The original recordings sound much better and more interesting to me. Way better. The AI generated versions sound slicker in some sense but... like the re-recorded versions of old hit songs from the 60s you hear at the grocery store sometimes. Technically the song is still there, but it blends in with the rest of the muzak.
I'm sorry to be so negative, it's great you're returning to the material after all these years, but the AI versions I've listened to all have the same smoothed-over quality that loses everything interesting and relatable to my ears in the original versions.
Thank you -- your post was downvoted into being hidden for a while, sorry I didn't see it earlier. This context is helpful, the example of the system delivering reading challenges that match their struggles makes a lot of intuitive sense to me.
I really appreciate that (it seems to me) your goal is not to replace human tutors, but to raise the general baseline. You emphasize scaling, how does that work in practice if you're trying to target audiences who may not have access to devices that can run your program? What is your plan from the perspective of funding and resources to scale infrastructure as needed to support these audiences?
Edit: I also think of other learning systems like duolingo and the application of tablets and computers in schools which begin from good places, but I'm curious if you are studying these alternatives and what you have learned from them?
I really think your goals are great, and if you're starting your design of this system from research about effective learning methodologies and working backward from there rather than starting from AI and working backward from there that erodes a lot of my personal skepticism about a project like this. I hope you find a way to make this work.
Thank you. The segment showing a child reading text on the screen which highlighted a word they had difficulty with seems like it could be a useful learning interaction. How does your system follow up in that case? Have you studied this type of interaction?
That's the only moment in the video that gave me a sense of what it might be like for a child using this system.
In the blog post you say:
> Imagine a custom story about dragons this week, ice princesses the next — woven with the letter blends your child needs to practice right now.
Have you considered using an automated orchestration system to deliver literature that already exists? This example seems like an opportunity to introduce children to really thoughtful literature like Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking stories but I'm deeply skeptical that generating the stories with an LLM would inspire a similar experience.
Are there other examples of your platform from the perspective of a child using it? I think those are both interesting cases: 1) interactive feedback on a subject they are making an effort toward mastering, and 2) trying to deliver information when it seems relevant. I'd like to know more about how you are approaching these things and other aspects of the learning process.
> Effective teaching isn't just about answering a child's question quickly, rather making the right move at the right moment. AI is also going to be an integral part shaping how this generation of kids learn to read and think, tackling this responsibly means getting the design right.
Can you elaborate on what the experience is like for the child? How does this system help them learn? The article focuses on optimizing for interactivity and engagement, but doesn't discuss how this system challenges or facilitates learning and why AI needs to be the solution.
There's no way to formulate this as a set of rules or best practices, each decision has to be made in a universe of context, but I appreciated this discussion.
Something I like to do is funnel the desire to build for something I don't need right now into TODOs and even FIXMEs. Sometimes they just get deleted, but other times I'll come across an old TODO during refactoring and be able to pay down a bit of accumulated technical debt.
I use it as a session store for a computer music system. It has worked well for me as a way to read mutable (by any client) parameters during synthesis, clients will often read dozens of parameters during a block of computation (a relatively short window of time in the low milliseconds typically) without adding any noticeable overhead to the render time for each block.
Edit: I also tried using it for larger blobs of data (like audio) but ended up only storing a reference to shared memory for larger blocks, anything larger than IIRC 4k that can't be stored in a single node kills performance, but for small values it seems pretty great.
I never thought I'd see anything like that easily accessible on hacker news. (Edit: I say that because this is a project by independent artists that has no real hope for commercial exit -- monetize free jazz, I dare you. Edit: actually don't, please.)
Bandcamp seems to be somewhat overrun with this LLM spam. I became aware of it because there's an account impersonating me with an LLM-generated review of my music which is weirdly specific and surreal.
The purpose seems to be to drive traffic to an advertising marketplace website. All the impersonating sites link to the covers.pics website which has no root page, but serves various paths linked in these bandcamp spam pages.
I contacted bandcamp twice in the last two weeks about removing it, but I don't know if there are any humans left there. They just replaced the rest of their engineering team with AI yesterday according to a blog post by one of their former engineers.
> The backlash is only just getting started, because the technology is only just getting started, too. Britain’s flimsy prime-minister-in-waiting, Andy Burnham, has barely said a word about AI. Even Americans still rank it 29th out of 39 election issues. [..] That is bound to change—and battles over data centres offer a hint of the struggles to come.
Or we'll see through the bullshit (which seems to be happening already) and this will fizzle out.
I have a great face-saving exit plan for AI companies: follow anthropic's lead and pretend you're saving the world by not releasing anything to the public anymore. Then just quietly back away, go bankrupt and let us all eventually forget.
In a marketplace, this is theft. (Which, given this example is of a website for a for-profit product, seems appropriate.) In a community it's tradition. Building on traditions in a community (aka great artists steal) is different than trying to get yours in a marketplace. Art and community traditions aren't a competition until they are dragged into the marketplace.
...and "maiinstream" -- seeing glaring typos (easily caught by spellcheck) now makes me wonder: did they decide to leave them in (or add them explicitly) to signal they didn't use AI to write, or (the more paranoid option) did they tell the LLM to add a few typos...
I didn't get the sense this was LLM-written, but typo-signalling is... I donno a bit weird. Firefox is underlining some of the words as I write. I'm leaving "donno" unchanged even though it's flagging it as a misspelling but I suppose I'd still opt to fix something like "maiinstream" even at the risk of potentially seeming more LLM-ish!
Our little town in Minnesota has some of these too (https://winona.lib.mn.us/library-of-things/) it's really cool! There's also a new maker space getting set up now which will have a tool library open to the community.
Sleepbot is an old, legit indie streaming service. They've been around for a long time, I used to listen to some of the stations circa 20+ years ago because the selections were good, they'd often play music by my friends and other unknowns. The "ambience for the masses" project is more like an independent radio station. https://sleepbot.com/ambience/
Maybe they're using your CDN to try to save some bandwidth costs and keep the service alive? Maybe reach out to him? (https://sleepbot.com/lookit/etc/dfoley.html) There's likely still a human on the other side and I doubt they're trying to do anything evil.