Sure they can. o3-mini can do web searches, which puts it far ahead of o1 if you require current information. You can also tell it to go read a particular paper from just the rough name.
If you have things organized neatly together, you can also use pre-existing compression algorithms, like JPEG, to compress your data. That's what we're doing in Self-Organizing Gaussians [0]. There we take an unorganised (noisy) set of primitives that have 59 attributes and sort them into 59 2D grids which are locally smooth. Then we use off-the-shelf image formats to store the attributes. It's an incredibly effective compression scheme, and quite simple.
So they want to build a hollow structure, 1 km high, with all its weight concentrated at the very top (when charged)? How is that supposed to not immediately collapse?
it's not a hollow structure, it's space set aside in an otherwise normal commercial/residential tower. like extra banks of elevators. even if it weren't though, the weight of the building would far outweigh the weight of the blocks.
Absolute pitch: a completely useless skill, which having can in some cases even be detrimental. While being very hard to impossible to acquire. So naturally I will stop at nothing trying to develop it :)
A couple of months ago, this paper made the rounds: Absolute pitch in involuntary musical imagery [0]. In a small sample group, nearly half the time (44.7%) when someone was asked to sing their current earworm, were they perfectly in pitch. Random chance would be 8.3%.
It’s a fun thing to try for yourself. Just hum your current earworm into a voice memo, and check the correct pitch against the recording of the original song. You may discover a skill you never knew you had, implicit perfect pitch on involuntary music!
Trying to make this more interesting, reproducing a particular song on demand (there’s references to that too in the paper - it also works better than random chance, but less so than the involuntary kind), I find it works best for songs that start off with a single note, preferably sung. Or then at least you can immediately check whether you were right, e.g. “Tom’s Diner”. I’ve been having a lot of fun humming the first tone to Laufey’s cover of Sunny side of the street [1] whenever I open YouTube. I’m more often right than wrong, and if I was wrong, I can just listen to the whole thing to brighten my day anyways.
It's probably an overrated skill depending on the musical task, but to say it's completely useless is really ignorant. Nearly anyone who studies music at the university level or above would find this statement ("completely useless") to be wildly incorrect.
> Random chance would be 8.3%.
A random human won't sing off the cuff with their tonal center magically quantized to one of the twelve keys in our modern western tuning (Equal Temperament).
The smiling emoji at the end of the first paragraph indicates that these statements were made somewhat in jest, or perhaps exaggerated. Of course some uses can be found for absolute pitch. I saw one a couple weeks back, when Jacob Collier was tuning the audience choir to lead into "Somebody to Love" played on the piano. But, hadn't he had absolute pitch, he might just have picked up a reference note from the piano or his in-ear monitors, like a filthy commoner. Usually when making music, having good relative pitch is required, and a reference instrument is mostly handy, making perfect pitch somewhat redundant. But do tell what you're doing with perfect pitch, I'm curious.
And on curiosity, I went to your website and randomly listened to "The Fugue Song" [0]. Really loved it! Very nice moment when the singing comes in, repeating the phrase from the fugy guitar intro. Good song! (I'm a total sucker for Nina Simone's "Love Me Or Leave me", do you know that? A song where she's inserting some counterpoint improvisations in the middle). I'm listening to a bit of "Hiss" now.
> 8.3%
Rounded to the next semitone of course, I left that detail out, it's in the paper.
It's just an anecdote, but: I remember playing in a band with an amateur musician friend who told me had perfect pitch, and it was "very annoying", according to him, when we transposed songs to fit our voices. They just "sounded wrong" to him. He would make beginner mistakes since he relied on pitch memory rather than listening to us to know what to play/sing.
I have no idea how it works in general, but it seems like it was a problem for at least this one guy.
xD Well I didn't expect it to go there. I don't know that song but I'll have to listen to it when I get home.
I don't have perfect pitch but it's not too hard to imagine what I could do with it. For me, it'd simply make a lot of tasks faster. I've spent a lot of time throughout my life transcribing music. I can do it relatively quickly but there's lots of moments where I have to confirm things, or poke around notes finding the matching notes, struggling to clarify shades of a chord based on the presence of notes.
Reading music will be easier for people with AP, especially in singing situations. Even if you're a pianist it will still be helpful. There are a few Marc-Andre Hamelin interviews out there where he describes some of the advantages. It's easier to read music if you know immediately what it's going to sound like. Again, this is possible with relative pitch, but it's just more work and slower.
Arranging and composing away from the keyboard will be much easier with perfect pitch.
As time goes on, it'll be less important, most likely. And yes, there are some downsides obviously. In my final aural training class in music school, we had a competition at the very end of the year for fun. It came down to a team of 3 I was on vs. a team of 3 that had a guy with AP. The final task was to sight-sing a musical 'round' (a composition where the melody repeats in the various voices at different points in different voices overlapping each other). The guy with AP actually ruined it for his team. They mistakenly chose him to finish the round instead of start it. Mid-way through their performance, the pitch on their team had drifted so heavily they were in-between notes on the piano when he took over. He tried to sing 'relative' to everyone else but it was so hard for him. It was so unnatural for him to sing out of key, he couldn't do it; it sounded really bad. Great guy though and a ridiculously good violinist.
> A random human won't sing off the cuff with their tonal center magically quantized to one of the twelve keys in our modern western tuning (Equal Temperament).
Why is that relevant? Whatever pitch they pick would fall into one of the 12 buckets, even if it isn't precisely the correct pitch.
It's not called "in-the-ballpark" pitch, it's called perfect/absolute pitch. Being up to a quarter tone off is a large error in music. Thinking of pitch in terms of 12 buckets is not musically useful. The vast majority of music is based off consonance where being even a few hertz off means unpleasant dissonance. TLDR: Thinking of pitch as 12 buckets is mostly irrelevant.
I always observed that the number of random non-musicians who can get it right using the "major" handful of those twelve keys is remarkable enough to be considered.
Since those are the only 12 notes so many people have been hearing from every direction for so long, and truly confined to not more than a few of the major keys that are "dominant" as a result of modern instrumentation, it gets ingrained in the psyche and the notes are almost memorized by frequency. With nothing in-between, so that's what they reproduce without any training. Or can have a more sensitive ear for out-of-tune notes than an actual music student of a number of years.
This is really a fun skill to learn that you have. I've had a pretty good ear for relative pitch since birth, which my music teachers picked up on right away (I could play songs "by ear" after hearing them a couple of times), but I struggled with blind pitch in the mornings... until I realized that, for whatever reason, I can hear the theme from Zora's Domain in perfect clarity in the proper key.
I used that to fake absolute pitch for a while in college, then explained to my voice coach what I was doing, and he looked at me like I had three heads. I'll never forget it. :)
I find I can recall something with accurate pitch, but the "memory" of that pitch fades over time. Whatever my current favorite song is, I can hum it at the right pitch. But, if I were to try to do so a month later, it will probably be transposed a bit because I somehow lost that sense of the exact correct pitch. My idea of what "feels right" in that regard somehow fades, or something...
If you are a regular HN reader who is (or was until this post) unfamiliar with Back to the Future, I'd love to know three more random facts about your life. In my world view, you are part of a fascinatingly small group of people.
Part 3 came out in 1990. So, anyone born after (less than 34 years old) who didn't bother to go back and watch it, would be sufficient? I'm familiar with the series' existence, but had no idea what 1.21 reference was. AMA, hah.
I’ve been on the BTTF ride at… wherever in Florida it is, and I loved that as a teenager. The films just never really appealed though for some reason. I guess one related fact would be I have a lot of gaps like that in the movies I have seen. For instance, people are often shocked that I’ve never see any of the Indiana Jones movies (also loved the rides!); but Star Wars I could probably recite the scripts of.
I don’t think I have any other facts that are very interesting, but then again I didn’t think not having seen BTTF was all that interesting either. For the record I was familiar with 1.21GW and what it related to… I don’t live under a rock!
I have kids that are in their late 20s. They never watch older movies unless someone forces them to. There is so much new media coming out that they don’t feel the need to watch older movies, even if everyone is telling them it is very good.
Couldn't you put that media on when they were kids?
I know movie nights are not a thing every family does but I'd imagine having one day modern movie, one day oldish from 80-90a, another day a classic from the 40s, etc.
Wouldn't that have worked if you started from when they were young?
I'm just thinking as that is my plan for when/it I have kids: mix older media with new one and just enjoy it with them. If it is truly good and not just nostalgia, they should be enjoyable even as a rewatch.
Since the franchise hasn't been rebooted like so many others, it hasn't seem the $$$ marketing that would introduce it to new generations.
Like The Princess Bride or Labyrinth, BTTF currently remains a phenomenom of the 80's and 90's -- familiar to most from that time and deeply treasured by some, but not refreshed and sustained the way the Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel/DC, etc brands have been.
I was wondering: have you thought about automation bias or automation complacency [0]? Sticking with the drop-tables example: if you have an agent that works quite well, the human in the loop will nearly always approve the task. The human will then learn over time that the agent "can be trusted", and will stop reviewing the pings carefully. Hitting the "approve" button will become somewhat automated by the human, and the risky tasks won't be caught by the human anymore.
Premature optimization, and premature automation cause a lot of issues, and overlooking a lot of insight.
By just doing something manually 10-100 times, and collecting feedback, both understanding of the problem, possible solutions/specifications can evolve orders of magnitude better.
yeah the people who reach for tools/automation before doing it themself at least 3-10 times drive me crazy.
I think uncle bob or martin fowler said "don't buy a JIRA until you've done it with post-its for 3 months and you know exactly what workflow is best for your team"
this is fascinating and resonates with me on a deep level. I'm surprised I haven't stumbled across this yet.
I think we have this problem with all AI systems, e.g. I have let cursor write wrong code from time to time and don't review it at the level I should...we need to solve that for every area of AI. Not a new problem but definitely about to get way more serious
This is something we frequently saw at Uber. I would say it's the same as there's already an established pattern for this for any sort of destructive action.
Intriguingly, it's rather similar to what we see with LLMs - you want to really activate the person's attention rather than have them go off on autopilot; in this case, probably have them type something quite distinct in order to confirm it, to turn their brain on. Of course, you likely want to figure out some mechanism/heuristics, perhaps by determining the cost of a mistake, and using that to set the proper level of approval scrutiny: light (just click), heavy (have to double confirm via some attention-activating user action).
Finally, a third approach would be to make the action undoable - like in many applications (Uber Eats, Gmail, etc.), you can do something but it defers doing it, giving you a chance to undo it. However, I think that causes people more stress, so it’s rather better to just not do that than to confirm and then have the option to undo. It’s better to be very deliberate about what’s a soft confirm and what’s a hard confirm, optimizing for the human in this case by providing them the right balance of high certainty and low stress.
I think the canonical sort of approach here is to make them confirm what they're doing. When you delete a GitHub repo for example, you have to type the name of the repo (even though the UI knows what repo you're trying to delete).
If the table name is SuperImportantTable, you might gloss over that, but if you have to type that out to confirm you're more likely to think about it.
I like the app and don’t need any customization options. Downloaded it after an earlier HN discussion I think.
The workflow of typing, then selecting a file name to save at the very end makes me somewhat uncomfortable. What happens if the app or the computer crashes? Will everything be gone?
This stops me from writing for really long sessions in there. Don’t want to type for an hour only to find everything is gone.
- almost every keypress is saved (+ the size limit is in MBs), so there's no need to worry.
Having said that, this is really useful feedback - somehow it has never occurred to me that this is not obvious, which is silly. That's on me of course. Thanks!
I'll:
- add a save shortcut (for forced save) with a visual cue (e.g. a toast saying "saved")
- add better copy + another way of marking occasional save points
Bat echolocation is a topic that's very personal to me. My grandpa worked as a researcher in telecommunications and fibreoptics in the 1970s, in East Germany (GDR). This being at the height of the cold war, it was completely prohibited to publish anything relevant to their actual work, so that the "class enemy" wouldn't be the wiser of what they were doing in the lab. When publishing anything, they had to water down the content so much that it became useless to anybody reading it. Also, publishing on data transmission with fibreoptics, while nobody in the country is able to get a telephone line in their homes, wasn't seen as helpful.
It was sometimes possible to travel to western/international conferences - of course only after the Stasi gathered from interviews with all your colleagues and neighbors that you loved your children, and were likely to come back. And even then they were not allowed to make any contact with western scientists at the conferences, making any kind of useful exchange near-impossible.
After finding and reading a book on Bionics, which was a bit of a hype topic at the time, he noticed that the biologists were talking about the inexplicable nature of bats' echolocation. As he had experience with code multiplexing, he wrote a paper on the signal theory behind that, in 1974 [0]. As this topic was considered completely harmless, it was no problem to get this published in the GDR. After a request, it was even published in a journal in West Germany. But then being invited to give a talk on it in Frankfurt/Main, the authorization was given three times by the institute, and then revoked again each time (by higher-ups/Stasi). He was then asked to cease any communication with West-German researchers (who had sent him a book manuscript to review). It was a bitter-sweet thing for him. In later years, he was often asked about bat echolocation, as it made for a good pop science topic. But of course he would have loved to publish, and exchange, on his actual research topics at the time much more.
My grandpa died a couple of years ago. When I travel to international conferences now - being able to present whatever I like, talking to whoever I choose - this history often comes back to mind. Sometimes these stories feel like a very distant past. But then I read about how Linux maintainers are removed just for having a Russian email address, as happened recently. So maybe we haven't come as far as we think. I believe it's important to be conscious of the great freedoms most of us currently enjoy, how precious they are, and how brittle they can be.
