joebergeron

> Calling AI a collaborator isn't an attempt to anthropomorphize it. We can collaborate with a horse to travel

Naive question: What, practically speaking, is the delta between anthropomorphization of AI, which it seems like you are trying to avoid (fairly so!), and the sort-of animistic stance you seem more comfortable to apply?

I reckon that a lot of folks who might recoil at ascribing human qualities to LLMs would similarly feel discomfort comparing those models to a horse. While it's probably uncontroversial to say that horses are, coarsely speaking, "simpler" in many ways than humans, I suspect most people would agree that they are more complex than i.e., a "stochastic parrot".

Is the difference related to motive, maybe? That humans can have hidden preferences, and their actions can in fact betray their intended ends? That no matter how closely we observe someone, we may not glean any meaningful insight into their true motives? And we feel some (justified) discomfort in conferring this quality to AI? I think non-human animals can exhibit this sort of behavior too (albeit to a lesser degree). To me, it feels like restricting oneself to analogizing AI to a non-human animal in order to keep some distance from ascribing it consciousness may be less effective to that end than desired.

In place of your horse example, would it feel appropriate to liken AI to, say, a compiler peppered with bugs? Program - prompt - goes in, executable - agent actions - come out; mostly what we expect, but occasionally goes off the rails in ways we cannot understand. The caveat there, I suppose, is that we have not until now created a compiler which we cannot sensibly decompile.

Fun to think about.

> I could learn. We all can learn. That’s the neat thing about technologies. They’re what we can learn to do.

What a wonderfully humble sentiment, and so plainly said. It's disarming to hear an idea stated so precisely which you've treated largely as subintellectum, despite its truthiness having a foundational effect on how you move about the world [0]. This so perfectly distills my (and I suspect others' here as well) draw toward all things technical. They are all mysteries, whose workings we must largely abstract away for the sake of our own sanity. But they are categorically products of our collective knowledge, and that knowledge is out there for anyone to claim, or to extend! Looking at my surroundings, I see thousands of objects which I could not today begin to re-create myself, and for each object, thousands of questions which could be asked - all of which have at some point been answered, and whose answers await those who are interested to ask. What an endless and delightful thing for the curious! A lovely thought.

[0]: Perhaps this feeling is why Le Guin is such a celebrated author, and I am not ;)

My father is an electrical engineer. Growing up, he had countless components in the basement, including a whole slew of 7400-series DIP chips, as well as a bunch of (powered) breadboards and spare wire. In highschool I had so so much fun building things from scratch - I recall building a basic adder by drawing out the truth tables and doing boolean algebra to come up with the circuit diagram, eventually evolving it into a more fully-fledged calculator. It felt (and still feels) like magic! Most of it was self-directed, though I certainly got his help in a lot of places.

I think sort of "choose your own adventure" projects like that are great, and they also force you to really understand everything you're doing. You can also scale the scope of the "project" to whatever you want; it can even be a sort of iterative process. More importantly (imo) you're left with a bunch of components that he can tinker around with endlessly :)

I read the title of this paper and thought to myself, “What are the chances this could be Erik Demaine?”. And sure enough!

Came to the comments to look for this! I was immediately taken by the idea after reading about the author’s experience.

I actually really enjoyed the latency, unintentional or not. There are a million tools I can use to create a groove exactly as I intend. I enjoyed the aspect of surprise, of recording something and it not coming out exactly as intended, somewhat wonky and imperfect. The challenge and subsequent joy of trying to “feel” the resulting groove, one that you may not have ever come up with otherwise, is a delight.

I thought the copy was fun and don't mind a good soapbox every once in a while, but yeah, wouldn't hurt to slip in a few words about what exactly the product does earlier on.

I'll definitely be trying this out on my decks before my next set :)

This is tangential to much of what this article discusses, but I've had this idea kicking around in my head for a while, that, to some degree, the artificial imitation of acoustic instruments using synthesizers is to music what skeuomorphism is to design, and I (generally) dislike it for all the same reasons. This isn't to diss synthesizers on the whole - I unequivocally love them, and they really opened up my musical world by a wide margin. Nor am I saying that there is no place for synth patches that attempt to "sound like" "real" instruments (for lack of a better word; I consider every "model" of synthesizer to be its own very real and distinct instrument).

Skeuomorphic design, to me, largely feels lazy and unattractive; rather than designing for the new, maybe unfamiliar, medium you're working in, you attempt some facsimile which inevitably cannot live up to the original, either out of lack of ambition, or lack of faith in your audience to understand or appreciate without the anchor of a common metaphor. It lacks idiomaticity - there are particular details, quirks, associated with different mediums that lend themselves to different sorts of designs, and a skeuomorphic design language ignores these. (The same is true of musical instruments. A piece written for the lute, say, played on piano, would feel very different than a piece written for piano, played on piano; what is easy, or possible, on one instrument, is not necessarily as sonorous on another.)

To me, the use of synthesizers to emulate acoustic instruments, where the express intent of the composer/producer/whatever is to evoke the sound of that acoustic original (read: where the creator would prefer the sound of the real instrument), is, at its most generous, telling of a lack of creativity and at worst laziness. (If what you want is expressly the sound of a synthetic imitation for the purposes of your art, none of this applies.) It is a lack of creativity in the case where the creator simply does not have access to "real" instruments they'd rather use, and it's laziness where you have access and ability but opt for something you yourself deem inferior.

Of course, this all presupposes that there is something lost when say, a synthesizer plays a violin patch in an earnest effort by the creator to emulate a violin - where a real violin is actually what's desired. I think this isn't controversial to say, but of course it's a spectrum; I have much less of a problem in cases where the delta is smaller; e.g., simple legato harmonies from a string section can be emulated more convincingly (by orders of magnitude) than some virtuosic cadenza by a solo instrumentalist.

Scrolling this website on mobile made me think I’d installed malware.

I configured fortune to spit out a random oblique strategy in my .bashrc every time I open up a new terminal; it’s great fun, and a gentle reminder when I’ve been working too long that I should spend more time pursuing the art that I love.

I wonder if there are parallels to be drawn here against the industrialization of other, physical, goods, and how their production evolved over time. If you look at something like, say, printing (I'll use the example of woodblock printing here, since I know a decent amount about it), it originated very much as a craft and discipline, as a means to fulfill a particular function. As printing technology improved and became better industrialized, the craft of printing was gradually replaced with other means that fulfilled the same function, but possessed a different form. i.e., lacking those characteristics of products of craft that we find desirable; artless.

We've been able to fulfill the function of printing very cheaply for what seems like ages now, and we've reached a point where some niche and particularly attuned segment of the population wants a bit more out of the actual form of the printed product, the depth of form that was once common. There is a growing community of people that deeply care about woodblock prints now, favoring their physical characteristics, despite such prints falling out of fashion for a period of time during the heights of industrialization. This group of people understands the value of such craft, and is willing to spend more for it, since the difference in the form of the end product from mass-produced stuff is so stark.

The key thing here, and with other categories of physical goods (e.g. pottery, glassware, furniture, etc.), is that there's an obvious and tangible difference in the form of products produced via traditional means, and those mass manufactured, despite them serving fundamentally the same function.

With software however, I worry that this isn't the case, and the sort of resurgence of interest we see now in products produced by traditional means won't ever translate, assuming that we do move in the direction of more and more software engineering being "automated" by AI assistance. To an end-user of a piece of software, I imagine that there will be very little visible difference in the observable characteristics between fully hand-written and AI-produced software. Indeed, given the same requirements, there ought not be a difference between these two things. It's exactly this delta, however, which drives the passionate and less cost-sensitive enthusiasts to prefer handmade physical goods over manufactured ones. If both the form and the function of AI-produced software is identical to those of traditional software, but the AI-produced software is cheaper, why would anyone go with the traditional stuff? I understand that there are other factors at play here as well (e.g., particularly principled consumers etc.) but really, some combination of form, function, and cost seem like the biggest levers to me, and they seem on the face of it to be pulled toward the direction of AI, for better or worse.

I’ve been reading “Deschooling Society” by Ivan Illich while slowly working my way through Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene”.

I've been writing and recording music for a long time, and I've internalized a lot of these pieces of advice. I work completely solo, so it's nice to see that some of the techniques I use are also useful to others. Lyrics have historically been difficult for me, not because I don't have the inclination or intuition for them, but because I've always been a bit embarrassed and frozen in-place by the prospect of sharing that sort of expression with others. I've forced myself to become more comfortable with it in the past several years, since it's ultimately the kind of music I want to write, but it hasn't been easy. I used to sort of "through-compose" both the lyrics and songwriting itself -- writing and recording entire songs "piecemeal" and in serial, chunks at a time, getting impatient with the lyric writing process and just wanting to set something to tape.

I've since come around to writing everything in full before doing any recording, which has been difficult and a real test of my patience. I'm taken to writing very long (>8 minutes), winding songs with dense arrangements and quite ornate language, and without traditional song structure or repetition. I'm not used to stewing on something for so long before being able to actually record; these days it will take me months from the the seed of an initial idea to recording. Whenever some idea strikes me, or I see or hear something in the world around me that piques me interest or inspires me, I immediately write it down on whatever I have handy. The same goes for musical ideas; whenever some motif or progression pops into my head I record it into my phone. It's taken some courage to get over my own embarrassment of having to leaf through this seemingly juvenile collection of half-thoughts I've amassed, but I've come to realize that of all things that may prevent you from realizing your passions, you shouldn't let yourself be one of them.

Anyways, I've come to love this slow, plodding process of writing. There's a great joy in finding precisely the right word or phrase for a particularly difficult passage.