dwringer

They usually (or often) have them, but often the most common tunes in the first few Real Book volumes (and other standards) have been memorized so they never actually pull them out. When I used to sit in with some guys from the local university, they'd usually play everything from memory and only pull out the fakebook for newbies/guys like me who didn't know the songs they were playing [so we could 'fake' our way through].

A lot of those guys would pride themselves on having played along with the recordings dozens or hundreds of times (and often with computer transposition) so they could play the tunes with their eyes shut, in any key and at any tempo.

I wouldn't be surprised if the connotation of being unlicensed had something to do with it, but growing up (and studying jazz with many accomplished musicians) I always heard the etymology that it has always referred to faking one's way through - which is the supported etymology in the linked article, as well. Personally I believe that words typically have multiple concurrent etymologies which all have some validity, and that's probably the case here IMHO, so, again, I think you make a fair point.

Since we're getting into technicalities, a "lead sheet" is not exactly synonymous with "fake book". A fakebook encapsulates a particular sort of standard repertoire, it is a curated assemblage of standards as much as it is sheet music. As such it's almost impossible for a fakebook of the most general sort to be fully licensed. (And when Hal Leonard came out with the legal Edition 6, many musicians rebelled and stuck to the pirated older editions because they covered the genres more comprehensively).

Thanks, I had this in a lower comment but it should really be at the top.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26737142

That's a fair point, but "The Real Book" was always referred to as a 'fake book' by every Jazz musician I ever met, though. I honestly don't think licensing has anything to do with the term.

For decades a legal version was available called "The New Real Book", but "The Real Book" was the name of the original*, unauthorized fakebook - preferred by every jazz musician I met - until the latest edition when the rights were finally secured by a major publishing house with edition 6.

*I used the term 'original', but to my knowledge fakebooks were around since the 20's or before. "The Real Book" was already a play on that back in the 70's. And typically none of them were authorized.

EDIT: Sorry for haphazardly continuing to update this but I was trying to dig up more. Here's the link I was trying to find[0] With previous discussion here on HN[1]. It states, 'They called them “fake books” because they helped musicians fake their way through unfamiliar songs.' However, it's certainly not the only possible explanation.

[0] https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/the-real-book/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26737142

I always understood it in the context of "fake your way through", but I think it's versus the alternative of knowing the song - and thus, not requiring music. If you need to use a lead sheet, then the best you can do is fake already knowing it.

Almost poignant though.

This immediately made me think of Wikipedia's latest change that moves their main menu behind just such a hamburger button on desktop, and replaces it with a table of contents down the left side.

Now instead of lazily clicking from one random article to the next (or to a different language, or to "current events", or the "main page" of headline articles), one has to move the mouse twice and make two clicks to get to it through the hamburger menu, or use the URL bar. I can't even remember the last time I went back to the ToC when reading a Wikipedia article and this change is utterly incomprehensible to me.

> but part of being a professional is being able to pretend those mistakes didn't exist because the audience doesn't know what it's supposed to sound like.

Very true, however it's something musicians have to specifically train for, because to a trained ear they can become painfully obvious and it's tempting for the musician to (at least) cringe in a way that the audience will detect. Musicians in the audience, though, can often tell when you flub a note, regardless of how you play it off. That's really the bar we are looking to meet.

Got the dosage perfect. Pretty close on the xmosmrelin. But the latter half is far too legible still.

I can see your point but I'm not sure it's that straightforward. Let's say you simply took a hat with your kid's favorite characters from tv/movies/books/whatever on slips of paper, drew some, then did the same for plots, then made up a story to tell your kid.

At some level, sure, it's not the same as coming up with a story on your own - there's not going to be anything meaningful in why you selected those particular elements of the story - but that merely constrains those choices to free you up to be creative with other aspects of the story.

I think there's still room for someone who wants to be creative to use the tools to provide the same experience you're describing. It's not like one has to give the raw output to one's child. And I think such raw outputs will be generally bland, missing something relative to those with a human touch. However, giving bland and meaningless entertainment to children wouldn't really be something new, and I still see a fair concern in there. I suppose this is already part of what articles on "Kids' YouTube" are talking about.[0]

[0]https://www.avclub.com/take-a-trip-to-the-automated-hellscap...

Honestly when I was a kid I would have been all about the AI-generated JRPG at least 60% over playing the latest Final Fantasy. I couldn't get enough different games at that age, so I'd absolutely enthusiastically dive into both.

One of my undergraduate literature courses was on postcolonial studies, so unsurprisingly we talked about Bhaba quite a bit, and I was confused for a second just like GP. The teacher of that class went on to be dean and also head of the entire university's honors program a year or two later, IIRC. So FWIW this seems to have been a hot topic in academia at that time, too (mid-2000's). I think given the global political climate at that time, the years of OIF when accusations of imperialism were being leveled at the US on a daily basis, it was a fairly interesting and relevant course relative to much of the rest of the department.

If those frameworks for A/B testing do any statistical analysis or automation I think they are easily classifiable as AI. I wouldn't be surprised if some publications at the top are using much more sophisticated software than that. I could only speculate to what level or with what success ML has been integrated into those pipelines.

I assume most major media outlet editors have used AI to help them come up with headlines for many years.

This sums it up perfectly in my mind, the analogy is extremely apt IMHO. As a musician I find it impossible to spontaneously produce melodies, rhythms, etc, that aren't heavily influenced by what I've listened to - perfectly analogous to how AI generated art is heavily influenced by the billions of training images it's ingested. The difficulty in composing is finding a way to transform, combine, and synthesize the influences into something new. I have been approaching generative AI in the same way and can't help but some of the fears are overblown. It takes work to get coherent results. If your own work is incoherent or wholly derivative, your AI outputs will also be. If your work isn't incoherent or highly derivative, then I'd argue you've already done a major part (if not most) of the creative work in your mind - the AI is just another tool to realize it which empowers human artists to be creative like never before.

EDIT: Okay, now I'm shocked to see your comment grayed out all the way at the bottom. Interesting times we live in.

I went through a roller coaster of emotions reading this thread and clicking through all the way to the github repo, where it slowly dawned on me that this was not just layers of satire.

You may be right about that, but I don't think any of the bots on the main page are particuarly good examples; to really get an idea of what capabilities it has I'd recommend creating a bot, playing around a bit with the example dialogue section you can feed into it, and then having a few rounds of conversation where you aggressively probe topics and vote on several possible replies before accepting one.

I still need to check out ChatGPT I guess, if something new hasn't blown them all away by the time I get to it.

As I understand, a couple of the lead Google scientists from LaMDA went on to form character.ai which, for me, checks all the boxes that an LLM should. I haven't really seen many people try to compare it with ChatGPT, and I've never used the latter, but from using the former quite a bit I think it's very comparable to what people have done with ChatGPT.

That's equally shocking to me but I guess it makes sense considering what the industry seems to prioritize. I got an Elektron Model:Cycles on which the only way the pads are even really usable is to set the velocity on them to full (or turn the velocity modulation depth so far down as to be mostly nonresponsive). Or, I guess, bash them so hard they'd probably crack the circuit board within a few months.

I have a Korg PadKontrol (now, disappointingly, discontinued) which has really nice velocity response and even lets you set different response curves to each pad. Not sure why they pulled them when there are very few alternatives.

I've always kind of wondered if this is working as intended. Occasionally I type the name of an installed program, but the result loads slowly for whatever reason, but in the meantime there's almost instantly a search link which, if I press <Enter> thinking my result was found, opens up Edge (a browser I never launch otherwise) and inevitably shows me a variety of advertisements, rather than launching the program I already have on my computer.

This reminds me a lot of news websites that scroll articles away as you're about to click on them, and in their place right as your thumb hits the touchscreen is a giant advertisement.

Heh while this sort of thing can work and is often hilarious, I think it can kind of backfire since this now fills the context with discussion about AI that the AI is more likely to bring up again in spite of the fact that it's been told not to and claimed that it wouldn't.

I'd take the approach of a doctor talking to the actual Gepetto who's just taken a blow to the head and has bad amnesia and hallucinations/delusions.

Seeing that brings back a lot of nostalgia for the old PC Paintbrush that was once ubiquitous on DOS machines. The images it turned out were really great for the time, and I sometimes miss the aesthetic of those dithering patterns.

Cortana lives forever in the hearts of millions, and Clippy was extremely popular at the level of a D-list celebrity I'd say. Neither for doing actual work, though, so, point well made.

I'd add to that, this is essentially a kind of auto-socratic explorer for a topic. It constantly questions the assumptions of the user, albeit in a rote and very simple prescripted way, and could still lead to insights or new perspectives for the users. This is also a major potential benefit of technologies like ChatGPT IMHO. If we expect it to know things we don't, we might be disappointed, but if we treat it as a well-meaning teacher with skills in pedagogy who depends on our own knowledge, I think we can reap great benefits.

This always makes me recall the trailer for the movie Twister in which a large tractor tire smashes through one of the truck's windshields - the scene wasn't actually in the movie, but I was on the edge of my seat any time they were in a truck with high winds around.

I think we really need to get on integrating technology like this into a curriculum which does build critical thinking and problem solving skills, since these kids are already inundated with AI generated content and it seems certain to increase several fold over the next few years.

Huh, I was reading this thread thinking I'd found some like-minded individuals. I also have a relatively long torso and slightly shorter legs (only a couple inches either way from average, mind you). I never really thought about that being connected but it could very well be. A big reason I move at the speed I do is because I rely on my torso's inertia a lot, and I often feel when walking slower with a crowd that my natural ability to leverage inertia for efficiency has been impeded, and I feel like it's more stressful on my knees, etc.

Is there a body of evidence that suggests people get more misled and confused after using things like ChatGPT? It seems like a reasonable hypothesis, but my own experience doesn't necessarily support it. I've used the language model at character.ai for a bit and have found it to be clarifying in a sense. When the model spits out some overconfident misinformation, it's a great opportunity to argue with the bot about it in ways one could never argue with another person - certainly not a stranger, at least.

Perhaps I've been confused and misled so badly I don't realize it, so all I can really say is I think it's premature to assume people will be any more misled or confused by technologies like ChatGPT when all they have to do now is get on the internet or flip on a TV to be personally targeted with misleading and confusing information already. I think there's very real potential for the technology to give people a lever against misinformation if it helps them understand and explore their own thoughts/thought processes.

I guess to me, fundamentally, it's a question of who's the one with agency over using it, and to what end. I'd be much more comfortable once we can fit models like this on home computers and worry less about them suddenly trying to sell us sponsored products or convince us of some ideology because their creator was paid to do so.

I think of that more of an eternal Summer of 2007 since that's when the iPhone came out, and anecdotally the shift in society was well underway by 2010. I'm not sure we could use this to explain things are necessarily that different today than in 2014.

I am tempted to think the amount I have used social media and my smartphone has actually declined since 2014, and in the case of facebook I suppose it considerably has, but I'm not sure I haven't just replaced it with other compulsive clicks. So in that sense I must agree things have probably escalated a bit, but I can't point to a single event over the past decade to create a turning point.

> So what is ChatGPT supposed to be useful for if people need to understand what the answer is in order to ask the "correct" question?

Personally I think there's still a lot of value in mere rephrasing, recontextualizing, perspective shifting, and occasional insightful connection that ChatGPT can do even if it's all using information you already ostensibly know.

As it is often said that one never learns a topic more deeply than when they teach it to others, ChatGPT can serve as the ultimate "rubber duck" coworker for any subject. I'm not sure what we can do about users not using critical thinking, or expecting the machine to do that part for them. There are plenty of non-AI sources of misinformation that can readily be taken uncritically too, though, so it's not necessarily a new problem.