First, I applaud what you're doing. Second, if you've already pondered these ideas, please disregard.
Third, I'm 49 years old and I was heavily into the "payola is evil, liberate music back to the ears of the listeners" movement, that spawned projects like muxtape, Napster, jamendo, and ultimately Spotify and the like (my involvement was nowhere near the scale of any of these players, but I knew the space well).
Now, I miss the Clive Davis's of the world. Go figure. I also miss trading cassette tapes with my friends, but today, to some degree, I do that through Spotify, but it's not the same. Of course, am not the same as the kid that was trading tapes. I'm a different person, no longer pedaling down the street to buy the latest Bad Religion album to listen to at a sleep over. Today I'd be more inclined towards Theloneous Monk. Nevertheless, I still LOVE listenng to, discovering and sharing music. I could be wrong, but given the trend, I don't really feel like that will change until I die.
With the context, I offer the following thoughts, to take or leave:
1. Maybe reconsider whether algorithms are indeed the enemy. The world of music is vast. Algorithms are powerful in helping me find new music in that ocean. However, the current Algorithms do seem quite myopic to me, functioning more like a echo chamber, vice expanding my musical aperture. So, maybe consider an algorithm, but one that functions more like the legacy music industry system network comprising scouts, producers, agents, managers and labels. Maybe even with some humans in the loop. The discovery and sharing go hand-in-hand. You want to share what you discover and love. Algorithms, I believe, can still help listeners discover.
2. Maybe consider radio. I don't fully understand why it seems as though people are forgetting the amazing network that is FM/AM radio (not internet radio). It's a one-way, open and persistent broadcast of information to subscribers - in a geographical vicinity that is. That latter piece is key. If I'm dialed-into a station, I know that others listening are in my local proximity and so are experiencing the same local issues as me (e.g. politics, crime, weather, natural disasters, war, etc). The other people listening aren't necessarily your friends, or family or colleagues (though some may be of course), but rather just people in this geolocal bubble you happen to be in together. The structure of our radio network is constrained geographically, which I believe is a massive strongsuit, vice a weakness. Bottom line, I suspect there is a benefit to the listener in music sharing mediums that are, perhaps at least in part, geographically constrained.
Some really interesting perspectives here and I agree with you I believe most if not all people will still love to be discovering and sharing music until they die. There really is such a thrill in knowing you got someone onto a certain song or artist that they now love.
You're right we definitely won't eliminate algorithms as they definitely do play a great role in everything nowadays, not just music discovery, but we want to alleviate a lot of that reliance that is currently placed on them, and provide another avenue for discovering music through humans, rather than machines.
Radio is definitely a great one, my only issue is that people of today, specifically younger people, want to consume as much content as they can in the shortest period of time as they can (not all but a large portion), and radio doesn't do well for these types of people, where you can't quickly change songs, and have to sit through lengthy ads. However, I do agree the radio is a powerful thing and for those who still have the patience for it, it's a forgotten gem for most.
"Take a chilly window sheeting over with ice: even one oddly shaped snowflake can exert an influence on the final frosty pattern."
I wish writers would do a better job of conveying chaos. Yes, the butterfly flapping it's wings in Brazil (or whatever) can drastically influence the weather a continent away. But I think the true wonder of chaos needs to consider that if that butterfly were turned a few degrees in another direction, the resultant weather can be completely different. It's these infinitesmally small changes in parameters resulting in widely different outcomes that really brings the idea of chaos to life I think.
> Yes, the butterfly flapping it's wings in Brazil (or whatever) can drastically influence the weather a continent away.
> But I think the true wonder of chaos needs to consider that if that butterfly were turned a few degrees in another direction, the resultant weather can be completely different.
The former is simply a different way of saying the latter.
For balance it’s worth say that chaos can greatly magnify the impact of small variables, while greatly suppressing the impact of others. Which are two reasons that make specific predictions in chaotic systems difficult or impossible.
The productive response is to look for behaviors of a given chaotic system. Which can provide a lot of insight, despite specific unpredictability. (I.e. “this heat is going to generate more storms, even if we can’t place those storms on a calendar.”)
Just realized that the show pluribus was an allegory for AI (or more specifically, the LLM's of the world). Turns out, the show creators didn't intend that at all, which makes me even more interested in how this thing plays out.
Tbh it feels like a cheesy exploration of various ‘noosphere’ and global consciousness projects. I guess the protagonist will discover a soilent green like plot next?
I actually enjoy the series, my comment says more about me than it i guess. Anyway, looking forward to the (HAM?) radio guy in Paraguay doing some interesting stuff! Bit done with the deer in the headlights protagonist
The original github repo was about Google, Amazon and Bing searches all returning shirts with stripes (while these companies talk about their huge AI investments)
But the correct chatgpt results are also an interesting data point!
Since this seems to be focussed on the US economy, can someone (...anyone), explain how a country that is many tens of trillions of dollars in debt can afford to pay a UBI in lieu of buying down national debt?
It feels like someone who can't pay their home mortgage deciding to make a donation to a favorite charity.
Most serious UBI proposals are almost cost-neutral. In other words, most people would not get any more money than they already get.
The main source of funding would be income taxes. The highest or second highest income tax bracket would start at 0. If you earn your living, UBI would be little more than an accounting trick for you. You would get some "free" money but pay higher taxes, and the end result would be more or less the same.
Some tax credits and deductions might go away, and related taxes such as capital gains taxes might also change.
UBI would replace some existing welfare benefits and make them automatic. The biggest impact would be on those in minimum-wage jobs and those alternating between unemployment and low-income jobs. Their financial situation would improve, and they would also face less bureaucracy. And this is pretty much the only place where UBI would be more expensive than the current system.
Ah, thanks. So, the "universal" in UBI is a misnomer since everyone is society is not actually getting the stipend equally. Rather, it's a redistribution of funds from the rich to the poor. I would think a better name for it then would be a "Robinhood System" vice a "UBI".
There's an assumption there that buying down the national debt is an important goal. Reasons that one might not want to take that position:
* Having debt helps keep a currency useful as a global reserve and store of value, with great soft-power benefits (though, honestly, the reverse is more true--being the reserve currency makes running up a debt easier).
* Having debt helps keep us out of capital-W War, as it binds nations together financially--if we owe another country a sufficient amount, they have a vested interest in seeing it come back. (Incidentally, historically, this is a shaky assumption as well.)
* Having a policy allowing for debt helps make re-investment in infrastructure and civilization-scale efforts more easy to accomplish.
* Having a debt helps encourage inflationary currency policy, which (in moderation!) has knock-on stimulatory effects on the economy. Some minor inflation is good for helping to encourage people to spend rather than hoard.
The more cynical take, of course, is: how can we not afford to pay UBI?
* Is it cheaper to remove, retrain, or simply resupply folks who are otherwise economic unproductive?
* Is it politically expedient to buy off the population whose only useful product is votes than to balance the budget?
* People are upset about work and making rent today...creditors of the US are some distant threat, and it's unlikely any politician will be in-office when that bill comes due--why hold off?
* We've spent more money on dumber things, what's wrong with this?
I don't exactly agree with any of the above points (in either category), but it's not hard to imagine people who do.
Thanks. I do understand the value in holding debt, to my engineering brain it's analogous to a heat sink - without it, energy (money) has impetus to flow. I guess I don't have a good sense for what "the right" amount of debt is for a country, so to your point, I don't really have solid reason to assume we should even care about buying down our debt.
I think the root of my confusion was clarified by the other reply above - it's not that the US just has a stash of excess capital coming in and UBI is a way to spend it, but rather UBI is a way for a government to step in, and force it's ultra-rich citizens to put their money back into the economic engine at the base level... like an artificial mechanism to account for some percieved flaw in the natural capitalistic process.
The big thing--usually missed by most folks, especially engineers whose intuitions and experience are correct but in the wrong domain--is that you don't balance a country's budget like you do a household's. The scale is different, the incentives are different, the problems and tools are different.
Of course, to confound things, it's entirely possible that we should treat a country's balancebook like a household's, and it's just the dumb luck of near 3/4 of a century that we've gotten away with assumptions like mine. :)
Well, that's not great. Gast turbine engines are notoriously inefficient compared to other electric power generation options (1). You use gas turbines when you need a lot of power, but limited volume (jets, warships). A server farm is not that.
Ha, I wasn't going to read the article, but I had to after reading this comment. Yikes dude - I hope you don't ever happen upon my messy-ass/inefficient lab!
It's supposed to be obvious I would not be in favor of removing what others often refer to as "clutter" :)
The aux storage areas are not where the overlaid layers of equipment on and around the benches would be as immediately useful. Plus, most importantly the storage rooms are supposed to already be full to the gills so you can hardly walk inside them ;) Containing equipment from which thousands of hours of learning has been gleaned beforehand.
In both, you often need as much stuff squeezed into a small space as possible before you can come near the goal line.
I'll take scientific progress that's good enough to emerge from the lab over a "clinical" appearance of the lab itself any day.
Didn't work for me. I asked for a man-made biomimetic submarine based on a blue whale swimming in the open ocean and instead got an actual blue whale flying above the ocean surface. Not very useful for me.
Didn't read. An LLM, of course, will think differently if it was trained natively on material written the "other" language (capturing the probablistic word associations inherent to the source material author's native language). However, if you train solely on English text and then simply translate the results to a different language, then no, there will be no difference. Seems pretty obvious.
I want to like this, but... While I do want generative AI for CAD, I really want it to generate initial files for me from scratch. That's where the bulk of the work is. Also, I'm not a building architect - my work is in mechanical and electrical systems. It wasn't readily apparent to me which domain this functions for.
The commercial vid was not very good IMO - I didn't get a sense of the actual product value-add at all. As an prospective customer, that's what matters to me, not terrible jokes.
Third, I'm 49 years old and I was heavily into the "payola is evil, liberate music back to the ears of the listeners" movement, that spawned projects like muxtape, Napster, jamendo, and ultimately Spotify and the like (my involvement was nowhere near the scale of any of these players, but I knew the space well).
Now, I miss the Clive Davis's of the world. Go figure. I also miss trading cassette tapes with my friends, but today, to some degree, I do that through Spotify, but it's not the same. Of course, am not the same as the kid that was trading tapes. I'm a different person, no longer pedaling down the street to buy the latest Bad Religion album to listen to at a sleep over. Today I'd be more inclined towards Theloneous Monk. Nevertheless, I still LOVE listenng to, discovering and sharing music. I could be wrong, but given the trend, I don't really feel like that will change until I die.
With the context, I offer the following thoughts, to take or leave:
1. Maybe reconsider whether algorithms are indeed the enemy. The world of music is vast. Algorithms are powerful in helping me find new music in that ocean. However, the current Algorithms do seem quite myopic to me, functioning more like a echo chamber, vice expanding my musical aperture. So, maybe consider an algorithm, but one that functions more like the legacy music industry system network comprising scouts, producers, agents, managers and labels. Maybe even with some humans in the loop. The discovery and sharing go hand-in-hand. You want to share what you discover and love. Algorithms, I believe, can still help listeners discover.
2. Maybe consider radio. I don't fully understand why it seems as though people are forgetting the amazing network that is FM/AM radio (not internet radio). It's a one-way, open and persistent broadcast of information to subscribers - in a geographical vicinity that is. That latter piece is key. If I'm dialed-into a station, I know that others listening are in my local proximity and so are experiencing the same local issues as me (e.g. politics, crime, weather, natural disasters, war, etc). The other people listening aren't necessarily your friends, or family or colleagues (though some may be of course), but rather just people in this geolocal bubble you happen to be in together. The structure of our radio network is constrained geographically, which I believe is a massive strongsuit, vice a weakness. Bottom line, I suspect there is a benefit to the listener in music sharing mediums that are, perhaps at least in part, geographically constrained.
Keep going! Love where this is headed
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