zulko
Joined 12 years ago
Karma
265
Submissions
52
Member since
Jan 25
Recent submissions
Comment · 9 days ago
Comment · 8 months ago
Possibly not what you're asking for, but I wrote a generally-accessible intro to why it can be tricky to assemble many DNA fragments with "Golden Gate Assembly", a mainstream method which relies on short sequence overhangs. The Sidewinder method discussed in this thread aims to solve that "short overhang" problem.
https://zulko.github.io/bricks_and_scissors/posts/overhangs/
Comment · 11 months ago
It does, why?
Comment · 11 months ago
Nice, how does your timeline work under the hood? Does it read from wikipedia? What could be interesting in your project is to be able to compare timelines. See for instance this website specifically for comparing composer works (with timelines pre-extracted from wikipedia):
https://zulko.github.io/composer-timelines/?selectedComposer...
Comment · 11 months ago
Yeah it would be nice if Wikipedia would host it, but it would probably require some more serious ground work so the project fits in the wikipedia ecosystem. Could be a pipeline Wikipedia -> Wikidata -> Atlas.
There are many projects that could be done with with wikipedia and LLMs, for instance "equalizing" all languages by translating all pages into all other languages where they are missing. Or, more surgically, finding which facts are reported in some languages of a page but not others, and adding these facts to all languages.
For now, it seems that wikipedia doesn't want to use generative AI to produce wikipedia pages, and that's understandable, but there may be a point where model quality will be too good to ignore.
Comment · 11 months ago
Thank you for reporting this!
Comment · 11 months ago
This is also very true of the events reported in Wikipedia, see this animated timeline of (a hopefully representative set of) historical events reported in Wikipedia. Is really is "Europe meets the world":
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1l3xl8x/events_fro...
I agree with others in this thread that this more probably "information-biased" than "eurocentric" on the part of the Atlas creator. Pretty sure they wish non-european history was easier to find and aggregate as it would make the project much more compelling (I certainly had this problem with https://landnotes.org/).
I am hoping LLMs will do a lot of good at bridging gaps and surfacing world historical information that didn't make it yet to centralized projects like Wikipedia.
Comment · 11 months ago
Total plug but this year I scraped 400,000 wikipedia pages with Gemini to create landnotes.org, an atlas where you can ask "what happened in Japan in 1923":
https://landnotes.org/?location=xnd284b0-6&date=1923&strictD...
https://github.com/Zulko/landnotes
My plan has been to overlay historical map borders on top of it, like the Geacron one from this post, but they all seem to be protected by copyright - and understandably so, given the amount of work involved.
Comment · 1 year ago
Very nice but the fonts render as white on white background on my phone which makes it difficult to read. Screenshot: https://ibb.co/29CqpTx
Comment · 1 year ago
Fascinating, I knew about the "Wikipedia degrees of separation" and whe wikigame (https://www.thewikigame.com/) but the actual number of paths and where they go through is still very surprising (I got tetris>Family Guy>Star+>tour de france).
If anyone is looking to start similar projects, I open-sourced a library to convert the wikipedia dump into a simpler format, along with a bunch of parsers: https://github.com/Zulko/wiki_dump_extractor . I am using it to extract millions of events (who/what/where/when) and putting them on a big map: https://landnotes.org/?location=u07ffpb1-6&date=1548&strictD...
Comment · 1 year ago
You should try the words from previous days (clicking on the date below the title). So far it’s been pretty random how many tries someone will need to find a word, the same person who needed 2 tries one day might need 10 tries another time. Just like wordle, you might get lucky or unlucky on your first guesses.
Comment · 1 year ago
In terms of the music being played, piano rolls can be different from "normal piano music" because it's not played live by a real human, so it can have complex parts with full chords, additional voices, all with perfect rhythm and no wrong notes. This can be very compelling when well executed on the right songs (and it can also sound "mechanical" on others).
There isn't a huge market for piano roll recordings, and these recordings are rare. It's a niche topic that can attract
- Older people who have known the time piano rolls (say, until the 1950s)
- People nostagic of old times in general (in particular the 1910s-1940s), the age of early jazz with stride piano and early Broadway.
- Music scholars, because some of these rolls are of historical/musical importance, in particular those "recorded" by George Gershwin or Fats Waller and other big names. A lot of material exists only as piano rolls.
For the example of the Gershwin CD I posted above, it was produced by musicologist Artis Wodehouse [1] in parnership with the yamaha disklavier pianos iirc [2], so my guess is this was a passion project above all, with a bit of Yamaha marketing.
[1] https://www.artiswodehouse.com/biography/ [2] https://usa.yamaha.com/products/musical_instruments/pianos/d...
Comment · 1 year ago
When I was about 10 I picked my first ever CD at a music shop, and it was a recording of the Gershwin piano rolls, because the cover photo caught my eye [1]. I didn't really understand what I was listening to, I assumed "piano roll" was a musical genre, like "rock'n'roll", until years later when my English became good enough to read the CD's booklet.
It was also a time when all these midi files started being available, like the 6000 rolls from Terry Smythe [2], and I figured out transcribing these could be a good way to learn old-school Jazz, which is otherwise difficult to find as sheet music.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BX9MCyO6smk
[2] https://archive.org/details/terrysmythe.ca-archive/mp3s/Ampi...
Comment · 1 year ago
This used to be one of my main hobbies, I listened to thousands of these and I am super grateful to the people scanning and hosting these collections.
Some software I wrote for piano roll analysis and transcription:
- Unroll: https://zulko.github.io/unroll-online/ - upload a piano roll midi file and have it quantized and converted to lilypond sheet music. More about the process in this blog: https://zulko.github.io/blog/2014/02/12/transcribing-piano-r...
- Pianola: https://zulko.github.io/pianola/ - upload a piano roll midi file, and it plays with the piano roll and keyboard animation (you can zoom on some parts, slow down etc).
Some transcriptions made with these tools:
- Hindustan: https://github.com/Zulko/sheet-music--hindustan
- Gershwin - Sweet and Lowdown: https://github.com/Zulko/sheet-music--Gershwin-sweet-and-low...
- Gershwin - Limehouse Nights: https://github.com/Zulko/-sheet-music--Gerhswin-Limehouse-Ni...
I went with "let's show pages with the most words first". If people spent more time writing a page, it must be a great topic, right? Unfortunately, this also surfaces all the wars, crimes, accidents and controversies that generated the most coverage. These are the most active pages on Wikipedia.
[1] https://landnotes.org/?location=u0q9wgry-5&paneTab=about