I agree that the AI thing is over hyped - even some people working with machine learning roll their eyes at the term “AI”. With formulaic music there are all sorts of hooks of je ne sais quoi that machines can’t get by averaging past work or going by rules. Well, they could spit out hundreds of pieces for audition by humans which I think the blogosphere and media are going to embrace shortly.
On that note, there was a piece an “AI” wrote for the Guardian a year or so ago, imitating one of the regular staffer’s style. They published it in the print version without telling anyone until a day or so later. Amazingly, nobody noticed and the supposed author said it was freaky how much it had nailed her style.
The shape of things to come. Fake news written by fake journalists, cheaper even than the rehashing PR/government/security services copy that passes for journalism today!
I was looking at that the other day! It could get even faster if it switched to rapidjson (or rapidjson + simdjson (since simdjson just validates and reads but is fastest by far)) since the its JSON part of the benchmark performs relatively poorly compared to some other top compiled libraries.
It does make you think what effect not using languages that compile in some way down to machine code and not using the fastest libraries has had on energy consumption and consumerist/e-waste for the internet explosion. If Drogon, for example, is 500x faster than racket (more with simdjson, even more with binary encoded messaging) then you need 500x → ??? more computing power for the same load. Yeah, there are a bunch more variables so 500x → inf is probably a smidge off the mark when everything’s taken into account, but even 2x faster would mean a lot.
… for just CPU power but they unfortunately used benchmarkgames’ benchmarks which are a hell hole of arbitrary rules and also don’t include LuaJIT so therefore need to be destroyed from lower orbit on both counts… ASAP.
Any of you using video chat software on linux? One of my nephews is trying to learn to play guitar from a stupid Rocksmith app and unnecessarily struggling with that dumb crap from what I gathered by asking him some questions about it and watching some video about it. I’m going to try to teach him some things to get him going at least. He lives too far away to make frequent trips to meet up so I thought we might try a web cam thing. I’m trying Telegram to start with, but maybe one of you can recommend something better.
I remember Garrick mentioning Zoom at some point. Maybe that is worth a shot?
I forgot about Discord. I think we’ll just run with that to get going. It is working at least with audio and video and can send files and share the desktop.
qutebrowser is nice. vim-like keycommands for navigating around, there are a couple of browser extensions that do similar things but this is qutebrowser’s main thang.
I use vimium in firefox for the vim keys experience. I can’t say that I have trusted Mozilla too much for a long time now and have tried to switch to other browsers with too many usability issues.
I may look closer into sound design. I’ve made two synth patches so far, trying to learn the basics. Watching video tutorials on YouTube. Could be a great distraction, hopefully with a musical outcome. Suppose I should make my own beats too.
Any patch makers around?
It’s an art alright. But it’s fun to learn something new. I enjoy making sound collages with loops and samples and cool sounds as building blocks. Might as well try to take it a step further.
Started using Syncthing. Very nice for syncing files between devices without having to go through a centralized server. I’m going to see if the band wants to use it for sharing recordings and such. Syncthing-fork for android (available from f-droid), and syncthing-gtk for linux desktop (from Manjaro/Arch package manager).
If you use it, I recommend exiting it on your phone from the app’s menu when not in use, not just closing the app (it will run in the background). It can use too much battery scanning for changes. But it can be set to only sync when on AC power too.
That looks good. I’d like to see something like that but for multiple people to have separately encrypted storage on each other’s systems. eg 3 people could get Raspberry Pis with 4TB disks and have 2TB of “cloud” storage each, or 1.3TB if a local backup is wanted too.
Maybe I’m missing something, but I think you could already do that. Multiple devices and multiple directories can be synced. I don’t know if there is a limit. Of course any data would need to be encrypted before being synced. And if any involved users want their ip’s hidden, they would need to use a vpn or whatever they like.
Also, I was out and about and had Syncthing set to sync over wifi only. Maybe it starts trying to sync when some open wifi is in range, because it was launching in the background once in a while. I noticed that there is a setting for having it sync on specified wifi networks though. Also there is a switch for turning sync on/off per folder in the Devices tab, and a force start switch in the status tab. I think it’ll take a little playing around to find what is most useful, but probably just using the force start will work for me. Get the files I need, then switch it back to following run conditions.
Also, I became aware of Aurora Droid today. It is an alternative client to F-droid for the F-droid repository. Searching in the F-droid client is pretty bad, and Aurora Droid fixes that. Site search seems fine, so I could have just as well used that and stuck to F-droid for downloading apps though.
Still waiting around on Pinephone to get far along enough to go for it. I hung out for a bit on the Pinephone chat and asked some questions a while back. It definitely still isn’t ready for daily use.
Wrote myself a little bash script today called up3 for grabbing live music stuff from youtube. It uses youtube-dl, and so this just makes it less of a pain. Of course, with some small changes it could be used for whatever is available from youtube. Pretty trivial but maybe useful to one of you.
#!/bin/bash
# youtube-dl installation is required to use up3
# Change all paths throughout to your desired paths.
# Make script executable via the command: chmod +x up3
# Add the script path to your .bashrc so that you can run it from any directory: PATH=/home/user1/youtube_script/:$PATH
# Else run it from the script directory after saving there as up3 via: ./up3
# It should stop if a command fails but no error checking. :/
# Just enter up3 at a command line and follow the prompts
echo -e "Enter a youtube video url"
read url
echo -e "Enter a name for the output mp3 (.mp3 will be automatically appended)"
read name
cd /home/user1/Music/youtube_script/temp/ &&
youtube-dl -x --audio-format mp3 $url &&
mv -f *.mp3 /home/user1/Music/live/"$name".mp3 &&
echo "Success. $name written to /home/user1/Music/live/"
Nice bit of time saving for you there, thanks for sharing!
Yeah, the PinePhone software side of things might have a bit to go. I watched a UBPorts (Ubuntu Touch) presentation a while back where they were saying they had a bit of work to do as well. They do spend quite a bit of energy on working around Android system things to get Ubuntu Touch onto general devices. Maybe they’d all be better just concentrating on pure Linux phones + a handful of more open devices.
youtube-dl has a serious throttling issue with YT recently. yt-dlp doesn’t have this problem - a 25 minute download of a 25 minute video went down to about 30 seconds.
