I even have a Talos workstation. Open hardware motherboard and open spec CPU both made in the US with fully open hardware. Also a Precursor which is similarly open.

I support these efforts as much as I financially can, but I admit open firmware/hardware is not a gap I have fully closed day to day. Yet. Deep down in some hardware is firmware I do not control, such as on the inside of my AMD GPUs. But I wallet-vote for those over Nvidia who require proprietary code in user space where it requires rights within my operating system.

How do you isolate those from affecting the rest of your machine? Do you use a different machine for entertainment? A different account? Something else?

I’m not judging or trying to catch you in some kind of gotcha, I’m interested in your setup in case the idea is something I could use myself.

Software Freedom means no one has more control of the hardware in front of you than you do. If no one can change the SSD firmware, then it is part of the hardware.

Now for firmware that can be changed, that is a different story and maybe the OpenSSD project gets us there. We will see.

Try as I might some are so addicted and gone now that they just come over, doom scroll for a few hours, and leave. Maybe they feel like they get something out of just being in the same room as other people. It confuses me, but I will not force my views on guests.

It’s not an either/or. Many sincerely held beliefs can be used by cynical actors in cynical ways. It can be both a cynical marketing ploy by the C-suite and a genuine fear.

Personally, based on my experience with AI, the only dangers with the current technology is a) massive loss of employment, b) deployment by humans to control critical infrastructure that LLMs shouldn’t be in control of. Both of those are real, society changing risks that framing the issue as “once we reach the singularity everyone could die” minimizes. Obviously their concerns are possible, but >10% is a random guess. The loss of jobs and how that affects an already K shaped economy is already happening, and nothing is being done for that

Can we look at a possible economic disaster scenario for a brief second?

Bankers for OpenAI and Anthropic are reportedly seeking an investment-grade credit rating after their potential initial public offerings (IPOs) to cut down borrowing costs for their ambitious AI projects.

The companies' bankers from Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have been in talks with credit rating agencies. The goal is to tap into the $11.7 trillion corporate bond market post-IPO, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday.

That, right there, is a major concern.

https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/openai-anth...

It all boils down to accountability. If you tell people there is a massive, unsolvable problem, then you don't need to talk about what you're doing to fix it. The labs have taken this approach by saying that they're willing to talk, at some point in the future, about maybe taking unspecified steps to slow down capabilities research, as long as everyone else agrees and it makes sense to the investors and it's not too cold in SF that morning. Likewise, if you tell people that AI is going to have minimal or no impact on the world, then there's nothing to mitigate. But if you tell people that AI is going to cause serious - but solvable - problems, they're going to want to hear solutions, and nobody wants to come up with any solutions.

And (2) if the law hasn't been used then WTF did we even consider signing it into power, let alone actually doing it? Something like this should never be done, but if done one would think it would only be in the face of an imminent and urgent need. Instead we seemed to have just casually signed unconstitutional executive tyranny into power 'just in case.'

The only way we're ever going to reign in executive power is if one party or the other starts rolling back executive power while they're in power. But when people are in power they seem to convince themselves that it will always be like this, and so when it comes to power all they can say is 'more, more, more.'

[1] - https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/president-obama-signs-in...

Someone has to get things done, and if Congress won't do it, maybe the President has to.

Ultimately minor sounds sad because it's been used that way for a long time and it's what we expect. I was listening to Trout Mask Replica and my wife said it sounded like her home town funeral music (I later heard some myself and yeah she was right) - Captain Beefheart doesn't sound sad to me, but it does to her. The funeral music uses major 5 note scale.

And on "But I've Been a Musician All My Life / Studied Music In College and I've Never Heard Any of This Before!" - ratios and how chords derive from that was absolutely part of my education at Berklee. This article is good for the objective parts, but really self-congratulating for the subjective/experiential part of it.

I played in a gamelan ensemble in college. The music was completely foreign. A piece that sounded like a funeral procession was played at weddings. I have a hard time believing the arrangement of music is not cultural - or, at least partially culturally bound.

I've been working with some people building a music model from scratch and it really surprises me how much correlation there is across different features. It's been difficult applying that to general sound effects, because music is highly correlated in ways more general sound isn't.

Does metal sound "sad"? Opinions differ. :)

These days I liken it more to the idea of ‘surprise’ in information entropy which denotes an informative signal then to revealing any sort of objective truth.

So there must be more to it.

If there is no ability to predict it’s random and just noise.

If there is no uncertainty and it’s just purely repetitive then there’s also no new information and it loses the music (see what happens with overplayed pre-recorded songs).

The sweet spot is when we can to some degree predict what’s coming and thus understand it to be information while not being sure of what’s coming so we get the reward of encoding it.

I think this works for pretty much all genres and contexts. Even listening to techno in a dark warehouse while off ones face: the altered state makes most things seem novel no matter how repetitive and your mind doesn’t tune the information out.

But that’s IMO why octave harmonies largely don’t work: the mind perceives no information in the pure octave, and so little joy is gained from it.

It’s my favorite example for the “minor != universally sad across cultures” thing since it’s not so “out there” for the Western ear that people would struggle to even hear minor/major/“music” in it at all.

Your brain is still just pattern matching “minor = sad” based on thousands of hours of examples from the western canon consumed throughout your life regardless of how you dress it up with rhythmic variations.

FTFY. Notice when you conflate subjective experiences with objective ones. You have been molded by the culture you grew up with. Trying to disentangle yourself from it is like for a monolingual person to express thoughts without using a language.

That's only true if you're expecting a "fully scientific theory of harmony" to mean "a theory that can precisely predict how popular/enjoyable any given piece of music will be." But I don't think that's a reasonable goal, since (as you say) individuals are complex and culture is even more complex.

It's not unlike, say, pain or discomfort, which we can also develop scientific theories for. We can discover how pain works physiologically and psychologically, but our theories are never going to fully explain why individuals or cultures might welcome and even seek out certain types of pain in certain contexts.

I had a similar dream as a freshman in physics, I had learned that the organ of Corti was a spiral-shaped transducer in a little special bone and I dreamed of snail shells and proving that harmonies formed interesting geometric patterns on the darned thing, and how maybe people who seemed chronically tuneless might be shown to have malformed ear bones -- until I finally got to see images of them in a bio textbook and realized that my dreams had to be crushed, this blobby thing, whatever else you say, is not working geometrically.

So a science of how music works physiologically and psychologically, is able to explain why rock and later certain forms of ambient and trance "felt good" to folks -- it took them right back into the womb: the distortion on the guitars felt like the swishing amniotic fluid, the four-on-the-floor sounded like a heartbeat, the indecipherable high-pitched vocals sounded like Mama's voice peeking through the noise. But beyond that, it's our experience with twanging strings and air blowing through wind instruments and the like, which informs what sounds familiar to our grown ears. And the proof is how robotic and alien pure sine waves sound: this is a part of your organ of Corti complaining, "hey, when these hairs are tickled usually those ones also tickle -- but they're just standing flat, what the hell is going on."

Lots of everyday things tickle the organ of Corti in patterns that resemble a major chord, so that sounds familiar to it. When you play a minor chord you deprive it of stimulation to some of those hairs but stimulate the ones a little more outward, and the organ says "there's something off, this thing is lower than I'd expect" and it's some sociology that you can do to say "when people are hurt they can communicate this most effectively to other pack animals through lower more mournful cries" and so there are semi-biological semi-cultural expectations that govern "lower = sadder" especially at low tempos. But you can do the same in reverse, play a sus4 chord, and it sounds weirdly brighter and you feedback through those semi-biological expectations in reverse, weird but with more energy than expected. But you can also just play minor scales uptempo and then they also change, the minor scale at a higher tempo has somehow more energy and less sadness than the major scale -- indeed rock music is full of minor pentatonic licks that nobody would ever describe as sad or painful or discomforting.

While chords certainly do have a perception of emotion, it's resolution and chord progression that seals the deal whether it's perceived as joyful or sad or otherwise.

Not necessarily: if you read the essay, one assumption is that the brain is halving and doubling frequencies to fit them all into one frequency magnitude, an obvious optimization for reducing circuitry. If so, then an octave is too simple to fire the recognizer for a particular harmonic series; instead we need an input that places it relative to the other tones even after the halving/doubling.

Consider the fact that we name both middle C and high C as "C" because, even though they are different notes, they sound so similar that we literally deliberately confuse them notationally as they play the same role in harmony: one can be used to replace the other.

> Music is pleasurable when it mostly meets expectations but surprises you as well, IE it sits just outside of what we expect.

Ok, but where do the expectations come from? Your assertion that it is all culturally relative ("nurture") and none from the structure of the most efficient algorithm for recognizing the harmonic series ("nature") has no basis in fact; you just assert it without proof.

In contrast, there is strong evidence for the absolute nature of auditory processing. In the essay, there is a quotation from Daniel Levitin's book "This is your Brain on Music" where it discusses an experiment he witnessed in graduate school where music was played through wiring directly into the brain of an owl. The music was played into the brain with the root removed; when coming out of the brain of the owl, brain had restored the root (see the essay for details).

That means that virtual pitch (1) is created by the structure of the brain, not by a cultural expectation, and (2) further, that it is created by the brain of, not just a human, but of an owl! This is a very strong argument for the assertion that the processing of sound and the artifacts thereof are quite universal, not just across cultures, but across species.

> ratios and how chords derive from that was absolutely part of my education at Berklee

So at Berklee they teach recognizer algorithms and artifacts thereof? I did not know that Berklee is that strong in computer science. The explanation of the experience of the minor triad in "Harmony Explained" requires the concept of an inconsistency arising from a redundant recognizer algorithm.

In this case, one recognizer fires, that of the conjunction of three pairwise intervals of tones, whereas another recognizer does not fire, that if the triple of tones in order. This combination of firings is inconsistent because it is not possible for it to occur by playing any single normal harmonic series on, say, a flute. To generate it, one must play multiple notes and then use the effect of the recognizer of intervals pairing up tones from across the notes.

That is, this is a new kind of auditory perception that can be created as an artifact of the auditory recognizer algorithms of the brain, but cannot be heard otherwise. This is harmony.

If this this was taught to you at Berklee, please tell me which course that was and what the textbook is so I can look it up in the course syllabus and table of contents.

You've got an awful lot of assumptions in there that I don't think are at all supported, and this is one. It's also contradicted by 3.5.2 in the article: if the brain were actually doing this, then you could, say, replace the 9th by the 2nd.

> Ok, but where do the expectations come from? Your assertion that it is all culturally relative ("nurture") and none from the structure of the most efficient algorithm for recognizing the harmonic series ("nature") has no basis in fact; you just assert it without proof.

I interpreted "mostly meets expectations but surprises you" as referring to things like chord progressions creating tension and resolving it, for which you don't need major triads. (and of which there's no discussion in the article).

> In contrast, there is strong evidence for the absolute nature of auditory processing

I'm perfectly happy to grant that an owl experienced the sensation of a pitch at a frequency that was not actually present, but there's something missing here that's also totally missing from the article: the role of the cochlea. The brain doesn't experience sounds, i.e. the pressure waves in the air, the brain experiences electrical signals transmitted to it that, tinnitus aside, come from excitement of the cochlea by those pressure waves. How do we know that there isn't some kind of mechanical resonance somewhere in the ear that fills in the missing root? And if we know there isn't in the human ear, how do we know the same for the owl?

> The explanation of the experience of the minor triad in "Harmony Explained" requires the concept of an inconsistency arising from a redundant recognizer algorithm.

Once upon a time the explanation of the propagation of light required the concept of a luminiferous ether.

> Your assertion that it is all culturally relative ("nurture") and none from the structure of the most efficient algorithm for recognizing the harmonic series ("nature") has no basis in fact

I never said that. I said "Though it's built on harmonics and overtones which can be explained objectively, you cannot make a fully scientific theory of harmony since cultural expectations factor in just as much (and maybe even more) than the expectations around harmonics." To put it in your terms, "you cannot make a fully scientific theory since nurture factors in just as much (and maybe even more) than nature". The world is not black and white, just because I believe sociology to be critical to understanding the emotional effect of music on people, does not mean I'm claiming there is no objective, measurable component.

> If so, then an octave is too simple to fire the recognizer"

Ok so the happiest music is perfect fifths? Or is 3/2 ratio also too simple? So when does this recognizer get complicated enough to fire? 5/4? For someone claiming to have a scientific theory, you are making a lot of assumptions to make this theory work. Scientific theory is about testing hypothesis to reveal truth and not making hypothesis up to match what you already believe. You make an assumption that the brain wraps/aliases frequencies, create a theory of the recognizer, and then make that recognizer have a very convenient threshold that it makes a physical process suddenly the reasoning for "happy". To the "fully scientfic theory" above, I absolutely agree that ratios play a part, simple ratios are boring, and get more interesting as they get complex, then get too complex and it sounds dissonant. That part I think we, and most people, can agree is objectively true, and fits in the theory of expectation vs surprise at a microscale. I just don't agree this translates to "happy" or "sad". Please show me an experiment that indicates the kind of recognizer that you're talking about, or some kind of cross cultural link between ratios and emotional quality. I'd actually be very curious about that, as it's been a while since I've been reading papers about this.

> The music was played into the brain with the root removed; when coming out of the brain of the owl, brain had restored the root

Yes, I'm sure you know this, I'm just showing I know this too - this is called psychoacoustic bass, and happens as part of the feedback loop between the brain processing and the actual ear - the ear actually generates the root tone! This could also be a product of pattern matching though, as we're used to hearing related harmonics (say 200, 300hz) with a root (100hz), so if we just get the harmonics without a root (200, 300hz) the psychoacoustic part of your brain helps out by filling in the 100hz - this is an alternate theory to the aliasing/halving/doubling theory you put out, not saying either one is absolutely true, just that there are other explanations for the owl thing.

It also has nothing to do with the emotional effect of the music.

> So at Berklee they teach recognizer algorithms and artifacts thereof?

Again, I did not say that. I'm not talking about the speculative, non-experimentally backed parts of your theory, just the parts of your essay that are part of the common scientific consensus. I said "ratios and how chords derive from that was absolutely part of my education at Berklee". Nothing more.