they affect related parts of the system. If you increase "baldness" on a woman's face, it will obviously increase the "male" factor and the "gray hair" factor. I understand that this faces are being generated from a continuous space. Fascinating.

It's very interesting and kinda creepy. The controls behave randomly, if you decrease "age" it might start changing skin color, etc.

It's like Amazon and Google are competing on evilness.

Damage control?

When I realized I can't go back to normal UI, I immediatly downloaded Thunderbird and went back to e-mail clients. I won't bother with the new gmail. Fonts look horrible, it is slower and in the end there is less information density.

This picture made me jump out of my chair and start doing squats.

Do you remember that project that mapped where words are "stored" in the brain? I don't have it right now, but it was something like that. They used a neural approach to map the word vectors in the brain.

I just read the article about trunk delivery. It blew my mind, I was honestly amazed that this exists. https://www.theverge.com/2018/4/24/17261744/amazon-package-d...

I feel you. Facebook virtually grants a certificate of existence. It's almost unimaginable why someone that wants to play music wouldn't have a facebook presence. (Don't know if that last sentence was correct, non native here).

My point is the following: I was one day on the street and saw a flyer glued onto a wall, it looked kinda funky and hand-drawn, interesting; some DJ's were going to throw a party and spin salsa, funk, latin jazz, cumbia... And I didn't recognize any of the names or the venues, I was mildly shocked because I believed I knew the local scene pretty well.

Almost always I can contextualize a music genre/scene, and see their connections and collaborations. But this random flyer I came across was so obscure! No relations, no known names, and the mix of styles and originality was very interesting! For the first time in many years I felt again what is like to find an underground scene, which I like a lot (like when dancing drum&bass in a basement in Berlin or listening to rap in Mexico).

This is a magic that is sometimes lost in the believed omniscence and omnipresence of online/facebook. I bet people soon will want to have those kind of experience, and the new thing will be to find scenes that people don't even know about online.

I had this idea once and routed my laptop's output audio into its own microphone and then opened a Google text document and turned dictation on. It didn't work too well, because of: noise/signal ratio and the strong Indian accent of the speaker. With normal paced pronunciation and clean audio it works definitely better.

You turn off profile updates.

But.. I type "Hilarry ind" (to see if I get "Hillary Indiana" like the example) and I get immediatly "Hillary indictment". It seems that search results are very hard to reproduce and compare, given that they are very tailored, is this the case?

I haven't. I would like to try it out, maybe I will check the browser emulation they released a couple of weeks ago. I would like to try it both in English and Spanish and compare the experiences.

When I watched the Google Home video from the I/O event, I cringed very hard. And I am not a skeptic: I generally am a believer in new tech, in natural language tech, etc., but that video looked really goofy and improbable. Do they really think that families are going to change their morning routines to interact via voice with a device? Just the "Hello Google" command is awkward enough, people aren't going to walk down the street while talking nerdy Google commands out loud. I don't see it happening.

And from a foreign language speaker standpoint, I find it even harder to imagine. In Spanish there is not really a consensus about how to pronounce 'Google'. I can't imagine people on the streets speaking Googlish.

On the other hand, everyone googles, for sure, everyone uses search and mobile. I have the feeling that these two interactions -text/type search and mobile- are too hard to improve on. I don't think voice has a chance to become bigger than text.

Simulation of ancestors.

1) This idea makes me think that the simulation hypothesis is wrong. If some advanced civilization has the power to create simulations, why would they create us, specifically? Why would they bother recreating a primitive world of the past? Wouldn't it be way more interesting to create cooler, crazier worlds? Do you really believe a post-human ultra-intelligent civilization would create something as present-day ISIS? Is someone having fun watching how we experience this world's horrors and pains?

2) Then I think the following: yes, the above scenario is possible, given that organized intelligence is able to realize more possibilities of the universal computational space. With enough computing power, organized intelligence would be able to spawn near-infinite world simulations, and ours is just one of those.

However an intrinsic part of the music (to me, anyways) as an art form, is the humanity of it.

I agree with the sentiment. But from a perceptual perspective, it's getting harder and harder to distinguish what is synthetic and what is organic. The trumpets, strings, and keys you hear on a song you like on the radio? It's very probable that they weren't played by humans: they might have been programmed and the sounds come from a massive, hyper sampled sound bank.

If we did an experiment, and recruited even expert musicians, and we asked them to classify sound clips in 'played/programmed' categories, I bet they wouldn't get them right.

David Cope's experiments showed that: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/jul/11/david-cop...

I say it is interesting. It's from the same guys from 'Watch a machine-learning system parse the grammatical structure of sentences'. AFAIK, here they are implementing automatic summarization, aided presumably by the accuracy of their parser. I signed up and I look forward to trying it.

I would probably want a browser plugin that watched my text areas and handled markdown

I was going to recommend Grammarly, it has a Chrome extension, but I think it doesn't support markdown. I use it and I'm happy with it. They have an advanced subscription for 'advanced' linguistic checking and furthermore, the gold service is hiring a human proof-reader. It's interesting.

No doubt about it. My background is in the humanities! I started out working for a literature magazine and going to college to study philosophy. Then my brain wandered and decided that it wanted to learn about programming, machine translation and related stuff. I do like and value fiction, and you're right: fiction can give you 'big picture' ideas, metaphors and can shape the meaning of our whole experience.