I heard Bob Weir on a Desert Island Discs broadcast with the Dead. He said the song Shock the Monkey was the song that got him willing to start using MIDI and digital tech, which the rest of the group had already embraced. Hearing how one artist I loved pulled another artist into a new direction really clicked for me as a music lover. I can't figure how to search their archive or whether it was an American copy with a slightly different title like desert island albums or songs. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qnmr/episodes/player
PG always loved playing with tech. He dropped a decent chunk in the late 90s, early 2000s to build one of the first real music streaming platforms. I worked for him for a while. I put forth the idea of releasing his Up album online in 5.1 surround, and he was happy to do it, and it was the first. (I only did this because I'd just installed a 5.1 system in my car and wanted more content for it)
I remember listening to Donald Fagan’s Nightfly. Still sounds fantastic, though to nitpick perhaps a tad harsh. Amazing thought to have recorded that at approximately the same time as the debut of the primitive original IBM PC.
I wonder if The Nightfly has now been ruined with dynamic compression (AKA "remastered") like everything else over the last couple decades.
My CD player came with Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits, as a demo of dynamic range. That album (a digital recording) has, shamefully, been "remastered" and dynamically compressed.
My uncle had the vinyl, and I got the CD a couple of years later. I see it has "manufactured by Columbia House" on the back. ;-) No loudness war back then, but the treble is brighter than most recordings of the time, leading to a potential tweaking of the knob for the album.
Some early CDs were mastered with pre-emphasis. On players that don't recognise and correct (de-emphasize) this, the sound can sound full of treble. Every hardware CD player should be able to play such discs as intended. iTunes knows about such discs and will rip them correctly, maybe Foobar2000 and CUERipper, but most other software has no clue. I know The Blue Nile "Hats" it's one such disc in my collection. I believe some pressings of The Nightfly were mastered with pre-emphasis. https://www.tnt-audio.com/vintage/procrustes2_pt1_e.html
Similar story! The first disc (and song) I heard was "Let's Dance," David Bowie.
I have hundreds of discs, but only have Let's Dance on vinyl.
I also have the second pop digital recording ever, The Nightly by Donald Fagen, only on vinyl. I use it to show people how good records can sound.
I'm glad I bought and kept so much music when I did, because now the labels have destroyed everything with dynamic (not data) compression. It's disgusting. Now that everyone has dirt-cheap access to pristine recording & playback technology, music sounds like absolute shit because some suits thought it needed to sound "louder."
It's possibly one of the biggest but least-understood crimes against art in all of history.
I had to ask duck.ai to summarize the article in plain English.
It said that the article claims that is not necessarily that AI is getting smarter but that people
might be getting too stupid to understand what are they getting into.
But this has been true forever, right? Assuming other people are as cognitively complex as you are, there's no way for a human to fully keep on top of even everything that their family is up to, let alone all of humanity. Has anything really changed? Or is it just more FOMO?
That's not really what he article said at all. More like "Singularity is when the computers are changing faster than humans can keep track of the changes."
The article didn't claim that humans were getting dumber, or that AI wasn't getting smarter.
They are not trying to sell adds. They are trying to sell themselves as a
monthly service. That is what I think when they are trying to convince me to go there to think. I rather go think at Wikipedia.
Idk, brainstorming and ideating is my main use case for AI
I use it as codegen too but I easily have 20x more brainstorming conversations than code projects
Most non-tech people I talk to are finding value with it with traditional things. The main one I've seen flourish is travel planning. Like, booking became super easy but full itinerary planning for a trip (hotels, restaurants, day trips/activities, etc) has been largely a manual thing that I see a lot of non-tech people using llms for. It's very good for open ended plans too, which the travel sites have been horrible at. For instance, "I want to plan a trip to somewhere warm and beachy I don't care about the dates or exactly where" maybe I care about the budget up front but most things I'm flexible on - those kinds of things work well as a conversation.
Wikipedia is, of course very useful, but what it’s not good at is surfacing information I am unfamiliar with. Part of this problem is that Wikipedia editors are more similar to me, and more interested in similar things to me, than the average person writing text that appears online. Part of the problem is that the design of Wikipedia does not make it easy to stumble upon unexpected information; most links are to adjacent topics given they have to be relevant to the current article. But regardless, I’m much more likely to come across a novel concept when chatting with Claude, compared to browsing Wikipedia.
It’s so hard to succeed without selling ads. There’s an exponential growth aspect to these endeavors and ads add a lot of revenue, which investors like, so those who don’t can find that the lost revenue “multiplies” due to lower outside investment, lower stock price growth, etc.
I wish the financial aspects were different, because Anthropic is absolutely correct about ads being antithetical to a good user experience.
Anthropic is very big (the biggest AI co?) in B2B, where you don't have ads. Also, if they end up creating a datacenter full of geniuses, ads won't make sense either.
Termux and I have a love-hate relationship.
Is my go-to app in my ARM based chromebook.
Yet I am forced to upgrade the package manager to install git and other tools and once the package manager upgrades.. SSL library breaks.
So you get ONE CHANCE to install your packages before SSL gets upgraded and bam!
No more installations for you.
I go to the usual places to look for fixes and it's like yeah yeah yeah. Try
this.. tried? Still broken, beats me.
That's what I get for sticking with 32 bit ARM chromebook.
Lightning fast. Great battery. Old OS.
This is actually a great way to foster the learning spirit in the age of AI. Even if the student uses AI to arrive at an answer, they will still need to, at the very least, ask the AI to give it an explanation that will teach them how it arrived to the solution.
No this is not the way we want learning to be - just like how students are banned from using calculators until they have mastered the foundational thinking.
That's a fair point, but AI can do much more than just provide you with an answer like a calculator.
AI can explain the underlying process of manual computation and help you learn it. You can ask it questions when you're confused, and it will keep explaining no matter how off the topic you go.
We don't consider tutoring bad for learning - quite the contrary, we tutor slower students to help them catch up, and advanced students to help them fulfill their potential.
If we use AI as if it was an automated, tireless tutor, it may change learning for the better. Not like it was anywhere near great as it was.
There is research that shows that banning calculators impedes the learning of maths. It is certainly not obvious to me that calculators will have a negative effect - I certainly always allowed my kids to use them.
LLMs are trickier and use needs to be restricted to stop cheating, just as my kids had restrictions on what calculators they could use in some exams. That does not mean they are all bad or even net bad if used correctly.
> There is research that shows that banning calculators impedes the learning of maths.
Please share what you know. My search found a heap of opinions and just one study where use of calculators made children less able to calculate by themselves, not the ability to learn and understand math in general.
> There is research that shows that banning calculators impedes the learning of maths.
I've seen oodles of research concluding the opposite at the primary level (grades 1- 5, say). If your mentioned research exists, it must be very well hidden :-/
> Do calculators threaten basic skills? The answer consistently seemed to be no, provided those basic skills have first been developed with paper and pencil.
So, yeah, there are no studies I have found that support any assertion along the lines of:
>>> There is research that shows that banning calculators impedes the learning of maths.
If you actually find any, we still have to consider that things like this meta-study you posted is already 74-studies ahead in confirming that you are wrong.
Best would be for you to find 75 studies that confirm your hypothesis. Unfortunately, even though I read studies all the time, and even at one point had full access via institutional license to full-text of studies, and spent almost all of my after-hours time between 2009 and 2011 actually reading papers on primary/foundational education, I have not seen even one that supports your assertion.
I have read well over a hundred papers on the subject, and did not find one. I am skeptical that you will find any.
Yeah; it gets steps 1-3 right, 4-6 obviously wrong, and then 7-9 subtly wrong such that a student, who needs it step by step while learning, can't tell.
That's roughly what we did as well. Use anything you want, but in the end you have to be able to explain the process and the projects are harder than before.
If we can do more now in a shorter time then let's teach people to get proficient at it, not arbitrarily limit them in ways they won't be when doing their job later.
Props to the teacher for putting in the work to thoughtfully grade an AI transcript! As I typed that I wondered if a lazy teacher might then use AI to grade the students AI transcript?
I love this project!
I am minimalist web-gui averse being embedded dev and all my documentation is plain ascii.
This tool will prove useful for posterity.
Thanks!
I am in the same boat. Running Windows 10 on a Ryzen 5 until the cows come home. I run Rocky Linux in my laptop but I am a gamer so I'll hold to Windows 10. Some Linux Distros are bringing AI. Not ready for that.
Yes I did went and paired up a CD with a cassette this morning OMG!!! Is true.
I could not afford the $300.00 USD Sony Portable CD but I friend of mine did.
First CD he let me listen to: Genesis "Genesis"
First DDD CD: Peter Gabriel "Security"
That last one probably the most influential music in my upbringing.
Funny though, I have hundred of CDs but I don't have those two.
I guess I have to go back to my friends house to listen to them.
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