> These songs don't have any hooks. Melodies don't get repeated. They all just meander along.
I've been playing around with it for a few days now. While I agree that it seems impossible to create songs with a more "sophisticated structure" (for lack of a better word off the top of my head), you still can get better results by fine-tuning, as is always the case.
If you just request "rock music" or "jazz", you get very dull, generic variants of the requested style. But on a second thought, isn't that exactly what should happen? You throw all the rock music on this planet in a blender, turn it on, and what you get is the most average rock music there is.
If you spend some time spicing up your prompt with flowery language or just a bunch of adjectives, you can get a sound that seems less bland. When you supply lyrics, using square brackets to denote verses, chorus and bridges can also result in a somewhat more structured song, but I found that the AI is pretty lackluster in that regard and you often need several attempts until it follows these inline orders.
So yes, in its current form it has mostly a novelty factor, this is Stable Diffusion for music, but I can easily see this being useful for a small indie gamedev who needs some BGM, or an alternative to the YouTube music library. Instrumental sounds fine, it's mostly vocals that have this clear digital distortion if you pay attention. It's surprisingly good, but still bad.
The melody of the instrumental pre-chorus is repeated consistently, and it's even used as the hook in the chorus; the pre-chorus is actually building up to the chorus. I'm impressed.
Ninja Gaiden was so fraking hard! At some point I used an invincibility hack and still gave up at some point! But it was pretty cool. Played Halo 1 & 2, PGR a lot, JSRF was just awesome even though I never finished that either. Fable just wasn't my thing, but had a lot of fun in DoA3 with friends.
I managed to beat Ninja Gaiden as a teen. I have no idea how I pulled it off (it wasn't in Ninja Dog mode either). Sadly I no longer have the necessary hand-eye coordination :(
Gate A20 famously was responsible for the original XBOX getting hacked. It redirected execution from the special hidden ROM into ordinary flash ROM, bypassing all security.
This sounds like all of you are living in Berlin, which is known as "failed state" to the rest of Germany. ;-)
It varies form city to city, I live in one that I'd say is an exception on the positive side: Most clerks in the various offices are actually helpful and even giving you hints. I had to renew my passport in January and got an appointment the next day. I got the appointment online(!) in Germany(!!). Passport could be collected 4 weeks later. Meanwhile an ex-colleague who lives in Berlin had to wrestle with his nearest office to even get an appointment for a passport renewal, then gave up and made an appointment with the office in the neighboring district, where it was still a 4 weeks wait. He told me there are districts where it takes up to 6 months.
I guess if you want pain and suffering, move to Berlin. :o)
Unfortunately, this is not just a problem limited to Berlin :-( [1][2]
It's been an absolute mess trying to secure my wife's settlement permit ("Niederlassungserlaubnis"). She has a german Master's degree, works in a government-funded research facility, and has been in the system since December 2022. We've now been ghosted for 14 months, only to be told to make an appointment to provide additional documents (which were not on the 'required documents' list they initially handed to us). After checking the appointment booking website to no avail, I came up with a python script that sends a notification to our phones when a new appointment pops up. It took 40 days of scraping until a new free appointment was available, only to be allowed to provide paper documents in person.
Adding to that, every six months, her employer threatens to fire her if she can't prove her legal status in Germany. So she's constantly jumping through hoops to get this temporary paper permit called "Fiktionsbescheinigung" just to keep her job. It's a hassle, costs €13 each time, and involves cycling through multiple unhelpful bureaucrats at the Ausländerbehörde's hotline (they do not answer emails) until finding one that very reluctantly produces this document.
What I always liked about HDMI is that it's basically backwards compatible all the way to DVI, just using passive adapters. I think that's the reason why HDMI dominates on laptops, where you're expected to move around and use projectors, which could then be very old and only have DVI inputs, and it "just works" with a plain old adapter. You could even go the other way round from a DVI output to a modern HDMI projector using the very same adapter, but I think laptops pretty much skipped DVI and went from VGA to HDMI. So in practice it doesn't really matter, especially with DP++ being supported by almost every device, which effectively gives you HDMI output using an almost passive adapter.
HDMI currently supports up to 144Hz. Even HDMI 1.4 (2009) could reach 120Hz.
However, compatibility is hit and miss in general. You may have had luck replacing one or more cables or adapters, but switching to displayport is likely to get the best results, anyway.
> AMD obviously needs to license the logo for their GPU boxes
This poses an interesting question, maybe some of the hobby-lawyers on HN like to chime in and post heir theories :o)
Let's assume they print that Logo on their box, call it HDMI in their Windows drivers, but don't do so in their Linux drivers, while it's still a spec-compliant implementation. Would that pose a potential legal problem, and if so why?
If it's the fact that they have access to the official HDMI 2.1 spec, implemented that, but call it something else, which I could imagine they forbid in some contract, would things change if some random hacker with too much time on their hands reversed the protocol by sniffing it, implementing it for the AMD driver (again without calling it HDMI)?
Too bad the HDMI forum doesn't feature an email address on their home page, I'd have loved to tell them what I think of them.
You don't just sniff a 48Gbit/s protocol as a random hacker. That's not what happens in the real world. A real-time scope that could do that is in the $1mil dollar range.
At best a random hacker will reverse engineer the binary driver enough to make something work in some capacity.
Yes you actually can. It's known that HDMI is TMDS and that the fastest frequency on any given pair is 680MHz and there are a total of 13 data pins (4 pairs + i2c + CEC pin + hot plug detect pin + reserved pin for some special features). A digital logic analyser that can sample at that rate over all 13 pins is going to cost less than a grand. If you stub in some hardware to convert the differential pairs back to a single hi/low signal and drop the optional features of the reserved pin, you can cut that down to 8 signals (or less if your analyzer has dedicated clock signal pins). A DSLogic U3Pro16 is 299usd and can sample 8 signals at 1GHz in buffer mode or 3 pins at 1GHz indefinitely in streaming mode.
If you know roughly what you are looking for, you can set triggers to start sampling when the event you care about starts, that's more than enough to be able to reverse engineer even the most intensive of the existing HDMI spec.
Given that a lot of these graphics cards cost substantially more than 300usd, it's not unreasonable to expect a logic analyzer capable of digesting HDMI to be within their price range.
A lot of those $1mil dollar scopes run Linux and connect to fast, high resolution displays; some of them are made by companies not always in love with US licensing.
But the question is not whether it's legal to reverse engineer a binary. The question is whether someone with no affiliation to neither the HDMI forum nor AMD could contribute the according code to the AMD driver which is part of the Linux Kernel, regarding legal implications.
Reverse engineering of binaries is pretty much a solved problem from the legal standpoint.
There is a contract between AMD and HDMI Forum covering the licence to use the logo. We don't know the wording, and I am sure it is thousands of pages of dense legalise; but it can literally say: "We promise not release a Linux driver compatible with the spec.".
Thanks, I emailed them:
# Solutions for the growing open source user base
"Hello, I am an AMD user, who uses Linux, and I currently use a small HDMI screen but I am looking to upgrade to a larger screen and I am concerned about the forum's decision to deny AMD's open source HDMI implementation. This decision has led to criticism of the entire HDMI enterprise as rent-seeking, and encourages non-trademarked implementations that weaken the HDMI brand. Linux is only growing in popularity, as people are tired of the advertising baked into Windows, and don't always want a Mac either, I highly suggest a re-think that looks at the rising popularity of open source with Linux, Android, Chrome and so on, to protect the HDMI brand.
I've worked and developed on Linux, for Linux, for 10+ years, I've seen my fair share of panics, especially using the bleeding edge releases. Most (not all!) of them were my own making though. :>
Yeah I've been using Linux exclusively for maybe 9 years and the only time I've ever seen a kernel panic was when I was messing around with Gentoo on a cheap machine I have just for that sort of screwing around, and I accidentally told it to literally overwrite the kernel. It got pretty far giving itself a lobotomy before it died, too.
Meanwhile, the last time I used Windows (in order to install Linux on a new laptop, lol), it blue screened four times just trying to mount a simple USB flash drive.
> it blue screened four times just trying to mount a simple USB flash drive
With Linux these problems can typically be solved by googling it on your phone then appending a text file with some nonsense string you found on a 10 year old forum post. I'm still holding my breath for Windows to catch up with that level of UX.
The basic difference and reason for me to have stuck with Linux for so long is that when there is a problem with Linux it is all about how much I can persevere trying to fix it. All code is there and I have the skills to fix it.
With Windows, if it doesn't work, there is a chance there simply is nothing you can do about it. There is no source code. The support people are completely useless. If you can't fiddle with it until it somehow works or find a person on the Internet that fiddled with it until it worked and they were gracious to share the solution, your only option tends to be to reinstall the entire thing and hope for the best.
So true lmao. One of the things that I noticed after moving from Mac OS to Linux is that like, yes, sometimes things don't work perfectly on Linux, and sometimes the Linux user experience is more awkward or arcane, but you can always, always figure out how to fix it or get it to work the way you want with like an hour of Googling tops and a little simple modification of configuration files or running a few terminal commands. There's no point at which something is so far gone that you can't just fix it yourself if you want to, so the choice is always there, it's just a matter of what's worth the effort for you. Meanwhile, with Mac OS, the last time I used it for a couple years I couldn't get it to consistently connect to external monitors correctly, and it was just an endless pain in the ass and there was nothing I could do about it.
This is surprisingly non-shitty by Google. I must admit that I didn't know that before. Can you limit such a passcode to just IMAP/SMTP, or can it be used to log in to other parts of Google?
This passcode is inherently limited to the service it bound to (IMAP or POP3), that's the whole point: don't expose your account password to something which only needs a finer-grained access.
You're directly contradicting your sibling comment. I guess I'll experiment with this in the coming days, although I'm a little worried tinkering too much will just completely lock me out of my account.
Not just that; I'd be OK with closed source firmware if I can just put it on an isolated network and be done with it, but from typical listings on Amazon et al you cannot even tell if the camera works without a mandatory cloud connection.
I've bought a router from TPlink a while ago that wanted me to install a fucking app, create a TPlink account and send all comms over some cloud servers to configure a router that's sitting right next to me, that all the traffic from the very fucking phone is going through. It did have a classic web interface, but it was completely crippled and basically just allowed changing the Wifi SSID and doing a firmware update. There was nothing in the product description about this, and none of the customer reviews mentioned it, because obviously this shit is now completely normal to the average joe.
I've been playing around with it for a few days now. While I agree that it seems impossible to create songs with a more "sophisticated structure" (for lack of a better word off the top of my head), you still can get better results by fine-tuning, as is always the case.
If you just request "rock music" or "jazz", you get very dull, generic variants of the requested style. But on a second thought, isn't that exactly what should happen? You throw all the rock music on this planet in a blender, turn it on, and what you get is the most average rock music there is.
If you spend some time spicing up your prompt with flowery language or just a bunch of adjectives, you can get a sound that seems less bland. When you supply lyrics, using square brackets to denote verses, chorus and bridges can also result in a somewhat more structured song, but I found that the AI is pretty lackluster in that regard and you often need several attempts until it follows these inline orders.
So yes, in its current form it has mostly a novelty factor, this is Stable Diffusion for music, but I can easily see this being useful for a small indie gamedev who needs some BGM, or an alternative to the YouTube music library. Instrumental sounds fine, it's mostly vocals that have this clear digital distortion if you pay attention. It's surprisingly good, but still bad.