🇨🇦 tunetardis

My mom’s childhood was partly spent in a war-torn country where they had no choice but to eat crickets for protein. Years later, I showed her an article about how some gourmet restaurants are experimenting with cricket preparations. She looked pensive, and said “They should harvest them from the rice fields. I think the rice-fed ones taste best?”

I’m not a web dev but was chatting with a friend who is, lamenting web 2.0 for pretty much the same reasons as OP. He’s like “2.0?!? Where have you been? It’s all about web3 and blockchains.” Now where was that comfortable old rock I had been hiding under again?

When the www was in its infancy, I thought there needed to be a standardized way to classify content. Something Dewey Decimal System-ish I suppose? But it would need to be easy for casual content providers to use, since the only way it could work would be in at a grass roots, decentralized level where each provider would be responsible for classifying their own content.

Perhaps there could be tools like expert systems that would ask you a number of questions about your data and then link it up appropriately. It could usher in a golden age of library science!

But then everyone went fuck that. Search engines.

I’m almost afraid to ask what Golden Dome is? If it’s SDI 2.0, we need to stay away in droves. I think there’s some merit in sinking a bit of R&D into dealing with emerging threats like drones, and maybe upgrading the ancient DEW line radars? But if this is another Star Wars missile shield over the entire continent proposal, that was a costly boondoggle in the 80s and I see no reason to believe it wouldn’t be one again today.

I’m not familiar with how Netflix’s ad tier works and am almost afraid to ask, but could someone ELI5?

If a company wanted to push an ad on Netflix, wouldn’t it be up to them to decide whether to use AI make the thing? Or is this sort of the equivalent of a small business sending a script to the local radio station to have the DJ read it (i.e. rather than producing their own ad), except they add some AI-generated visuals?

Yeah, I suppose they could also be useful for translation when travelling someplace where you can’t read the language, provided it’s reasonably accurate and not too laggy?

In terms of occasional use, I was thinking they could be good for loading speeches or music/lyrics when you’re up on a stage. But while that seems like it ought to be a fairly trivial feature to implement, as both a software developer and performer, I could see this being more challenging than you think to get a good experience out of that sort of app.

This seems like a tech that would be hard to get right? There are a lot of trade-offs involving cost, weight, resolution, processing, battery life, etc.

For my part, I would probably use AR features rather sparingly to maintain my sanity, but they could be very useful in certain narrow applications. Whether these would be sufficient to justify the price tag is uncertain. I also tend to be rough on glasses, so that would be a worry.

Given how things are these days, I fear this would be the day you’d be forced to go into work to make up for any wfh you do.

Yeah. I think it started when I was playing 2nd violin in a community orchestra. I’d get lost and think just keep playing and look like you know what you’re doing. As long as it doesn’t clash…

Then I joined a band and they said there are no rules here. Make up whatever you want to go with the song. I was in Heaven!

One time, I was at some kind of open mic thing and an old guy walks up, introducing himself as the official city poet laureate. (Yes, that turned out to be legit!) He started reciting a poem about a local historic event and before you know it, I was playing along. He looked at me but continued. I think it sounded vaguely like something you might hear in a Ken Burns documentary, and when he was done, he came over.

Wow, that fit the words perfectly! What piece did you choose?

Oh what? No I just made it up on the spot.

Really! Could you play it again?

Yeah, no. But if someone made a recording, I’m sure I could harmonize to it! 👍

I can play a spontaneous and convincing harmony on my violin to any song I hear. Sometimes I can even do this as I’m hearing a new song for the first time and trying to join in. I also suck at reading sheet music, so this could be a survival adaptation?

My choirmaster years ago taught us that raising your eyebrows actually does help you reach the top of your vocal range, so that might actually be technique? Though I’m not a professional singer by any stretch, so who am I to say.

For me, I think it’s whatever face I make when I’m in the zone. I’m not really aware of what I look like or contrive to look a certain way. But if I crack a smile, that’s a pretty good tell that I goofed up somewhere.

One time I was playing a Robbie Burns event where we were all encouraged to wear kilts. I made the mistake of putting my phone in the sporran (a kind of purse that hangs right over your crotch) and it started vibrating incessantly. I can’t even imagine the faces I was making that night!

I think it was in the late 90s when a vicious ice storm took out power lines everywhere and the whole downtown core was plunged into darkness for the better part of a month. Fortunately, out where we lived in the suburbs, the power mostly ran underground and was restored pretty quick.

But then my wife got a panicked call from a distant relative who said she couldn’t reach her daughter studying at the university and could we look in on her? So we found her and offered her the guest bedroom for as long as she needed it.

At first, it seemed to be working out? Then it began to emerge that she was some sort of evangelical Christian who was frustrated that we were not eager to convert. I sort of thought taking in a refugee was a fairly Christian thing to do, but whatever.

Eventually, she demanded I take her back to the dorm. I told her downtown is still dark and cold, but she said “I don’t care. You guys are so boring!” So I carefully drove her back around downed trees and power lines and dropped her off.

I felt pretty bad about it and we prayed she’d be ok. A couple of weeks later, the relative called again and thanked us so much for taking care of her daughter and that we went way beyond the call despite how things turned out.

This makes me think of my late grandfather. He had been a civil engineer for the US Navy who spent several years working in the Panama Canal Zone. He told me this story of a senator showing up one day with cost-cutting on his mind. He focused on one line in the budget: mosquito control. “Mosquitoes? There are no mosquitoes here! What a colossal waste of money!” The whole area became pretty much unliveable within a year of his returning to Washington.

Lately, I’ve been listening to The Martian. I’m kind of a sucker for synthy orchestral compositions and that soundtrack is just so hauntingly beautiful.

Living in Ontario Canada, I immediately think of things our premier Doug Ford has done or is trying to do. Right out of the gate, he tore down a wind farm near me that was 90% complete and had to pay millions in legal fees for breaking the contract on the taxpayer’s dime. More recently, he’s on a rampage to tear out bike lane infrastructure and build some giant tunnel under an already huge highway to expand its capacity.

Thanks, I’ll give that a shot.

Reminds me of when I was up in Iqaluit (far north in Canada). The best way I could describe it is imagine Mos Eisley if it were on the planet Hoth.

Ah ok, thanks!

Thanks, it makes me feel relieved to hear I’m not the only one finding it a little overwhelming! Previously, I had been using chatgpt and the like where I would be hunting for the answer to a particularly esoteric programming question. I’ve had a fair amount of success with that, though occasionally I would catch it in the act of contradicting itself, so I’ve learned you have to follow up on it a bit.

I turned on copilot in VSCode for the first time this week. The results so far have been less than stellar. It’s batting about .100 in terms of completing code the way I intended. Now, people tell me it needs to learn your ways, so I’m going to give it a chance. But one thing it has done is replaced the normal auto-completion which showed you what sort of arguments a function takes with something that is sometimes dead wrong. Like the code will not even compile with the suggested args.

It also has a knack for making me forget what I was trying to do. It will show me something like the left side picture with a nice rail stretching off into the distance when I had intended it to turn, and then I can’t remember whether I wanted to go left or right? I guess it’s just something you need to adjust to. Like you need to have a thought fairly firmly in your mind before you begin typing so that you can react to the AI code in a reasonable way? It may occasionally be better than what you have it mind, but you need to keep the original idea in your head for comparison purposes. I’m not good at that yet.