Tl;dr:Hang a blanket, quilt, or something else that’s absorbent behind you while you make your lecture recordings. That’s it. — A whole lot of people are going to be audio recording their university lectures in the fall, or delivering lectures live over Zoom. This series of tutorials will give you some easy steps to make […]
Category Archives: Technology
Some quick takes on AI-based music composition startups
I just responded to two questions about AI-composition startups from a student and thought I’d share them here as well. This is a placeholder for deeper thoughts. The questions: What are your thoughts on the uses of Amper music specifically as an AI generative software? A user can create their own personal track by determining the […]
Fake news about artificial intelligence and fake news
One of the things I hate most about the current AI craze is the apparently sanctioned ignorance in business and computer science about how the rest of the world works. Canada’s “Leaders Prize” just announced a $1 million prize for an AI application to automate fact checking. This assumes that a “fact” exists in the […]
Advertising makes the internet worse; here’s what that means
I remember standing in Microsoft Research New England, talking with a few brilliant mathematicians and computer scientists. Twitter had just started including ads in their feed, and there was much grumbling and surprise. I responded that Twitter only had a few choices–fewer, given that they were giving away their service for “free.” A quick look […]
Logic Functions Bonus Round for Synth Nerds
I learned about the XOR function, and pretty much everything I know about logic functions, from modular synthesis. Modular synthesis, like AI or any other media technology, works on a set of conventions ensconced in a set of standards. A modular synthesizer is basically an analog computer (this is a whole other post, which I […]
A Few Random Thoughts on the Politics of the Logic Functions
Burç Kostem pointed me me to this wonderful piece by Matteo Pasquinelli on the history of neural networks. In the middle, there’s a small historical detail that I never quite grasped before: In 1969 Marvin Minsky and Seymour Papert’s book, titled Perceptrons, attacked Rosenblatt’s neural network model by wrongly claiming that a Perceptron (although a simple […]
New Text: Reflections on the MP3 format
“Reflections on the MP3 Format”, Interview by Geert Lovink in Computational Culture.