Reading an audiobook is reading. As a partially blind person, it is the only way I can read comfortably. I'm not sure how a different word would help. If one was reviewing the audiobook, specifically, they might call it out in order to comment on the narration quality, etc. But if you listened to the book, you've read it.
I don’t agree. Your eyes sending signals to your brain is different than your ears. It is a different way to digest information. People tend to remember 20% of what they hear and only 10% of what they read. While the hearing is greater it doesn’t include the same process of acquiring information. “Listening is reading” is a false generalization just because you were able to gather the same information doesn’t mean you “read” the book. I don’t consider a person in a wheel chair a “walker” but I would go for a “stroll” (roaming) with them.
Some of the books that have stuck with me for the longest are the ones I listened to during the years I had a grueling 45+ minute commute. The only downside I've found is that it's a lot harder to find and reference passages you've found of interest. Otherwise I think it's a perfectly valid method of ingesting information. If you listen while doing something that really should require your undivided attention, then I'd agree that it falls short to reading the text.
They also state up front that they listened to the audiobook, so I'm not sure how much value there'd be in defining a term to differentiate reading versus listening to a book.
> On the other hand, I know people that want to jump straight to the end result. They have some melody or idea in their head, and they just want to generate some song that revolves around that idea.
I don't really look down on those people, even though the snobs might argue that they're not "real musicians". I don't understand them, but that's not really something I have to understand either.
So if someone generates their music with AI to get their idea to music you don’t look down on it?
Personally I do, if you don’t have the means to get to the end you shouldn’t get to the end and that goes double in a professional setting. If you are just generating for your own enjoyment go off I guess but if you are publishing or working for someone that’ll publish (aka a professional setting) you should be the means to the end, not AI.
If you're talking about a person using an LLM, or some other ML system, to help generate their music then the LLM is really just a tool for that person.
I can't run 80 mph but I can drive a car that fast, its my tool to get the job done. Should I not be allowed to do that professionally if I'm not actually the one achieving that speed or carrying capacity?
Personally my concerns with LLMs are more related to the unintended consequences and all the unknowns in play given that we don't really know how they work and aren't spending much effort solving interoperability. If they only ever end up being a tool, that seems a lot more in line with previous technological advancements.
Project Managers will tell you that "getting to a place" is the goal
Then you get to the place and they say "now load all of the things in the garage into the truck"
But oops. You didn't bring a truck, because all they told you was "please be at this address at this time", with no mention of needing a truck
My point is that the purpose of commercial programming is not usually just to get to the goal
Often the purpose of commercial programming is to create a foundation that can be extended to meet other goals later, that you may not even be remotely aware of right now
If your foundation is a vibe coded mess that no one understands, you are going to wind up screwed
And yes, part of being a good programmer includes being aware of this
I work with quite a few F100 companies. The actual amount of software most of them create is staggering. Tens of thousands of different applications. Most of it is low throughput and used by a small number of employees for a specific purpose with otherwise low impact to the business. This kind of stuff has been vibe coded long before there was AI around to do it for you.
At the same time human ran 'feature' applications like you're talking about often suffer from "let the programmer figure it out" problems where different teams start doing their own things.
> I can't run 80 mph but I can drive a car that fast, its my tool to get the job done.
Right, but if you use a chess engine to win a chess championship or if you use a motor to win a cycling championship, you would be disqualified because getting the job done is not the point of the exercise.
Art is (or should be) about establishing dialogues and connections between humans. To me, auto-generated art it's like choosing between seeing a phone picture of someone's baby and a stock photo picture of a random one - the second one might "get the job done" much better, but if there's no personal connection then what's the point?
What has always held true so far: <new tool x> abstracts challenging parts of a task away. The only people you will outcompete are those, who now add little over <new tool x>.
But: If in the future people are just using <new tool x> to create a product that a lot of people can easily produce with <new tool x>, then, before long, that's not enough to stand out anymore. The floor has risen and the only way to stand out will always be to use <new tool x> in a way that other people don't.
People who can't spin pottery shouldn't be allowed to have bowls, especially mass produced by machine ones.
I understand your point, but I think it is ultimately rooted in a romantic view of the world, rather than the practical truth we live in. We all live a life completely inundated with things we have no expertise in, available to us at almost trivial cost. In fact it is so prevalent that just about everyone takes it for granted.
> So if someone generates their music with AI to get their idea to music you don’t look down on it?
It depends entirely on how they're using it. AI is a tool, and it can be used to help produce some wonderful things.
- I don't look down on a photographer because they use a tool to take a beautiful picture (that would have taken a painter longer to paint)
- I don't look down on someone using digital art tools to blur/blend/manipulate their work in interesting ways
- I don't look down on musicians that feed their output through a board to change the way it sounds
AI (and lots of other tools) can be used to replace the creative process, which is not great. But it can also be used to enhance the creative process, which _is_ great.
If they used an algorithm to come up with a cool melody and then did something with it, why look down on it?
Look at popular music for the last 400 years. How is that any different than simply copying the previous generations stuff and putting your own spin on it?
If you heard a CD in 1986 then in 2015 you wrote a song subconsciously inspired by that tune, should I look down on you?
I mean, I'm not a huge fan of electronic music because the vast majority of it sounds the same to me, but I don't argue that they are not "real musicians".
I do think that some genres of music will age better than others, but that's a totally different topic.
I think you don't look down at the product of AI, only the process that created it. Clearly the craft that created the object has become less creative, less innovative. Now it's just a variation on a theme. Does such work really deserve the same level of recognition as befitted Beethoven for his Ninth or Robert Bolt for his "A Man for all Seasons"?
Your company doesn’t care about how you got to the end, they just care about did you get there and meet all of the functional and non functional requirements.
My entire management chain - manager, director and CTO - are all technical and my CTO was a senior dev at BigTech less then two years ago. But when I have a conversation with any of them, they mostly care about whether the project I’m working on/leading is done on time/within budget/meets requirements.
As long as those three goals are met, money appears in my account.
One of the most renown producers in hip hop - Dr. Dre - made a career in reusing old melodies. Are (were) his protégés - Easy-E, Tupac, Snoop, Eminem, 50 cent, Kendrick Lamar, etc - not real musicians?
If I wrote an article on Turing Machines, someone could reasonably express surprise that I didn’t mention Alan Turing, even if (especially because?) his last name is right there.
To be honest, thinking of all the times I read an article that in the very least mentioned Turing Machines, I don't recall significant occurrence of linking "Turing Machines" to a Wikipedia article on the subject _or_ to one on Alan Turing, or subsequent (in parentheses, for example) elaboration of either concept or brief excerpt on the person -- the reader's knowledge on the subject of either, seems to more often than not, be implied.
I think their specific objection was sort of wrong—it isn’t really that similar to Turing, because Turing machines are a very well known concept in CS, which is a whole big field. Lots of blog posts on CS assume you’ve at least taken the 101 level class and know who Alan Turing is.
Retail, uh, theory or whatever is not not nearly as widespread (I mean lots of people stock shelves, but as someone who did, I never thought about why things were laid out the way they were). So, most likely an article about Gruen Transfer is introducing the idea to the reader. So, some background could have been nice.
And the article really isn't about the man or his achievements. The term is named after Gruen, but I don't think he had all that much to do with it or wanted to be associated with it.
I probably would have linked the first use of "Gruen" to his wikipedia page, but I understand why the author didn't. If you really care you can find it yourself and keeping the post focused is a good thing.
I wonder how that additional cost breaks down. Is it mostly cost of labor? Supply chain access? Environmental controls and compliance? Other overheads not present in China? Is economically viable production possible in the US?
For hobby parts? It’s not viable because you’d be setting up a manufacturing operation to serve a small number of people. The fixed costs would be so high you’d never get it back.
Contrast that with someone setting up an operation to serve the entire world, a market 1000 times larger than many localities.
> We all kind of know this is true, but it’s always really eyeopening to see to what extent these companies know everything about us.
I agree, if you have a Spotify account I implore you ( and anyone reading ) to download their Spotify data [1] and just look through it, it’s really interesting.
I hear news about how big companies are collecting all our data and got kinda desensitized to just the news but to see it applied to you and your specific music experience is pretty eye (re-)opening.
Could you elaborate a little further ( maybe not data itself, but its type and so on )? I don't have Spotify, but I am obviously fairly interested in the subject as a whole ( and that business model spread widely ).
Thanks! Giving it a try. I've been using Google's take out to download my Fitbit data already because the app is so shit these days. I wonder what else has these data dumps available.
Meta has the money to burn, 1. it’s easier to fight all this in court after having done it rather than to ask for permission from all the publishers beforehand.
2. sadly oftentimes the fines are minuscule when big tech does wrong.
3. CEOs in big tech don’t have or listen to morality, they have “sold their soul” so to say a long time ago
This is not a jab on this specific blogger but a general thing.
There should be a term for listening to an audiobook that’s not reading but does refer to a book on audio level, or just say you listened to the book.
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