It is nearly incontrovertible that perfect (aka absolute) pitch is either 100% innate or picked up in very early childhood. A product like this could easily discourage kids from learning music.
It's also a well-established fact that many of the most famous musicians in history, from the Beatles to Tchaikovsky did not have perfect pitch.
Perfect pitch can even be a negative factor in one's musical training. For example, in musical theater, cabaret, and jazz, transposition is a necessary skill. Singers routinely ask the accompianist (on piano) to move the key up or down to match their vocal range. I have heard anecdotally that perfect pitch actually makes it difficult to transpose, because if you learned a song in a certain key, the transposed version sounds like a different tune.
I find it strange that no one talks about consciousness and intelligence from the perspective of evolution.
We have big brains for exactly one reason only: bigger brains bestowed reproductive success upon our species.
Evolution doesn't give a shit about the meaning of 'consciousness'. It just pushed us farther and farther along a trajectory that led to modern humans (and other animals).
This take suggests, then, that consciousness might be an epiphenomenon -- an aspect of the system that comes about outside of the pressure to reproduce and thrive. It arises unbidden, and we don't have any a-priori information as to its purpose or effect on reproductive success.
Put another way: we have a correlation (the smartest things seem to be conscious) but not causation. Consciousness may arise naturally in any system above some intelligence threshold. Perhaps it arises early in the evolutionary cycle, and does in fact have an impact on species success. We really have no way of knowing what is the chicken vs the egg (Smart things become conscious, or consciousness promotes intelligence). Or maybe some smart things are conscious and others are not.
Looking at this from an AI perspective, in some sense it doesn't matter which scenario is true, if all you care about is results. The AI equivalent of "Shut up and compute" (riffing on Feynman's "Shut up and calculate").
Where this gets tricky is when we haul in the baggage of ethics and morality into the picture. Is it OK if our AI system is treated poorly by human standards? If it is conscious, does that imply an ability to suffer, and/or to feel pleasure? If the answer is yes, does that not make the case for considering their moral status?
In the end, we need to decide if the evidence points to AI as being a form of "philosophical zombies", to which we need not attribute moral status, or they are like us -- presuming we are not zombies ourselves!
You can say that again. I went through a 50-75 hour process of interviews, leet-code exams (with tight pencil-down timing), culminating with a long-form project that they budgeted 4 hours for (took me 20+).
I finally had a brain fart in the umpteenth interview and was not offered a job.
Is it possible the chatbot he is communicating with meant literally "I have no API endpoint for refunding your money"? Meaning their use of the verb "can't" was hyper-literal, as in "I have no way of"
Dunno if this is a late-in-life thing or I was always like this, but I definitely need more blue to see blue than most (this test put me at 82%, I think that means I'm in the lowest quintile for seeing blue?) Bright blue still looks mighty blue, but when light is dim, I basically see black where most would still see blue.
Practical ramifications:
* Some of my 'black' shirts are blue when it's sunny
* Popular desktop themes (solarized dark) have text that is completely unreadable
Just a minor troll: I have 10+ yrs experience with Django, none with RoR. I suspect I could take a RoR position and do just fine, budgeting myself 5-10 hrs non-billed per week to get up the learning curve.
But why would I do that when all the evidence I've seen lately is that Python + Node are the present & future (maybe add go, rust), whereas RoR peaked years ago and is becoming a legacy/maintenance job? Why fill my head with that?
When is the last time anyone has heard of a company building from scratch on Ruby?
I would turn this around and flip the script. Hacker News is valuable to me because people don't pull punches out of the sense of social obligation to be polite.
While people can be harsh here, generally there's almost zero tolerance for ad hominem attacks and the kinds of sophistry you see elsewhere on the net.
Think of it like this. If I want a pat on the head and some affirmation, I'll talk to my mother. But if I want straight dope on what I'm doing right or wrong, this is a great resource.
For a truly lasting legacy, I vote for vinyl. Plastic lasts forever, and the format is easy to reverse-engineer.
My grandpa had an old record player that included a "16 2/3 rpm" speed setting (33 1/3 divided by 2) which was apparently used for 2-hour spoken word performances (think audiobooks, comedy shows...)
Any recent format for storing video, audio, and even text is lkely to be undecipherable in a matter of decades.
I had a career in the robotics field for almost 5 years a while ago. I think my experience is best summed up bye a business analysis done by someone who actually went on to do several y combinator startups. Very smart kid at the time.
His report basically said that anything you want a robot to do, no matter how difficult or dangerous, you can get a human to do for a few dollars more than they would charge for safe, easy work.
In trying to create machines that have anything close to the capabilities of a human being, you're competing with billions of people, many of whom are desperate for work. You're also competing with millions of years of evolution.
Then again, when they reach a critical capability level, I suspect robots will suddenly be everywhere and doing tons of things we don't like to do. But it's very binary, and until you can really compete with human beings effectively, there's basically no market for it.