I mean, the link is to ableton.com, the most popular professional music production software. You're not the target audience if you haven't heard of it.
Don't have a dog in this fight as I don't know much about synthesis, but I always remember the old saying. The best book to learn about "hard subject" is the third book you read on it.
How many people will comment on a youtube video, course, strategy or book, and say something like
- It's the best explanation. I tried all these different things and only this worked.
The common denominator is previous failed attempts at the subject.
This is the conundrum of AI generated art. It will lower the barrier to entry for new artists to produce audiovisual content, but it will not lower the amount of effort required to make good art. If anything it will increase the effort, as it has to be excellent in order to get past the slop of base level drudge that is bound to fill up every single distribution channel.
It's a financial instrument, not necessarily a good one. I wouldn't recommend holding this to anyone. BTC is the only 'low risk' investment. However, thinking about it, this would effectively work the opposite of an index as safe investment vehicle. Effectively it is pairing high risk assets - Altcoins - in the same bag as a "low risk" asset - Bitcoin. You are not trying to minimize loss, rather maximize gain at lower risk.
Its weird that people are celebrating the fact that our lifestyle and food supply is so bastardized that it's causing people to become unhealthy to the point where they need a lifelong drug to overcome it. I get why the manufacturers and big pharma likes it, but it seems that it's also celebrated by many individuals, like you see in this and other HN threads.
This drug is a symptom of a sick culture, and not cause to celebrate. I don't at all blame the individuals that have this prescribed to them for taking it, but it just seems like a technochratic solution addressing superficial symptoms of a much larger problem.
Smoking causes lung cancer. I don't smoke, but if they found a cure for lung cancer I would celebrate that rather than griping about "personal responsibility" or whatever it is your grievance here is.
This thing objectively and subjectively improves the lives of the people you share this world with. If you have a problem with that it might be time to turn your gaze inward.
I'm upset that we just accept a society that requires a lifelong commitment to purchasing a drug as an appropriate answer, rather than looking at real causes of why people are so unhealthy. I don't think it's exclusively a matter of personal responsibility, rather a supply chain and incentive structure to produce sick people that need medication to be healthy. This is a band aid.
> rather than looking at real causes of why people are so unhealthy
I'll answer this one.
The human body is designed and built to eat as much as possible, as often as possible. The brain will prod, poke, and even force you to eat.
For all of human history and prehistory, this is incredibly advantageous. A greedy approach to food consumption allows lower risk of starvation, and fat reserves can be utilized to provide survival mechanisms when food is short.
For the first time in human history and prehistory, we have an abundance of food.
Some humans, a minority, are able to simply fight their biological urges or they may not even have those urges. If this were 10,000 years ago, they would surely be one of the first to die. Now, however, this is advantageous.
Every single part of our biology is in contradiction with modern society. It's not a shock that humans have a problem with obesity. If I gave my dog infinite kibble, I give him a month before he has killed himself.
I don’t buy this fatalistic attitude at all. Japan has an abundance of food as well, and Japanese humans are also human. Yet I don’t see nearly the same level of obesity here. The difference is entirely cultural, and yet you argue that we poor humans are destined to overeat. It’s not like the poor Japanese are suffering not to overeat every day of their tragic lives.
Instead the same measures that work here work in western countries as well. Free food at schools in the US and Europe has led to less obesity. Teaching cooking at school has led to less obesity. Teaching appreciation of the own physical self as a gift that one is responsible for rather than a burden has led to less obesity.
None of this requires throwing even more money at pharma to balance out the out-of-control American food industry (originating from the unscrupulous tobacco industry) which pays pharma to create more addictive foods. And yes, our bodies did not evolve to handle those ultra-processed foods laden with additives, but that is not normal food! Look up how the American food industry wreaked havoc in Latin America, leading to insane rates of obesity in mere years.
I don't think that anything you said here is wrong, however I don't see how any of it is relevant either.
I mean, sure... We should fix all the everything, but we can also help the people who are dying right now while we do that. They aren't mutually exclusive.
Imagine rejecting a cure for cancer because it might encourage smokers to continue. That would just be silly.
Yes, and like a band-aid it will help sick people heal. Which is a good thing, that should be celebrated.
I don't believe that I've ever heard anyone espouse the idea that nothing else in the patients life should change, or that the drugs alone are a complete answer. Although, that seems to be the counter position to your argument.
Everyone knows that fat people need to eat less and exercise more, including the fat people. These drugs help them do that. The drugs are advertised, sold, and prescribed that way and include advice to that effect in the informational pamphlets they come with in addition to usually including a lecture from your physician.
What else do you need before you can just be happy for people that are struggling a little less now?
I'm happy for that, I repeated that I don't blame the people that get it prescribed. And I was using the term band aid in the colloquial term, as in 'something that doesn't address the root issues'.
Obesity, diabetes, have all risen, especially in kids since the 90s, what changed, and what caused this? Are we still having the same causes, or because we can get a lifetime prescription to Ozempic and cover up the worse symptoms, we're ok with it? This is a massive red flag that something is wrong with this situation, not because some people are losing weight, but because some people are getting people sick and others are selling a cure at their expense. Encouraging another lifelong prescription is not addressing the causes and encouraging people to benefit off of making people sick.
I can accept that there may be larger root causes left to address, as long as we can also be clear that these drugs are also a huge win for individual health while society works on those, possibly intractable, root causes.
It's obviously going to be faster to treat individuals than it is to change our entire societies relationship with food and how we produce it, and we shouldn't just let all the fat people die while we figure it out.
Geez, as architecture these plans are absolutely horrible and produce unusable spaces. As an abstract math problem, it seems marginally useful, but I would not want to live in a place laid out by this algorithm.
As a non-architect, I would love if you could explain some of what makes the non-duck designs _so_ horrible. Some of them looked more than fine to me at first glance. It's also something that can be rerun over and over with little interaction in-between runs so one could generate a handful of designs starting from different seeds and get inspiration.
You generally want your rooms to be not just rectilinear, but rectangular after you fill in all built-in storage spaces. And storage spaces have to be sized appropriately to their intended purpose: you don't want three-foot-deep shelves. Another thing this optimizer doesn't take into account is corridors. It has the notion of room connections and area ratios, but area ratios are the wrong way to think about corridors: you want them to be as small as possible while still having at least a certain width.
The algorithm prefers rectangular rooms, you'd just need to adjust it a bit. The wall loss function minimizes wall length and tries to regularize angles, so it naturally converges to square-ish rooms:
> we compute the norm of the tangent edge vector, which is equivalent to the norm of the 2D normal direction. Minimizing this loss has the following two effects: simplifying the wall between two adjacent rooms by penalizing its length, and aligning the boundary to the coordinate axis by making the coordinates of the tangent vector sparse in 2D.
The optimizer also seems like it should handle corridors okay as long as the corridor area is set to something reasonable. A corridor is just a room that is allowed to be long; since the other rooms will try to take up relatively square spaces you should be left with a long connecting area.
> And storage spaces have to be sized appropriately to their intended purpose: you don't want three-foot-deep shelves.
Like you said, this is the same minimum/maximum width problem that makes corridors wonky. I think this is relatively easily solved, though. A "minimum width" constraint is really just a requirement that no voronoi site is within X distance of a wall. A shelf is a sub-area in a room where there must be 2 borders within X distance of a voronoi point. Things like furniture and kitchen islands are also basically represented like that, as constrained areas.
A simpler alternative to complex per-point constraints would be to have area constraints per control point- a bunch of single-point "rooms" inside the actual rooms. In the case of a corridor, since the voronoi cells tend towards a square, you just need to set that area to the minimum width and they should avoid shrinking below that width.
I guess that one gripe is that it's clear that they looked at this as a math problem, and didn't really take into account people that have the accumulated wisdom of laying out hundreds of spaces, the pitfalls that fall when doing that, and the complaints that only surface when you are embodying that space. This is a case of the classic engineering mindset of 'let me go into a field which I have zero practical experience with, then reduce everything to a simple math problem and ignore everything you think you know about doing this'.
No, they didn't. When an artist draws a picture of Manhattan, they draw steam coming up from the streets and no utility poles. They don't need to know anything about the buried power infrastructure or steam pipes. It would probably be worse if they did; the point is to communicate the conception of the space. It does not matter if steam is coming up on a street where it shouldn't; they drew it to say "this is manhattan", not to depict a component of the infrastructure that exists off-canvas. It does not matter if businessmen are walking around at 3pm when they should be at work if the point is to indicate that business is happening. The kayfabe is more important than the reality.
This is for a computer graphics conference, not an architectural conference. The point is to generate more-plausible interiors instead of copy-pasting the same layout. They are generating the feeling of more realistic spaces. You're the one coming in and saying that they don't know what they're doing, and trying to simplify an art into something you understand.
My critique in the parent comment is exclusively on architectural terms. For video games or other spaces that won't have any actual people living there, I don't have a dog on that fight.
Based on some of the floor plans I've seen, architects also seem to have developed a habit of designing weird floor plans somewhere after the year 2000. I don't know why they thought apartments could need corridors with diverging or converging walls in the hallways, or why rooms without 90 degree angles are a good idea, but their decisions don't seem that far off the floor plans this tool generates.
These outputs are far from perfect but unfortunately they're not unrealistic.
If you just look at the plans in the initial diagram. Plan C is the only one that makes marginally useful spaces, avoiding excesive corners and awkward leftover space that ends up without use. It also happens to be the more obvious solution to the problem.
I could see the value in generating a bunch of rooms roughly accounting for the space requirements, but that's usually done in a more abstract way before taking into consideration things like privacy, thoroughfares, building conventions, spans, noise and light access, wind patterns, and things of that nature.
It seems like if you already have a weird space, you can also maybe use this to minimize cuts while you’re adding carpet, or solve constraints about minimizing distance for shared water supply pipes that need to touch the sink and the shower, etc.
That said I actually might want a room shaped like a duck, provided I don’t have to put down the flooring =)
I'll grant you this. Meditation in the modern secular context which is devoid of its philosophical undercurrent, done in absence of an experienced teacher that has achieved the goal can lead to the pitfalls you describe.
Meditation is a tool, and it can be pointed to many aims. Without the right aims, it can lead you to reinforce things you don't want to like you describe. It can also lead you to dissociate, or to exacerbate latent neurosis. However, it can also be a life affirming method for being more present and less hung up on the vicissitudes of the anxiety producing nature of an impermanent world. It takes wisdom to use it for the latter.
I agree. I am referring to "pop" meditation, "mindfulness", clinical meditation, what you get at workplaces -- i.e. the "thinking about nothing" meditation promoted by this webpage.
I'm calling attention to value, virtue, beauty, etc. Someone who is telling you that prayer is bad while meditation is good, or that religion is bad while secular mindfulness is good -- they are telling you to focus on yourself instead of something or someone else.
I am a huge fan of meditation, I've been practicing it for over a decade. I would like to extend an invitation to those that are interested to pursue the concept of this applet further to find a proper teacher rooted in a tested tradition.
There's this movement to reintroduce millenial traditions of mindfulness into our lives under the guise of modern secularism. I am not convinced that removing its original context is as wise as it's purported. So many old traditions focus on lineage for a reason, and it is something we're too quick to do away with in society.
Most meditation practices come along with a warning, that doing this type of work can lead to results that you need proper preparation for. At the very least you need proper intentionality, and doing them incorrectly can lead to neuroticism and in some cases breakdowns and dissociation.
This is not a foxcon factory, this is the most famous and productive Youtube production company. People here work incredibly hard IN ORDER TO get this particular job, seeking it out specifically.
> Many people in entertainment feel lucky to be a paid employee at all
We know this isn't true because of the necessity of unions. Mining coal and many other trades are a lot worse than cleaning toilets, and people still had to do them nearly for free.
While I do see the value in unions in some settings, this is not a job of necessity. This is a job for people that wish to self actualize and not settle for anything less than their dream job. Wouldn't creating a union for Mr. Beast employees is akin to saying something like "I want to have my dream job but I want it to be easy"? I don't think that the analogy to mining coal holds.
That's not a value judgement on my part, just a conclusion from decades of declining union membership, with no correlating uptick in starvation or massive reduction in wages.
(You may argue for wage stagnation, and you may attribute that to declining unionism, but that is not a collapse in wages!)
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