I think it's a bit unfair to draw the line here. Some of the most memorable music in my life has been from video games and I'd hate to lose the human touch here just as much as I'd hate to lose the human touch at live shows.
DOOM 2016, FTL, the Donkey Kong Country games, Mega Man and the Mega Man X series - and of course anything Koji Kondo's done - just to mention a few off the top of my head. I've never really been the type to listen to game music outside the context of a game (unless I've got a particularly bad earworm), but man, I do appreciate good game music.
This is very true. Not much they can do about that unfortunately. Some people work a job in the meanwhile and they work with those people. But it definitely detracts from the program and they warn against it if avoidable
The rate at which the value accumulates depends on release of new models and admittedly it's a small community, so you may be in for a wait! But I still mean it, it is a small but enduring stream.
I made a new reddit account for a side project a few months ago and I couldn't believe how terrible reddit is when you don't have 10 years of subreddit curation. The default experience is to be dumped into what basically amounts to "Facebook boomer slop" mixed with a ton of hustle / small business / get rich quick content.
It's an unpleasant experience. My main Reddit account doesn't "solve reddit" by any means - I often find myself thinking "man this site sucks, I should stop coming here," but the difference between that curated account and a fresh one is night and day.
classic linux advice lol. disable the smart features on your TV and then buy a whole computer so you can ... not be able to watch netflix and youtube on your TV
disclaimer: i run a whole variety of home media stuff, so i am one of you - but it's just a funny example of exactly the kind of thing that makes people not do this stuff
Wow, this works way better than I expected. Fed it "Shimmer and Out" by Lotus, the intro of which is just a pretty simple guitar riff based around triad shapes - but it's the kind of thing I've seen Chordify just mangle. This produced a transcription that sounds 1:1 to my ear.
Could totally see myself using this as part of the tools I use to learn music - and I could also see someone eating Chordify's lunch by hooking up a model like this and doing note-level theory analysis in addition to whatever spectral analysis model they're using.
ah, thanks mate. this isn't even their most powerful model - i'd recommend using the Mirelo API to access their most powerful variant or self-host on a GPU.
Good god. The 360 and the NES are perfectly chosen to sting me personally (and I'm sure many others of my generation).
A story I've told too many times at work: I was born in 1991. The first game console I owned was an NES which we got one year, for Christmas, new in box.[0]
I can't imagine I was any younger than 5 or 6, first off because I remember the Christmas and second off because I don't think my parents would have bought a game console for me as a toddler. So that means they'd have bought it in 96 or 97.
But the N64 released in '96! So we were two console generations ahead of the NES by that year. So when I tell this story to co-workers, I always end: "where did they find it??
Anyway, the 360 was also a sort of signpost in my gaming career. I don't think it was the first console I self-purchased, but it was kinda the first "grown up" console, I guess. Many happy evenings spent during high school with friends on XBL.
tl;dr - thanks, I hate your fun fact
[0]: From some quick research it appears to have been the "NES Challenge Set," and I saw reports of people buying them as late as 1997, so maybe I'm not as unique as I thought.
I'm kind of surprised to find myself enjoying this because I've had a certain hatred for box pushing games. (maybe it's trauma from the sliding blocks in Pokemon games, heh). I guess I'm getting over it (maybe it's happy memories from Baba Is You).
Anyway, one thing that's fun here is that you can trigger the AI solve from any board state. So in particular on puzzle 12 I was interested to see that an initial push (to escape from the 'box' where you start) I'd written off as untenable turns out to be the optimal solution. Then of course it's fun to watch the solver tackle the initial conditions I solved under (and still beat my number of moves).
Might be kind of fun to play with "pessimizing" the puzzle - like, how can you move blocks around to provide a maximally adversarial place to hit the "solve with AI" button? (obviously you don't get to count your initial moves around the board, or you could just move back and forth to get the most pessimum (thanks, Mel) solution.)
Edit: Puzzle 14 feels odd. Super easy, why is it at 14? Maybe something tricky about it that I'm not seeing, perhaps the shape of the arena makes A* harder or something?
Also, 15 is interesting and highlights a theme I'd noticed, which is that often the initial moves of a puzzle seem pretty locked in, and the place where the AI shaves moves off my solution in in some clever approach to the "stacking" of boxes onto the goals. I guess that seems kind of obvious when I write it out.
Anyway, thanks for something to noodle on this morning!
I think 14 exists as a test case for having a larger search space that needs to be efficiently ignored. Its not difficult solution wise, but if it is particularly slow that means you're doing a bad job at pruning potential steps. Making sure you're doing good early pruning of the empty chambers.
Yeah, that was kinda what I figured too, maybe something about the "pinwheel" shape makes the pruning harder (since beyond each bottleneck there's a large amount of useless search space.)
Kinda tempted to go play with it now and see if it becomes more obvious...
I've been a Gitlab fan for a long time[0]. I typically default to GitHub for my repo slop[1], but if I'm doing something serious I put it in Gitlab. I like their CI setup better than GitHub and there's also self-host options if any of those "serious" projects ever needs that.
Also back in the day, you needed a paid account to make private repos on GitHub, but Gitlab made them free.
Anyway I haven't heard anyone complaining about Gitlab going down constantly, maybe just a function of not being the default slop-forge in the AI era, but still, they've been a long time friend to my constant hackery.
Also, Microsoft sucks.
[0]: over the years the UI has gotten a good bit more cluttered and annoying, so there's probably slicker stuff out there. But it's fine.
[1]: some of this is definitely vibe-coded LLM-vomit but I mean a more general type of slop in this case - random throwaway code, half baked ideas, etc.
Yes! And for those complaining that gitlab CE selfhosted is resource hungry: It can be tuned to only use 2 GB memory in total and run perfectly fine for a single developer or limited concurrency. Gitlab CI is awesome.
I've used github for ~12 years, and it was fine for single repos, but it sucked _hard_ for any kind of organisation. It also sucked really hard for CI.
I joined a company that was using hosted gitlab. I really liked it, apart from it had the same uptime as github has now.
Features wise its about the same as github now, apart from organising repos is far simpler. Its not a flat list in an org, you can have sub teams in an org with thier repos neatly owned.
However the security story around them is not great, so I'm not really sure that I'd want to host a public instance of gitlab.
I think it's a bit unfair to draw the line here. Some of the most memorable music in my life has been from video games and I'd hate to lose the human touch here just as much as I'd hate to lose the human touch at live shows.
DOOM 2016, FTL, the Donkey Kong Country games, Mega Man and the Mega Man X series - and of course anything Koji Kondo's done - just to mention a few off the top of my head. I've never really been the type to listen to game music outside the context of a game (unless I've got a particularly bad earworm), but man, I do appreciate good game music.
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