I used to use FL Studio, but hated using Windows. I got almost all features (including VSTs) to work in Ubuntu under Wine, but had a problem with WineASIO, which I seemed to require to use the USB sound card properly.

Because of that, I since changed to a DAW called REAPER which is built natively for Linux and works flawlessly and is very nice. There is a program called Yabridge to help run Windows VSTs. I even got more complicated plugins with authentication like Addictive Drums 2 to work using Wine no problem.

If you want a fully FOSS solution there is Ardour which is also great but a little less slick than Reaper IMO.

Tough-guy Ted “Bundy” Nugent also shat on himself to dodge the Vietnam draft.

Why do bots

Suddenly appear? 🐦

That’s pretty disingenuous - it’s one of the many reasons that comprise a pattern of behavior whereby Microsoft makes Windows worse at each iteration. More bloat, more spying, more locked-down for user “security”. And for what? The dubious benefit of being “compatible” with other shitheel software providers like Adobe who use their monopoly power to stranglehold the corporate and professional media sectors? Toeachizown but IDK how anyone can use Windows by choice. The small amount I have to use it at work is torture enough.

I think it does look pretty cool. I applaud automotive design that dares to be different. Everything nowadays is a giant snarling grill with angry anime eye headlights up front, then a bunch of superfluous sharp creases and fake air vents to add visual elements for the sake of it. Tesla took a boldly minimalist approach with this one.

Before you crucify me, note that I don’t particularly like the vehicle overall - it doesn’t seem to be a design that translates well to mass production, practicality of maintenance, or pedestrian safety. It’s no Alfa 33 Stradale, but I think visual flare isn’t an area you can fault it much.

Rivian has done a good job of embracing EV design features (e.g. lack of need for frontal air intakes) in a more conventional way.

I heard some of the really wealthy Silicon Valley types kit out their own private laboratory and hire chemists.

I have to disagree about that last sentence. Augmenting LLMs to have any remotely person-like attributes is far from trivial.

The current thought in the field about this centers around so-called “Objective Driven AI”:

• https://openreview.net/pdf?id=BZ5a1r-kVsf

• https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.10135

in which strategies are proposed to decouple the AI’s internal “world model” from its language capabilities, to facilitate hierarchical planning and mitigate hallucination.

The latter half of this talk by Yann LeCun addresses this topic too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pd0JmT6rYcI

It’s very much an emerging and open-ended field with more questions than answers.

In a sense… yes! Although of course it’s thought to be across many modalities and time-scales, and not just text. Also a crucial piece of the picture is the Bayesian aspect - which also involves estimating one’s uncertainty over predictions. Further info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding

It’s also important to note the recent trends towards so-called “Embodied” and “4E cognition”, which emphasize the importance of being situated in a body, in an environment, with control over actions, as essential to explaining the nature of mental phenomena.

But yeah, it’s very exciting how in recent years we’ve begun to tap into the power of these kinds of self-supervised learning objectives for practical applications like Word2Vec and Large Language/Multimodal Models.

Some reading material:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayesian_approaches_to_brain_function

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/embodied-cognition/

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/surfing-uncertainty-9780190933210?cc=us&lang=en&

Many modern theories in cognitive science posit that the brain’s objective is to be a kind of “prediction machine” to predict the incoming stream of sensory information from the top down, as well as processing it from the bottom up. This is sometimes referred to through the aphorism “perception is controlled hallucination”.

I joined Twitter fairly recently as Machine Learning Twitter is/was a thing, and I wanted to stay abreast of news from people like Andrej Karpathy, Chris Olah, Andrew Ng etc., especially since r/MachineLearning went down the shitter.

But I can’t even - I log on and just instantly see ragebait posts from Daily Mail talking heads and bullshit.

Are there any better alternatives for this purpose?

I can’t help feeling a lot of these new motorized doodads are total deathtraps. I used to have a 40mph kaabo electric scooter and although it was mega fun, I sold it before it had a chance to kill me. Small wheels, poor geometry for stability, small caster angle, intoxicatingly high power - it’s a recipe for disaster.

I (maybe naively) believe a healthy society could find a way to build a robust public transport network and still accommodate the minority of enthusiasts who drive and work on cars for fun.

Engineers aren’t just dry husks of people, robotically creating solutions to meet needs. The drive to create cars, planes, and motorbikes, which have significant technical overlap with trains, buses, and mobility aids, is at least partially borne from the thrill of piloting machines that extend human capabilities.

I’m reminded of that Futurama episode where the gang logs onto year-3000 VR internet and is immediately assaulted by a vicious swarm of flying viagra ads.