Effective altruists are a transhumanist cult filled with people that think an ML degree qualifies them to speak on subjects outside of their domain and make decisions on behalf of humanity.
A disclosure should be required next to anything they're working on.
Is that this person though? If you actually look at his website there doesn't seem to be anything about transhumanism. Seems like he's just a metascience/science policy guy
You're projecting. EAs are people interested in EA. That there might be overlap with some "transhumanists" (which is no crime as far as anyone is concerned) has no bearing.
Says so right there. If you want to argue otherwise, provide a source. As it stands you're just making things up.
> Effective Altruism is in of itself a philosophy developed by charlatans that refuse to engage in the tradition that preceded it by about 2500 years.
You're not communicating anything of substance, and I expect you can't. If there's a problem with EA in itself, it should be pretty damn easy to coherently point it out. There's nothing complicated about it: a) they value charity, b) they value maximal efficacy from a charitable dollar, c) they value taking the time to understand the impacts of various charities and prioritizing what matters to you
I'm not sure what "tradition" you're alluding to here, but if you plainly mean charity-giving and volunteering, the opposite is true. They give, while the average person doesn't.
I have a feeling you find it uncomfortable to confront some of these questions, and so it just feels better to make EA out to be some boogeyman. That way you can content yourself with not changing your habits. Am I getting warm?
Today’s ways of living - no matter how challenging or disillusioning or alienating they may be - are largely preferable to literally being hunted and having your livelihood threatened by predators, compared to the figurative hunters and predators you’re describing.
It ain’t perfect - and we’ll work to improve it - but it’s way better than the way it used to be for so many people. Civilization aint all bad.
I do prefer modern living, but when people describe the horrors of the past, they go for movie horror version rather then anything actually resembling what historians describe as past.
The Hobbes argument can be used to justify tyranny far worse than what we see. It does not prevent me from believing that substantial improvement is possible.
I see so many people try to reinvent sequencing as a circular diagram, as opposed to (say) a piano roll that loops, and I see little to no advantage to it. It's a cool novelty, but not the type of thing you'd like to work on.
Horizontal (left-to-right) sequencer displays like a piano roll or step sequencer are far more compact to display and easier to read. For drums parts, it's one dimensional until you add a second layer, and then the parts stack vertically, nicely on top of each other.
It's all to say that I don't really see much advantage in this petri nets paradigm. Even the trigger conditions and probabilities have already been incorporated into a large number of DAWs and hardware sequencers. This feels a little like someone who has discovered fire independently from the rest of civilization, but in this day and age I don't think that counts for much when all they had to do was observe the design paradigms that already exist.
In the end, the proof is in the pudding: How good is the music made with the tool? Does the technique allow us to more easily do something that was previously difficult or tedious? In this case, I'm not yet seeing it.
I make beats with Patterning on iPad all the time. It's a fantastic sequencing surface. The main advantage over a traditional horizontal sequencer is that time at the measure level is represented much more naturally (as a loop), which makes polyrhythms and track offsets (both common when putting together more interesting sounding, swung beats) easier to visualize and manipulate with confidence. It's also arguably a bit easier to visually reason about symmetry / 'rhyming' across beats, when making step changes - a much more minor improvement but noticeable to me (I'm highly visual).
I enjoy Patterning too. One limitation of that representation is that it doesn't seem to lend itself to working with loops that evolve over time. I don't know if it could be accomplished by some isometric view of stacked wheels (patterns) or a slinky, but maybe a Petri Net?
The only flaw i see in your reasoning is trying to optimize a creative process. Piano rolls may be technically better, but since the majority of music is made with a piano roll you can use other types of interfaces to break out of the mental ruts a piano roll creates in your thinking. Music making isn't about best - it’s about creativity and inspiration and lateral thinking.
> In the end, the proof is in the pudding: How good is the music made with the tool?
hating on OP for being AI slop is fully legit imo (sorry OP) but don't judge the concept on this example. the rotary sequencer model's actually quite effective. there's lots of niche software and Eurorack modules which implement it, e.g., Moskwa (and Moskwa II) from Xaoc Devices.
here's a YouTube video which shows Moskwa II in action:
They had to have had _some_ inkling, considering one of the lyrics is “a cop knelt and kissed the feet of a priest, and a queer threw up at the sight of that.”
> The Bureau of Street Services (StreetsLA) has not repaved a street since last June, and the city’s latest budget practically zeros out repaving for next fiscal year. StreetsLA crews are still doing some road repairs, fixing potholes and patching problem areas. But the most basic form of urban maintenance—full street resurfacing—has all but disappeared in America’s second-largest city.
Anecdotally, a residential street (four blocks long) was freshly paved two days ago in my neighborhood here in Los Angeles. A full resurfacing. I'm not even sure it needed to be resurfaced, but they did it anyway. It's not even in a "nice" neighborhood where you might expect more attentiveness to the roads.
Have the corners been updated? We had a big update to four or more corners in the neighborhood last year and it did feel a bit excessive. The old corners weren’t the ancient ones that require a step, they were already ramped.
Not to mention that Amazon drivers are delivering to dozens of stops along their route to you, making them far more efficient compared to each consumer traveling to the store in their own vehicles.
Yeah that too, although I'm not looking to throw my weight behind that argument as I've seen how many redundant deliveries Amazon tends to make. Never mind the amount of stuff one has to return due to it arriving broken or due to trying to mitigate their customer-hostile policies. I'd like to think this demonstrates how cheap amortized delivery actually is, but I think the truth is they've just got things set up so sellers eat the costs.
I've been using Macrofactor for many years (after a HN recommendation) and now that you mention it, I've been super happy with the experience and don't detect a whiff of dark patterns, unwarranted tracking, or bad business practices that plague other apps.
The value of tracking my diet and health has been well worth it. I will happily pay their asking price and it's heartening to hear that the founders/owners are committed to good practices.
Side note: I recently switched over fully to the Proton Unlimited ecosystem. Another ethical service that I will happily pay for.
I'm beginning to think that we might be able to turn this shitty ad-industry-lead ship around, folks. Or at least we have strong alternatives these days for the people who care.
Now if I can just get my social groups to use Signal.
It's not. You're putting the cart before the horse (or attributing the horse to the cart?).
Contemporary music began using a click track because it makes techniques like sequencing, non-linear editing in a DAW, and tempo-synced effects far easier to incorporate. Click tracks and rock-solid tempo are also an aesthetic choice.
It's far more difficult to sync these techniques to a wavering tempo, so the trend has been for bands and records to conform to the click as the central authority for the pulse in order to unlock the benefits of the above-mentioned techniques.
The author's product allows users to slave the click track to the drummer's playing (which may now waver). This opens the door to real-time tempo-following by the click. The band can now push/pull the tempo AND use all of cool synchronized techniques in real time.
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