Which reverb and at what levels? It's way, way faster to hot swamp for previewing and getting the sound at what levels. Same with drums, I believe there are about 10 different kits per each of the 909 and 808 flavors in the factory tool kit. Typing out claude commands to do this kinda thing would be way slower than actually doing it. I'm not opposed to LLMs having control of the ableton interface, but adding and tweaking devices is going to be glacially slower via an LLM.
This person is a Luddite. I just don't think that implies what most people on HN wish it would imply, though, as reading thea actual article shows. You don't even need to ask your LLM of choice to summarize it for you, as the salient point is contained within the first two paragraphs: paragraph one, the Luddites were workers protesting their terrible living conditions. Paragraph two, these workers were jailed and killed by the government.
Then, further down the article, it elaborates:
> The Luddite movement emerged during the harsh economic climate of the Napoleonic Wars, which saw a rise in difficult working conditions in the new textile factories paired with decreasing birth rates and a rise in education standards in England and Wales.
> Luddites were not opposed to the use of machines per se (many were skilled operators in the textile industry); they attacked manufacturers who were trying to circumvent standard labour practices of the time.
>The crisis led to widespread protest and violence, but the middle classes and upper classes strongly supported the government, which used the army to suppress all working-class unrest, especially the Luddite movement.
"Won't somebody think of the children" is constantly used sarcastically in order to dismiss the concerns of people who want to ban something they claim is harmful to children. This is often a completely justified rejoinder - many regulatory policies that thoughtless people argue for in the name of children's safety are counterproductive, disproportional, or otherwise harmful.
I understand your point and clearly see that LLMs cannot be compared to audio ... but ...
Back when I was a kid, music, audio and sound systems had high quality as a standard.
Nowadays people listen to music mostly with bluetooth headphones which basically recompress an already compressed audio signal to send them in low quality. Also, it is more and more difficult to find OK stereos that play music in good quality. Either, you have to pay very high prices for overpriced "audiophile" equipment, or you are stuck with cheap chinese MP3 players.
Yet, society and markets have spoken. Sometimes society is happy to accept marginally worse products in exchange of price and convenience.
It's against the law for it to be in the wild. And the temperature range in which it can survive is quite narrow, it would probably die sometime this year if left alone.
Solar is nice and all - it's is cleaner than fossil fuels, but requires a bunch of inputs. Geothermal really needs to be pushed for more; after the initial investment, requires basically no inputs and has no toxic byproducts or disposal problems.
"The full technical potential of next-generation geothermal systems to generate electricity is second only to solar PV among renewable technologies and sufficient to meet global electricity demand 140-times over."
Inputs for solar? Do you mean the sun? That's a new complaint I've never heard anybody state.
But agreed, advanced geothermal is likely to have a ton of deployment. It's fun to follow all the startups making great progress right now. The big thing to watch will be the degradation in heat levels over 10-20 years; depletion of heat faster than the ability of the surround rock to conduct it is the biggest threat to the technology as a whole right now. But early pilots are showing no fall in output temperature so far, so that's great.
> Inputs for solar? Do you mean the sun? That's a new complaint I've never heard anybody state.
Well more precisely, the inputs for making the solar panels compared to the inputs for making geothermal plants. The best of solar last 30 years atm and the best of geothermal atm last 100+ years. Not to mention you don't need any rare imported minerals to make geothermal plants.
It depends on what you're doing. Steam turbines are absolutely full of exotic alloys. But I tend to agree that large-scale geothermal would be an important component of our all-of-the-above energy policy, which would profit from our existing expertise in punching holes in the ground.
I do not believe anyone will be running 100 year old turbines in a geothermal plant. Those things have fairly serious lifetime maintenance requirements.
> If humanity goes extinct in the next few years because of unaligned superintelligence,
I've seen people claiming that this could happen, but I've yet to read any plausible scenario where this might be the case. Maybe I lack the imagination, could you enlighten me?
That "etc" in "robots, factories, etc" is doing a lot of work here.
Factories, even fully robotic ones, heavily rely on humans to set up and maintain them. Moreover, the safety culture means there are tons of "disable" controls which can be triggered by any human and no machine can override.
Robots look impressive, but they cannot function without the humans either. Military kill-bots are likely the worst, but machines cannot repair or refuel them.
None of this is going to change in the "next few years".
Robots can't function without humans because they're not super-intelligent. We already see quite capable humanoid robots. Those factories that rely on humans - they'll be converted to be operated by humanoid robots. By the super intelligence.
That's the hand wavy story. It's hard to dive into details in an HN comment but I'm happy to try and develop some of those details. You're saying that something much smarter than humans isn't going to be able to bridge the gap to the physical world. I'm not so sure.
EDIT: Another way to think about it is that if a god-like infinitely capable being took control of all our online digital systems including I donno Teslas, factory automation, power grid, any form of connected robot in the world, nuclear weapons launch systems, airplanes, whatnot, do they have any path to a sustainable "existence" without relying on humans. Or at least with us unable to detect and stop that. If the answer is no then we're probably safe. It's kind of hard to convince ourselves of that. Keep in mind that humans can also be manipulated to do work for this god just like spies/saboteurs e.g. are recruited online today and paid bitcoin to do some random master's bidding.
> Another way to think about it is that if a god-like infinitely capable being took control of all our online digital systems including I donno Teslas, factory automation, power grid, any form of connected robot in the world, nuclear weapons launch systems, airplanes, whatnot, do they have any path to a sustainable "existence" without relying on humans
ha ha ha no. Teslas run of energy and cannot refuel, a circuit breaker in factory pops and no robot can reach it (or maybe a roof leaks), and "any forms of connected robot" _either_ cannot walk the stairs or can maybe run for a hundred miles before running out of battery.
The "humans can be manipulated" is the only thing to worry about, and you don't need robots for that, other humans have been trying hardest to do it just fine for millennia. I guess it's up to you if you want to be afraid or not, but I am not seeing anything super special so far.
I've yet to read any plausible scenario where stockfish defeats me, all the scenarios my friends come up with have obvious holes in the plays they suggest stockfish could make.
reply