m-photonic

So, does it?

I don't think there's going to be a winter this time. The current boom may only take us so far, but there are a couple more booms on the horizon that in all likelihood will be cusping well before this one is finished.

And all successful activists.

The complaints about "SJWs", while indelicately phrased, aren't completely off-base. Hacker News has gotten way more PC over the past 5 years, much to its detriment. I remember what the site was like before the big reddit influx in 2010, and the actual political center wasn't that different, but the quality of discussion was a lot higher. People were forthright, analytical, and thorough. Conversation wasn't so prone to being dominated by groupthink, memes, and keeping up appearances.

Some of this doesn't come from HN itself but from the overall tech culture. But I think a big part of the story is that the site saw a massive expansion in users, thus becoming more generic and "public", meaning people have to be a bit more reflexive about what they say on here. When your audience is a trusted community of people with a shared understanding of the rights and protections that discussion participants grant to one another, you can cut through the bullshit a lot easier.

This technology isn't a luxury. The vigor of youth and the wisdom of age underlie all of human flourishing. Whatever meager good we manage to achieve in the world flows from these things.

The first world wouldn't be doing the third world any good by forgoing this type of research. Far to the contrary.

The Pythagorean comma is nothing to worry about -- it's tiny and more or less negligible. It's the syntonic comma that's the killer.

The fifths in equal temperament are completely fine, but the thirds are really quite a ways off from the harmonic 5/4 major third. I would recommend experimenting with the traditional meantone tuning system if you're interested in this -- it offers almost as much flexibility as equal temperament (with 6 adjacent keys on the circle of fifths being free of wolf intervals), and it lets you play with "real thirds".

Optimized? A lot of those chairs look pretty uncomfortable.

Very interesting. What if you took a large set of musical notes on various instruments, with about a two-second duration, with the same pitch, same volume, and same sample rate, and did the same thing? Eigensounds! And that's just with a time-domain representation of the sound -- you'd get different eigensounds if you used a frequency-domain representation.

I have to wonder if something like this is used by those song-recognizing apps that can tell you what a song is just by hearing a snippet through your phone.

This is true, but it's too easy to go from that to assuming that ALL our cognitive biases were selected for. Some of them just emerge because it's hard to design a brain that doesn't work like that.

But some really basic cognitive biases, like the tendency for irrational confidence, are clearly evolutionarily adaptive.

It was released two years later, but all the upgrades were to more peripheral features like the palette and various special effects. They're both chewing through the same amount of memory each raster to draw the screen, which is the core of what each hardware system is designed around.

It's an interesting contrast with NEC's Supergrafx system, an obscure upgrade to their better-known Turbografx-16, which was released some months prior to the SNES and was a much greater advance in terms of raw power. It uses two separate graphics chips which simultaneously read graphics data from separate banks of RAM, which allows a lot more to be displayed. It has twice the sprites, twice the graphics RAM, and can use up to twice the resolution as the SNES. However, it's not as "well-rounded" a system as the SNES and is simpler in various ways. Unfortunately the 5 or so games that were released for it didn't push the hardware much, so you won't be able to see much evidence of its prodigious capabilities, but they're there.

You're being discriminatory in a sense, but then being discriminatory is normal. It's just what people do, and the large-scale consequences can be trivial or important depending on any number of things. Whether or not it's worth intervening through policy (or simply through culture or collective intent) varies case by case, but I think there's a case to be made here.

I especially liked how he would give examples of similar techniques being used outside of chipmusic where similar constraints would come up, such as the bass player adding percussive slaps to the gaps in his melody.