vkxwz
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Posts posted by vkxwz
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1 hour ago, usagi said:
or:
AI that outperforms humans in a working capacity (i.e. just in terms of capability and responsiveness before you even consider the abstract notion of "intelligence") might well be possible soon, and it is likely to be a net bad for mankind. in the same way that every other touted tech miracle has been a net bad for us, by further entrenching the worst of our tendencies and excesses and creating new, unforeseen problems. "but it solved some of the old problems!" the silicon valley slumlords and rentseekers will splutter, which is not a worthwhile counterargument.
in any case, I don't think the general recurring pattern of scientific discovery being exploited by shitty people to create self-serving anti-human systems is going to stop anytime soon. I also don't think it necessarily negates the value of discovery itself. it's not that progress in this field isn't worthwhile or exciting. this is not a simple "technology bad" argument. the concern is how it will pan out practically, for everyone, not just the advantaged - something that techbros infamously do not give a shit about, or pretend to give a shit about at best. "move fast and break things" has now been replaced by... "the best future for humanity" or whatever else Altman tweets while the people at OpenAI who might keep him in check just quit.
Yeah I was just arguing against the "it's nothing, all hype no effect" type of take. I am in agreement that there is a lot of potential for negative impacts, and if this thing takes off quick enough I think it's quite a scary thing. I don't agree that every technological advancement has been a net negative for humanity though, I'd much rather be alive today than any other time in history. I don't want to live in fear of starvation, death from attacks by wild animals or illness, and I don't want child mortality to be ridiculously high or for child birth to be much more dangerous than it is now, and I actually prefer our hugely extended life expectancy and the massive access to information I have through the Internet and the ability to connect with many more people.
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4 hours ago, EdamAnchorman said:
I get that it will probably become the norm even for people who write or code for a living, but I guess I'm just having an old man get off my lawn moment when I think that the students should still be able to learn to write / code on their own, regardless of whether or not an LLM can do it for them.
Yeah I agree with you, I think learning to write is super useful and if we lose that people will be much worse off. And surely it's not a super hard problem to fix, just have more writing exams that are done in class where you don't see the question beforehand.
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4 hours ago, Alcofribas said:
this topic reminds me of crypto/bitcoin/nft quite a lot. like, we have this crypto thread on watmm where there was this core idea about how crypto was like some big new step for "humanity" or computing or whatever. several years down the line, does that appear to have any resemblance to reality? definitely not, to me. there's this core of bullshit to all this and it reeks of a scam that keeps getting repeated over and over again. extremely rich tech giants produce products (actually, it's just as common to have no product whatsoever) and everything about it is discussed as this big revolution for humanity. it's totally the future, it's inevitable, this changes everything, there's no going back. the media does what it does best, i.e., transcribes the marketing copy with total credulity. social media is inundated with all incessant content about some superficial aspect of this stuff - remember when we were seeing "apes" over and over for however long that was? some dipshits created nft apes and we just had to look at this everyday like this is important in any way whatsoever. in the end, what gets delivered? what problem is ai art "solving?" what is the point of gpt? i've yet to see anything even remotely like some kind of revolutionary power here. i'm seeing an incredibly inefficient technology that requires massive computing power to produce a vague product that con artists like sam fucking altman get rich talking about like cartoon salesman villains from an 80s horror satire movie. i'm tired of it. i'm tired of people like elon musk and sam altman talking about how what they do is good for humanity and establishment media uncritically reporting all this as anything other than schemes to get rich by hooking the public on stupid technology. i mean, look at this recent brain dead chicanery by altman just ripping off scarlett johanson's voice with his idiot technology* and then pretending it wasn't on purpose or whatever. these guys can't help themselves, they have to shove their little dicks around and they're rich enough that they can be transparently full of shit and get away with it over and over. it's pathetic.
otherwise, yeah it's really cool.
*it's worth thinking about this one bc altman tweeted "her" in obvious reference to the scifi movie about ai. this is the incredible inevitable future we are being promised? a stupid ripoff of a spike jonze movie from 2013? and the tech bozo doesn't even pay the voice actor lol. come on man
Yeah I can see how if you're just doing pattern matching you go: big hype = not panning out in the future, and so you see the big hype and go, well I've seen this before, it's going to be nothing again. In this case if you engage with the actual topic, thinking it will turn out to be nothing means that either you believe we won't get anything close to human level intelligence in silicon any time soon, or you believe we will but that it won't matter. The former position is valid, but all the hype is coming from extrapolating from the very real progress that exists in that field. Nobody sane is saying chatgpt in it's current state will totally revolutionize the world (although I know quite a few people that use it on a nearly daily basis to save a lot of time), but they are extrapolating from the progress in deep learning in general. It was only 12 years ago that deep learning got 16% accuracy on imagenet (image classification tasks), by 2017 most of the best systems had over 95% accuracy. In 2018 gpt 1 was trained and was hopeless, gpt 2 and 3 were huge improvements and gpt4 is now doing things that experts in the field a few years ago would have said was 20 years away or more. So if we end up with nothing happening, it'll be because deep learning hits a wall that there isn't evidence of yet, or because having human level intelligence in silicon will have no impact. And if you're claiming the former, the current evidence is against you.
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8 hours ago, zero said:
what is the end game here with all this AGI crap? get people to buy more shit? "helping humanity" is BS speak for "capitalism."
seems to me like we're at a point in time where there's a massive pile on to get in while the gettin's good, yet no one has any clear idea why they need this technology exactly. AI / AGI helping to write a book report, or making a shitty electronic music track, are entry points to get the masses hooked on the concept. then what? military / govt's all buy in because the other guy is doing it, and we head toward terminator scenarios?
until there is a clear goal here with what this is AI fad / frenzy is intending to accomplish, and not some vague "make the world better" bullshit, then it is nothing more than a for profit product that really has no quality control oversight. the people pushing this out are all glorified sales reps. the machination of capital only moves in 1 direction - forward - and doesn't ever want to truthfully address the "why" question.
I think the main reason that there isn't a clear goal given is because the goal is more of a generalized / meta goal, it's to help us achieve goals more effectively in general. If you have a system that is more capable than the average person and cheaper to use, then as a society we can buy more productivity for less, this means faster progress on anything that needs human input at the moment (medical research, agricultural research, mental health research, anything you can label "productivity"). That's the more utopian view of it and least, and I think AI being the meta problem is true.
But of course the motivation to pursue a solution to the meta problem is going to be profit and control 99% of the time.
You can disagree about the hypothesis that machines can exceed humans in every way because of whatever metaphysical beliefs you may have, but the people working on this stuff and pushing for it seem to believe it is possible and inevitable even.
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On 4/26/2024 at 2:52 AM, auxien said:
curious what definition of intelligence you’d suggest using in general terms & specifically regarding machine systems
My main issue is that she doesn't give a concrete definition at all, not that I think there is 1 perfect definition everyone should use. A definition I like personally is that intelligence is the ability to make predictive models of a domain, but a lot of other people like to include the ability to solve problems, achieve goals etc. I think the important thing is to just state what you actually mean, because it's a word that means different things to different people.
And sorry @ignatius I wasn't in the best mood when I wrote that post, I think the video does have some value in how they show some of the limitations of certain tools and dispell some wrong intuitions about them.
Also, here's an interesting use of generative AI, I think the current tools are able to be used to make some pretty cool stuff as long as a human is making all the decisions.
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3 hours ago, ignatius said:
thats the first one i've seen and dude even post it on a forum "i released an album created w/Ai." ugh. "there's gonna be so much shit art" - already is but now it's gonna be people writing prompts thinking they have some special sauce.
we all know the special sauce.
anyway.. i took the opportunity in that thread to post those two Ai youtubes that take it all to task as the shitshow it is...
That last video is awful, I only got 6min into it but all I heard is that algorithms that need to be retrained aren't intelligent, and that if you retrain and it's categorization matches the data but not what you meant, that's not intelligence. The video is lacking a proper definition of intelligence and seems more concerned with being condescending about a field she's isn't a part of. Online learning is theoretically possible and chatgpt already demonstrates a pretty good ability to interpret what you actually mean and fix it's own mistakes, exactly in the way she's saying is not happening in ML(also interestingly it's been shown that when chatgpt learns during inference [being corrected on a mistake, being explained a new procedure to carry out, or given examples to make a new category out of] , it's actually internally doing something very similar to the algorithm that trains it, just in a way that's erased when the context is erased).
The only thing worse than the flood of annoying ai hype is the condescending anti hype coming from people who aren't aware of the facts that contradict what they are saying. But don't worry, there's no need to learn more and get things right, you have a huge audience of people who know no better than you do, which you can use to farm ad revenue.
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8 hours ago, mTesc said:
I'm spending much too much time on Reddit and Facebook "fighting" with people who don't seem to understand that music and art are not just pretty things to enjoy but the results of others' desires to communicate or convey something. I keep telling myself that I'm just going to ignore AI-related posts and that anyone who doesn't get it or doesn't feel similarly to how I feel isn't going to have an epiphany based on what some internet stranger has to say. But the Udio-bolstered uptick in interest / sharing is difficult to let slide.
There will always be people out there that don't understand that, and for them, AI art probably will satisfy them. I don't think it's really possible to get someone to appreciate art on a deeper level than "this sounds nice" or "this looks good" just by explaining to them how they are experiencing it in a way that's too shallow.
An analogy(which I'm not sure really reflects history accurately) to this whole situation I've heard is this: Before factories, mugs were all handmade, and were much more of an artistic creation, each person making them put their own art/expression into it and sculpted the whole thing by hand. As a result, there were fewer mugs, they were more expensive, more valued by the users, and had much more human expression in them. Now factories come along, suddenly you can produce identical copies of the same mug, with no artistic content, for a tenth of the price.
This is great for the consumers because they have cheap mugs and most didn't care for the art. And for those that did care about the art, there are still a number(albeit much smaller) of artisan mug makers producing the artistic product.
I think it'll be the same with AI art, for those that don't care about the artistic side, they'll get loads of nice looking and sounding things for super cheap and they'll be happy. And for the people who genuinely care for the art(and are willing to pay for it), there will still be artists making their art.
To me the open question is this: are we losing something important when a huge amount of human expression which is already going unnoticed and unappreciated loses the ability to get paid for? My gut feel is that we wouldn't be losing autechre, and a lot of us on watmm are making music without any expectation or need for money in exchange for what we make anyway.
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9 hours ago, ignatius said:
someone certainly will do that. an andrew tate kind of douchebag
If it results in giving people music they want to listen to, I don't really see the harm. There's so much garbage out there already and I don't see how it affects me negatively at all. Nobody is gonna delete your Autechre albums and replace them with ai music.
I can see a possible future where there is ai music that is genuinely interesting, but the current wave is extremely boring. I can't stand listening to any if it for more than 5 seconds, probably because the way the models are trained is to try to generate something that people would use a predefined set of words to describe, so it's only goal is to create something recognizable as a specific genre. When a human does this it's extremely boring too.
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In case anyone here hasn't seen SORA yet. OpenAIs new text to video model:
And this is the worst it'll ever be
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On 6/3/2023 at 10:22 PM, taphead said:
Ah yeah that's totally a fair approach, I can't resist getting jokes in where I can, but yeah you don't wanna just assume that everyone will open up. Though I do think there are existing things out there that can provide insights like https://genderdysphoria.fyi/en but even with the breadth, it still is just one source so it may not cover all experiences, but it is at least informed by some firsthand experiences.
I'm down to talk a bit about my own experience as well, I'm planning on writing something a bit more in-depth very soon, so this is actually a good opportunity to get a rough draft out for some of that.
I only recently began transitioning, started taking hormones about a year ago. I'd come to the conclusion that it was what I needed to do in February of 2022. It's like I was waiting for the moment that would be the worst timing possible, since that was shortly before the huge furor over Lia Thomas kicked up, and it feels like that marked the point where a lot of people decided they would absolutely never shut the fuck up about how they're mad that transgender people exist.
So I mentioned earlier that I was 11 when I realized I was trans. I was 36 when I gave myself permission to pursue it. I spent 25 years repressing. I don't think a lot of people who aren't transgender realize exactly how powerful the cultural forces that encouraged repression were in the 90s and 00s.
Do you remember Quack Pack? It was a 1996 cartoon that Disney did for television, updating Donald Duck's nephews for modern sensibilities. They were cool teens now, and could have plausibly skateboarded. In the first episode, they got super powers, the nephew that wore blue got the super powered brain, head all big. The other ones had strength and speed, or something like that. The three boys split up to do some superhero business, blue boy sees that a plane is crashing and decides to save the day by possessing a stewardess, so that he can land the plane. The joke being that he doesn't know how to land a plane, and they still crash. The speed powered brother shows up and discusses his own adventure, and asked how it went for blue boy. He responds with "I found out what it's like to be a woman" (because he possessed a stewardess). He looks quite shaken by this. His brother looks at him and makes a "wtf?!" face and dramatically back away, a great distance. This is how I know that I knew I was trans when I was 11, because I remember feeling shitty after seeing this. It's funny to revisit the clip now
Like it seems silly to say this is such a significant thing for me, especially since this video is on a fetish youtube account full of body swap content, for ppl to jack their dicks off with. But it really did establish an understanding in the broader culture that reverberated back thru my memories of the first Ace Ventura movie, and forward into Jerry Springer and the high prominence of "chicks with dicks" in 90s internet porn. I understood that is not something that is compatible with a normal life and relationships, that this belonged to a fringe subculture that I wasn't cool, rich, or sexual enough to ever be a part of, and the reminders were non-stop and could appear in anything.
Because it's not like there was something that triggered this. It just came along with the ride on puberty, like "hey yeah, everything that's happening is wrong, but there's this other way, not gonna happen for you but it's actually everything that should be happening. Everything that is happening to you adds something bad while simultaneously taking you away from what's right". And so then on top of that, it's like "oh yeah and also everyone hates that you are this, even tho it doesn't hurt anyone, it's just offensive that you could think to do this".
I spent some time feeling horrible. I guess it was convenient that middle school was available so I could have a delineated space to be emotionally unstable. But eventually, I figured out an approach that got me thru the day to day, an embrace of a concept that I called "gender dissonance". I wasn't aware of the term gender dysphoria at all, it's sort of connected, but it's like I wanted to use that dysphoria as a part of a male identity, treat it like the noise in noise rock. I would be a failure of a man, but aggressively, knowingly, so that it would still somehow work out to be masculine. It never really involved direct femininity, it was dealing more with the specific areas where the absence of masculinity, for a man, becomes femininity, even tho it's a negative value, it's not actually the posession of something.
I probably need to sit down and figure it out how to explain that part better. But like, you know how there's dipshits online who try to act like they're being kind when they tell trans people to just not be trans, and accept their body as it is? I was like their model citizen! I found a way to make the male gender sort of work for me. Fortunately, I was still able to be happy for the trans people who came into greater prominence in the 10's. I was like "well that's just not possible for me".
There's some people out there who, as part of their repression, will be really fucking transphobic online. Because that way, you know you can't come out, because you know how shitty people would be to you. Glad that's not me, looks miserable!
I've seen this trope in some video games, where when they really want to fuck with you, they'll invert your controls so that left goes right, and up goes down. You can get used to it but it's still extra taxing on the brain. That's what it felt like to live, even with this identity I'd crafted for myself, like I was still going through all of this extra work to come out normal. I didn't actually realize all the ways that living like this was impacting me. I was living entirely in the moment because I didn't really care about a future for myself. I didn't realize that it was possible to see myself and feel good without the use of alcohol.
I transitioned so that I could free up all that mental effort that I was wasting on hiding the fact that I was trans. Especially since I realized the only people who benefitted from this effort were assholes! But yeah honestly the gender stereotype stuff kind of helped me prolong the repression. There's so many bullshit expectations on women, almost like capitalism stole parts of the gender and expects us to buy it back, while masculinity is allowed to be a bit more innate. Not to say that there's no pitfalls on the male side, I've seen it, it's rough. But I was able to use this idea that it'd be cheaper to stay put, and build up some paper thin walls that I respected for longer than I should have.
I do enjoy the clothing options that are available to me, but it's more like now I actually care about my visual appearance, where I didn't really at all before. And I just feel more comfortable with everything that the hormone swap has done for my mind and body. I don't think I'm really going to do too well with many of the stereotypical stuff, but I think I'll still get by comfortably enough. So yeah at least for me, that kind of stuff has not really been what I'm after.
Sorry for writing so much lol
The fucked up part is that there's so much more ground to cover...
Thanks for the write up, really interesting to read and I'm glad you feel so much better now. It seems like your experience is centered around feeling that people hated the changes that were happening to your body, and that those changes were wrong in some way. I'm not sure what you were referring to here though: "it's just offensive that you could think to do this", is this about wanting to transition? And do you have ideas about why you felt negatively about the changes?
On 6/3/2023 at 12:43 PM, zlemflolia said:your views are from talking to people with gender dysphoria? interesting how you reached the opposite conclusions of what most people with it say then..? if you know nothing, you are a blank slate, and shud take my word for it. just do some basic intro reading and follow sources below
from wikipedia I've gotten:
Gender identity is the personal sense of one's own gender
Gender includes the social, psychological, cultural and behavioral aspects of being a man, woman, or other gender identity
A man is an adult male human
A woman is an adult female human
so when I plug it all together I get
Gender identity is the personal sense of one's own social, psychological, cultural and behavioral aspects of being an adult male human, adult female human, or other gender identity
which has a bit of a circular definition, so I'm not sure what the deal is here
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5 hours ago, zlemflolia said:
agi is not a real concept
just cuz u can make sentence doesnt mean it is
Care to explain further? I feel like this depends on the definition, if you define it as some software running on a computer that is capable of all the mental capabilities of a human(in a functional sense, being able to learn, complete tasks etc, not something like consciousness) then I don't see why this isn't a real concept or possibility.
Maybe you mean that the concept itself contains a contradiction that makes it impossible? Like the term "communist utopia".
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3 hours ago, o00o said:
I really love that thats what ChatGPT really looks like:
Yeah I like the shoggoth way of viewing these things I reckon it's pretty accurate. I highly recommend this article of you're interested in this sort of thing: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vJFdjigzmcXMhNTsx/simulators basically viewing these models as simulators, since they are trained to predict the next token, they must learn how to model the systems that produced the tokens. Because they have been trained on pretty much the whole Internet it means they are in theory able to simulate (to some degree of resolution) a wide range of types of people and situations.
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21 hours ago, iococoi said:
https://restofworld.org/2023/ai-image-stereotypes/
just nuke it from orbit..
Stereotypes are the natural consequence of having a system that tries to model the world using categories and course grained approximations, it's impossible to avoid this if you're trying to model a complex domain, humans are not above this.
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4 minutes ago, zlemflolia said:
chengod: "This is the literal definition of communism according to Marx"
Marx: "no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today"
Is there a definitive text or place where Marx's final views are layed out in an accessible form, if I hypothetically wanted to enter this discussion...
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34 minutes ago, phudoshin said:
Venue-wise..
We talking stand-up dancing or sit-down head nods?
Sydney show was seated, Melbourne was standing
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1 hour ago, djimbe said:
Okay, coming up is the mp3 of my Sydney room recording. I'm using WeTransfer for now (link expires in 7 days from now) just to get it to you. I'll sort out WAV/FLAC and/or archive.org in next few days. Thanks for the suggestions.
Autechre_City_Recital_Hall_Sydney_270823.mp3 download (166MB)
Great recording, thanks for that.
interesting how different it sounds when you aren't feeling it through your whole body. Feeling the bass was such a big part of the experience, I'm getting the feeling that a lot of what we heard last night was actually bass frequencies below the audible spectrum that we could feel only through our bodies, is that a thing?
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10 minutes ago, monoppus said:
The monitor placement fits a little too neatly into the overall visual presentation style to be purely about sound imo. I think the fact that it blocks view is also part of it. A convenient bonus perhaps, but big speakers directly in front of the performers who play in the dark without any visual andornment adds an extra layer of humor to me.
Same deal at the Sydney show tonight, and they ducked under the table for most of the time where it wasn't light£ off.
Never been to a live ae show before but Sydney was incredible, far exceeded my expectations (that I formed from listening to the Helsinki set)
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14 hours ago, BlockUser said:
Ah, now I see! Thanks for clarifying. Yes I agree, that's one way of clicking: On the intellectual level. Personally, the real click is when I connect mentally/emotionally, it usually trumps intellect. It's through mood, atmosphere, and texture that stuff really wins me over. But it's fun to reverse engineer if you have a curious mind.
Yes I agree the emotional connection is the important part. I think that on some level our mind has to figure out what's going on and reduce the complexity to simplicity in order to connect to that emotion in the first place though, but that seems to happen without needing that "intellectual level" understanding, it could happen on a subconscious level. When this emotional connection happens I think it's because our mind realises that the best model of what it's hearing is that it's sound produced by an entity that has it's own emotions and internal life. music with lyrics obviously shortcuts this because we know it's a human and are used to interpretting emotion that way.
A story containing other conscious experiencing entities is much more meaningful than a bunch of shapes moving around, no matter how complex and perfect that may be, and I think that autechre nails the former even though it appears like the later on first listen for some tracks.
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10 hours ago, BlockUser said:
Loved that bit. I digress but iirc, Sean was talking about how they're using Max specifically(and then started relating this principle to processes in nature or smth). I love how Sean + Rob are constantly speaking up against this meme of "Autechre is at the forefront of music because they're using the most intricate and cutting-edge sh*t1!!". Pretty sure that a lot of the processes in their Max system, at least on message level / in the sequencing domain, are really just many simple bits / modules set up in a way so that they all can communicate and mess with each other. And then, complexity arises from the interaction between the elements, while the elements themselves are simple. The rest is their strong work ethic + incorruptible instinct.
You say "it's very satisfying when something complex gets reduced to something simple", but didn't Sean mean that it's the other way around? Personally, I find complexity from simplicity really beautiful. Or am I getting you wrong here?
Yes I agree he meant creating complexity out of simple principles in the process of making the music, but I'm saying that because the music is constructed in this way, our minds can basically learn to reverse engineer it in a way, reducing the complexity/noise back down to simple principles, and I think that this phenomenon is one way music can "click".
9 hours ago, xox said:3. thankfully we have many ways of understanding the nature including ourselves! “other approaches” being incoherent as you say, just shows you how difficult and deep the subject really is but id rather take the road less traveled vs the usual shallow one bc I believe it’s closer to the truth. science is beautiful, i love it, i consider myself a scientist (and probably the people who play me to do the work) but scientific methodology is not practically applicable to every aspect of life and existence, and in this form as is today it shouldn’t be imo; it’s confusing to see how science started to dominate in some famous art universities
I'd like to know what you mean by these other methods in more detail. I've recently gotten stuck into logical positivism so I'm probably taking a more extreme view on this that I usually would, but the way I currently see it is this; in order for you to know that something is true or have any level of confidence that it is true, it should be either a tautology or something verifiable by sense contents. And overall I think the only thing we have access to is the information of our conscious experience, so all that we can do is study this information and make models of it, etc. I do agree we are only really answering how and not why with science though, we are just building models that can make good predictions, which is valuable.
9 hours ago, BlockUser said:My problem with most pop music is that it always leaves me feeling both hungry and nauseous, like a big McDonald's menu. It just hits me in all the wrong places. It wants too much from me. It's too user-centric. I prefer stuff that is following its own course, the less I matter in that process, the better. But pop music is engineered towards eliciting emotions, manipulating the listener. It's constantly trying to press buttons in my brain. It's trying too hard to click. The Loudness War was nothing compared to the Engagement War.
I think I know what you mean here, I'd rather be watching an ecosystem unfold than have YOU FEEL GOOD YOU FEEL GOOD shouted at me
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55 minutes ago, xox said:
Western mind and knowing yourself - Thinking in the veil of postmodernism vol.378
Great question @vkxwz I still remember your lovely posts when we talked about aesthetics of music and how you sincerely tried to understand my convoluted ideas written in broken english; kudos to you, really
I just wanted to say that I see a big problem in our modern approach to metaphysics and objective analysis of ordinary life! we have become accustomed to and satisfied with shallow operational explanations like “apple fell off the tree because of gravity” as if they mean anything meaningful outside of mechanics…
imo it’s impossible to answer the question from a materialistic standpoint; all you get is more pain and sorrowI don't remember any broken english, just you refusing to explain further. I recently realised you were probably referencing Schopenhauer in that thread, maybe I'll revive that thread and start pestering you some more.
I don't think theres anything more to metaphysics that it being misunderstandings of language really. You talk about explanations about mechanics being shallow, and I agree but this is all we have, just observations and models. You seem pessemistic about this approach but the alternative is incoherent, and whether you like it or not; modern science actually has produced models that are predictive enough to give us great control over the world around us.
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51 minutes ago, hoggy said:
Here's another thing I wonder - do you ever try and try to get something, but you never can - like I have put so much time into trying to get Ween after Pure Guava, or the middle era Autechre stuff (Draft, Untilted etc. - I love Confield, but after that until around Exai I don't get), and it just doesn't click
There are so many tracks that I just don't understand despite listening a lot, maybe some day they will click like the others. With draft I feel like the theme of the album is things falling apart and breaking down, so that's why it doesn't click in a way that makes everything seem like a perfectly functioning unified whole, because it isnt. But then again maybe in a few years it'll all make sense to me in a way that contradicts that, who knows.
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On 8/17/2023 at 11:42 AM, hoggy said:
Love this topic! I think part of it is learning the meta-language the music speaks in, it's like when you meet someone who has a really weird way of talking, and at first they make no sense, but the more you get to know them, the more you understand what they're expressing and why they talk the way they do, and there's something about the way they communicate that bypasses the habitual ways of communicating that can make meaning and emotion less accessible.
I think that often the thing being expressed can't be expressed in a more accessible way, like the format is more intertwined with what is actually being expressed than if it was just an interchangeable language that you have to learn.
On 8/17/2023 at 6:42 AM, logakght said:Interesting topic which I'd like to dive more, but for now I'll just say it definitely has relation with the neurogeometry of our respective brains—I kind of believe it's more empirical rather than subjective the appreciation of music
Can you expand on this? I do believe that there is something in the music that is more concrete than just a subjective feeling dependant only on the listener, I think that with these kinds of tracks there is some sort of objective structure that holds some intrinsic meaning no matter who is listening or if they perceive it. Similar to a mathematical equation, or a video tape of some real world event. I think the question is then how can these objects be embedded in sound in the first place, and how do we reconstruct them from the sound, in our own minds.
I think it comes down to how our perception works, and how we are constantly contructing a model in our brains that serve to explain our senses and predict the next set of senses. If we cant model something, it's perceived as noise (what is probably happening with hoggy's friend), but through paying attention to something we build up an internal model that is able to predict it, and this model is the meaning we find. There are many ways to model and predict the same thing, for example a track can become entirely predictable just by you memorising the order of all the notes and sounds as one sequential thing, but it's proveable that the smallest / most compressed encoding of some data gives the best prediction of how that data will change next (there's a formalization of occams razor called solomonoff induction that has been proven). It seems like our minds are always trying to find this most simple encoding, in order to be able to understand/predict better, and with less information stored. In the case of music that clicks, I think it's because the music can be modelled in a relatively simple way despite being so complex, so when something clicks you experience reducing a ton of complexity to simplicity.
Something in this vein that I enjoy it when music has a momentum to it and feels like physical objects with weight moving around, bouncing off each other, being pushed and pulled and there being elasticity, like things are being stretched and then releasing by contracting again, throwing an object back to where it came from.
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On 7/8/2022 at 8:05 PM, nickthefish said:
No damning evidence here but definitely some bits of info that make it seem more likely. It's slowly working it's way toward being on of my favourite releases, super dark, gritty, aggressive and subtle all at the same time, there are lots of really quiet sounds I never even heard in my first couple of listens honestly that now seem like integral parts of the tracks. Some parts actually feel like drukqs drill type tracks except taking place in the same space as gwarek2. If it's RDJ, it's easily his darkest release in terms of mood imo.
And good catch @hoggy, at around 1:25 ish in backyard, it's possible it's not but it sounds like it.
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On 8/1/2023 at 8:54 AM, hoggy said:
oh fuck I forgot about steinvord, my old HD broke so I lost all my MP3s. Has anyone notice the Doom sample in Backyard?
Doom sample? I never played much Doom so not sure what sound you're talking about
AI - The artificial intelligence thread
in General Banter
Posted
Yeah I don't see it being likely that creating agi will give the layperson a better understanding of themselves, and even if as a society we understand how the brain itself functions in a general level, it'll still be, as you said, a very personal affair for someone to go on the journey of understanding their own specific mind. I suspect we'd get some pretty interesting insights but the average person probably won't care anyway. I do think that the promise of AI isn't just information though, it's the extra productivity without the need for as many people.