I actually can relate to AI music better than to music made by humans.
I always feel some jealousy when listening to rockstars. Because they get all the action and I get so little. They see the world, are desired by all the beautiful women, earn a ton of money and don't have to work a boring job.
With AI music, I know it is just some lonely GPU in a cold, dark datacenter somewhere. Crunching numbers. Just like I do.
I think if you knew more musicians personally, you would feel different. What you're imagining and the day-to-day lived experience of most real musicians don't exactly overlap that much.
So in a sense you're ruining the music for yourself based on nothing but you're imagination.
I think a lot of modern life suffers from this problem. Most of us live such walled in lives now, experiencing everything second hand, from a distance. The absence of information lets us fill the gap with anything we want, which ends up being more a reflection of our own psychology than reality.
Don't have to as they can retire, but as someone who used to be in a professional band (far from a rockstar), I would have end my life if I have to play one of these songs EVER again after playing them 10000s of times (rehearsal + gigs). I cannot understand how anyone does that without being very much drugged up. Especially once you have the money to quit.
"Not all artists". Very few of them, especially these days. I'm reminded of the old joke about how when Mozart was my age, he'd been dead for ten years.
Apart from the "warfare" aspect, it is an interesting question whether the combination of "The man is attractive because of money" and "The woman is attractive because of her looks" can work.
When I look at instances in my social circle, it seems like it doesn't really work. The relationships typically seem to suffer from a lack of mutual interests. The woman's beauty quickly dwindles as time passes. And the woman feels like she is missing out on a "real life" because all she does is be at the side of the man, instead of building her own career. The attraction of the man seems to dwindle quickly too. I know a few such couples, where the man told me that their sex life is dead, even though he wished it were different.
What that tells me is that to work on your attractiveness, working on your career is not the way to go.
Many people have no interest at all in building a career. (Of the four adults who live in my home, only I want to participate in the economy.) Lots of people, including, I bet, the majority of sober-minded women. Want security and emotional support.
The match-up of pretty female and ambitious and successful male can and has worked through all of history. Yes beauty fades, which is why there better be other layers of connection, but that doesn’t have to be shared interests. I share very little interests in common with my wife of 34 years. We don’t connect in that way. We connect on the level of mutual respect, mutual need, and mutual service.
Our society has become so disconnected from concepts like “respect” and “service.” We are amusing ourselves to death, as the saying goes. But these things work. They are timeless.
Cheers! I learned only during a Covid quarantine that I need to spend a certain period of time in her presence, a few times per day— not even doing or necessarily saying anything— to feel really okay.
In my circle, I've seen it work, not in the same way though. Attractive women often go after the wealthiest men they can get. Likewise the minute a man goes out of a job, the strain in the marriage becomes immediate in a dual income household; less likely in households where the man was the sole breadwinner. The greater the difference in incomes and/or wealth, the more likely the marriage is going to last. And no, these aren't observations from some theocratic shithole in the Middle East or some ultra conservative Asian circles. These are from all the most liberal cities in the world.
And there is data to suggest children of high earners tend to be more attractive, for just this reason.
A woman who is a 9 out of 10, but not inclined or able to make her own high-earning career, can jump to the head of the income line by marrying a wealthy man. No one is surprised by this, but there are certainly some genetic consequences.
Of course, children of high-income families have better access to dental care, pimple medicine, and so forth, in the US.
Funny, in the comparison image the article shows for the 3 design styles - Skeuomorphic, Flat, Liquid Glass - the Skeuomorphic one looks absolutely best to me:
The items look so much more tangible, and the text is more readable. Everything is easy to grok visually. The flat design looks way more confusing. And the liquid glass one looks even worse.
As I remember it, there was actually a step between Transition and Native in that image, which was noticeably flatter than Native. It was the first Ives interface, mentioned in the article: "iOS 7's initial release had similar problems: ultra-thin fonts that were hard to read, blue text links that didn't look clickable, animations that made some users motion sick. Apple responded with gradual refinements: thicker fonts, higher contrast, optional accessibility settings, and more obvious interactive elements." i.e. they made it much worse and then made it slightly less bad. I presume they'll follow a roughly similar path with this, when really, in my view, they should be reversing course on some of the fundamentals to make it easier to use. Scrollbars are a great example. I've got used to the fact that they're hidden on macOS now, but looks at some of the great ones from the past that have an almost tangible feel to them: https://imgur.com/scrollbars-through-history-fixed-jpdGk
One reason I use a plain black background for my iPhone--I can actually read the labels under each icon. (I could use plain text rather than icons, but that's a different gripe.)
Also, I can actually read the battery level indicator in the skeuomorphic display. I sometimes resort to getting out a magnifying glass to read it on my iPhone's current display. (Yes, I have old eyes. And I have to keep telling those Apple UI people to get off my grass.)
The cause and effect are not so clear cut. Customers also expect something new. That way they feel like they got something new when they have to replace their phone, especially in the "evolution not revolution" phase of a device.
And it's not just phones either. Car companies spend money on retooling to give a model a facelift because people expect it. Sales drop and then pick up again after the facelift because nobody wants to buy something that looks dated from day one.
Manufacturers take cues from each other because once a "modern" trend is set everything else looks dated. Everyone went with flat UIs in a matter of a few years. Cars went with lightbar lights in the past few years too. That's what feels modern now.
As long as a huge part of the market remembers skeuomorphic design and associates it with the early 2000s it will never feel modern so designers stay away from it.
P.S. For me suspenders are still the third best way to keep my pants on (right after "picking the right pants size" and "fastening the buttons"). But nobody wants them these days and it's not a Big Belt conspiracy. They just don't look modern.
I don't think that's true at all. Customers hate when things change in my experience. It doesn't matter how well intentioned the change is, it's going to be upsetting to people. I really do think it's just that companies are obsessed with changing things, in willful defiance of what their customers want.
Customers hate if things change on their phone, but will absolutely also slam your product and not buy it if it feels "old" and hasn't been changed in a while. Especially media will smear you and tell people to buy the other guy's work if you don't run the redesign threadmill.
People aren't always rational. And "customers" aren't a single group either.
Well if you go straight to the elephant in question - Apple - their laptops have looked essentially the same for 10 years or even 15 years if you squint. Because they found a design that's near perfect. So it doesn't need to be renewed to communicate reliability and quality.
Motorcycles of the classic cut are still being manufactured and sold in massive quantities, even though the design is about 50 years old. Same for them, customers know that the quality is high so it doesn't need to say "new".
And I'm positive that people would line up to buy cars with classic designs if the manufacturers started caring about what customers actually want. Not that I dislike modern car design, but it hit the sweet spot about 5 years ago IMO.
So at least for hardware I think a classic design works well to communicate quality.
And I think we're soon reaching a similar mood in software GUI as well.
Do they? I used FVWM's MWM theme for 13 years starting from when I was 12 and was pretty happy with it. I've been using CWM for the past 6 years with roughly no changes and am happy with that. Having themes and UI changes forced on you is annoying.
I have similar feelings every time I look at a Windows 95 screenshot: everything is easy to grasp and feels natural. I know immediately what is interactive or not and what is the hierarchy between the different parts of the UI.
Sure, it's not pretty by today's standard, but it's way easier to use IMO.
iPhone 5 with iOS 6 was peak, around when Jobs died iirc. Then they changed the design, made the phones too big to fit in pockets, removed headphone jack to sell AirPods, and replaced the home button with some confusing gestures. The keyboard doesn't even work right anymore.
Yeah at the default sizes i couldn't read the glass ones nearly as easily. the icons themselves look like a bad icon pack that i could download on android 14 years ago
I really hated all the liquid glass screenshots, and had a bad reaction when I first updated my phone to it. I also updated my macOS, and had a MUCH better reaction to that. And after a few days I really dig it on my phone too.
I thought there was supposed to be a way to add a tint to it though, which I haven't found a setting for, and think I would do if I could find it.
In the Apple ecosystem, grey hasn't meant 'disabled' for years except for glyphs and text. In Liquid Glass, glyphs and text haven't changed their colouration.
I don't think too many people go hard on skeumorphism itself per se. It's more that the era was associated with desirable properties that seem lacking in the flat era. The primary thing that makes me gravitate to the left screenshot is the clear separation of foreground and background elements with drop-shadows. Icons were more complex and differentiated, less abstract: what is "news" supposed to be now, "game-center" became a bunch of bubbles, "reminders" and "notes" are spiraling into each other, and "passbook/wallet" has become less distinct at each step. Color is being used less and less as well (less true for top-level app icons).
I don't know how well connected it is to the power-user axis, but I would say a characteristic power-user doesn't care that they are looking a somewhat garish and busy collection of colored icons, gradients, bezels, etc, whereas the opposite sensibility favors a minimalist UI for the aesthetics over perhaps ease of locating things. The real opposite of a power-user is not a first-time user, its a non-user. The non-user is not annoyed that they can't find things that are hidden away in secret trays you have to swipe for or such, but they appreciate the resulting saved screen-space.
I know there are JavaScript ports of FFmpeg and I would love to use them. But so far, I never got it working. I tried it with AI and this prompt:
Make a simple example of speeding up an mp4
video in the browser using a version of ffmpeg
that runs in the browser. Don't use any server
side tech like node. Make it a single html file.
But so far every LLM I tried failed to come up with a working solution.
It transcodes a webm file to MP4, but making it speed up the video is trivial: just add arguments to `ffmpeg.exec()`. Your lack of success in this task is trusting an LLM to know about cutting-edge libraries and how to use them, not a lack of progress in the area.
The problem is that they don't provide the full code that can run in the browser. I have not managed to get the function they show in the first example to run in the browser.
That's just wrong. The example is live: you can run it right there on the page. If the code isn't working when you write it, you're probably importing something incorrectly (or you're not running it in an environment with React, which is where the `use*` functions come from). You can even click on the source of the log lines when the example is running (on the right edge of the Chrome console) to jump into the hot-loaded code and see the exact code that's running it.
I think there is some kind of misunderstanding here.
You say "an environment with React". My environment is the browser.
I don't know how one is supposed to run that nameless function on that page. What I am looking for is a simple, complete example in HTML that can run standalone when opened in the browser. Without any server side processing involved.
If you want to copy/paste, try taking the first example and asking the llm to refactor the code to run in a browser with no dependencies. It should be able to strip out the react stuff, or at least get it close and you can fix it from there.
I have tried that a bunch of times and a bunch of ways and did not get ffmpeg to work.
It might have to do with these two strange comments at the top:
// import { FFmpeg } from '@ffmpeg/ffmpeg';
// import { fetchFile, toBlobURL } from '@ffmpeg/util';
The rest of the code seems to assume "FFmpeg", "fetchFile" and "toBlobUrl" are somehow magically available. Neither me nor any LLM have yet managed to get these into existance.
OK to your credit your original request was to get this all working in a single html file. That is not possible with the easy paths documented on ffmpeg.
By default, the build relies on web workers which need to load their code from somewhere (and usually it has to be the same origin as the code making the request)
Through much mastery of JS build systems that I would not wish on my enemies, I bet you could get it working on localhost, but you’ll have a much better time of it if you set up vite or something for a local build. You can still easily do a “serverless” deploy with GitHub pages or similar but you do need an http server correctly configured for asset requests.
Trying to do things off the beaten path with LLMs is rarely successful, especially if there's a related much more popular option.
I'm convinced that programmers' bias towards LLMs is strongly correlated with the weirdness of their work. Very often my strange ideas pushed to LLMs look like solutions but are rather broken and hallucinated attempts which only vaguely represent what needs to be done.
The JS ports of FFmpeg (or WASM port if you want the in-browser approach) are very old and would be more than present in modern LLM training datasets, albeit likely not enough of a proportion for LLMs to understand it well.
Entered the same prompt with Sonnet 4. Just needed to paste the two errors in the console (trying to load the CDN which won't work since it uses a web worker, and hallucinated an ffmpegWasm function) and it output an HTML file that worked.
I'm sorry, but if you give up on something you would "love to use" just because LLMs are unable to oneshot it then you might be a bit too dependent on AI.
Time is a finite resource, and there's an opportunity cost. If an easy PoC for a complex project can't be created using AI and it would take hours/days to create a PoC organically that may not even be useful, it's better project management to just do something else entirely if it's not part of a critical path.
If you can't be arsed to google the library and read the Usage page and run the _one command_ on the Installation page to come up with a working example (or: tweak the single line of the sample code in the live editor in the docs to do what you want it to do), how do you expect to do anything beyond "an easy PoC"? At what point does your inability/unwillingness to do single-digit-minutes of effort to explore an idea really just mean you aren't the right person for the job? Hell, even just pasting the code sample into the LLM and asking it to change it for you would get you to the right answer.
Another commenter showed how they were able to use Claude to do this in two messages: one to write the code, a second to paste the error that comes out so Claude can fix it. The exact word of the comment you replied to was "oneshot": if you're going to outsource 100% of the thinking involved in the task to a machine and can't even be bothered to copy over the error you're getting after the first response, my response remains the same.
As long as you make sure the npm package is available, you can! If you can't figure out how to do it, I'm sorry but I literally can't think of a way to make it less effort. The problem you described in another comment with the import statements is literally explained on the Installation page of the documentation.
Runs on demand, doesn't require root, can be nested, usually uses newer and simpler primitives (e.g. a few nftables rules in Podman vs iptables spaghetti in Docker). In my experience it is ~90% compatible with Docker. The author explains the practical differences in the blog post https://www.edu4rdshl.dev/posts/from-docker-to-podman-full-m...
It is usually easier to install - most distros ship relatively recent version of Podman, while Docker is split between docker.io (ancient), docker-ce (free but non in repos) and docker-ee.
Not everything is rosy, some tools expect to be talking to real Docker and don't get fooled by `ln -s docker podman`. But it is almost there.
In general, if one is happy to run very old versions of software Debian can be your driver. If not, you are in for pain in my experience. (That is also why Ubuntu as default Linux is a tragedy, old bugs and missing features mean that it is not really attractive to officially support Linux for vendors.)
I've not experienced something on this scale for many years, "Debian stable packages are so outdated" is mostly a meme. Debian 12 was 1y old when I did this and very often you can relatively easily find a backport or build one - but I think in this case it was either glibc or kernel, that's why "just run upstream" didn't work.
What’s the point of using a distribution if you need to find back ports or build your own? Distros are, after all, mostly collections of installable software.
The point is that it works 95% of the time, or probably more like 98%.
If this is a e.g. webserver and I only need my fastcgi backend built by myself, I can still have reverse proxy, database, and every other package be done by the distro.
No one said you need backports. More like: If it fits 90% and one package doesn't work, you get it from somewhere else - that doesn't invalidate the concept of a distro for me. YMMV
Honest question: wouldn't that make you more nervous you now arrived at an unknown/unsupported configuration?
Boring stability is the goal, but if Debian does not fit as is, then why not find a total package that is somewhat more cutting edge but does fit together? Especially given the fact that Debian does customization to upstream, so esoteric times esoteric.
It doesn't make me nervous because Debian has only let me down a couple of times over nearly 20 years and for example Ubuntu und RHEL and SLES have let me down dozens of times each.
Also I don't usually run "supported". I just run a system that fits my needs.
I maintain a couple of Debian servers and this is how I do it too.
Reverse proxy, DB, etc from Debian. The application server is built and deployed with nix. The Python version (and all the dependencies) that runs the application server is the tagged one in my nix flake which is the same used in the development environment.
I make sure that PostgreSQL is never upgraded past what is available in the latest Debian stable on any on the dev machines.
2) `podman run --entrypoint="" --rm -it debian:stable /bin/bash`
in most instances you can just alias docker to podman and carry on. It uses OCI formatted images just like docker and uses the same registry infrastructure that docker uses.
I would think the Docker infrastructure is financed by Docker Inc as a marketing tool for their paid services? Are they ok when other software utilizes it?
On my system it asks between a few different public registries, and dockerhub/docker.io is one of the choices.
t's all public infrastructure for hosting container images, I don't think Docker-the-company minds other software interfacing with it. After all, they get to call them 'Docker images', 'Dockerfiles', and put their branding everywhere. At this point
I always feel some jealousy when listening to rockstars. Because they get all the action and I get so little. They see the world, are desired by all the beautiful women, earn a ton of money and don't have to work a boring job.
With AI music, I know it is just some lonely GPU in a cold, dark datacenter somewhere. Crunching numbers. Just like I do.