I’m just perusing my old comments and came across this, 7 months later. This is an amazing article, thank you.

Okay, that’s all very interesting and I love the idea about dynamic music, I’ve had similar thoughts myself but wouldn’t have thought to go this far to make it happen. I’d love to see what you come up with!

My only real thoughts are about the transpiling, so the editor uses relative time codes but the format itself uses absolute, if I understand you, and you’re converting between the two?

That to me hints of code smell, because I wonder why that’s necessary. For example, could you program the editor to display and work in absolute time codes, or is there something stopping that from happening?

Alternatively you could simply make the format capable of natively understanding both relative and absolute commands, so whichever is more appropriate to the context is what gets used.

Keeping them different seems like it will require you to program two formats, make them compatible with one another and deal with bugs in both of them. Essentially you’ve not only doubled the number of places where bugs can arise within the formats, you’ve added the extra step of transpiling which also doubles the number of interactions between the formats, adding even more complexity, even more places where inconsistencies can show up, even more code to sift through to find the problem.

It’s the sort of thing that shows up in legacy systems where the programmers don’t have the freedom to simply ditch one of the parts.

Personally if I had the freedom of programming the system from scratch I would rather commit completely to a single format and make it work across the entire stack, so then I only have one interpreter/encoder to consider. That one parser would then be the single point of reference for every interaction with the format. Any code that wants to get or place a note for any reason - for playing, editing, recording, whatever - would use the same set of functions, and then you automatically get consistency across all of it.

Edit: another thought about this: if you need some notes to be absolute and others to be relative, it might be worth having an absolute anchor command that other commands can be relative to, and have it indexed, so commands are relative to anchor 1, 2, etc. Maybe anchor 0 is just the start of the song. Also maybe you could set any command as an anchor by referring to its index. That way you can still move around those commands in a relative way while still having the overall format reducible to absolute times during playback. Also a note “duration” could just be an off command set relative to its corresponding on command.

I say that because as another principle I like to make sure that I “name things what they are”. If the user is programming things in the editor that are relative, but under the hood they’re translated into absolute terms, that will probably lead to unexpected behaviour.

Honestly a lot of this post is very inside-baseball with a lot of lingo, and the last paragraph is very dense, so it’s hard to know what you mean, especially by the term “transpiler”. What is it transpiling to & from, and where does this happen in the overall process of implementing the editor?

I’m sorry I don’t have a lot of insight other than: it sounds like you know better than anyone here, so just try it and see what works. Sometimes rewriting a system is unavoidable as you figure out the logic of it.

Also as someone with some interest in programming my own physical MIDI instruments, I’d be interested to hear what limitations of MIDI you’re talking about and what your system does differently. It sounds like you’ve got a pretty advanced use-case if MIDI isn’t up to the task.

And I’ll keep saying this: you can’t teach a neural network to understand context without creating a generalised context engine, another word for which is AGI.

Fidelity is impossible to automate.

He proposed a moon cannon. The moon cannon was wrong, as wrong as thinking an LLM can have any fidelity whatsoever. That’s all that’s needed for my analogy to make the point I want to make. Whether rockets count as artillery or not really doesn’t change that.

Cannons are not rockets. LLMs are not thinking machines.

Being occasionally right like a stopped clock is not what “fidelity” means in this context. Fidelity implies some level of adherence to a model of the world, but the LLM simply has no model, so it has zero fidelity.

Interesting article, but you have to be aware of the flipside: “people said flight was impossible”, “people said the earth didn’t revolve around the sun”, “people said the internet was a fad, and now people think AI is a fad”.

It’s cherry-picking. They’re taking the relatively rare examples of transformative technology and projecting that level of impact and prestige onto their new favoured fad.

And here’s the thing, the “information superhighway” was a fad that also happened to be an important technology.

Also the rock argument vanishes the moment anyone arrives with actual reasoning that goes beyond the heuristic. So here’s some actual reasoning:

GenAI is interesting, but it has zero fidelity. Information without fidelity is just noise, so a system that can’t solve the fidelity problem can’t do information work. Information work requires fidelity.

And “fidelity” is just a fancy way of saying “truth”, or maybe “meaning”. Even as conscious beings we haven’t really cracked that issue, and I don’t think you can make a machine that understands meaning without creating AGI.

Saying we can solve the fidelity problem is like Jules Verne in 1867 saying we could get to the moon with a cannon because of “what progress artillery science has made during the last few years”. We’re just not there yet, and until we are, the cannon might have some uses, but it’s not space technology.

Interestingly, artillery science had its role in getting us to the moon, but that was because it gave us the rotating workpiece lathe for making smooth bore holes, which gave us efficient steam engines, which gave us the industrial revolution. Verne didn’t know it, but that critical development had already happened nearly a century prior. Cannons weren’t really a factor in space beyond that.

Edit: actually metallurgy and solid fuel propellants were crucial for space too, and cannons had a lot to do with that as well. This is all beside the point.

Most commercially produced media is slop. Porn isn’t special in that regard.

That doesn’t mean porn is somehow specially devoid of artistic merit. Done well it can be beautiful and meaningful.

You’ve got a stereotype in your head that was put there by a misogynistic culture, but that’s not inherent to the genre.

Who was that? I said sex is about interpersonal connection. I didn’t learn that from porn, I learned it from sex.

I trusted the audience to understand that good porn or erotica in general should be about portraying that connection in some form, which is what is actually hot about sex, but maybe I gave you too much credit.

But hey, if sexuality to you is really that shallow, you’re free to pity me, because I put absolutely no stock in your opinion.

I’d suggest that if you think AI porn is anywhere near the real thing, that’s probably because you think porn is already slop in the same way that these AI bros think of code or creative writing or whatever other information-based thing you already know AI can’t do well.

Porn isn’t slop, people aren’t just interestingly-shaped slabs of meat. Sex is fundamentally about interpersonal connection. It might be one of the things that LLMs and robots are the worst at.

You are not worth talking to.

People are being miseducated about what they can achieve by charlatans looking to make a quick buck before the hype bubble implodes, and the tech is helping cook the planet.

It’s not “fine”.

Which is also not a real use-case. Like, just check your work, you don’t need a tool for that.

Hell I don’t even use spell-check because it’s just distracting, and it’s a fundamentally wrong way to think about language.

I don’t remember those being particularly emphasised traits of his.

Not since after I saw this graph:

From this paper:

https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc/page/n7/mode/1up

This was published in 2014, back when Obama was in office.

The institutions are completely captured. Yes, even the ones you thought were on your side all this time.

Capital calls its own theft “innovation” and that of the individual “crime”.

Excrubulently.

I have absolutely no idea, I’ve barely played it, I just saw an essay about the design and thought it was cool.

I use ctrl-s and ctrl-z for occasions just like this.

Gotcha, so when the boss tells me to “give 110%” I can go ahead and translate that to 55%.

And then not do that either.

Cool thing about rain world is that it has a whole ecosystem of critters that run around and do their own thing independently of you, so this gif might just be of the big guy having a snack and have nothing to do with the player directly.