I really wish I had studied piano for that reason. I put many years into flute and almost went to conservatory for it, so I can play pretty much any melody by ear after hearing it, but I have zero ability to do the same for harmonies/chord progressions. I've tried to learn some piano (and like the parent said, was forced to as part of music curriculum at college) but it's incredibly difficult to learn a new instrument to a satisfying level as an adult.
Can't agree more with that last sentence. I picked up guitar around 16yo, bass a couple of years later, and shortly tried my hand at drums. I'm now more than twice the age and I am indeed deeply unsatisfied with my technical ability at either.
Yeah, this is going to be interesting. First thing I did with the new Instinct bot was have it generate a property tax value appeal for me. Which will almost definitely go through; it's a slam dunk case but I'd been putting it off for an embarrassingly long time. Now it took me 10 minutes on a Sunday. This is obviously good, but I don't know how public agencies are going to deal with the influx of people trying to get the benefits they are owed, now that they can't rely on red tape and busy schedules to decrease the load.
I have a related question as someone who's been fully remote for about 12 years now, including all of my time in more senior/management roles: how does in person work even work for people who are in meetings all day every day?
My role (eng director) consists basically of 50-60 half hour meetings a week, back to back, with people all over the country/world. It wouldn't be tenable in an open office and it wouldn't even be tenable if I had to physically move across a campus in between meetings. Did people just work/manage across fewer projects and teams?
You are in office and then you hunt for a quite office room for every call, within the same campus you hope everyone gets to the same conference room which in bigger companies is infeasible so you are still remote aka face to face over a call... Haha.
That's how all engineering leaders I have worked with have worked.
Maybe this is just because you can have more meetings being remote. If you were inside an office and had to mive between meetings, you would maybe scale down this (insane) number of meetings per week.
There were a lot less meetings cause you would just walk over and talk with someone. Of course that’s still a meeting but it meant that people generally had more free time to connect and often problems would be resolved in five minutes right away instead of waiting for a scheduled half hour meeting.
Not to mention the number of times that I would end up taking a “meeting” in my boss’s office while he was on a call that he wasn’t listening to
When I was at Google it wasn't uncommon for a particular conference room to be "assigned" to a director or VP. From what I remember their calendars were always crazy full, too.
Many projects, many teams. Eventually it all becomes tens of thousands of unread emails, a lot of "thanks, but I've gotta leave for my next meeting", and lots of multitasking.
I'm working on Trebella [0], a tool to help classical music students structure their practice sessions more effectively. I tried to build something similar ~10 years ago in the form of a more interactive music game, but felt like it wasn't actually that helpful for intermediate and advanced students. So this time I'm doing it in collaboration with actual music teachers and building a tool that actually helps me learn. I'd say 90% of my flute practice is done using it at this point, and I'm in the process of taking on the first arms length users in a closed beta. Please shoot me an email if you are interested in any way!
Great question. I’m using MOSS-audio for that which feels good (and is fast/small enough) but not sufficient to give useful feedback out of the box. I’m working on fine tuning it on a bunch of masterclasses on YouTube and recordings sourced/labeled by my friends. That’s really the blocker for me to feel this is ready for prime time. But the rest of the app already helping me structure my practice.
This is unfortunately why I keep buying the Razer Deathadder Pro. It fits my hand perfectly and is super accurate. I hate their software, and the company, but the performance and ergonomics of the mouse are worth it to me.
DA has probably the most widely cloned shape in the market and has many identical or compatible alternatives and clones, check e.g. MCHOSE A7 Ultra RE or Pulsar Xlite v4 Large (never had either so can't vouch for their software)
In theory I could see really enjoying them in an action sports (backcountry skiing, mountain biking, rock climbing) setting. I'd want 1) true AR that could annotate terrain with stuff like slope angle, aspect etc, 2) all the GPS and monitoring functionality of a Garmin watch, and 3) a high quality action camera that could replace a gopro with less faff.
From what I can tell we aren't particularly close to putting this all together in a consumer usable package.
Why did they discontinue that? It was a very good product; we got them for all the grandparents and they worked really well at bringing the family together across distance. Could have fit in so well with WhatsApp too. But then they just killed it.
Shareholders didn't like it. At the end of the day Meta is an advertising company so everything they do must be in service of increasing revenue from advertising.
I saw those and got excited; I've been using Mathematica for decades and do a lot of work with symbolic music.
Unfortunately they are extremely surface level in this release. It looks like there isn't even any ability to load/export MusicXML, kind of weird low level primitives and zero interesting higher level functions. Hopefully they keep iterating on it but I don't think it'll be useful for my workflow right now.
I strongly agree on that being the release where these tools got good enough to substantially speed up my professional work. I have to admit I was super skeptical of AI coding until then.
Your skepticism led you to underrate the usefulness until then. Those who have been using agentic coding for the last 2 years can tell you Opus 4.6 was not a step change in quality, it was mostly a step change in the Overton Window and narrative.
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