I don't have a specific recommendation, but Lansky sounds a lot like the Tape Musician's of the 50's. Said musicians would slice and glue together countless snippets of sound recordings of real objects or spoken voice to create their compositions.
Today, the same can be accomplished digitally. Here is a recent example (though a little pop-music like):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAwR6w2TgxY
You're looking back with rose-coloured glasses. I did the same thing with ICQ, MSN Messenger, etc. for chat. I did the same thing with Ultima Online and Counterstrike for gaming. I mean shit, there was a few weekends where my best mate from school and I camped a spawn of particular monsters in UO such that we spent about 17 hours total there each day of the weekend for a few weekends. When one needed to go (dinner, lunch, toilet) the other controlled their pets and vice versa. Why? Cause we were teens with heaps of spare time and no commitments.
Teens go through this phase. They're time-rich, money-poor and have few commitments and obligations. In the 70s and 80s they spent the time at an arcade becoming savant-level good at pacman or asteroids or whatever. A natural part of leaving your teens is slowly inheriting a bunch of obligations that you must meet (bills, employment, etc.) which take away the free time you had to utterly saturate yourself in whatever hobbies you had, and thus you become more selective in what sinks you plough your time into (and the depth of those sinks).
This is no worse than what any other generation went through. There'll be outliers of whatever time sinks in any generation. Don't sweat it.
We're all addicted to a million things (by this definition of addiction)
It's only negative when that becomes a problem somehow in your life.
It's not even clear to me that we'd be better off with a fully mindful approach to every pleasure and activity.
What is unhealthy though, is disparaging everything other people enjoy. Especially when you don't have the courage to say "I don't like it" but couch your disapproval in terms of concern for their "addictions"
I don't think so. When I was a teenager I spent hours talking on the phone with friends (even though I had just seen them that day at school) then later on AOL then instant messenger (I'm old). At that age your world revolves around your friends and communicating with them is important. Later we all get jobs and spend most of our time doing other things and it doesn't seem as important to be constantly talking to our friends. We also don't have the common social environment of high school or college with all that entails to talk about.
Reminds me of Brave New World, where the general population lives in a shallow lifestyle void of any meaning.
Seem like a pattern, predicting that future, is emerging. E.g. My parent's teenage hobby was musical instruments. Mine was playing video games. Kids today it seems is responding to selfies.
pg also has a good essay on the Acceleration of Addictiveness* that seems relevant.
> Which is more social than either of the other hobbies you mentioned.
The girl in TFA just dumps the snapchats she's sent, flicking through them just to be rid of them. She's not being social, she's just incrementing a counter to boast about. Well, unless you're calling the boasting the social part, I guess, but I wouldn't say that that was more social than learning a musical instrument.
On the other hand, they have a lot of free time, and need to find ways to get social validation. I used to spend hours on ICQ or whatever, and there will always be something they use for that point. All in all, its something that is socially important for them right now, but that doesn't matter on the long view
True, mad love is a beautiful experience, maybe the most powerful and satisfying thing that can happen to you.
I have been lucky to have experienced it once and now, 8 years later we still have it in us.
Of course it doesn't manifest in endless nights of looking into each other's eyes, but we still cherish that period as a gift from God himself.
Yes it does resemble an addiction, although maybe it's worth reversing the terms - addiction is actually like "true" love.
Everything in our lives just clicked - we'd just moved to the beautiful city of Barcelona, it was spring time and flowers were in bloom, we had money, more than we could spend and we traveled around and experienced each other through Europe - Paris, Amsterdam, Lisbon, Brussels, Stockholm, Athens, Vienna, ...
Every week in a different city, weather was always great, the food and wine were fantastic - but all that beauty around us was pale in comparison to the look in her eyes.
That look - when this beautiful girl looks at you like you are everything for her and you feel like she's everything for you - like you are the perfect drugs for each other - that is a powerful and fulfilling experience.
That's what it feels like to be blessed.
Our daughter is the result of that love and we often joke that our love was actually the effect of her coming into this world.
Drugs don't really come close to the powerful emotions that we can generate naturally when we are in love - I can only compare it to an MDMA trip that lasts for months...
That love has carried us through the difficult moments of having a child and careers in our modern, artificial society and we would have been separated many times had it not been for those memories.
I love your story. I hate that can't tell if I should wait for that or "settle" for the feeling others describe of "just well comfortable". I keep waiting for, searching for, your style of relationship but all I find, generally, is the "this is comfortable" style which while pleasant is also mostly "take it or leave it" kind of feeling for me. For lack of a better way it's nice while together but it's mostly "out sight out of mind".
It may also decide that it's necessary to reduce the population by implementing social purging, starting with the people who disagree with this decision.
Purge everyone who doesn't agree with the purge.
150 milliseconds later, law-enforcement drones and robots start executing.
6.8 billion phones today means 6.8 billion pieces of high tech garbage a couple of years later, leaking all kinds of toxic shit into the water, plus 6.8 billion new devices manufactured while digging up all kinds of precious materials out of the ground and using oil to transport them all over the world, then burning coal, heating oil and natural gas to melt and glue shit together, and then burn more oil to transport the finished devices to customers all over the world.
That helps climate change, which leads to droughts in places like Brazil, determining people to use bathtubs to catch every drop of rain, were mosquitos breed and then fly around spreading Zika.
More phones and more porn, that's what's needed for a happy future.
Europe [1]. I was very interested when I first saw some Fairphone 2 buzz online a couple months ago, but I'm a little apprehensive about water resistance and the price (525 EUR). Also, most people probably wouldn't have this problem, but I'd have to switch to a different cell provider to use an FP2.
Sure. But in that case, why interpret choosing him as "a push for AI"? The logic of "Google put an AI person in charge" -> "Google wants to focus the company more on AI" seems mostly valid, but the premise is false, so there's no reason to believe the conclusion (more than we would have otherwise).
It is just spin (so is almost everything you read in the press, fwiw) and as such represents PR people doing their job well. You only realize the spinness when you have inside information that contradicts it.
Congratulations to jg regardless. He's very smart and I'm sure has picked up enough understanding of current AI techniques in the past couple of years. Disclosure: I've known him for 30 years or so..
That part, I'm ready to bet dollars to peanuts, is a talking point pushed by Google PR, which the journalist used (just like the other 99 facts and not-so-facts served to him on a platter all ready to digest by PR) because he's on a deadline and doesn't have the time to look for alternative explanations. That's a lot of work for a very weak ROI.
I guess it's possible to use a MIDI synthesizer instead of the physical piano to achieve the same result ?
All that's needed is the conversion from the voice spectrum to notes/chords...
The added advantage is that it would be possible to use the pitch wheel to achieve intermediate notes for higher fidelity..
The output can then be processed again and it's pitch changed and so we can create music from synthesized speech. Does this make any sense :) ?