It’s not really the subject of the article, but debating whether tutoring/teaching/education works, as a lot of posts here seem to be (without too much of a scooby what they’re talking about, if I may say so…), is really as daft as debating whether eg. computer programming works... Teaching is a real skill and, to say the least, it isn’t always easy, especially to pick up as a ‘side-hustle’. It has its own learning curve. That goes for both private tuition and teaching in schools/universities. Different teachers/teaching/learning styles suit different pupils. Trying to teach a subject soon shows up whether you really know it well, but you can really know a subject and be terrible at teaching it… I thought what was interesting about the article is that it highlights what can be a problematic power dynamic between parents/tutors, especially if you are inexperienced/unsure of yourself as a tutor/teacher (or financially precarious, as all the tutors/teachers I’ve ever known are), that is, you can end up pandering to what the parents/pupils think they want (or what a certain curriculum/bureaucracy demands), rather than working in the best, long-term interests of the pupil… But most parents/kids are brilliant and this isn’t a problem… Again, it really depends… A lot of practical/intuitive psychology/varied communication skills, patience and understanding are required to be a good teacher IMHO. and again, you get better in these respects over time… There are a heck of a lot of advantages to teaching one-on-one, especially with increasing class sizes/budget cuts in public institutions at least/vastly differing abilities/concentration levels of students… In an ideal world students would understand how lucky/privileged they were to get private tuition, though as you might imagine that’s not always the case… Being a great teacher is sometimes unavoidably about ‘teaching’ more than just the subject you are teaching, if that makes any sense, as is maybe highlighted at the beginning of the article…
The trust of the author, in a survey of one software user, is obviously at an all-time low, the trust of seemingly a large number of people reading it, judging by the comments, is similarly low, eg. Apple seems keen on marketing privacy, so maybe Apple at least feels that a certain segment of their customer base’s trust in software is at an all-time low (or should be)? That’s at least some ‘my’s and ‘their’s… How would you quantify feelings of trust quanticle? What would be sufficient proof to make a general claim about a nebulous emotional quality like ‘trust’? Perhaps it is poorly phrased as a headline/not the most accurate title ever, but how do you feel about what the article says? Do you agree? Should people not be allowed to write/post articles based on qualia?
…staggering that unchangeable/indelible personal, political, financial and even biometric/medical data which could potentially be leveraged against users, eg. in an aggregate profile by various forms of AI, is often seemingly slapdashedly stored/shunted around various shady ‘cloud’ services/data brokers. After all, seemingly ‘solid’ companies may go bust/become desperate, governments may change radically/may have radically different values if you plan/are forced by circumstances to move around the world, or what’s to stop eg. insurance policies/mortgages/rental contracts etc. etc. unfavourable to various dubiously-defined ‘categories’ of people in future being based on inferences made from these profiles/dystopian ‘social credit’-like schemes being introduced that could be calibrated based on all manners of unforeseen criteria…
‘En garde!’/‘Zut alors! Pas de problème, mon ami! (…that’s probably all wrong heheh..) Your English is certainement a billion times better than my French! :) Bonne chance!
Hey Bruno - sounds like a cool concept - wishing you both all the best! Just looking at the screenshot (and being afflicted with the pedantry of being the son of an English teacher), would ‘Ready to take back control of your meetings?’ be more usual/a little less clumsy wording-wise? Not that I think what you’ve written is ‘wrong’ - in some ways it’s fresher/more unusual (‘Ready to bring sexy back to meetings?’ :), but anyhow that’s my tuppence worth!
“We mustn’t over-educate the plebs - next thing you know, those uncouth oiks
will be getting uppity ideas beyond their station and before one can utter a forlorn ‘gadzooks!’ the bally country’s gorn all wrong!”
“…Hence nothing prevents those things which may be learned from the philosophical disciplines, so far as they can be known by the light of natural reason, from being considered by another science according as they are known by the light of divine revelation. Hence theology included in sacred doctrine differs in kind from that theology which is part of philosophy…”
So theology need not make any rational sense whatsoever? It is more an affirmation/fiction/opinion that represents the authors’ own intuitions about divine matters, or perhaps proceeds from a survey/study of previous hierology/sacred texts? Is an experience of personal revelation therefore necessary to study the subject? You believe a man must believe in a (presumably exclusively Christian?) God, as defined in canonical scriptures, as interpreted by the Catholic church, to study or rationalise about theology? Augustine defined ‘theologia’ as: "…reasoning or discussion concerning the Deity..." - but he got the ‘rationem’ bit wrong? Aristotle must also have been a misguided old fuddy-duddy when he stated that there were three aspects of theoretical philosophy: mathematics, physics and theology - or rather he didn’t mean theology as you define it, but instead something more akin to metaphysics? Thomas Aquinas defines theology as: ‘…what is taught by God, teaches of God and leads to God’ - this seems much closer to what you suggest? A person must first believe, and then an understanding, or more knowledge, of the nature of a god, that you already believe in, will more likely accrue to the initiate after appropriate study, but only given that prior belief? Would you agree with Thomas Paine:
“The study of theology, as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion. Not anything can be studied as a science, without our being in possession of the principles upon which it is founded; and as this is the case with Christian theology, it is therefore the study of nothing.”
…or Protagoras: "Concerning the gods I cannot know either that they exist or that they do not exist, or what form they might have, for there is much to prevent one's knowing: the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of man's life."
…understand that might be a bit heavy duty/tough ask for a HN comment - but I am genuinely interested if you can point me to useful passages/sources/help me understand Aquinas’/your ideas better…
Bertrand Russell on Thomas Aquinas:
“There is little of the true philosophic spirit in Aquinas. He does not, like the Platonic Socrates, set out to follow wherever the argument may lead. He is not engaged in an enquiry, the result of which it is impossible to know in advance. Before he begins to philosophize, he already knows the truth; it is declared in the Catholic faith. If he can find apparently rational arguments for some parts of the faith, so much the better; if he cannot, he need only fall back on revelation. The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading.” [History of Western Philosophy p. 453]
Perhaps we need more sustainable economic models or ‘logistically effective mitigations’ as you say: ie. moving stuff around the world more efficiently? Perhaps the clever people that read this site can help develop technology or software to help? What other choice do we have as a species?
…as for your ‘possibilities’:
1) the truth: we could do a lot to ‘mitigate’ it tomorrow given sufficient political and popular will. The problem is that some powerful and influential people would lose a lot of money and some countries’ economies are precariously built reliant on eg. fossil fuels, logging, non-sustainable farming etc. that will take time to transition from/implement alternatives to…
2) see my above post - if you doubt it: prove it/provide evidence!
3) how do you define ‘cost’? Do you have kids/grandkids/relatives?
“Taken as a whole, the range of published evidence indicates that the net damage costs of climate change are likely to be significant and to increase over time.”
- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Thanks Karrot_Kream - much appreciated! …I’ll try and do some research about the best way to go about that/tidy it up some/update it for iOS 14 first… (think it was last built for 13)
Thanks! Yes, you could basically select from various downloadable ‘audio experiences’/layers for that area… The localized user-contribution
based audio wiki/encyclopedia type-thing is an interesting idea... Even people telling stories or guiding people around an area… I did think about how users might be able to upload content to a location for others (like an audio grafitti-ish type thing), but I imagine the moderation/networking/storage part of it would be tricky to get right…
I’ve an iOS app I wrote a while ago which provides the functionality of game audio middleware (something like FMOD I guess) basically for sounds placed at locations in the real world: tracks the users’ location and orientation relative to all the sound sources and spatializes the audio based on that. You can make and layer together sounds that follow coordinate paths, sounds that ‘wake up’ at/after times, are triggered/stopped by proximity, do sample accurate playback at different pitches/volumes for each ‘grain’/chunk (as far as possible on iOS devices), randomise order in a couple of different ways/follow looping playlists for variation and so on. It uses standard ideas nicked from game audio to save on the download/disk/memory size of sounds (though there is obv. trade off with CPU/RAM and perhaps other OS stuff going on I don’t understand). It’s basically kind of an amateurish game audio engine overlaid on the ‘real world’. It’s likely got loads of holes I haven’t detected/am unaware of in the code, probably poorly structured/commented/badly named functions/variables and so on as I am primarily a guitar teacher/music producer/sound designer for
my ‘day’ job and it’s the first thing I’ve written in Swift/really just an experiment to see if I could get it working, but I’m kind of wondering what to do with it/what it might be useful for… I made a fully functioning demo. that is a historical recreation of an area of the city I live in with lots of evolving/generative sounds in it: eg. horse’n’cart trotting past, blacksmith, pubs, trigger zones for a narrator voice/music playing back ‘2D’ etc etc …I don’t really know what to do with it now… I think it might be sim. to ‘Microsoft Soundscape’, but I’ve not actually tried their app yet… Do you think anyone might be interested if I put it on Github? (…never used Github, though I used SVN/other CMS as a sound designer on games before… though I know it has a social component…) I guess it’s trivial for most ‘proper’ programmers to make something sim. as it just uses the Apple native API/swift functions (sorry if this is not the correct terminology)/as low level as they go on the sound stuff anyhow, nothing custom?… The sound ‘definitions’ are all XML/.plist basically at the moment, so it’s not user-friendly for sound designers/musos/general public, though I could make some sort of graphical front end that generates the xml for it and uploads sounds etc, though I know nothing about network coding and it looks scary!!
I guess Apple could come out with some superior system tomorrow… Anyhow, if anyone reading this is at all interested/has any advice (even if it is to get knotted! :P) that would be gratefully received… Apologies for the overly long and spammy post…
Yawn… Predictable fake culture war stirring/clickbait from the specTrashy. What a waste the current obsession with empty, half-baked symbolic nonsense/gesture politics is of both sides’ time and mental energy, especially when there are obviously far more pressing problems (and exciting, positive developments) in the world to report on, discuss and deal with!
On the off-chance that someone reading this is also interested in algorithmic composition:
https://michael-edwards.org/sc/index.htmlhttps://michael-edwards.org/sc/liner.html
“slippery chicken is an open-source Common Lisp environment for declarative or generative algorithmic composition building on CLM, CMN, CM, MusicXML and Lilypond for score, sound file, and/or MIDI file outputs and the integration of these into closely aligned hybrid acoustic-electronic pieces of music.”
…made by (the extremely awesome) Michael Edwards:
https://michael-edwards.org/
That looks like an extremely impressive venue (‘…wavefield synthesis…’ etc.). I’d love to visit! Many years ago I saw a concert featuring acousmatic/spatialized music performed by Dr. Robert Dow (and some other people who I forget the names of) in Edinburgh that blew me away... I’m not sure what the set-up he was using was/whether he was using ambisonics/how he had maybe customized/expanded on that standard (as I remember he had what looked like home-made speaker ‘trees’ set up above the audience’s heads, alongside loads of more conventional speakers…), but it sounded great!
Yes - it does seems a shame and potentially a loss to developers/the open source community? Surely an open standard like Ambisonics would have had more of a chance of being widely adopted/supported and therefore perhaps longer-lived anyhow (was just thinking about MIDI)… I guess that’s not the end goal for Apple?
I totally agree - there are real possibilities to do interesting new creative work afforded by this, particularly if the barriers to entry are kept low/non-proprietary/open-to-all (…as another poster noted, it would have perhaps been nice if an open standard had been used instead…). I would only add that I think there are even more interesting possibilities for using the same technological capabilities with AR. That was the focus of the iPhone app. I wrote, which was more along the lines of Microsoft Soundscape:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/product/soundscape/
(but to be fair, before Microsoft Soundscape was available :)
So they are. We’re better able to localise sounds in the horizontal plane if you prefer, though because of the shape of our ears/pinnae and so on, we can also detect to some extent whether they are above or below/in front of or behind our heads (perhaps there is more accurate terminology for it:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomical_plane )
Yeah you’d need the multitrack original recordings to do a good job I’d say. There are tricks with eg. phase cancellation/spectral filtering and so on I suppose you could use to try and hack something together, but the results would vary greatly depending on the original material/skill of the engineer… A lot of multi-track recordings, especially older ones, have a lot of bleed between tracks which might complicate matters…