What was quietly done in my school instead was the creation of a "sports-oriented class". All male staff, way more PE classes, including judo and the like. Nominally unisex, but only some boys showed interest. Also candidates needed to pass a test of physical fitness, so they saw it as a point of pride that they qualified.
Enrollment began with third grade and enabled me to enjoy a solid four years of relative peace, without the most high-energy part of my class to date.
Interestingly one generally well-behaved classmate also went there, but since he was also physically competent, he didn't experience any issues.
My bully had two much older brothers and I guess that's how he learned to communicate, so I communicated back. We became friends afterwards.
Looking back it's not the physical bullying that was the most damaging, but social. I went to a different middle school and without a support network it was difficult to say the least.
> some are thus not using it to distance from a particular influence instead
That's not the reason. The real reason is how those regions were Christianised - Cyril and Methodius created the first version of what would later evolve into cyrilic script and they were sent by Constantinople, while missionaries sent by Rome would use latin script.
> It produces sound based on the way the instrument, including its vibrating strings, physically interacts with the surrounding air.
I suppose this is the innovative part. They're not simulating just the string, but also the fluid it's immersed in, which is a computationally hard problem.
I made a vibrating string simulator in college for our Numerical Methods course and for quite a while I couldn't understand why it sounded so bad.
Turns out rounding errors in floating point operations can propagate to a point where they produce this distinct, "metallic" sound.
They're incredibly small, but if your system of differential equations is large enough, they'll become noticeable. Switching to an algorithm with better numerical stability would probably mitigate this issue, but I didn't get that far with my project.
> Turns out rounding errors in floating point operations can propagate to a point where they produce this distinct, "metallic" sound.
Reminds me of a Karplus-Strong synthesis implementation that produced a gorgeous guitar/mandolin sound, but only for delay durations that weren't simple ratios with the given sample rate. The simple-ratio durations would end up sounding like crude, attenuated periods of noise-- metallic sounds like you'd expect from a pitch produced in a KSS demo. Everything else had some kind of subtle interpolation error that ended up shaping the noise just enough to make it sound like a million bucks.
The problem with most KSS is that the filter used will typically saturate the timbre. So rather than hearing a guitar string, you're hearing a guitar-adjacent interpolation scheme whose prominence makes you wonder just how un-guitarlike the original unfiltered sound must have been.
Now that I think of it, the problem may have been independent of the sample rate. It may have just been all periods that were integers. So A440 sounded like a guitar string because it's a period of about 2.72ms. But at 1000Hz you're suddenly transported to a sound-effect from a 1970s episode of Dr. Who.
To me it had, in a way, the opposite effect - I started appreciating non-AI content more.
Good art has something that is difficult to reproduce if one isn't already an artist who is just using AI as a medium - it's intentionality.
Take for example Floor796[0]. Every little detail counts and while you could use AI to generate single characters or even the whole thing, you'd inevitably find details which have no reason to be there. You could then remove them manually or modify your prompt or input image so that those you know about won't appear, but AI being AI will keep sneaking in new ones.
The longer your prompt, the more intentional everything becomes, effectively making it the art piece.
A lot of people regard technical measures as the signal of quality. The most realistic painting, the most expensive purse, the most technical flip on a skateboard, the most well drawn AI art.
It’s a cheap way to judge quality because you don’t have to understand what makes something good.
But then some people recognize that technical excellence is not the most important thing, and extend that to assuming that technique does not matter at all. And so we get this constant drip feed of absolutely terrible conceptual art (with an AI-generated artist statement, can't leave that out!) in every single local art scene.
AI might actually help in this regard. Where you may have someone who has good taste, and can create a unique style, but lacks the skill to execute on the technique. Kind of like a song writer that can't play an instrument, but can hum a tune to the band, and articulate subtle changes they want.
Of course, current AI is not even close to that yet, but decoupling creativity from technical ability could actually be a good thing in the long run. Though to be honest, I am generally pessimistic on it.
Yeah, but you have to realize we are on the losing side of this war. The armies of bullshit now have an incredible advantage that actual art can never have. At least in the past, there was some equilibrium. Bullshit was cheaper to make than art (or any other quality product), but now it has become infinitely cheaper to produce, and much more expensive for us to separate from the bullshit.
Think about this for a moment - it takes a company of 8 people to make 3000 podcast episodes a week. It would take far more than 8 people to listen to that many podcasts. How can we possibly hope to separate the wheat from the chaff? What happens when it's 30,000 episodes per week? 300,000. What possible hope does art and craft have against an army that is effectively infinite.
We can hope that the cream will rise to the top, but I am not optimistic. I genuinely believe we are watching the end of art and human creativity as it is absolutely drowned is mass slop.
>How can we possibly hope to separate the wheat from the chaff?
Categorize, curate, and share. The war is only for your attention. I have favorite creators now, and they would cease to be favorite if they suddenly started sloppin' it up. The best of them recommended cool things made by other people, who in turn recommended more things, and so on.
If instead you peddle bullshit, it won't take long to be identified as a bullshit vendor, even if you have 1000x the bullshit of the next leading brand.
Not everyone will get the message especially if you mainly consume algorithmic feeds - we all seem to have that relative who thinks you would enjoy being sent an AI Jesus image every other week.
Already the way I find out about new podcasts is from recommendations from people I know, positive reviews, or from them being associated with a podcast I listen to. For now all of those have meant I haven't been exposed to any AI ones.
> Motor overheating might be a problem. The dog, just standing, has its motors stalled under load, converting power to heat.
The Nao robot[0] had this exact problem and of course no way to fail gracefully. I recall checking its basic functions with my lab partner in college. I looked away for a moment and that was when it went down hard. Me and the other guy locked eyes in an "oh fuck" moment, as the robot was expensive and our thesis supervisor went through quite a lot of paperwork to have it funded. Fortunately it was intact and none of us mentioned this incident to anyone.
Just like Big Tobacco moved onto greener pastures in the developing world, Big Slop is not targeting specifically us, but the billions of new internet users who connected over the past decade:
There's this (now old) meme called "Italian brainrot" - AI generated characters with vaguely Italian-sounding names like Bombardiro Crocodilo (note the incorrect spelling of the Italian word for crocodile).
One character stands out - Tung Tung Tung Sahur. Not only does it not sound Italian at all, that last word rang a bell.
Sahur (or Suhur) is the meal eaten before dawn during Ramadan.
After some digging I discovered this whole category originated in Indonesia. The country experienced an absolute explosion in the number of internet users in recent years and is home to internet phenomena which spread globally, but few in the west seem to realise that.
> fixing issues is now basically free if your company is willing to shell out for tokens.
Yeah, about that: I looked into Cursor's usage stats and daily I'm going through the equivalent of a bacon sandwich in my cantina, so not much, but this is at today's prices and very light usage of Sonnet.
I was for a time using Opus 4.6 for a heavier task and even then I think the cost was well into the double digit percentages of my salary.
Opus 4.7 reportedly uses more tokens overall and while they reportedly kept rates stable, that is not a given.
Just wait until, with increasing costs, the first company figures that they'll offer this as a benefit and then maybe scrap it altogether in the name of cost cutting.
Watch token budget be included as part of employee TC figures - I feel this is an eventuality due to rising costs and "true pricing" slowly creeping in.
Current ventures feel moreso like a pilot program (you bought a private jet, now get a couple of your pilots to actually fly it) versus having an entire fleet of jets, and having to pay salaries to all those pilots, plus account for their fuel charges.
Right now all expenses are relatively "someone else's {problem,money,infra}".
What was quietly done in my school instead was the creation of a "sports-oriented class". All male staff, way more PE classes, including judo and the like. Nominally unisex, but only some boys showed interest. Also candidates needed to pass a test of physical fitness, so they saw it as a point of pride that they qualified.
Enrollment began with third grade and enabled me to enjoy a solid four years of relative peace, without the most high-energy part of my class to date.
Interestingly one generally well-behaved classmate also went there, but since he was also physically competent, he didn't experience any issues.
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