[HN Gopher] We don't know how bad most things are nor precisely ...
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We don't know how bad most things are nor precisely how they're bad
Author : surprisetalk
Score : 344 points
Date : 2024-08-21 15:16 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.lesswrong.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.lesswrong.com)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I showed my wife (who runs a riding academy) a picture of a
| pretty Chinese girl holding a horse somewhere near the mountains
| in the West of China and the first thing she noticed was that
| they'd put the halter on wrong.
|
| I was impressed with how AIs would draw individual stitches on
| clothes but a seamstress friend of mine shook her head and
| pointed out how they also got it wrong.
| diggan wrote:
| I spent a really limited amount of time in stalls (mainly
| because my sister was really into horses and sometimes they let
| me ride the small ones) but I seem to recall at one point
| someone talking about halters and how both people and horses
| have different preferences for how it should be put on, and it
| also depends on the style/type of halter. Maybe I misremember
| completely, but doesn't feel too out of place that they'd have
| different preferences and ways of doing things if you're
| comparing Eastern ways and Western ways.
| beedeebeedee wrote:
| Yeah, and even no halter. No offense to the parent commenter,
| but things like dressage are driven by defining "right" and
| "wrong", in order to create an in-group and out-group, and
| not necessarily to create better riders. You can ride a horse
| bare back, and in some cases, it really is better than with a
| saddle (and other accoutrement).
| Suppafly wrote:
| Presumably it was 'wrong' in that it was placed in a way that
| wouldn't work at all, IE objectively wrong not just
| subjectively wrong.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Specifically one of the straps was twisted 180 degrees
| before it was clipped on.
|
| It certainly looks wrong although I don't imagine it
| creates distress for the horse.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| I don't really know anatomy but I'm exposed to anatomy through
| dance and body work a fair amount. It's not just the fingers
| but any part of the bodies that AI draws that look wrong to me
| - _if_ I look carefully.
|
| I don't think you necessarily need to be an expert to see the
| multiple wrongnesses of AI images. It's just that AI images
| don't signal people to look more closely. (and a lot of popular
| illustration has bad anatomy and people excuse that).
|
| And broadly, I think the division between experts and non-
| experts in the "telling things are wrong" department is over-
| emphasized by focus-example chosen in the article. The
| production of pop-songs, for example, is an area where an
| expert can make a song more appealing to the average person
| (objectively verifiable: they create top-ten hits). So the
| average person can tell a song is well/badly produced when they
| aren't an expert who can produce songs.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| You can't learn to be a good figure artist by looking at flat
| images, you have to study anatomy, look at skeletons, learn
| the names of major and minor muscles and otherwise know
| what's inside. 3-d animated characters in games are good
| because this knowledge is baked into them.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| I think with piano tuning, or anything that is historical and
| physical and analogue and has status, you're going to get lost in
| human psychology and so miss the real issue.
|
| A similar field that has always been digital is audio and video
| compression codecs.
|
| You see similar issues with say Apple advertising their
| compression as perfect, and devoted hobbyists slaving away to
| meet goals that the average person cannot even discern.
|
| The capitalist, rather than technical, reality is that advances
| will be used to deliver the same (or lower) quality at a cheaper
| rate. And if you measure progress by the number of people who can
| watch Fast and the Furious on their Android phone on a capped
| data plan in a third world country that is perhaps the best
| thing.
|
| And even if you care only for perfection, despite all the genius
| and effort applied, you could argue that most of the progress
| over decades has been the ability to throw more CPU at the
| problem.
| ineedaj0b wrote:
| the Japanese seem to have a culture that appreciates the
| pursuit of perfection, at least in some domains.
| hooverd wrote:
| Cheap housing too. You can spend 20 years apprenticing how to
| make the tamago or whatever when you're not worried about
| rent.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| There is also a lot of bullshit about "quality" -- like the
| idea that you could get a significant quality improvement
| sampling audio at 96k as opposed to 44.1k or 48k.
|
| For that matter I can't believe people's eyes don't glaze over
| when they see TV ads that say, for instance, that Dawn dish
| detergent is better than other brands even though Dawn really
| has a better package of surfactants than most competitors and,
| over time, P&G has invested a lot of research into improving
| it. (E.g. ultraconcentrated soaps were an advance in practical
| chemistry and you really can clean more with less soap)
|
| Although their ads must be a reason that Dawn is market leading
| I'm pretty sure the ads, through their style, make a withdrawal
| from the legitimacy bank account.
| 015a wrote:
| One of the angles I find interesting when it comes to
| "quality" is the debate between Spotify and Apple Music.
| You'll see takes on Threads/Twitter like "I didn't realize
| just how much sound I was missing until I switched to
| lossless audio on Apple Music; Wow!" Its pedantic to point
| out: The audio quality you're hearing _probably_ isn 't
| better on Apple Music. I mean, the stream is definitely
| higher quality; AM delivers ALAC lossless audio for most
| music, while Spotify is still on 320kbps. But, you're
| listening to it through Airpods, which do not support a
| wireless, lossless codec. [1]
|
| However: You _did_ notice something different. I know you 're
| using APs, because you noticed something different. What you
| noticed wasn't audio "quality" per se; you noticed the APs'
| faux-Atmos. Its a similar vein to saying that the vogue
| "TAYLOR SWIFT 9 DIMENSIONAL SURROUND AUDIO" [2] Youtube
| videos are "higher quality"; obviously Atmos, when its at its
| best, is packing more data from the master, more microphones,
| more streams. But, you're muxing all that data down to a
| lossy wireless codec, and then outputting it through two
| speakers. At best, what you're hearing is not necessarily
| higher quality, but is simply "more pleasing". And, when
| Apple Music delivers truly-fake-Atmos tracks, meaning the
| Atmos was synthesized and processed from original Stereo
| masters, which does happen quite frequently with older music
| on the platform, it might even be accurate to say that what
| you're hearing is actually worse quality; but it might still
| be more pleasing.
|
| [1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/118295
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpMsqFc7-Z4
| PaulHoule wrote:
| My take is that 96k MP3 "sux" but I might tolerate
| listening to it on my watch in a noisy gym or running out
| on city streets. If you hear 128k MP3 compared to the
| original CD the difference should be night and day but you
| might think it was OK, somewhere between 192k and 320k the
| quality difference disappears and even the phase
| relationships between the channels are pretty well
| preserved because Dolby Pro Logic works right.
|
| Now there is a huge difference between a good master and a
| mediocre master and often when people release on a fancy
| format they start with a better master. For instance a lot
| of CDs are victims of the loudness war and it isn't hard to
| make a better release.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| I believe you are conflating kbits/s with kHz. The latter
| being the unit of the sample rate. The thing is, no human
| ears hear higher tones than 17kHz and Nyquist and Shannon
| thought us that double of that as a sample rate is
| sufficient to reproduce tones equal or lower.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I am using k in this particular message to mean kbps but
| it I think it does describe the menu of sound quality
| options that people will hear.
|
| I know people can't hear sine waves above 17kHz but there
| are questions about transient response and particularly
| how accurate you would need to represent phase if you
| want to replicate how well people can spot the direction
| of sounds in the real world. (Notably no "surround sound"
| technology of any kind would help a blind man with a gun
| shoot as accurately as they can in the real world)
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| If i understand you correctly, you have 3 points.
|
| 1)you indeed meant kbps so you were not conflating with
| kHz.
|
| 2) you chose the kbps unit because most systems offer
| those as quality parameter.
|
| 3) Phase shift on 17kHz cannot be accurately adjusted
| with a 17kHz*2 sample rate based system.
|
| All 3 true but... I don't want to sound too pedantic
| pointing out that... I think those findings do not fit
| the context of the parent comments.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Sorry it's my neurodivergence.
| 015a wrote:
| I agree; I believe it to be the case that even when
| provided with an immaculate audio consumption setup,
| fully wired, insulated, abyss headphones, some insane
| schiit amp and dac, a perfectly silent room, let the
| listener pick the songs, the full nine yards, maybe 1% of
| the population could correctly discern a stereo lossless
| track from a stereo 320kbps more than 50% of the time
| over many songs. Genetics plays a role in getting into
| this 1%, but the far, far bigger cause is really just
| experience: Its having listened to the same tracks over,
| and over, and over again, until you've literally learned
| where the imperfections in _this specific 320kbps
| encoding of this specific song_ are, rather than
| imperfections natural to the codec itself.
|
| That's the "dirty secret" of lossless audio: If you ask
| even someone in this 1% to do the same thing, but for
| music the experimenter picks and that they've never heard
| before: that 1% literally becomes 0%. _Maybe_ there 's
| some gigahuman audio codec engineer employed deep in a
| basement at Dolby HQ who knows exactly the classes of
| imperfections that AAC encoding imprints into tracks and
| also has superhuman ears and such... but its damn close
| to 0 humans who could do this.
|
| What this says about why anyone cares that AM, Tidal,
| Qobuz, whatever offer lossless audio, or that Spotify
| doesn't, is certainly interesting. It does seem like a
| tremendous waste of bandwidth and local storage, to me.
| But, I totally and fully subscribe to the message of the
| original article: It matters to me that this quality is
| maintained, that it exists for those people who do care
| about it, and that what I am consuming is as close as
| possible to what the original artists intended (rather
| than letting a bunch of cooks into the kitchen with
| opinions about which hertz are more important than
| others).
| dahart wrote:
| > like the idea that you could get a significant quality
| improvement sampling audio at 96k as opposed to 44.1k or 48k.
|
| There can be real quality improvements, if you're editing,
| recording, mastering, producing audio. If the thing you
| sample isn't the same as the thing that's going to be played
| back, then a higher sampling rate is sometimes called for.
|
| This is true in imaging too. You don't need HDR or raw
| formats or excessive resolution if you only show the same
| thing you captured, but sometimes you do if you're going to
| modify it.
|
| Some of the lore around high sampling rates is when people
| make a rule of thumb for recording and apply it always
| without thinking about the specifics of a situation. That's
| easy to do, but you also have to examine the cost of using a
| high sampling rate. Does it cost a lot or hurt? If you're
| running short on storage space, maybe, but usually no, it's
| usually a tradeoff with very low downsides.
|
| Sales people and corporate marketing absolutely do take
| advantage of this, for sure, and turn what are legitimate
| tradeoffs for some professionals into specious needs for mass
| market consumers.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| If you want to do physics-based sound transformations which
| amount to applying partial or ordinary differential
| equations you have to sample at a rate 3x or more than the
| Shannon rate because otherwise you encounter instabilities.
|
| Similarly you can't really hear more than 16 bits worth of
| sample depth if you got your levels perfect but in the real
| word recording in the studio and field a few more bits of
| headroom make a big difference.
|
| Thus I'd expect people to record at a high sample rate but
| I think there is no practical delivery rate.
|
| I'm somewhat agnostic as to whether or not people can hear
| anything atr all past 44.1kHz, particularly because if you
| consider how accurately people can point out objects in a
| real physical soundfield (e.g. like a blind man shooting a
| gun) and you believe phase accuracy is the key, you'd make
| the case that people can hear timing differences that
| couldn't be captured at 44.1khz.
|
| But no "surround sound" technology comes close to
| replicating how accurately you can spot things in real life
| and I don't believe practically any commercial recordings
| past 44.1khz are noticeably better on any real equipment.
| dahart wrote:
| Yep for playback, I agree, you don't need more than 16
| bits/sample or more than 44.1k playback rate. The vast
| majority of humans can't hear beyond that, at least
| through the air... I have heard that it can go a lot
| higher via direct bone contact, but that's not relevant
| to playing back music anyway. I just wanted to help
| clarify that there are real reasons to "sample" (record)
| something at 96khz or higher, or at 24
| bits/channel/sample, but that the reasons easily get
| lost, and sometimes artificially or intentionally
| misrepresented for marketing purposes.
|
| I kinda relate this to sporting equipment or cars or
| other things people buy. Like, nearly everyone on a road
| bike is riding and wearing race gear, which is
| uncomfortable, while very few people are actually
| training or racing. Or, people often buy cars or
| computers that are far faster or more powerful than they
| need. Those things get rationalized similarly, with
| claims that the extra is necessary and makes a
| difference, or fears that it might be needed someday, and
| little reflection on the downsides.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| All of this makes me think. I recently bought a car, and there
| seems to be quite a bit of audio difference. Or how pleasurable
| the audio sounds, how immersive, how the bass sounds.
|
| 1) Using Android Auto
|
| 2) Using Apple CarPlay
|
| 3) Which USB cables are used. Some seem to be better than
| others.
|
| 4) If it's over bluetooth - the worst experience with Android
| for me.
|
| 5) Car radio vs the above
|
| 6) Am I using YouTube Music or Spotify on Android Auto/Apple
| CarPlay
|
| It's almost like with some of these configuration it's
| frustrating, while it's really pleasurable with others, but I
| can't tell if I'm imagining it.
|
| From my tests so far, it feels like I'm only happy with the
| wired Apple CarPlay, and everything else doesn't seem
| satisfying. I'm not an audiophile or anything. And it has a
| real effect on my mood. But I have Android myself.
|
| If anyone has any suggestions to try out here... I'll try to
| maybe see if all the music is downloaded with offline support
| beforehand and maybe check the settings in Spotify/YouTube
| Music apps. It seems to be related mostly to how smooth or
| immersive bass is to me. Because bass can be annoying or it can
| be pleasurable.
| chgs wrote:
| "Which USB cables are used. Some seem to be better than
| others."
|
| You are imagining it.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Are you sure about that? Because there are some extreme
| examples, for instance some USB cables won't work at all
| for Android Auto. Then some USB cables I had music
| skipping, and with at least 1 cable the quality seemed much
| worse for Apple CarPlay than for the best one.
| Sindisil wrote:
| It's a digital data stream. The bits either make it or
| they dot. Unless the cable is actually faulty (i.e., the
| error rate exceeds what error correction and recovery can
| handle), one cable _cannot_ "sound different" to another.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| The gold plate-ended USB cables that come in a wooden
| case with velvet finishing, make the reproduced sound so
| much smoother, the way yhey were intended by the
| composer. The glossiness of the gold combined with the
| subtle soft touch of the velvet will seemlessly flow over
| to the analog side of the 192kHz DAC, polishing these
| once harshly digitized signals up to their finest
| quality.
|
| /i
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| You are joking, but all I want is the bass to feel really
| good and immersive in EDM songs. It somehow really makes
| me happy and the car ride so enjoyable. Like when the
| bass kind of smooths around you and it feels it's coming
| immersively from everywhere at once. With some setups the
| bass kind of does a rough "boom" and goes away quickly,
| while with others it kind of simmers and tickles you.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| I think we are on the same page. The bass is the part
| that makes a lot of difference. From working in
| automotive amplifiers i remember that there are tricks to
| make the bass sound louder and deeper with a limited
| amount of voltage difference. Usually the mac diff is +14
| to -14 volts due to the battery limitation, which seems
| plentiful but for low tones, the energy efficiency as
| well as human perception is very low with audio. One of
| the tricks is introducing first and second harmonics.
| I've experienced plenty of in-car demos that we would
| present to customers e.g. in Munich.
|
| Other tricks are speed adaptive eq and volume.
|
| But in the end most quality yield boiled down to tuning.
| Cars full of, rather low quality speakers (BOM cost a few
| dollars per channel) could create a quite immersive
| sound.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| That's very interesting to me. Because of this
| specifically being so weirdly pleasurable. I have now
| driven a lot of different cars because where I'm locally,
| you can use an app to rent cars for very temporary times
| and they are everywhere, within walking distance. Maybe
| it's in other countries as well, I don't know. But in any
| case, this has given me so much opportunities to try out
| various cars from 2021-2023 year release. I only recently
| got a license, and the car I bought is my first, so I
| don't have much historical experience, or experience in
| general, but to me when driving a car this particular
| audio quality is the main thing to affect my mood and
| perception. I either feel hyped for the rest of the day
| or frustrated and disappointed. And I usually don't think
| of myself as a music fan or anything like that. Also
| don't think I'm very young, I'm just a late bloomer in
| terms of getting a car.
|
| Because of that impact, and because of my lack of
| knowledge, it was very difficult and concerning to find a
| car, because we are kind of trying out Android Auto,
| Apple CarPlay, bluetooth without anyone really giving
| advice on the topic. And car sellers don't seem to be
| mindful about the topic, neither any relatives that we
| tried to consult on which car to buy. The best advice car
| sellers have had on the topic is to "just always use the
| original cable" which I don't even know what it means.
| Well I know what it means, manufacturer likely put the
| proper USB with optimal transfer rates and all, but it
| doesn't really answer to what the factors are or anything
| like that.
|
| Are we using wrong settings somewhere? Are we using
| optimal settings in all the apps, the car audio tuner,
| equalizer? I don't know.
|
| So we have learned a lot and we decided on a car, which
| we bought, but presently I still feel there's something
| different about Android Auto, vs Apple CarPlay, that
| doesn't make it quite as pleasurable. Like I'm not
| getting this immersive hype feeling, but more of a rigid
| "boom". Apple CarPlay showing that the car should be
| capable of it, but I can't really reproduce it with my
| Android phone.
|
| But surely I can't be the only one in the World, so it
| seems like a thing that can be this pleasurable would
| have been obviously solved.
|
| And it's not about the loudness, it's about how it
| smooths out or spreads, or feels like it's all around you
| at any volume. Like you are inside the music and the
| bass.
|
| When I tried to Google for solving this problem, I didn't
| really find any answers, so I'm sharing this here on
| hackernews, since frequently interesting perspectives
| appear here.
|
| If there's a traffic jam or rush hour, but the music is
| so great and immersive, it wouldn't matter and you never
| want the music to end, it seems odd that there's not that
| much focus on it from sellers point of view or people I
| know in real life.
|
| Or do I just have a weird physiology/psychology that
| responds to some odd things that no one else really cares
| about, or is some small setting somewhere?
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| One of the songs I would like to test out on a car I
| would be to buy is "Elley Duhe & Whethan" - "MONEY ON THE
| DASH".
|
| How is this song going to make me feel in that car with
| those settings.
|
| It's a song that happened randomly on one of the cars we
| were renting.
|
| But it really got us both.
| vundercind wrote:
| Could it be sending a lower bitrate stream over poor
| cables? Similar negotiation happens at other points of
| various communication stacks.
| Suppafly wrote:
| That was my thought about part of the process too, like
| does YT and Spotify use a lower bitrate if you're using
| usb out vs analog out vs bluetooth? Plus if the data
| connection is 4g vs 5g or sitting in the driveway using
| wifi, how does that affect the streaming?
|
| I'm not an audiophile by any means, but streaming almost
| always sounds worse than CD or even sometimes radio.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| Yeah - with bluetooth, definitely there's much, much
| lower quality in some cases. Initially when trying cars I
| always used Android and bluetooth, and it gave me very
| bad impression of some of their audio systems. Then when
| finally bringing a cable for Apple Car play and using my
| partner's iPhone, the sound was totally different.
|
| But it does also seem to depend on a car. Because I'm
| pretty sure I've had some very good experiences with
| bluetooth as well. And a case where bluetooth Youtube
| Music sounded good, and bluetooth Spotify sounded bad.
|
| In addition both of these apps have different volume
| levels despite car having the same volume level, and
| Android has different volume levels compared to iOS, so
| all of it combined, testing around made for an annoying
| experience.
| ianburrell wrote:
| Audio doesn't use very much data. CD bitrate is 1.4Mbps
| while USB2 is 480Mbps. It would have to super bad to for
| audio to have problems, and USB2 is super reliable.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| The ones I tried were new, of course still could be
| faulty. I went to the store and asked for one that would
| divide to both Apple lightning cable and USB-C, so my
| partner and I could both use it, since she has iPhone.
|
| The store owner said that he's not sure which ones will
| work, so he gave many different ones which we tried in
| the parking lot and then brought back. He gave us only
| one that spreads into 3 different connectors, USB-C,
| Lightning and the old Micro-USB. He said that this won't
| likely work. Rest of the cables were all either USB-C or
| lightning. However when trying, contrary to what he said,
| the 3 different connectors one worked, and it seemed to
| also have best quality, e.g. compared to one lightning
| which definitely had much worse performance.
|
| What I think is happening is that like someone said
| somewhere below as well, there's some difference in how
| fast or stable the data goes through the wire and
| something will change how they encode/decode it for those
| reasons. I don't know if it's the apps or the car
| software. I have to assume there's some sort of quality
| check and something will change depending on that.
|
| It doesn't help that packaging seems to list out random
| details and it's hard to compare cables with each other.
| Some USB cables have listed the data transfer rate, some
| have not, but they do allow data transfer. Then others
| don't.
| unregistereddev wrote:
| Or the car has a fair amount of EMR noise and one cable -
| being shielded - experiences less loss as a result. This
| could also explain why bluetooth was particularly bad.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| When I asked ChatGPT about it, it also brought up
| interference as a potential culprit, but I'm not an
| expert on the topic to consider it or be confident enough
| to bring it up by myself. I'm not sure how well different
| materials are shielded from interference or how much
| effect can interference actually have on it.
|
| What it specifically said is:
|
| > High-quality USB cables often have better shielding,
| which helps to reduce electromagnetic interference (EMI).
| EMI can introduce noise or degrade audio quality,
| particularly in cars where multiple electronic devices
| are in close proximity.
|
| But I don't know if this is the exact culprit.
| apercu wrote:
| How the music was produced/mastered makes a huge difference
| too.
|
| There is a lot of stuff from the late 70's and early 80's
| where I think a combination of new technologies and cocaine
| made for producers creating masters that sound awful to my
| ears.
|
| (disclaimer: not a professional audio engineer, just an
| instrument player that has some production experience).
| hathawsh wrote:
| I would use a microphone to capture the different renditions
| and compare them using Audacity or some other similar tool.
| Here's one place to start:
|
| https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/comparing-two-supposedly-
| id... https://forum.audacityteam.org/t/comparing-sound-
| comparing-p...
|
| I like one forum user's suggestion: build an audio file where
| the left channel is from one recording and the right channel
| is from another, but in perfect time sync. For example, the
| left may be a recording of an Apple CarPlay rendition, while
| the right is a recording of an Android Auto rendition. Then
| it should be easy for your ears to discern the difference.
|
| The Bluetooth issue could be real. I have a Bluetooth-enabled
| car radio that switches between full duplex (two-way audio)
| and half duplex (one-way audio) mode. It sounds normal in
| half duplex mode, but in full duplex mode, it sounds a lot
| like an old telephone.
| mewpmewp2 wrote:
| That's an amazing idea, and I'm really curious to try out
| to see if I'm insane or not.
| kimixa wrote:
| The majority of music apps on devices have their own "custom"
| EQ settings. It's probably not surprising that they all sound
| a little different, even if everything around them is digital
| and "exactly the same signal".
|
| It very much gets into matters of preference and taste -
| people love to abuse the word "objective" when there's not
| really any objective measure. Sure, you can say the dominant
| frequency of a note on a piano is correct or not, but the
| rest? More due to taste. The preferences can often be
| "shared" by culture associating specific quirks with "better"
| or "worse", but that's still just preference.
|
| How many musicians _intentionally_ use older techniques or
| "worse" equipment specifically because of the sound they
| create? Look at the culture around Synthesizers, for example.
| Is it really crazy to believe that the "perfect" concert
| piano tuner example in the article is just a preference in a
| shared culture of "Concert Pianists"? And are we then
| _really_ losing something that 's "better"? Or just another
| cultural artifact that may fade with time?
|
| We're not "losing" things any more than any cultural shift is
| a "loss".
| octokatt wrote:
| Quoting the article, because from your comment I'm not sure you
| got to the end, which is a shame as it addresses your point.
|
| TL;DR: If we're not going to aim for better, what's the point
| at all?
|
| > If it weren't for the piano soloist (the conductor probably
| didn't notice, he just knew to defer to the piano soloist's
| concerns), we would have played the concert on a very slightly
| out-of-tune piano, and then... > > What? > > Nobody in the
| audience would probably notice. Certainly not in the specific.
| Nobody is standing up and saying, "there, see how G above
| middle C has one string that is 0.2hz out of tune with the
| others?!" Nobody is standing up and saying "that piano is out
| of tune, what a travesty." Perhaps some of the more sensitive
| listeners would have felt some vague sense that the piano could
| have sounded nicer, that maybe the hall needs a better piano,
| or something. > > Did the piano sound better, after all that
| work? Yeah... it did, I think. Hard to say. I'd like to pretend
| it was some colossal difference, but that's really the point.
| My big stupid ears are not the best judge here. Just trust the
| people who have the best discernment.
|
| > Only a very few people possess the level of discernment
| needed to know how bad your local concert hall's piano is, and
| precisely how it is bad.
|
| > If their art dies out, maybe nobody will know how bad all the
| pianos are. And then we'll all have slightly worse pianos than
| we would otherwise have. And I mean if that's the way things
| are going to go, then let's just steer the Earth into the Sun,
| because what's the point of any of this.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > The capitalist, rather than technical, reality is that
| advances will be used to deliver the same (or lower) quality at
| a cheaper rate. And if you measure progress by the number of
| people who can watch Fast and the Furious on their Android
| phone on a capped data plan in a third world country that is
| perhaps the best thing.
|
| This is a really strange choice of example, since advances in
| video compression and streaming have obviously been used to
| deliver _higher_ quality at a cheaper rate.
| nuancebydefault wrote:
| Higher quality for cheaper implies exactly the same as higher
| quality for the same price or same quality for cheaper.
|
| They are all the effect of price per unit of quality going
| down.
| Spivak wrote:
| I'm having a hard time squaring the "don't put this guy out of
| business because it will become a lost art" with the very real
| practical goal of "release a digital piano tuner for $2 on the
| App Store that will make every piano not tuned by this guy-- the
| ones in school theaters, churches, or sitting rooms, sound
| _better_. I can 't even imagine what an exorbitant price to a
| concert hall means but for sure the high school production of
| Anything Goes can't afford it.
| yogurtboy wrote:
| I don't think this is the point of the article. In the TL, DR,
| they allude to the fact that the introduction of general AI
| into the world will accelerate this, because it will be "$2 app
| store tuner" on a larger, more intense scale.
|
| Doesn't require much through to extrapolate this to different
| areas. Sure, it would be sad if the expertise on sewing and
| clothing construction was lost to automation, but it wouldn't
| be the end of the world. But every person has a hobby that they
| would be sad to see lose its complexity and art. It might be
| catastrophic, though, if the world's nuclear engineers began
| automating their right-tail knowledge away.
| 8note wrote:
| It sounds like you haven't tuned an instrument with many
| strings.
|
| Tuning one string will change the tuning of the rest.
|
| The tuner might tell you the end state, but not how you get
| there, and it might not be the right tuning for how the piano
| will be played or the room it will be played in
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Befriend anyone that is working full-time in one of the skilled
| trades (welding, plumbing, masonry, roofer, etc.) and they will
| tell you precisely how bad the thing is.
| alanbernstein wrote:
| Or perhaps a piano tuner, as in the article?
|
| This comment reads as a counterpoint to the title, while it's
| actually repeating the point of the article.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I've worked at companies where the internal vibe among
| engineering was that the product was shit, but customers loved
| it. Engineers are looking at parts they know could be better;
| customers are looking at the competition.
| kridsdale1 wrote:
| First time I've really enjoyed any writing on LessWrong. This
| felt zen.
| isoprophlex wrote:
| Yes. Below the article are some tags with numerical values,
| "complexity: 4", "expertise: 2".
|
| Another fitting tag would have been "weaponized pedantry:
| unusually low"
| disconcision wrote:
| and then a "weaponized metapedantry: medium" metatag on the
| tag itself
| throw4847285 wrote:
| It's just nice to have them produce a critique of AI that
| isn't rooted in barely secularized eschatology.
| madrox wrote:
| Not sure how I feel about this. As the author acknowledged at the
| end, the piano tuning maybe was "good enough" in the beginning
| that no one would really notice the difference. What, then, was
| the point that leads us to say this piano tuner is essential and
| should not be replaced by something that can get it tuned to the
| level it was at the start of this essay? Especially considering
| not many could afford that piano tuner's exorbitant Sunday rate.
| We shouldn't pretend ROI doesn't matter.
|
| I want to agree with the thesis of the essay, but this anecdote
| didn't get me there.
| Etheryte wrote:
| You could say the whole point of art, and mastery in it, is to
| seek something beyond a "pretty good". The pianist could tell
| the difference and so could the person tuning the piano.
| Similar to how you can print a copy of a photograph taken of a
| master's painting, there is a difference between a "pretty
| good" and "the best".
| madrox wrote:
| Yeah, this has shades of "shining your shoes for the fat
| lady" to borrow a Salinger reference, and I understand that
| within the context of performance, but maybe I expect this to
| generalize farther than it does. There are many domains where
| a low cost, good enough solution is better. Not everyone can
| afford a piano tuner's exorbitant Sunday fee...
| jononor wrote:
| If we are going to bring cost into it, then digital pianos
| are superior in term of tuning (one might argue about other
| aspects of sound and feel). Same tuning every time, no
| adjustment needed.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >If we are going to bring cost into it, then digital
| pianos are superior in term of tuning (one might argue
| about other aspects of sound and feel). Same tuning every
| time, no adjustment needed.
|
| I think they tune them slightly differently depending on
| what's going to be played. But I suppose a master pianist
| could have a whole database of their preferences saved up
| or something.
| ithkuil wrote:
| I bought a Kawai ca99 digital piano three years ago.
|
| The feel is great. The simulated sound is pretty damn
| good, with a lot of attention to harmonics produced by
| undamped strings.
|
| The built-in speakers do however quickly reach their
| limit when played at high volume and distortion artifacts
| can be annoying.
|
| I'm not a professional pianist. I tried a few pianos both
| digital and some vertical pianos and I have to say that
| this one is the best instrument I have played so far.
| zarzavat wrote:
| Poor tuning often leads to cascading failures. If an instrument
| is out of tune it limits your technique because your brain is
| expecting frequency X but you are hearing frequency Y. To play
| quickly and accurately you have to be able to trust the
| instrument.
|
| Tennis players are really particular about how their rackets
| are strung. While nobody in the crowd will notice an unbalanced
| racket, the crowd _will_ notice if they hit the ball out.
| Consistency is important.
| ikekkdcjkfke wrote:
| But I want to hear The Entertainer and I certainly don't want
| the piano in tune!
| roughly wrote:
| To the point of the article, sure, it was good enough, but it
| could be better, and if we're not striving for the best - if
| we're not valuing the expertise and practice that allows
| someone to hear a fractionally out-of-tune piano and recognize
| it immediately; if we're not valuing the technical expertise to
| then listen to that piano, recognize all of the tells, and know
| how to adjust them; if we're not valuing the notion that the
| piano sounding better is a net good in and of itself - then
| what's the purpose of us? In the long run, if we're just going
| to settle for mediocrity, what's the purpose of anything we're
| doing at all?
|
| Sure, make the device that tunes the piano to the imperfect
| level it was at the beginning. Better piano tuning is a net
| good. But recognize the difference between a thousand pianos
| tuned very well and one perfectly tuned piano, and don't
| pretend the first is a replacement for the second.
|
| (And, to the obvious point that, like, everyone in this thread
| is missing: Substitute "piano tuning" for anything you actually
| value. The point is excellence, not pianos.)
| madrox wrote:
| Remember this the next time you cut a technical corner to
| launch faster
| csallen wrote:
| _> Only a very few people possess the level of discernment needed
| to know how bad your local concert hall 's piano is, and
| precisely how it is bad. If their art dies out, maybe nobody will
| know how bad all the pianos are. And then we'll all have slightly
| worse pianos than we would otherwise have. And I mean if that's
| the way things are going to go, then let's just steer the Earth
| into the Sun, because what's the point of any of this._
|
| The problem with this line of thinking -- "If X happens then
| we'll all be cooked!" -- is that it ignores the fact that _X
| already has been happening_ and yet life is just fine.
|
| There's an infinite number of pursuits in which expert
| practitioners could theoretically possess a level of discernment
| so sublime that nobody else can understand it, let alone
| appreciate it.
|
| A huge number of these arts will either never be practiced, or
| were practiced in the past but have already decline. And yet
| there's no mass ennui or clamoring to steer the Earth into the
| sun.
|
| The pinnacle of human attention cannot be directed at everything,
| everywhere, all at once. We have to focus our attention on a
| limited subset of arts and pursuits, where discernment will
| always be high, and settle everywhere else.
| tiltowait wrote:
| It also appears to ignore the fact that pianos had to be
| invented. The "best" had to be discovered and learned, and can
| be learned again in the future, even if the present chain of
| knowledge dies out. Or, not beholden to the past, future
| generations might determine/discover a new "best".
| detourdog wrote:
| A similar story is often told about really old violins.
| apercu wrote:
| I thought that was debunked, that in "blind" tests experts
| nearly always selected modern, high end violins over the
| Stradivarius's (Stradivarii?).
| detourdog wrote:
| That is sort of what I meant. The idea that ancient
| violins hold an unattainable mystique. That is now just
| an investment vehicle.
|
| I violated HN guidelines by being too flippant in my
| answer.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| That won't stop people from telling the story. Wine is
| the same way.
| HappMacDonald wrote:
| I disagree. In a blind test I can absolutely tell which
| application is running natively on Windows.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Wine, the beverage.
| RandomThoughts3 wrote:
| I think you missed the joke.
|
| But to get back on topic I'm not sure I get how wine is
| the same.
|
| Wine is a product with large taste variations between the
| different regions and vine varieties. Plus depending of
| the year you will again have variations in the grapes
| which can be more or less balanced during the
| fabrication.
|
| Some producers are known to have produced particularly
| great wine some specific years which lead to say bottles
| being very expensive but most of it is very much fact
| based.
|
| The only dubious thing I see in wine is that the way
| aging changes the taste of a bottle is not an improvement
| indefinitely. At some point the wine just gets worst and
| the search for very old bottle is mostly posturing.
| bluGill wrote:
| Which Stradivarius? He made many, some better than
| others. Also, which modern violin - there are many makers
| who make theirs sound different, and of course each
| violin from the same maker will have their own sound.
| detourdog wrote:
| That is really the point. The fact of who made the violin
| is much easier to conceptualize and communicate than any
| of it's acoustic properties.
| analog31 wrote:
| Yes, and that's common knowledge among most musicians
| nowadays. Sure, it's hard to be a musician -- amateur or
| professional -- and not also be an enthusiast. And I
| don't think very many violinists would turn down a chance
| to try a Strad, or at least hold it and look at it.
|
| There's still an open question about whether the new
| fiddles are better, or that the old ones are
| deteriorating, or both.
|
| Disclosure: Working double bassist. And don't get me
| started about bows. ;-)
| gizajob wrote:
| French bows or German bows? Just so we know what not to
| get you started on.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| Deeply check out the story of Steinway if you respect their
| instruments.
|
| It's not publicized but there was a documentary about how
| they almost lost far too much of their raw abilities gained
| since the 19th century when it comes to institutional
| knowledge which had always been essential to the way they
| had made pianos in a less-then-fully documented way, that
| had been passed on through generations.
|
| Most likely some of the most talented builders at earlier
| times were not very literate with paperwork anyway.
|
| The modern company dropped the ball for quite a while
| through attrition, until an urgent effort was undertaken to
| preserve what they had and uncover any little tidbits that
| were inadvertently lost. A lot of careful measurements were
| taken like never before, and documentation produced.
|
| I doubt if the pianos are the same, but don't think I would
| be able to tell the difference either.
|
| This page has some excellent little videos itself:
|
| https://www.steinway.com/news/features/inside-the-new-
| york-c...
| detourdog wrote:
| I think there is a Jean shepherd story about his
| apprenticeship spent in a harp or piano factory. I think
| the arc is he started out lost and hating it, finally
| started to like it and then they chose to keep the other
| kid they hired.
|
| So he was left unsure how he felt.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| > The "best" had to be discovered and learned, and can be
| learned again in the future
|
| Only if the conditions required for re-discovery occur in the
| future. Those conditions may include things like a thriving
| world market in high-performance acoustic pianos, the need to
| have only the best pianos played at court, the need for one
| king to be or appear wealthier than another king etc.
| Acoustic pianos may never be that important to humanity
| again, so it's not clear we'll recover all information we
| gained when they were.
|
| Archeologists often try to reconstruct ancient practices.
| Although modern humans have the advantage of a much larger
| basis of knowledge, it's not always trivial nor even always
| possible to reconstruct old ideas.
|
| Learning is a feedback loop process. Whether you can recover
| knowledge depends on how successfully you can replicate the
| feedback loop. And that depends on ambient factors.
| tw04 wrote:
| > and can be learned again in the future
|
| Maybe? You're assuming that someone between now and whenever
| humanity ends will have the time and resources to rediscover
| it. I'm not sure I'd take that bet.
| zo1 wrote:
| > "The "best" had to be discovered and learned, and can be
| learned again in the future, even if the present chain of
| knowledge dies out."
|
| If the Boeing Effect is anything to go by, I don't think that
| assumption can hold in the short/medium term. Yes, maybe a
| century from now we'd have some set of pressures and
| alignment of various incentives such that we
| rebuild/rediscover this lost knowledge. But it'll be bleak
| until then, and we can't rely on it to happen in our
| generation.
|
| But I'd go further and argue it's deeper. Sometimes it's not
| just about any one single "node" being lost. The network of
| nodes and the unique connections and weights between them
| will forever be gone.
|
| To borrow yet another saying/aphorism. "It's much easier to
| destroy something than to build it."
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| > The problem with this line of thinking -- "If X happens then
| we'll all be cooked!" -- is that it ignores the fact that X
| already has been happening and yet life is just fine.
|
| We sure as hell are cooked, son, we just ain't stopped movin'
| yet.
| bigallen wrote:
| "maybe nobody will know how bad all the pianos are. And then
| we'll all have slightly worse pianos than we would otherwise
| have."
|
| But not really. Because if I truly cannot tell the difference
| between two objects or the way they sound, then they're the
| same to me, and I don't lose anything by listening to one over
| the other. If I could tell the difference, and it was important
| to me, then maybe I could do something about it.
|
| "The pinnacle of human attention cannot be directed at
| everything, everywhere, all at once. We have to focus our
| attention on a limited subset of arts and pursuits, where
| discernment will always be high, and settle everywhere else."
|
| This is exactly correct
| bluGill wrote:
| But can you tell? I cannot tell many of these when I hear
| them in the piano tuning context (I've tried and given up).
| But I can hear how much better the piano sounds after all
| that is done.
|
| Then again, pianos are a bad compromise. There is no way to
| have octaves and fifths on the same piano, much less thirds
| (both major and minor). We learn to live with it, but it
| isn't right, for simple pieces you can tune a piano for that
| exact song and make it sound much better - but if you get
| much more complex than "mary had a little lamb" you run into
| a conflict and some key will need to be two different notes.
| Miraste wrote:
| The compromise in question is called equal temperament, and
| it's quite interesting if anyone is curious.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| In the case of stringed instruments, equal temperament
| isn't the only compromise; there is also stretched
| tuning, which seeks to match the harmonics (rather than
| the fundamentals) of harmonically related strings to one
| another (in a mechanical system where the harmonics are
| neither perfect integer ratios of the fundamental nor
| constant ratios across all of the strings).
| adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
| and wind instruments can and do bend their notes with
| their mouths to fit better in the chord than equal
| temperament
| epicide wrote:
| > We learn to live with it, but it isn't right, for simple
| pieces you can tune a piano for that exact song and make it
| sound much better
|
| "Better" is always relative, so it's often more correct to
| say it is/sounds "different".
|
| For example, a true temperament guitar can sound
| weird/"wrong" to some people. A lot of folks are used to
| those compromises just being part of the sound. Similar to
| a "honky tonk" piano: if you tuned it differently, it would
| come across as a timbre change more than simply "better"
| tuning.
|
| In the grand scheme of things, there are professions and
| arts that were once considered essential to everyday life
| and in ways that we today don't even consider. The
| profession is lost to time, but so is the need. It's the
| in-between transitional state, where the profession is in
| the process of dying, that is the most painful period.
|
| Some day, the last note played on a piano will be played
| and lament for the piano tuner will die with it.
| card_zero wrote:
| I don't know, I guess everything ends eventually, but
| people still play the crumhorn, the carnyx, and the
| eunuch flute.
| Miraste wrote:
| The internet has worsened this phenomenon. I, like many other
| people, have gotten into the habit of appending
| site:reddit.com to Google searches as search quality
| declines. This gives better results from actual humans
| (usually), but it also skews toward people who are invested
| enough in the topic to post about it on niche subreddits.
| This leads to, for example, product recommendations that are
| way out of alignment with what most people need, even if the
| information about them is true.
| MrLeap wrote:
| "product recommendations that are way out of alignment with
| what most people need"
|
| I have to disagree. When i dont do the reddit thing, the
| average quality of material products has been.. very bad.
| Amazon reviews don't seem to be enough to choose anything
| with an electric motor or a hinge that won't fall apart in
| a month of light use.
| Miraste wrote:
| Let me give an example: soundbars for TVs. Reddit will
| tell you to never buy one, because a dedicated speaker
| system sounds better at the same price. This is true-ish.
| However, a speaker system requires a large, heavy A/V
| unit, lots of wires, lots of space, and highly
| noticeable, if not outright ugly, speakers. A soundbar
| doesn't have any of those problems, is usually the
| cheaper option, and still sounds much better than built-
| in speakers. They're the right choice for most people,
| but it takes reading between the lines to parse that from
| reddit posts.
| MrLeap wrote:
| I trust people to be able to generally decide if they
| have the space, tolerance for cords and aesthetics to
| make a purchase decision like that. I'm struggling to
| visualize the peril in accidentally buying speakers.
|
| Personally, I'll happily pay for something with some
| features I don't need if it's got good build quality.
| Finding versions of MANY THINGS that aren't egregiously
| poorly made seems like it's getting harder?
|
| Maybe this is just the temporal warp of getting older. As
| subjective time passes by more quickly, entropy is
| getting more of my attention than when I was younger and
| a day felt long. It's possible my perception that tools
| are engineered to the brink of _functioning by a thread_
| is survivorship bias. All the old tools that are still
| trucking are just the ones that survived. No way to know
| for sure, but if some convincingly thrice burned
| carpenter on reddit makes me think I oughta buy mikita I
| probably will.
| Miraste wrote:
| The recommendations aren't bad, they're just overkill.
| Makita makes great tools, but depending on the tool,
| cheaper ones are fine for most purposes (cheap _er_ , not
| cheapest, I've seen too many Ryobi contraptions start
| smoking for that). Guitars and bicycles are two more I've
| run into where reddit advice will have you paying much
| more than you need to. Sometimes it's okay to get the no-
| brand Amazon version, and sometimes it's very much not.
| It's a skill to determine which is which.
|
| I do think you're right that average quality has gone
| down. The MBAs of the world work hard to make their
| products function till the last day of the warranty and
| not a second longer, and that's a relatively recent
| business philosophy.
| lupire wrote:
| I learned on HN years ago:
|
| Buy a cheap tool. If it breaks, buy one for twice the
| price. If you lose it before it breaks, buy one for half
| the price.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| That is some of the worst advice I've ever heard. Cheap
| tools are always cheap for a reason.
| mlyle wrote:
| Cheap tools are usually adequate to judge whether this is
| a type of tool you need and will frequently use... and
| cheap tools may be adequate to meet your entire need.
|
| I frequently buy cheap tools while I am learning about
| whether I need a "real" one and which one I should then
| select. I would suggest other people do so, too.
| SAI_Peregrinus wrote:
| Yeah. The trick is to never buy a cheap replacement tool.
| KronisLV wrote:
| I actually got a cheap Chinese chainsaw for some light
| work around the countryside, it cost me about 80 EUR and
| performs adequately for the task at hand.
|
| So then I bought another one of the same variety, with
| the expectation that once this (or the other one) dies,
| it can be cannibalized for spare parts if need be AND I
| won't have to stop in the middle of doing something,
| cause of the backup.
|
| It's much the same for me when buying mechanical
| keyboards, computer mice, HDDs/SSDs or other technology
| too. My current CPU is on AM4 because I have the old one
| as a backup and a spare motherboard too.
|
| What can I say, I like having backups and being
| reasonably frugal: e.g. getting a mid range phone since I
| don't need fancy features and if anything happens to it
| it won't be a big financial hit to replace (or use any
| old one for a bit, until the new one arrives, since none
| receive software updates for that many years).
| yial wrote:
| I agree with you. I do think there are different levels
| of cheap though.
|
| I don't have the eloquence to quite describe, but it's
| the difference between a harbor freight miter saw, a
| Milwaukee, a Makita,(their 12 in. Dual-Bevel Sliding
| Compound Miter Saw, is amazing, but I still use my harbor
| freight dual bevel as well with a different blade for
| more construction ish stuff vs trim work / precision
| ish), and a festool.
|
| My father drives me insane with this. He buys these $1
| can openers that break every 3-9 months. He thinks I'm
| insane for paying $10-$20 for a can opener that has now
| lasted me 9+ years.
|
| I probably would have been okay with a $5-7 one.
|
| More succinctly : the cheap One is cheap for a reason.
| But that doesn't mean you need the most expensive.
| Usually the cheap tools end up being more in the long
| run. (Breakage, poor quality output, time, material
| usage....)
|
| When I first got a 10 inch table saw, I couldn't believe
| how easy things were: setting the fence, cutting hard
| wood, depth adjustments were so much faster. But I still
| have my 8 inch craftsman I paid $5 for at a yard sale 20
| years ago, and it's not bad.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| I'm not advocating for running out and filling your shop
| with boutique tools by any stretch. Mid-market brands
| like Dewalt are perfectly serviceable without incurring
| all of the safety issues that harbor freight brands are
| notorious for.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> Cheap tools are always cheap for a reason._
|
| Right, and that reason is because there is a market for
| testing tool waters to see if it is a tool that you even
| need. Often you cannot truly appreciate if a tool is a
| tool you should have before trying it. You can read
| testimonials from other people all day, every day, but
| until it is actually in your hand...
|
| So, hypothetically, do you buy the $100 version with
| clear compromise, but good enough to offer some
| validation, or go for the $1,000 ultimate version from
| the hop? That's the gamble. If your assumption was right,
| you're in deep for $1,100, but if your assumption proves
| wrong, you're only out $100. That's the idea here. When
| in doubt, try the cheap tool, and when you're still
| wanting to use it beyond its constraints, you've proven
| you need the more premium product. If you leave it
| sitting on the shelf, now you know you don't need the
| tool at all.
|
| As with all short-soundbite suggestions, it's not meant
| to apply to all situations. But in the average case, it
| is likely that you are better off gambling the
| hypothetical $100 - especially when the undertone is
| within a hobby context. It is _very_ likely you will
| discover you didn 't really like the hobby anyway. Of
| course, as always, it is assumed you will still bring
| your thinking cap to the table. Indeed, there are
| situations where going straight to the hypothetical
| $1,000 tool is the right choice, but the saying is merely
| pointing out that it isn't always the best choice like
| some people are inclined to believe.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > That is some of the worst advice I've ever heard. Cheap
| tools are always cheap for a reason.
|
| As a DIY person with a garage _filled_ with every type of
| tool imaginable, that is some of the best advice that can
| be given: buy cheap tools, but expensiver tools if it
| breaks.
|
| IME, most people don't use the cheap tool enough to break
| it.
| forgetfreeman wrote:
| As a contractor who makes a living off his tools daily
| your read-through is one of the reasons why I know so
| many people with permanent eye injuries from buying
| shitty hammers. Cheap tools are dangerous.
| josephg wrote:
| Yep. And cheap tools are bad in more ways than life
| expectancy.
|
| Cheap knives can't hold an edge. Cheap laptops are slow,
| have bad battery life and crash. Cheap microphones make
| your speech more tiring to listen to. And so on.
| hansvm wrote:
| Part of the problem is that expensive tools are not
| usually expensive for a reason. Till you work with the
| cheaper one a bit you don't even know what you want from
| the expensive tool and can easily buy a "cheap" tool at a
| high dollar cost.
|
| Another side of that idea is that you often don't need
| the more expensive features. My immersion blender is the
| cheapest thing I could get my grubby little mitts on. It
| reaches to the bottom of the deepest pot I care to use it
| with, it's plenty powerful to chop up veggies smoothly,
| and it doesn't overheat on sustained use. It would not
| work in a professional kitchen, but I don't run a
| professional kitchen. Any additional expenditure would
| have been wasted, and if the item were bigger, were
| heavier, or had more attachments, those would just
| represent a waste of space in my house.
| yunwal wrote:
| The other thing is that I have the "slightly upmarket"
| immersion blender (Breville) that everyone recommends and
| mine overheats before finishing a pot of soup. Which made
| me realize that most people who recommend things (on
| reddit or anywhere) don't use them enough to have
| firsthand experience with that thing, they're just
| repeating what they've heard.
| recursive wrote:
| > requires a large, heavy A/V unit
|
| Not really. You can use powered bookshelf speakers or
| studio monitors just fine. That's what I do.
| wiredfool wrote:
| Small amps have gotten remarkably good in the last few
| years.
| lupire wrote:
| Top google result for [tv soundbar reddit] https://www.re
| ddit.com/r/Soundbars/comments/137ukxi/are_soun...
|
| is this exact debate.
| Miraste wrote:
| That's in r/Soundbars, which is naturally rather
| favorable. The outright dismissals I've run into come
| from the much larger r/hometheater, which is also the
| source of most TV audio buying guides.
| pokerface_86 wrote:
| it absolutely doesn't, the common reddit recommendation
| is to just get edifier r1280dbs and a sub, and you'll
| outperform most soundbar systems that cost even 2x as
| much.
| bsder wrote:
| > A soundbar doesn't have any of those problems, is
| usually the cheaper option, and still sounds much better
| than built-in speakers.
|
| The specific problem here seems to be that soundbars have
| gone _actively backward_ over time.
|
| I had an old JBL soundbar whose only issue was that it
| had no Bluetooth security. This meant that someone in the
| apartment complex would randomly connect to it and blast
| us with 900 decibels of whatever they were watching--
| generally at 7:30AM.
|
| So, we went searching for a replacement. We must have
| listened to every soundbar available at retail.
|
| They were all expensive and all sucked--none of them were
| better than that 10 year old JBL.
|
| Eventually we opted for a sound system that was not
| particularly cheap. And my wife still complains that it
| doesn't sound any better than the old soundbar we
| replaced. And she is correct.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| Could you disable Bluetooth and buy an external Bluetooth
| receiver that outputs analog audio?
| bluGill wrote:
| It also leads to bots posting ads disguised as posts to
| reddit. Often they are posting in communities that nobody
| subscribes to but google indexes.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| > But not really. Because if I truly cannot tell the
| difference between two objects or the way they sound, then
| they're the same to me, and I don't lose anything by
| listening to one over the other. If I could tell the
| difference, and it was important to me, then maybe I could do
| something about it.
|
| Trust me, as a former piano/harpsichord tuner, that the
| audience absolutely _can_ tell the difference between a
| perfectly tuned instrument and one that is badly tuned. They
| just can 't put their finger on what that difference is.
|
| It's the same as when the viola section of an orchestra is
| out of tune or the horns drag (both very common problems for
| amateur symphonies). The overall effect is "muddier" and less
| "brilliant" than other performances, and you can tell as a
| listener, but very few people in the audience can say "the
| violas were flat in the adagio section."
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| It's worse than that. In many cases the consumer _can 't_
| tell, but it still matters.
|
| Take food, for example. If the tomato on your sandwich has
| fewer micronutrients than a different one, you may not be
| able to taste it, especially after the restaurant (or you)
| have slathered the sandwich with sauces full of salt and
| sugar and fat. So you want a chef you can trust who knows
| how to choose a tomato (and a farmer who knows how to grow
| one), whether you can taste the difference or not, or the
| result at scale is you end up deficient in various vitamins
| and minerals and can't figure out why you're tired all the
| time.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Another analogy would be a tomato grown in contaminated
| soil may taste the same, you just pay for it in cancer 20
| years later.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| That's not quite the same thing, because if the tomato is
| full of cadmium, whether or not you can taste it the
| 0.01% of the customers who are chemists and personally
| test all of their food for safety themselves are going to
| figure it out. Then every store will refuse shipment of
| any of those tomatoes and the cops will come to shoot the
| farmer's dog and run over the tomato field with their
| ludicrous panzer.
|
| Whereas if they find that the tomato has 10% as much
| b-carotene as a tomato should or what have you, somebody
| will write an article about it that six in a thousand
| customers read and people will keep buying those tomatoes
| because they're cheaper and not even required to be
| labeled differently.
|
| It's the difference between "so bad that people won't
| stand for it" and "worse, but people tolerate it", and
| the second one can be more of a problem specifically
| because people don't get mad enough about it to fix it.
| thatcat wrote:
| I doubt there are chemists sitting at home with an ICP
| testing heavy metal levels of all their produce. That
| would be a lot of work and expensive to maintain. In
| reality no one would even notice the toxicity unless FDA
| happened to check or someone got sick and traced it back.
| rafaelmn wrote:
| This is a bad analogy because food is dual purpose -
| nutrition and enjoying the taste.
|
| Music is just about subjective enjoyment - you will not
| get cancer if the piano was not in tune - and if you
| can't tell the difference then it is irrelevant to your
| experience.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Have a look at the research as to the effect of music on
| mood and mental health.
| SirLordBoss wrote:
| To follow this analogy, isn't it possible then for someone
| to study precisely what the difference is, and become an
| expert, thus bringing us back into the level of expertise
| we were at at the start of the analogy?
|
| Surely the experts didn't all learn from each other; who
| was the first expert? That expert surely learned in some
| other way, so the only thing lost at the start of the
| analogy is the time required for someone interested to
| (re)achieve mastery.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Sure, related to tuning because it's a pretty closed
| problem. The expertise in terms of tuning was developed
| over about ~800 years, but the math for modern tuning was
| known 500 years ago. It's conceivable that one could re-
| invent equal temperament and then quickly re-invent the
| modern tuner given everything we know about electronics
| and audio processing. However, that knowledge all builds
| on itself. If we decide that all audio processing is done
| with RNNs/ML instead of objective ("old") mathematics,
| then we're going to lose the ability to make a tuner,
| too, and eventually we'll need a new Fourier to come back
| up with the Fourier transform.
|
| About the tomatoes in the other comment chain? Your guess
| is as good as mine whether we can recover that knowledge.
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| I heard that pianos have stretched harmonic series due to
| string tension/weight/something, so piano tuners actually
| have to tune upper notes higher and lower notes lower,
| while ensuring various harmonics interact well. There's
| quite a bit of art to it rather than pure numeric ratios
| (which may or may not be possible to encapsulate in ML).
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| Yes, this is correct for pianos. I believe it is actually
| due to the thickness of the strings varying a lot across
| the instrument.
|
| Most piano tuners today use a tuner for a middle octave
| and then tune the outer octaves by ear.
| mlyle wrote:
| There's stuff on the edge, though-- like there was a post
| here a few days ago, where the commenter was talking about
| deploying monitoring and measurement into workplaces and
| finding _lots_ of stuff wrong, and everyone panicking.
|
| On the one hand, panicking is unproductive: nothing is worse
| than it was last week.
|
| On the other hand, finding out that a whole lot of
| infrastructure that was supposed to make your business
| better, actually isn't doing its job, is still significant.
| If your e-mail campaigns weren't clickable, and you lost a
| bunch of business but never noticed, you still lost a bunch
| of business. It still required uncommon discernment to even
| notice, but the impact was unquestionable.
| mrandish wrote:
| > finding out that a whole lot of infrastructure that was
| supposed to make your business better, actually isn't doing
| its job, is still significant.
|
| Yes, in many contexts discernment matters. More broadly,
| being able to tell the difference in quality or performance
| is relevant when you've spent more time/money/effort to
| have a better result. Even if "no one could tell and it was
| fine anyway", then you could have saved that
| time/money/effort and put those resources to better use.
| kazinator wrote:
| Even if you can tell the difference between the way two
| objects sound, there is a leap between that and deciding that
| one is worse than the other.
| aqfamnzc wrote:
| I think about this when cooking. There are 1000 variables
| like ingredient choice, prep methods, spices used, cook time.
| Changing one produces an effect too small for me to discern.
| But when I make suboptimal choices on 20 different variables,
| they stack up to produce a dish that's noticeably worse. :(
| How can I do science and improve my skills when I can't
| observe the difference changing one dimension makes!?
| josephg wrote:
| > How can I do science and improve my skills when I can't
| observe the difference changing one dimension makes!?
|
| The classic answer to this is you need to improve your
| capacity to measure. Ie, taste ingredients and things
| constantly and learn with your mouth how the taste of your
| tomato will translate into the taste of your curry.
|
| Just like the soloist and piano tuner in this story, subtle
| discernment is a huge part of expertise.
| HPsquared wrote:
| "You might not have noticed it, but your brain did" - H.
| Plinkett
| myth_drannon wrote:
| And even on things that impact us, we can't be experts.
|
| The roofers did a shit job, but it looked so professionally
| done and I paid them well. Six months later the roof started to
| leak, by that time they were gone... The contractors widened
| the doorway but didn't bother checking the house plan and the
| load was incorrect, the structural engineer had a heart attack
| looking at that.
| sorokod wrote:
| If all mathematians die we may get stuck with Q.
|
| That doesn't mean that irrationals don't exist or aren't worth
| exploring.
| Log_out_ wrote:
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.willeypian...
| bee_rider wrote:
| I'm not 100% sure but I read that part as a little bit of a
| joke? Like in the context of the story, the author had just
| describe the fact that the piano sounded only a little better,
| they thought, during the concert. Possibly the difference was
| imperceptible to most of the crowd.
|
| So I think chucking the Earth into the sun is intentionally
| being over-dramatic.
|
| Actually I think ending it on a joke was not the best move,
| because it does muddle things a bit. The stakes are not so high
| but it does matter. The piano was not bad enough for the
| audience to notice, but it was bad enough for the player to
| notice. If it is bad enough to bother the person using it, it
| is bad enough to matter.
|
| I mean, if the player is self-criticizing like most elite
| people do, they probably play better if they know everything,
| even the little stuff that the audience barely notices, is
| going right.
| HappMacDonald wrote:
| > The piano was not bad enough for the audience to notice,
| but it was bad enough for the player to notice.
|
| It truly is a poor craftsman who blames the tool.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Sure. But, when self-criticizing, the good craftsman
| understands that their tools are their responsibility, the
| customer cares about the results.
| bluGill wrote:
| That is a reflection on the types of tool a good craftsman
| uses.
|
| While a good craftsman can use some bad tools to good
| results, they almost always use good tools (not using good
| tools is often done to prove a point).
| wizardforhire wrote:
| I think this is the rub with anything subjective ie culture,
| especially art. Case in point greek sculptures from antiquity.
| We have known now for a while that they were painted and even
| know what pigments were used and can go on to create some
| semblance of what they probably looked like. But I have yet to
| come across anyone that prefers them to the unpainted versions.
| [1]
|
| More recently and more zeitgeist, Breakdancing in the olympics.
| Most people have no idea about breakdancing yet alone how its
| culture has evolved. Viewed from their lens Australia was a
| terrible joke easily made fun of, yet to the breaking community
| Rachael Gunn is a hero and being defended. [2]
|
| [1]
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=7UsYHo5iarM&pp=ygUVR3JlZWsgc3Rhd...
|
| [2] https://youtube.com/watch?v=xPysiKi8mSM
| yunwal wrote:
| 2 is disingenuous IMO. The olympics is an athletic
| competition. There are objective winners and losers. Breaking
| _as an olympic sport_ is an athletic competition.
|
| It's a totally different thing than breaking as creative
| expression. There's nothing wrong with being confidently
| goofy at a party, sure, but if breaking wants to remain a
| method of expression and nothing else, it shouldn't be in the
| olympics. Otherwise it's fair to be puzzled (and amused) that
| a subpar athlete reached that level of competition.
| roughly wrote:
| > The pinnacle of human attention cannot be directed at
| everything, everywhere, all at once. We have to focus our
| attention on a limited subset of arts and pursuits, where
| discernment will always be high, and settle everywhere else.
|
| There's 8 billion of us. There's more than enough human
| attention to go around.
| ruined wrote:
| There could be, but most individuals don't have the agency to
| freely allocate attention.
| roughly wrote:
| In the words of Stephen Jay Gould, "I am, somehow, less
| interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's
| brain than in the near certainty that people of equal
| talent have lived and died in cotton fields and
| sweatshops."
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| That's not as much attention as to cover everything we can
| direct our attention at. This is so obvious to me that it
| almost seems like a tautology.
|
| More so, there being enough attention to go around is
| tangential to whether the sum of our attention colors in all
| the space.
| jollyllama wrote:
| >yet life is just fine
|
| Based on what? You'd have to have somebody who could compare
| the past to the current state to establish a delta (or lack of
| one) and make that assertion.
| mistermann wrote:
| > Based on what?
|
| Consciousness, downgraded due to cultural conditioning.
|
| For example: sometimes climate change is a huge deal, other
| times it is just fine. Consciousness (2024) seems unable to
| (try to) be consistent, it's like it lacks an index or logic
| processor or something. Maybe there's a startup idea here
| somehow.
| undersuit wrote:
| What if when climate change isn't a big deal you have the
| equivalent of a person using a free app with ads to tune
| your piano reporting to you, and when climate change is a
| big deal you have that piano repairman that can hit a key
| and tell you the string is rusted when struck too hard from
| experience.
| mistermann wrote:
| And what if it is the same person in both instances?
|
| Perhaps we will find out if Mother Nature shares your
| sense of humour.
| undersuit wrote:
| It's not the same person.
|
| Mother nature isn't a humorous process, it's physics.
| f154hfds wrote:
| You're under representing the sadness of lost artistry. For
| example, there is a marked degradation in the quality of fine
| art between the late classical period and the early medieval
| period. Civilization in a large region of Europe lost skills
| for centuries.
|
| We as a society don't want to lose artistry that was
| painstakingly developed - there's no guarantee it will ever be
| developed to that level of sophistication again. I don't want
| future generations to look at my generation as we do the dark
| ages.
|
| I think it's easy right now to think that progress is
| guaranteed or the opposite - that it's impossible to achieve.
| As population levels out civilization will need to become more
| about archiving what we know than pushing the envelope but no
| one wants to lose information.
| bambax wrote:
| > _X already has been happening and yet life is just fine_
|
| The OP doesn't say life isn't fine. He says that if we don't
| aim for perfection, if art ceases to matter because we cease to
| truly care, then there's no point. We'll eat shit and reproduce
| just the same -- but there is no point.
|
| He's got a point.
| throwthrowuknow wrote:
| Not really, he isn't accounting for variation in skill level
| in his anecdote. If this piano tuner is just average for his
| profession, which seems likely, then the piano is still out
| of tune to the top 20% of discerning musicians, aficionados
| and expert piano tuners. The problem is there's only a very
| small amount of that skill to go around so the majority of
| concert hall pianos are going to stay imperfectly tuned. The
| bigger problem is with the author's assertion that a robotic
| piano tuner must necessarily be worse than a human. Maybe the
| currently available electronic tuners are but that they
| remain so isn't a given, it's more likely that they could be
| better but it would simply cost too much to achieve that
| level of performance at the moment. With sufficiently cheap
| electronics and intelligence it may eventually be possible to
| sell an automatic piano tuner to every piano owner that far
| exceeds any human's ability. Is that not a valid way to
| achieve perfection?
| bluGill wrote:
| > the majority of concert hall pianos are going to stay
| imperfectly tuned.
|
| Any "important" concert hall will tune the piano before
| each concert. If there is no concert for months the piano
| will sit untuned (but still be practiced on), but a piano
| tuner is cheap insurance that nothing happened. If there
| are two concerts on the same day they might or might not
| tune between them.
|
| Of course there are a lot of "small-town" concert halls
| where the piano is not tuned as often. Your local high
| school probably isn't tuning the piano before the concert -
| even though the piano is moved from the choir room to the
| stage before the concert which is the most likely way to
| mess up tuning.
| medstrom wrote:
| They said the piano will be imperfectly tuned even when
| it was tuned just now, if the job was done by an average-
| skilled tuner.
| dnissley wrote:
| What do you think about mediocrity?
|
| https://www.ribbonfarm.com/series/mediocratopia/
|
| _I'm fascinated by mediocrity as an aspiration, understood
| as optimization resistance and withheld reserves. Mediocrity
| is slouching towards survival. Mediocrity is pragmatic
| resistance to totalizing thought. Mediocrity is fat in the
| system. Mediocrity is playful, foxy improvisation._
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| It makes sense to some, but this is how you lose Leonard da
| Vinci before he even gets started.
|
| I sill enjoy resistance, reserves, survival, pragmatics,
| fat buffers and improvisation better without any mediocrity
| I would say.
| deciplex wrote:
| I think your point is going to be lost on people who view art
| as a commodity to be consumed. From that point of view,
| replacing the artist with a machine can only result in a
| loss, if the person consuming the art could tell the
| difference in the first place. If not, then who cares if a
| machine or a person tuned the piano, etc?
| paretoer wrote:
| I just think these are the thoughts of old people.
|
| The creative mediums of the day are tiktok videos and video
| games.
|
| It is the same line of thought from back in the day that the
| electric guitar is just noise, people should play a "real"
| instrument like the clarinet!
|
| Rap is just noise, they aren't even singing! People should
| play a "real" instrument like the electric guitar.
|
| Tiktok is not art! I am talking "real" art like Marcel
| Duchamp or Andy Warhol's movie Sleep. No one is making REAL
| art like that anymore I tell ya.
| debugnik wrote:
| > Rap is just noise, they aren't even singing
|
| > Tiktok is not art
|
| These two sentiments aren't _that_ uncommon amongst gen z
| either, in my experience.
| jakubmazanec wrote:
| I think it's simpler than that - it's just repetition and
| practice. Even if we lose a skill, we can learn it again. And
| IMO very quickly - if the author of the article practiced
| tuning pianos for a few hundred hours, he would quickly
| discover how is his skill increasing.
| bluGill wrote:
| Also is it worth it. We know longer know how to make a
| saturn-V rocket like what took us to the moon. We could
| figure it out, but we have much better technology and so if
| you want a rocket like that it is better to start from
| scratch at this point. (it probably would be cheaper as well
| once you adjust for inflation, but for sure better. Faster
| depends on your budget, NASA paid a lot of speed in the
| saturn-V program)
| kazinator wrote:
| Maybe I don't _want_ parallel minor 7th intervals on the piano
| to exhibit gradually changing beats among the harmonics, in
| proportion to the frequency. Maybe pianos don 't need to be
| same to that extent.
| bluGill wrote:
| Pianos should not have that - a piano should have a minor 7th
| that doesn't beat at all. However if you play the key tuned
| as a perfect minor 7th and use it as the root note for a
| standard major chord (root-third-fifth) it will sound
| terrible as the intervals will not even be close. Your choice
| is have hundreds of keys on the piano so that when you want
| the chord you select the exact perfect pitch you want (called
| just intonation), or we have to compromise the tuning of the
| piano somehow so we can get by with just 88 keys. We have
| chosen to stick with 88 keys and then use equal-temperment as
| a compromise so that the key we use for a minor 7th also
| sounds okay when used as the root note in a regular major
| chord. The piano overall sounds much worse than perfect, but
| it is an acceptable compromise. there are other compromises
| that people sometimes argue are better, whole books have been
| written on the subject.
| kazinator wrote:
| I don't think that's what the article is talking about:
| differences between perfect minor 7ths and equal-
| temperament ones. Rather, the tuner in question basically
| has already nailed the equal-temperament minor sevenths
| already (as far as you or I might think) and is just
| listening for beats among their harmonics now, so that when
| a run of parallel minor sevenths is played, the frequency
| of the beats among the harmonics rises in proportion to the
| frequency of the chord, like speeding up a recording.
| maxerickson wrote:
| There's anyway, at the moment, more people that are more
| discerning. Maybe not for tuning your cheap upright piano, but
| it's pretty likely there's more concert halls with more amazing
| grand pianos than there ever was before.
| drewhk wrote:
| It is not so clear-cut though. There is a hierarchy here that
| the article misses a bit I think. There will be participants of
| various awareness level:
|
| 1. Members of the audience that do not notice anything at all
| 2. Members of the audience that only notice it subconsciously,
| affecting some overall feeling of quality (an analogy would be
| typography which operates mostly in this realm) 3. Members of
| the audience that consciously notice that something is off,
| somewhere 4. The conductor that exactly knows that the piano is
| off 5. The tuner that exactly knows what and where is wrong
| with the piano
| okr wrote:
| Love the last paragraph. Well described.
| 015a wrote:
| > "If X happens then we'll all be cooked!"
|
| I don't feel that statement is stating that if X happens we're
| screwed; its stating that if X happens why is life worth
| living?
|
| Its only one metric among many, but rates of depression and
| anxiety diagnosis are at an all time high.
| Vecr wrote:
| > And I mean if that's the way things are going to go, then let's
| just steer the Earth into the Sun, because what's the point of
| any of this.
|
| That's one hell of a statement for a place like LessWrong.
| diggan wrote:
| > That's one hell of a statement for a place like LessWrong.
|
| Not that I hang out a lot at LessWrong, but it seems like a
| place for philosophy (and more), from an outsider perspective
| at least. And nihilism certainly is a perspective some hold
| within philosophy, so it seems like exactly the right place for
| a statement like that?
| Vecr wrote:
| Nihilism is a terminology debate. Running the planet into the
| sun because the pianos are out of tune is a physics-based
| policy proposal. You want your civilization to gracefully
| degrade as it loses value, rationally shedding components
| that become untenable.
|
| It's likely that at least one person's going to have value up
| to the very end as your civilization loses resources but
| still remains rational, something that can't be said if it
| went into the sun hundreds of years ago.
| dwaltrip wrote:
| Annihilating all life on Earth because we became worse at
| tuning pianos? It's absolutely deranged.
|
| They need to get grounded. Workout, sit under a tree, hug a
| friend, whatever floats their boat.
| digging wrote:
| Deranged? Seriously?
|
| Did it not occur to you that the statement was humorous
| hyperbole, did you actively choose to reject the idea, or are
| you commenting in bad faith?
| dwaltrip wrote:
| Huh, maybe I was a little hasty. Looking again, it does
| seem like a joke.
|
| I still think it's kinda off. It doesn't quite land. Like
| I'm not sure what takeaway they are trying to give. That
| ambiguity makes it much less funny.
|
| It would have worked better if they connected it to the
| point about not automating away these skills / expertise
| with shittier versions, which is a great point and would be
| nice to end on.
| mistermann wrote:
| I doubt that this is what the author intended, but it could
| be interpreted to refer to human's cultural ability to pay
| attention to small, _seemingly_ unimportant (if not unseen)
| details.
|
| Take climate change: most informed people think this is a job
| for science, this is where we should exert our effort and
| invest our funds. But this overlooks that individual human
| opinion and volition plays an absolutely massive role in the
| problem, at many levels. From where I'm sitting, this problem
| is not even on science's radar, beyond general complaints
| about those stupid people who ruin everything (overlooking
| that it was science that invented the technologies that went
| on to enable climate change in the first place...but you see,
| that doesn't count, it is(!) _not a part of "the" chain of
| causality_). Metaphysical causality is something else that is
| basically not on science's radar, or in their Theory of
| "Everything".
|
| But of course, all of this this is _pedantic_ , and can be
| safely ignored, or better yet, suppressed.
| throw4847285 wrote:
| The existence of LessWrong does make me want to steer the Earth
| into the Sun. All that effort supposedly reinventing human
| dialogue in terms of what is maximally rational and instead you
| get insights not far above the level of your below average NYT
| op-ed column.
| ChainOfFools wrote:
| From a certain distance LessWrong looks like the kind of
| place that would appeal to someone like me, so in spite of
| some of the negative characterizations I heard I tried
| browsing it through the strongest steelman goggles I could
| find.
|
| The experience mainly left me with a sober respect for
| Groucho Marx's about not joining clubs that would have me as
| a member.
| zoogeny wrote:
| > Just trust the people who have the best discernment.
|
| I don't like that kind of conclusion. For some reason (the
| context of the article?) it made me think of gold plated digital
| cables.
|
| It's like the old fairy tale of the princess and the pea [1].
| Sometimes when people are complaining about some tiny subtlety
| that we can't recognize ourselves we think they are a princess.
| Other times, someone tries to convince us they are a princess by
| pointing out a subtlety that isn't even there.
|
| There is likely an objective truth about tuning pianos. I am
| suspicious when someone claims they have a super-power that
| cannot be replaced.
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Princess_and_the_Pea
| gosub100 wrote:
| Gold _plating_ has a practical purpose: anti-corrosion. Selling
| cables with audiophile shenanigans that aren 't based in
| science (or gains that are microscopic and inconsequential) is
| where you cross the line into bullshit.
| gizmo wrote:
| Although this article doesn't make the point explicitly, this is
| really about how we can't discern right tails. The Olympics
| nicely illustrate this. In most cases we can only tell which of
| these world class athletes are best by having them perform side-
| by-side. But otherwise who can tell by eye if an athlete is top
| 100 or top 10 worldwide? Even good chess players can't tell by
| the moves alone what the Elo rating of more skilled players are.
|
| We don't know how bad things are is one way to put it. Another
| way is that there are people of extraordinary ability, walking
| among us mere mortals.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| _Even good chess players can 't tell by the moves alone what
| the Elo rating of more skilled players are._
|
| That's an interesting claim, is there any verification for it?
| (I'm honestly curious).
| wavemode wrote:
| Humans can't analyze chess exhaustively. We do so largely by
| pattern recognition. As a result, we mostly cannot accurately
| analyze the chess of players who are significantly stronger
| than we are.
|
| In other words, when a human says "this is a good position
| for white" or "that was a good move" (roughly equivalent to
| saying "that move leads to a good position"), we do so not by
| checking every possible sequence of moves (which would
| require analyzing billions of possible continuations) and
| ensuring that all of them are good. We instead do so by
| intuition - we assess what the position looks like in
| comparison to positions we've analyzed before that we know
| lead to a win for one player or the other. As a concrete
| example: if we see connected passed pawns for white, we're
| probably going to say white is winning, unless mentally we
| can find a continuation where black is able to capture them
| or blockade them.
|
| So all it takes for a chess position to be good without a
| human being able to tell, is for there to exist some sequence
| of moves that leads to a different result from what we
| expected, and we are unable to find that sequence. In the
| example above, a human would wrongly conclude that white is
| winning if there actually does exist some deep and
| complicated series of moves black can play to permanently
| blockade the connected passers.
|
| You see this most commonly with chess engines (i.e. chess
| AI). The engine will make a move, or suggest a move, and the
| human (who may even be one the top players in the world)
| raises their eyebrow. Why, because the move visually seems to
| make no sense and/or serve no purpose. The engine is making
| that move based on some billion-position analysis it
| performed, that the human just isn't capable of. Only after
| the engine ultimately wins the game, does the human go back
| and start to get a sense of what the purpose of that strange-
| looking move was.
| goatlover wrote:
| > The Olympics nicely illustrate this. In most cases we can
| only tell which of these world class athletes are best by
| having them perform side-by-side.
|
| Maybe for the judging events. Race vents have times. You can
| google how fast someone has run or swam before.
| deltaknight wrote:
| Over time this is likely true, but the reality of the top-end
| of sport is that tiny differences in tracks/environments have
| a big impact. So if your goal is to find the best out of a
| group of people at a point in time, I'd suggest the only fair
| way to do it is to pit them against each other at the same
| event.
|
| For an example of this, see how the Paris Olympic pool was
| considered a slow pool due to its depth. Or how wind impacts
| running times, and can't always be fairly accounted for (e.g.
| gusts).
|
| There's also the phenomenon where athletes perform better
| when competing against someone vs competing by themselves.
| TheAceOfHearts wrote:
| I've played this game called Heroes of the Storm for many
| thousands of hours and I still struggle to identify a player's
| skill level. The only time I'm certain that I'm playing against
| a Grand Master-tier opponent is when the match-up allows for a
| lot of counter-play, these players manage to make you feel
| incredibly frustrated at every opportunity. It's also one of
| the best ways to learn, because it teaches you what kind of
| behavior is allowed and possible, and how to punish your
| opponent for their mistakes.
| empiricus wrote:
| In games with elo ratings the skill level is quite clear. If
| I play vs a GrandMaster then I will lose 99% of the time. I
| can watch the replay and see what he does better, but even
| then I will probably understand just a part.
| jmwilson wrote:
| > The space of possible subjects is huge, so on average your
| discernment is terrible, relative to what it could be. This is a
| serious problem if you create a machine that does everyone's job
| for them.
|
| It's a problem if you're building systems as a dilettante. There
| are enough individuals on the planet that people can specialize
| so we need not be at the mercy of systems built by people of
| average discernment.
|
| > If their art dies out, maybe nobody will know how bad all the
| pianos are. And then we'll all have slightly worse pianos than we
| would otherwise have. And I mean if that's the way things are
| going to go, then let's just steer the Earth into the Sun,
| because what's the point of any of this.
|
| One counterexample to this viewpoint is Damascus steel. The exact
| art of making it has been lost (although now effectively
| reproduced), but modern steels surpass the qualities that made
| Damascus steel prized. It turns out those ancient masters didn't
| know bad _their_ steel was. Maybe modern piano tuners don 't know
| how bad their technique is, once the process of "finessing how
| the overtones interact with each other" has been thoroughly
| characterized by present or future technology.
| Loughla wrote:
| I thought that it was precisely because ancient masters knew
| how poor their steel was that Damascus even became a thing. Is
| that not correct? I have always read that it was a technique to
| overcome bad base metal.
| bluGill wrote:
| Pretty much. We know how it was produced, but we have better
| steel available and so nobody is willing to go through that
| much work to produce an inferior product. If you want a good
| sword you start with good modern steel and treat it like the
| book says - which includes give it as little time in the
| furnace as you can get by while shaping it. If you want a
| sword that looks pretty you can cheat to apply decorations
| that look like Damascus from a distance and that is good
| enough (you might or might not start with good steel, but if
| you do it is better than a real Damascus sword). Nobody has
| the patience to do things the old way as there is no
| advantage to it.
|
| If the old way actually had advantages someone would do it.
| In the case of Damascus we have enough science to know it
| wasn't as good. There are other areas where people to go
| through the effort to create something the old way - either
| it isn't much more work (it may be more work, just not too
| much more), or the old way is somehow better.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Wait, I thought those Indian wootz ingots _also_ were blessed
| with being able to start with better than average magnetite ?
| huijzer wrote:
| Very true. My favorite example of this is academia. When you do a
| MSc everything seems nice and some things feel a bit weird but it
| is what it is. Then over time you realize how misaligned the
| incentives are with what is actually useful for the general
| population. But the whole system is writing with much jargon and
| emphasizing that they followed all procedures and peer-review. So
| the population thinks it must be useful, or at least cannot point
| out why it isn't.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| Remind me of the florida keys syndrom where each generation think
| it's a great fishing spot but doesn't have a frame of reference
| for how much the fishes actually became less numerous and
| smaller:
|
| https://earimediaprodweb.azurewebsites.net/Api/v1/Multimedia...
| keiferski wrote:
| I get this feeling a lot when reading old books. People used to
| be...more interesting? Or at least there were more interesting
| places like Paris in the 20s. Today the "artistic" hubs in the
| world feel boring compared to NYC in the 80s or Paris circa
| 1890-1930, but you wouldn't know it if you didn't read the
| older books.
| renewiltord wrote:
| That's just a property of the fact that the interesting
| people all know each other and the uninteresting people don't
| know them. In some sense, Sam Altman, Emmett Shear, Eliezer
| Yudkowsky, Paul Graham, Elon Musk, John Carmack are in a
| shared sphere. And they _are_ interesting whether you think
| they are smart or not.
|
| You don't hear about John-Pierre Duvage from the coffee shop
| because he wasn't interesting. In the future, they will talk
| about the places where these people met.
|
| Groupies always wonder where the musicians are. The musicians
| find each other easily.
| keiferski wrote:
| Those people you mentioned are interesting and intelligent
| but I wouldn't call them artistic, or diverse
| intellectually. And more importantly they aren't "a scene",
| in a physical place, like Paris or lower Manhattan were.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Their sphere almost certainly include the rest that those
| outside barely know of. For every well-known Aella in the
| group, there is someone more strange and esoteric with
| local influence only within. The strange and interesting
| are never as legible to their contemporaries as they are
| to those who come after because one's influence is only
| clear after one has sufficiently influenced.
|
| A thing that strikes me is that people in the Bay Area
| frequently claim that it has nothing interesting, but my
| friends hosted a 30-person event locally that had musical
| compositions, art, and talks about all sorts of things. A
| local festival. No one outside us knew. I suspect that,
| like us, there are numerous groups of people out there
| and that this sort of stuff is common. Only those with
| breakout ideas make it out, but the groups themselves
| comprise individuals who, if you teased out their tales,
| would make good stories.
|
| If my friend groups span libertarian billionaire techies
| and union working-class ironworkers, I must assume that
| the rest of these groups are similarly diverse.
|
| For my part, I have found the Bay Area a fascinating
| place full of fascinating people. I am thankful to have
| found my way here. Sometimes I think not even Moll
| Flanders has lived more exciting a life than many of
| those I have met here.
| supportengineer wrote:
| What all those people have in common is wealthy, healthy,
| well-connected parents.
| barryrandall wrote:
| The role of alcohol, drugs, and other mind-altering
| substances in history can't be ignored. A lot of these
| fascinating people were intentionally and unintentionally
| drugging themselves.
| keiferski wrote:
| Definitely a factor but I think the movement of social life
| online and away from physical spaces probably played a
| bigger role.
| 8note wrote:
| Many were also dealing with tuberculosis, and doing their
| best to square the wasting from TB with how their social
| class/status is supposed make them
| ruined wrote:
| it's material and political. the most interesting people have
| enough resources to focus on non-survival tasks, and the
| individual or collective ability to act freely. today, people
| generally have higher expenses, less free time, and there are
| more cops. you'll still see interesting culture among
|
| 1. cities where living expenses are generally high, so
| discretionary spending is low, but a subculture has
| successfully secured low-cost housing or workspace somewhere
| the cops can't easily go.
|
| 2. rural areas where wages are generally low, so
| discretionary spending is low, but a subculture has
| successfully exploited region-exclusive exports or
| experiences somewhere the cops don't bother to go.
|
| 3. wealthy people
|
| 4. indigenous people that have resisted the incursion of wage
| labor and state power
| armchairhacker wrote:
| > today, people generally have higher expenses, less free
| time, and there are more cops
|
| Do you have sources for these?
| LUmBULtERA wrote:
| I found the above comment an interesting thought, but
| then it raises the question -- how do you measure
| "interesting culture"?
| scruple wrote:
| Read a (auto)biography of a person who grew up or spent
| considerable time in an area where you have experience. It's
| illuminating.
| thecupisblue wrote:
| Because we are more socially interconnected, so the strings
| of society that keep us connected are also the ones
| constraining us. The "risk" of non-uniformity outweighs the
| gain for most people.
|
| Back then, doing something that society deemes
| risky/provocative/condemns, as an artist, a musician, a
| politician would be seen or heard only by the people present,
| everyone else would have second or third hand accounts of it,
| and that would be maybe tomorrow, maybe the week after, maybe
| the month after.
|
| You could get drunk in a tavern, get in a brawl and paint the
| owner's wife posing as a nude boar. The people who would know
| about it first hand would be only the people who directly saw
| it. Your boss wouldn't hear about it unless he is in direct
| contact with the people there, which would be rare.
|
| Nowadays, getting in a brawl would end up with someone
| calling the cops immediately, someone posting it on
| instagram, someone calling your job to get you fired with
| probably a dozen articles next day "drunken fool fights local
| bar owner after insulting his wife".
|
| These social constraints, the speed of information and the
| interconnectedness of it all is constraining us into
| uniformity, as behaviour against the graph is more and more
| ostracised - unless you have enough social capital to afford
| it, at which point it is rewarded.
|
| So of course we are less interesting - we are being forced
| into uniformity.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| _> If their art dies out, maybe nobody will know how bad all the
| pianos are._
|
| I'm already seeing this happening in a number of industries
| (including software development).
|
| It starts with the consumers accepting crap, and works its way
| back.
|
| That's why I think AI-produced output will be just fine, for most
| folks.
| vundercind wrote:
| The vast majority of content that entertains people online is
| just the Nokia Snake Game but for writing or film. Near-zero-
| value time-wasters. Hard to make it much worse or ruin it when
| it's already worth about as much as used tissue paper. That's
| also why I don't relate to concerns about what might happen to
| the Web without ad revenue--nearly all of what that pays for
| has nearly zero value and is easily replaced by plentiful other
| low-value things.
|
| (Yes, I do include this comment among the low-value junk)
| pimlottc wrote:
| That's an insult to Nokia Snake. Nokia Snake doesn't have
| ads, loot boxes, in-app purchases, collectibles, social media
| integration or any of dozens of other dark pattern that are
| practically standard in casual games now.
| vundercind wrote:
| Oh, it's not shittified, I just mean it's a way to pass the
| time that's basically interchangeable with tons and tons of
| other ways to pass the time. That's most of what people do
| on the Web, and that's what most of the content's for. It's
| all solitaire (the real card game) or reading the magazines
| in the doctor's waiting room. Just something to do.
| Suppafly wrote:
| >I'm already seeing this happening in a number of industries
| (including software development).
|
| It comes up in all sorts of unexpected places in technology,
| once things are overly optimized for price often the original
| better version goes away. Like right now you can't buy a good
| cassette tape player, because the only ones made now all use
| the same mechanism that sucks. They stopped making good
| mechanisms like 20 years ago when people mostly stopped buying
| cassettes.
| digging wrote:
| > I'm already seeing this happening in a number of industries
| (including software development).
|
| Hm, that's a good point.
|
| I see other commenters getting hung up on the idea that "in a
| world where nobody can tell that a piano is 0.01% out of tune,
| does it even count as out of tune?"
|
| But that's just a toy example, and though the author _already
| did directly address it_ , many don't seem to understand the
| impact. Maybe it helps to put it into other terms.
|
| I can tell when there's problems in software that I couldn't
| write. Similarly with most systems I interact with. For society
| to lose the knowledge of making $system perfectly doesn't mean
| that nobody will ever know, it means everybody who interacts
| with $system will just be a little bit less happy than they
| would be otherwise.
|
| Our _societal fitness_ will be reduced because we 'll all be a
| little less happy, a little less healthy, etc. Saying "it
| doesn't matter if this thing is a little worse and nobody knows
| how it could be better" is like saying a parasite is fine
| because you've been living with it for years.
| philipwhiuk wrote:
| Personally I don't see any evidence that this is happening on
| a broader level. If anything humanity is diversifying and
| specialising more, not less.
| scruple wrote:
| > I'm already seeing this happening in a number of industries
| (including software development).
|
| Hear, here, and there's nothing I can do about it.
| yogurtboy wrote:
| A lot of people commenting are referring to hobbyist art, like
| TFA's piano tuning, or audio cables, or sewing equestrian tack.
|
| The point (that the article alludes to but definitely does not
| spell out) is that, with the advent of general AI, this style of
| artistry will die in EVERY field if we allow it to; not just art
| and media, but engineering, technology, policy too.
|
| This to me is a HUGE problem with the introduction of these
| consumer-ready AIs. You may be able to say "agh I'm an engineer
| and I wouldn't let this happen in my project!" but some places
| just want their dang power plants, whether or not they have a
| host of lifelong nuclear engineering in their region. I worry
| about a power plant that has a fault when the only true experts
| are few and far between.
| Spivak wrote:
| What do you think makes AI special? Technology advances have
| been killing artisans in every field for as long as we've had
| them.
| beedeebeedee wrote:
| These new AI tools have the potential to be more personally
| comprehensive and have more widespread adoption than slavery
| and other forms of servitude. The loss of skill (or lack of
| development) that the parent commenter is referring to has
| been discussed as widely as Hegel's master-slave dialectic to
| Idiocracy. Individuals and cultures that use these tools to
| replace the innate tools they have developed become
| qualitatively less sophisticated, unless they are pressured
| by some other external need, or their own self-mastery. I
| suspect we will have a mix of all these situations across
| fields and cultures that adopt these new AI tools, and will
| need to focus on not only making the tools better, but
| pressuring ourselves to be better (i.e., we replaced physical
| labor through previous tools, but have only partly
| accommodated that lack of physical development through gym
| culture, sports, and more back to the earth activities like
| hiking- personal transportation being one of the first things
| to get replaced by new tools like domesticated animals, bikes
| and cars). If it happens too fast, or we have other
| catastrophes, we might need to bring back non-military
| conscription focused on the environment (as in William
| James's lecture on the Moral Equivalent of War), in order to
| prop up our nation state and technological culture that it
| has provided the foundation for.
| blargey wrote:
| Even with the most advanced pre-genAI technology, making
| sounds and images is a manual craft that requires one to
| develop not just technical skill / tool knowledge, but the
| concepts to define and articulate what you actually want.
| Intentionality and vision. The "what you want" becomes more
| complex and nuanced just as much as the "what you can", by
| necessity.
|
| GenAI not only fills in the blanks for "what you want" based
| on a vague text prompt, with the lowest common denominator of
| its training data, it provides no means or motive to develop
| intentionality. In its current form, it's a cognitive dead
| end, endlessly providing a statistically smudged shadow of
| the detailed knowledge and conceptual space that gave birth
| to the data it was trained on. A picture is worth a thousand
| words, and today's cutting edge models still forgot most of
| them.
|
| It could get better. But it could also stagnate in a very
| dystopian way if it discourages learning traditional art
| without becoming a real alternative that continues to produce
| artists and not just consumers.
| yogurtboy wrote:
| This is totally true, but the rate of this death has exploded
| with the advent of computers, and is accelerating as LLMs
| become more sophisticated.
|
| At the very least, to me it seems like things are finally
| happening fast enough for humans to notice a trend. I think I
| read the phrase "faster than generational rate", meaning that
| things happen at a frequency that we can observe in our
| lifetimes (advent of computers is faster than generational,
| but the development of agricultural advances really isn't)
| tantalor wrote:
| See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luddite
| taco_emoji wrote:
| > with the advent of general AI
|
| which is still nowhere near reality
| ithkuil wrote:
| It's still worth discussing what may the effects be once it
| does become available.
|
| It's hard to know exactly when. We're bad at estimating.
|
| "progress is always slower than you think in the short term,
| and faster than you think in the long term."
| yogurtboy wrote:
| I agree with this, but I also think that while we're not at
| 100% general AI, we are experiencing a gradual continuous
| approach towards it. The problems start now, and we have
| the opportunity to solve them while they're not as serious.
| yogurtboy wrote:
| I almost agree with you; I would support that we do not
| currently have GAI, but I think we are near it, and
| regardless of how close we are to it, we currently have a
| lesser version of the same thing, which means a lesser
| version of the same problem.
| lelandbatey wrote:
| People can learn things when they need to solve problems,
| forging "expert-enough people" out of otherwise lower-skilled
| folks with incredible speed. This only happens in the face of
| problems that need solving, and so far AI seems to be _amazing_
| at generating "problems that need solving" by being just good
| enough to get going but not so good as to solve all the
| unforeseen or unknown problems you encounter once you _are_
| going. I don 't think this pattern will result in a world of
| only upside or purely better solutions than before AI hit the
| scene, but I also don't feel like it's quite as apocalyptic as
| many fear.
| yogurtboy wrote:
| This is a good point; I agree that it's good that we have a
| nuanced and realistic (as opposed to pessimistic) view of the
| situation. As someone else pointed out regarding the Dunning-
| Kruger effect, the less knowledgeable we are the worse we are
| at understanding our own level of knowledge. Regarding your
| comment, not understanding the "unforeseen or unknown
| problems you encounter once you are going" could be
| catastrophic in certain fields.
| lesuorac wrote:
| I don't think you need AI for this.
|
| The title is actually what Dunning & Kruger found in their
| paper. Poor performers have no idea the difference between a
| poor performance and a good performance. If they knew how bad
| they were then they could tell the difference between good and
| bad. And of course, because of how quantiles work, there's
| going to be 50% of people in the bottom half.
|
| (The classic usage of Dunning-Kruger effect to mean poor
| performers rate themselves higher than good performers isn't
| what the paper is about and you're welcome to read it [1])
|
| [1]:
| https://www.hep.ucl.ac.uk/~eo/stuff/unskilled%20and%20unawar...
| dsjoerg wrote:
| We don't know how different, and how good, things can be until we
| try.
|
| Until some of us invest in discernment, invest in the art of it,
| and the rest of us give it a listen or a look.
|
| Some cultures end up adopting the new level of discernment
| wholesale.
|
| And in some cultures, the refinement slowly slips away and things
| revert back to the sloppy, lazy, easier-to-sustain base level.
|
| As others have noted, our time and attention are finite. Both as
| producers and consumers of culture. I care about some things and
| ignore others, both as a producer and a consumer. We individually
| and collectively choose which aspects of life get the attention
| and the love.
|
| These are the aesthetics of life.
| JackFr wrote:
| There is an alternate explanation. The piano is fine. The soloist
| is an asshole and likes to make people jump through hoops. The
| conductor does or doesn't realize this, but either way doesn't
| want to upset the soloist. The piano tuner knows the piano is
| fine but doesn't mind getting paid so plays along. The author
| plays along, unwilling to point out them emperor has no clothes.
| mordae wrote:
| 1. If we really need consistently good piano sound quality, maybe
| we should replace the unreliable pianos overly susceptible to
| humidity and wear with computer synthesizers that can be told
| exactly how to sound? I mean that leaves just the speaker housing
| and wear on the input interface.
|
| 2. Maybe music is actually a hobby and not really necessary to be
| produced reliably. Maybe the fun is in the negotiation with
| instruments and people?
|
| If the priority is a diverse, fun, culture, maybe don't structure
| all economy and politics around the idea forcing people to
| justify their existence.
| wildermuthn wrote:
| Counterpoint -- good-enough technology prevents over-
| optimization, where we pay too high of a cost for too-marginal
| gains. It is generally better to reduce the cost of a 98%
| solution than to maintain the cost of a 99% solution. There will
| be exceptions for domains that require a 100% solution, but piano
| tuning is not one of them.
| aners_xyz wrote:
| In most cases piano tuners are probably operating within the
| confines of what's realistic with regards to cost and time. I
| mean even in this post they did exactly that. Not sure the
| point you are making
| Aardwolf wrote:
| > 'God's prank on musicians' (where He cruelly rigged the
| structure of reality such that (3/2)^n!=2^m for any integers n, m
| but IT'S SO CLOSE CMON MAN)
|
| What exactly is this about? Other than (3/2)^12 being 129.7 which
| is somewhat close to 2^7 I don't see much other being close.
|
| Also, musician's mathematics are so weird, talking about '11'
| while there are 12 notes, '5th' while no 5 is involved, ...
| vaylian wrote:
| There seems to be something missing from the problem statement.
| If I can choose any integers n, m, then I will just choose
| n=m=0 which gives a trivial equation.
| 8note wrote:
| That says the issue though. The only time you can tune a
| piano is when the frequency is 0 - that is, that there's no
| sound being played
| recursive wrote:
| Doesn't mean that. 2^0 is non-zero. I interpret it to mean
| that every note must have the same non-zero frequency. In
| other words, the ratio between any two notes is 2^0 = 1.
| 331c8c71 wrote:
| 3:2 is the perfect fifth. 2:1 is the octave. Hence if you climb
| (or descend) by perfect fifths you never align with the notes
| you get if you climb (descend) by octaves.
|
| Look up "just intonation" and "equal temperament" if you are
| interested. Also "The Well-Tempered Clavier" is highly
| recommended for listening!
| heikkilevanto wrote:
| Just a side note: "The Well-Tempered Clavier" is not at all
| the same as the "Equally Tuned Piano".
|
| Bach was certainly aware of the equal tuning, where all
| intervals were the same. It had been used on lutes for some
| centuries. But with harpsichords, and to some extent pipe
| organs, an equal temperament was not what Bach or his
| contemporaries wanted - it didn't have a single pure
| interval!
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| They are more like ordinals than "math" numbers the way you're
| thinking. It's the fifth scale degree, not 5 of something.
|
| The 11/12 contradiction, or seven notes in an octave too, is
| just because it's essentially 1-indexed. Interestingly indian
| classical music is distantly related through the shared proto-
| indo-european cultural history but counts it differently. They
| call the octave the saptak, etymologically related to the
| "sept" root for seven in romance languages.
| zahlman wrote:
| The author is mistaken in the details. 12 5ths are stacked in
| order to get back to the start note (7 octaves higher). They're
| called "5ths" because they're the fifth scale degree, i.e. 4
| diatonic scale (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diatonic_scale)
| notes above the start point (because they start counting at 1),
| which is an interval of 3 tones and a semitone. With the notes
| "equally spaced" (according to the logarithm of frequency,
| because we perceive intervals according to pitch ratio), the
| semitone becomes equal to exactly half the tone (despite the
| name, that isn't guaranteed for other tuning systems!) - thus,
| the interval that we play on an "equal tempered" piano as a
| "perfect fifth" is 700 "cents" i.e. a frequency ratio of
| 2^(7/12).
|
| Meanwhile, per music theory going all the way back to the
| ancient Greeks, this interval _ought to be_ exactly 3 /2, which
| is slightly larger. Contra what was written in the article,
| these intervals are thus tuned _flat_ from that Pythagorean
| ideal. The difference is about 2 cents (where a cent is defined
| as a frequency ratio of 2^(1 /1200), effectively). Most people
| wouldn't be able to hear the difference
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-
| noticeable_difference#Mus...).
|
| Which is to say: yes, 129.746... might not seem that close to
| 128, but 1.498... is close enough to 1.5 that it lets us have
| music that sounds right (if sterile, according to some) in
| every key.
|
| Other intervals possible in this tuning arrangement (i.e,
| powers of 2^(1/12)) can approximate other reasonably-consonant
| intervals with varying accuracy.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Prank or gift? The fact that we get an approximation to 3/2 in
| one of the best bases ever (12) is sort of a miracle.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's going to be okay. The wonder of the Internet is that you can
| create small communities found among the billions that inhabit
| the Earth. And your communities can create small areas of deep
| interest. The drive to make something a certain way is built into
| many of us as humans. It will not break in the face of some
| degree of standard quality.
|
| As an example of a triviality:
|
| Costco has pens to put your cart in. They also have people going
| around retrieving carts. They then have a tractor move the carts
| to where people can take them into the store. Many people leave
| their carts in the pens. Some do not. The other day, the carts
| were overflowing from the pen I'd walked to, but I could see the
| reason was that there were two carts misaligned deep in the pen.
|
| A valid and reasonable thing to do is to have gone to a different
| pen. Many would have accepted adding my cart to the overflow as
| well. But a desire for order caused me to realign the carts and
| solve the overflow. If I had not, nothing much would have gone
| wrong. Because I did, no greater result was created.
|
| I am paid a large sum of money and any marginal additional time I
| spend I can create more money (since I work in HFT). The cart
| wrangler is paid very little. It is not comparatively
| advantageous. The work was wasted work, in some sense. But I had
| to do it. I was compelled to do so.
|
| This is a useless thing, but there are people who feel that
| desire I felt there who will feel it for other things. To make a
| better-sounding piano, the perfect dish, to master joinery. And
| things will be good for them and those they serve.
|
| And that is good. And that is enough. Because total utility is
| the integral of utility across all. And less individual over more
| participants can sum to higher overall utility.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| This is another instance of an insidious modern meme that states
| that people with non-mainstream skill X should be okay with it
| dying out because it's not mainstream. It's just a long-winded
| way to call something irrelevant without actually saying that.
|
| But we know we can't call it that, so we dress it up in pseudo-
| intellectual bullshit, citing "pragmatism" and using
| misdirection: "oh, but _who_ can actually appreciate such an
| obscure thing? " It's exceedingly presumptuous on the speaker's
| part.
|
| The world's a big place, but it's only as big as we perceive it
| to be. Don't let people who need it to be smaller tell you what
| to think.
| kazinator wrote:
| Hearing things the easy part. The finer you split the hair, the
| harder it is to actually translate that to a tuning action, with
| a piano. There are no fine-grained worm gears in the tuning pegs.
| The pegs are just metal sticks stuck into a hole, prevented from
| rotating (going flat) by static friction. You cannot adjust them
| smoothly; when you turn them with the tuning wrench (properly
| called a "tuning hammer"!) you must overcome static friction to
| make them move. At that point, they will jump. If you're looking
| to make a very fine adjustment, it will be almost certainly
| overshot. So you must do something like jump to a sharper pitch,
| and from there try to relax it by jumping down to the target
| pitch. (And that also results in better tuning stability: lower
| likelihood it will slip.) If the target is very narrowly defined,
| this can take multiple attempts. The piano has 88 keys, the bulk
| of which have three strings: have fun!
| stcredzero wrote:
| _If their art dies out, maybe nobody will know how bad all the
| pianos are. And then we 'll all have slightly worse pianos than
| we would otherwise have. And I mean if that's the way things are
| going to go, then let's just steer the Earth into the Sun,
| because what's the point of any of this._
|
| I think a similar thing happened to journalism ethics over the
| course of the 20th century up through the 1st quarter of the
| 21st.
|
| The XKCD counterpoint: https://xkcd.com/915/
|
| (I think this shows how arrogant Randall Munroe can be sometimes.
| He does a lot of great stuff, but when he's wrong, he's
| egregiously so!)
| 8note wrote:
| If you extend your journalism one back a quarter, you lose that
| trend, instead, we start and end with the fine art of creating
| click bait. Yellow journalists followed by Buzzfeed bloggers
| patrickhogan1 wrote:
| AI scales expert discernment
| sirspacey wrote:
| We've already lost a tremendous amount of craft over the last
| 1,000 years. There are almost no craftspeople left in the world
| who can do the kind of moldings & designs you see in renaissance
| era buildings.
|
| Having been a classical musician, what I noticed about getting
| tuning right is there is a body sensation of lightness/breath
| that is palpable if you are a classical enthusiast - even if you
| can't distinguish the sound you are hearing from an "ideal
| memory" of what it should sound like.
|
| But the largest reduction in auditory tech has already happened -
| mp3 compression.
|
| Uncompressed audio is radically different and richer than low fi
| digital compression, but almost everything we hear everywhere is
| coming through streaming services.
|
| The rare delights of extreme tech built around the first
| principles of a discipline like sound/music are achieved by
| overcoming very difficult and confounding problems. They are
| technical wonders as much as they are refined experiences.
|
| I once worked with a scientist who had permanently solved the
| issue of mic feedback. Imagine what revolution that would be for
| AV use cases everywhere! But it required a radical shift in the
| protocols used to build both mic and speakers, so even though
| Sony optioned it there's not a single product you can buy with
| the tech.
|
| Like the Internet, everything is really just a semi-poor
| adaptation to a semi-poorly design system. Fundamental protocol
| changes (like ipv4 to ipv6) are brutally hard.
|
| We like to believe that modern society is hard-wired for
| improvement, but it seems mostly hard-wired for minimal change
| that delivers marginal improvements detectable by the lowest
| common denominator consumer/user.
|
| To me, that makes it all the more extraordinary when genuine
| protocol level changes - like EV cars - are made reality.
| austin-cheney wrote:
| Just in renaissance? There is virtually nobody left in the
| workforce that can write JavaScript. Most of the old timers
| have gotten out, and the youngsters are an epic example of the
| article: the loss of perspective to self-reflect due to a
| machine (library) that does their jobs for them. Case in point:
| take React and querySelectors away and watch the sadness unfold
| like an apocalypse movie.
|
| Yes, yes, I know there are still people who can/do write
| JavaScript... they just are not statistically represented in
| the workforce.
| heikkilevanto wrote:
| Great composers were never "statistically represented in the
| workforce". Just like rock stars today are not. Yet they
| still exist, and have a positive impact on the life of many
| people.
| JasserInicide wrote:
| _To me, that makes it all the more extraordinary when genuine
| protocol level changes - like EV cars - are made reality._
|
| Not how I see them at all. They're just as incremental and
| actually overall a worse experience. The only "benefit" they
| have is their acceleration.
|
| Everything is touchscreen in the cabin which is demonstrably
| worse. There's a persistent Internet connection sending all my
| data to a black hole where it will get used in ways I don't
| approve of.
|
| If I want to fuck off for a weekend somewhere, I need to plan
| the getaway around places that have recharge ports. And when I
| do get there, I need to figure out what a "charging network"
| is, download the correct app for the charging network, fight
| with the fucking app/charging port to get my payment
| information where it needs to be and that the charging port
| recognizes my payment, and finally wait for several hours vs. a
| 5 minute (max) refueling stop with an ICE.
|
| And these are just some of the problems I have with them. The
| core tech of EVs may be a big game-changer but everything else
| about the EV experience can fuck off in its current iteration.
| natdempk wrote:
| > Uncompressed audio is radically different and richer than low
| fi digital compression, but almost everything we hear
| everywhere is coming through streaming services.
|
| Out of curiosity, have you blind A/B tested yourself with the
| various streaming service "high" quality MP3 encodings vs.
| lossless? (like https://abx.digitalfeed.net/) I agree that
| there is some difference that you can hear in certain parts of
| songs listening on high-end equipment/headphones (stuff that is
| greater quality than >99.9% of the listening population has),
| but really to me it would be hard to call it radically
| different. Obviously if you are below 320 MP3s there are more
| noticeable compromises that do ruin things one you notice.
| J_Shelby_J wrote:
| You are probably right, but I take OP as metaphorically
| speaking.
|
| Recently I went to a local orchestra performance, and I was
| absolutely blown away by the sound. It was overwhelming in a
| way spotify never is. It was like a full body experience.
| I've been to the orchestra before, but it's been a few years
| and I just forgot how powerful music can be.
|
| Kinda like how most people listen to low quality audio
| streams, on low quality earbuds/soundbars. Hell, I torrented
| a video recently because it wasn't available to buy, and
| again, was blown away because the quality was so high
| compared to the streaming I pay for. I think in general,
| we're all just becoming used to the mediocre.
| natdempk wrote:
| Well, it's important to differentiate what actually matters
| in cases like this otherwise we just get into a weird
| luddite place of complaining about things that don't
| actually matter.
|
| Here it is the listening medium and environment where an
| orchestra hall is a physical building built at a cost many
| orders of magnitude more expensive than speakers
| specifically for the experience of listening to live music
| compared to listening to something on a home speaker or
| phone.
|
| To me It's interesting that you assume Spotify is the
| problem, whereas its actually the listening medium you are
| using Spotify through. In the case of audio, you could
| listen to Spotify recordings on sound systems that will
| basically blow you away in the same way a live orchestra
| will, but they cost probably 10's of thousands of dollars.
| For example at the higher-end of setups people describe it
| being hard to differentiate between concert recordings and
| actual concerts, and this should be expected with what we
| know about audio.
|
| I do agree though that quality degradation as a means of
| meeting cost and false-repackaging of that as higher
| quality is annoying. Especially in streaming video, things
| are advertised as 4K, but that ignores bitrate and we have
| the potential infrastructure to deliver experiences that
| are way better like streaming the equivalent bitrate of a
| Bluray, but we've kind of fallen into a place of "good
| enough" where most people don't know or appreciate what is
| possible. Audio is kind of similar, but there is maybe more
| of an argument that cost of listening systems means we're
| at a happy-medium of cost vs. quality and you can pretty
| much buy the level of experience you want there.
| 015a wrote:
| One really, really critical piece of this: our ability to
| discern quality is predominated by how much quality we've had
| the opportunity to discern in our lifetimes.
|
| Jeff has eaten at ten thousand restaurants around the world
| in his lifetime. Nick drinks Soylent for 80% of his calories;
| the other 20% often comes from McDonalds or Chipotle. They've
| both eaten at this Bistro you are considering getting dinner
| at; after asking for their opinion, would you assign more
| weight to Jeff's or Nick's?
|
| Its true that 99% of the population cannot discern the
| difference between lossless and ~320kbps lossy audio
| encoding. Is that _truly_ a "natural" phenomena? Or is it
| learned through existence in an inevitable world where high
| quality music and high-quality listening devices aren't
| available to most people? What impacts does this have as that
| drop in quality feeds upstream: when producers and musicians
| make music with Airpods because that's what they grew up
| with, and its what most of their audience uses?
|
| Music is a less interesting domain of this discussion
| because, really, most platforms do lossless now. Spotify is
| adding it soon. Its basically the default on Apple Music and
| Tidal. AM has genuine multi-channel Dolby Atmos. Extremely
| high quality music consumption has never been easier or more
| accessible (well, a 3.5mm jack would be nice, but that's a
| sailed ship).
|
| IMO: Video is a far, far more tragic loss. Netflix charges
| more for access to 4K content; but you'd be a fool to pay it,
| because as many who have streamed both would attest, "4K
| isn't worth it you can barely tell the difference between
| 1080p". If you played these same people a Bluray of that
| release, their minds would be blown. Near-100% of people can
| discern the difference, and would prefer the Bluray; but
| Netflix will not stream that quality, because its an order of
| magnitude more bandwidth usage. What's more: Many recent
| productions are simply never available in this highest-
| quality format. Because 99% of content is consumed via
| Compressed Stream: TV panel quality at the same price point
| has stagnated or even dropped over the past five years. I
| hope you'll believe that some major productions may soon have
| a conversation like "Why do we need these five figure dollar
| 16k cameras, this is just going to stream on netflix, just
| grab a basic Sony DSLR from B&H and let's save some money."
|
| Welcome to Enshitification.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > Your discernment in a subject often improves as you dedicate
| time and attention to that subject. The space of possible
| subjects is huge, so on average your discernment is terrible,
| relative to what it could be. This is a serious problem if you
| create a machine that does everyone's job for them.
|
| This is the "first level" of expertise. Yes, you will notice this
| as you delve into more and more areas, but you also find there
| are a lot of common modes and human patterns that inextricably
| become part of the subject matter. Having a grasp on this allows
| you to very quickly get to the intermediate level in most
| subjects.
|
| Consequently, this is why I dislike modern math's continued
| fascination with Greek symbols, when Greek or Latin is not taught
| anymore. It creates an artificial barrier to entry that's very
| frustrating.
| auggierose wrote:
| I find German letters much more problematic. Greek symbols are
| very readable.
| akira2501 wrote:
| Admittedly.. these days it's much easier. In the 1990s and
| prior to unicode it was a small nightmare. It's the same
| issue that Wikipedia still generally uses generated images to
| display equations, so unless you know the name of the symbol
| or can type it, you're going to have a hard time finding any
| reference to it.
| moi2388 wrote:
| What an absolutely lovely little read that was
| beryilma wrote:
| If Keith Jarrett can produce such a sublime music as his Koln
| Concert on a broken piano, perhaps the level of perfection
| mentioned in the article is just professional pedantry. After
| all, isn't an artist a better artist when they can use their
| medium to maximum effect no matter its imperfections.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_K%C3%B6ln_Concert
| lalalandland wrote:
| I was thinking the same. Technical perfection and artistic
| perfection on a Venn diagram are two not entirely overlapping
| circles
| biztos wrote:
| Two great examples from art are Michelangelo (look at the
| women) and Caravaggio (look carefully at anything).
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| Sometimes precision dies, no one cares, and that's ok. There are
| vanishingly few people who can maintain pipe organs, which is ok
| because historically speaking relatively few people want to
| listen to pipe organs anymore.
|
| We can't prioritize everything all the time forever.
| steelframe wrote:
| Having grown up in the generation of DVDs and Blu-rays I'm cursed
| with the inability to ignore streaming video compression
| artifacts such as blocking, banding, and ringing. They alone can
| get me annoyed enough that it breaks my engagement with the film.
| Any sort of hiccup from packet loss resulting in complete
| distortion of the video or buffering sends me into a "fsck this
| sh!t" rage. It completely ruins the experience for me. That means
| I will never watch a film that I really care about via streaming.
|
| I don't have a lot of time to watch films these days, so when I
| do I always opt for a physical disc to make sure I actually enjoy
| the experience. In addition I've noticed that it often costs $20
| to "rent" a new release via streaming and $30 to buy an actual
| disc, so it doesn't make any financial sense to me at all to
| "rent" a crap streaming experience for 2/3 of the cost of buying
| a high-quality copy of the film.
|
| But now there's another problem. I've noticed that many films
| being released today are streaming-only. One I looked at last
| week could be "rented" from a streaming service for $20, "bought"
| from said streaming service for $30, or bought on physical media
| in _JULY 2025_. That 's right, an entire _year_ from now.
|
| In years past I've frequently made it a habit to head down to the
| local Target in the late afternoon to see what new releases they
| have in the electronics department. However the last time I went
| there the Blu-ray section had been completely removed. No doubt
| because studios are no longer releasing new films on Blu-ray
| until a motherfscking YEAR after they make it available on
| streaming. When I asked an associate where the films were he
| apologetically stammered, "Uh, yeah, sorry, we're, uh, turning
| down our film section. There are a few stragglers left at the end
| of the aisle over there."
|
| Now there is no way for me to legally get a new release film that
| I can tolerate watching within a reasonable amount of time. I
| would garner that it's primarily an artifact (no pun intended) of
| the current generation having grown up with crap streaming
| videos, and so they are adapted to it and don't have expectations
| for quality like those of us from the DVD and Blu-ray generation
| have.
|
| I suppose this is another way it goes to show that knowing how
| bad most things are and precisely how they're bad is more a curse
| than a blessing. As I walked out of Target empty-handed I admit I
| did have a feeling somewhat like wanting the Earth to be steered
| into the sun.
|
| And then I jumped on VPN and pirated the film I wanted to watch.
| dimatura wrote:
| For what it's worth, I recently visited a thrift store and I
| was somewhat surprised to see a sizable DVD/bluray section. I
| imagine there won't be any new releases there, though.
| steelframe wrote:
| The part I left out was that I also went to a thrift store
| and found a couple of used 1080p Blu-rays for older films for
| around $5 each. There were almost no 4k Blu-rays though, and
| no new releases.
| agnos wrote:
| This reminds me of the current research in ML of "simplifying"
| models for inference (pruning, distillation, etc.). Our model of
| reality is so imprecise, can we be confident that all the local
| details are insignificant to the global context?
| semanticjudo wrote:
| Reminds me of the narcissism of small differences:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differen...
|
| Few people will care because only a few are capable of caring and
| the world keeps on turning.
| exitzer0 wrote:
| It only takes a single visit to an old house built around the
| turn of century to realize that the artistry, craftsmanship, and
| all of the other skills needed to make such a thing today are
| incredibly rare.
|
| Everyone seems to think and say that they want some for of AI to
| arrive and free us from all that grind that is beneath us.
|
| I am just reminded of this TNG episode.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA9fcTJGXf0
| Spellman wrote:
| This is classic Survivorship Bias
| bena wrote:
| People like the piano tuner in question are the kinds of people I
| love talking to and watching work. They _know_ these tiny minute
| details of things most of us only have a gross understanding of.
| They know the ins and outs of the craft they 've chosen and have
| a true joy in working it.
| leshow wrote:
| The book "Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion
| Against Big Tech" covers lots of stories like this from the
| industrial revolution. The luddites resisted having their work
| taken over by machines. The machines produced worse quality, but
| were cheaper and lowered the skill level required to do the work.
| It also made output predictable, allowed people to be bunched
| into factories and enabled child labour and other kinds of
| exploitation.
|
| At the time people resisted having their autonomy taken away by
| smashing the machines and burning factories. It's a great book
| that will surprise you with how similar many of the situations we
| deal with today are.
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