I’ve been working with https://fractal.boston/ and adjacent communities for the last year and my loneliness has been cured. I now have the opposite problem where I don’t get enough time to myself!
I’ve been helping build https://fractal.boston/ for about a year now and it’s been a massively rewarding experience
Like the author, I highly recommend _building_ rather than simply joining a community. If you’re joining an already established scene, get involved! Host events, and bring in new members, establish new norms
Some seem to think this organization was “anti free speech”. Thing is, if you believe in free speech, famously, you have to agree to let people disagree with you!
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.“
The federal government putting its thumbs on the scales in debates about what can and should be broadcast (on both traditional and social media) should worry anyone who cares about free speech.
I will not defend the case against this person, because I think that trump's gouvernement actions are awful.
But just to nitpick, it looks like that what is taken against this guy is not that they defend a point of view as "free speech" but that they took offensive actions against free speech by pressuring tech and starting baseless legal actions.
But, in the end justice is there to say if things are free speech or not, so it is really bad spirit to use the visa to take revenge on him.
Also the cynical in me would say that somehow you are still a guest in the country so maybe it is not very legitimate to be a lobbyist group for what you think should be the spirit of the country.
Like if I have a visa in China and there create an offensive lobbying group to force companies to support capitalism and free market...
Lots of hate here, but I think this is clever and some iteration of it will sell well
I get that folks are worried about what AI-generated art will do to kids sense of creativity. Will they still learn to draw? Play instruments? Write stories?
But I genuinely believe that tech like this will only whet their imaginations. I would have had so much fun with this as an 8 year old, and would have spent hours just in my head, dreaming up ways to use my limited stickers.
Ofc parents will still need to encourage them to pick up hard skills (as has always been the case). But having an AI companion will mean they start seeing rewards for their efforts much faster. A shallower learning curve will prove to be a very good thing for most.
These are all (both mine and yours) opinions, and we will need studies to see what's what.
That said, my opinion is that not everything is a software development pipeline and needs to be efficient with short feedback loop.
To me what you say:
> will mean that they start seeing rewards for their efforts much faster
sounds essentially a negative. This leads to rewards-chasing and a habit of obtaining result without an appropriate amount of effort. This means that many won't even ever discover their passions or what they are good at. Putting the effort is a necessary step to grow. In other words, will any kid with this machine ever draw something from scratch, after they got used to having something much better than what they could do (at least at the beginning) by hand?
All of this without even mentioning the impact of creativity, where instead of having to think/conceive stuff you have a technology that does that for you after a minimal input, rehashing what has been already thought.
My wish is that tech people just realized that the world is better off without their tech in most cases and stopped thinking that everything in the world needs some tech to "help" (which of course is really a way to make money).
Why learn to draw when the slop machine will make images for you? Why learn to write when the slop machine will make stories for you? Why learn an instrument when the slop machine will make music for you? This does nothing but kill actual creativity at the hands of the people making electricity expensive. We should be appalled and ashamed.
Also, criticism is not hate, and I think you and every other disingenuous AI cheerleader know it.
I mean horoscopes have been a thing for a while or very conservative religious people. Same thing. "Don't do that, dont do this" type of content has existed way before the internet.
The title seems a little click-baity and basically wrong. Gabor transforms, wavelet transforms, etc are all generalizations of the fourier transform, which give you a spectrum analysis at each point in time
The content is generally good but I'd argue that the ear is indeed doing very Fourier-y things.
Agree on the click-baity part, but as for being wrong... not if we're really pedantic. As you've said, Gabor and wavelet are basically generalizations of the Fourier Transform, not actually Fourier Transforms. Just like FS/DFT/DTFT aren't really Fourier Transforms either.
On one corner of the square, you have Fourier Transforms, which are essentially contiguous and infinite. On the opposite corner, you have the DFT, which is both finite (or periodic) and discrete. Hearing is more akin to a Fourier Series, which is finite/periodic but contiguous. That's probably not what the article aims at addressing, though.
But then wavelet transforms are different from Fourier Series again, because you have shifted and stretched shapes (some of them quite weird) instead of sinusoids.
But yeah, colloquially, I agree, the ear is indeed doing very Fourier-y things.
It's a graduate student writing a journal club article about the Lewicki 2002 paper, which is very good, and whose abstract states the idea more precisely: "The form of the code depends on sound class, resembling a Fourier transformation when optimized for animal vocalizations and a wavelet transformation when optimized for non-biological environmental sounds"
Probably true. Most mass-appeal science communication is bullshit.
But TBKTS helped to bring "somatics"--the idea that physical and psychological issues are often interwoven--to the mainstream. There is very clear evidence that this is true [1], and underappreciated by a medical field that has a heavy bias toward specialists over generalists. How many people are experts in both gastroenterology and trauma? And yet we all know intuitively that stress and stomach problems go together.
I'll always appreciate TBKTS for this, despite its flaws.
The reason why we have such big smartphones is that the ratio of screensize (2d area) to battery size (3d volume) is better for smart phones with a bigger screen.
I have iphone 11 and you can have battery replaced just fine. I did it few months ago and the phone became like new. I am not sure about Apple in US but if they won't do it then some third party will.
The bigger problem is that app and web designers have stopped accommodating smaller screen sizes. I can't use my bank's app on an iPhone mini, because the buttons end up off the bottom of the screen (and the app doesn't scroll). Ditto for a number of popular web apps.
My eyes aren't great - I need three different sets of glasses: reading, office, long distance - and I'm clinging on to my 13 mini, desperately hoping that they in fact end up making something smaller. Granted, I bet I'm not the median buyer, but I would instantly upgrade to an iPhone that's around the size of the 4.
Things that we called "feature" phones nowadays and iPhone 3 worked alright with all sorts of people. Maybe phone manufacturers shouldn't opt for putting so much bullshit into the screens. Reading news, video calling people, audio calling, recording voice, messaging. They all work alright with small screen estate and good UI design.
The only thing I see a possible issue is dealing with camera features. But, you know, tech companies should actually innovate stuff... I know radical.
I’ve been working with https://fractal.boston/ and adjacent communities for the last year and my loneliness has been cured. I now have the opposite problem where I don’t get enough time to myself!
reply