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georgebonnr | 5 years ago | on: Talented People Frequently Don’t Rise to the Top

Maybe one of the lessons we're learning from removing all the gatekeepers is that Michelin stars aren't a truly objective form of assigning value. Or, value doesn't exist in a vacuum -- it depends on the application, and maybe the applications aren't what gatekeepers say they are.

georgebonnr | 10 years ago | on: Google I/O 2015 – Keynote

Surprised nobody's commented yet about the jarring juxtaposition of the running chat that reflects the sentiment of average Youtube viewers alongside content that's meant for a fairly specific audience (developers).

Or rather... how discouraging it is that it IS such a juxtaposition.

It's well-known by now that Youtube is not the place to go to find quality discussion. It still stings a little bit to see it applied in realtime to people you care about, even if it is just because you loosely share a profession and professional culture.

georgebonnr | 11 years ago | on: 42Floors Lays Off Half of Staff as It Cuts Brokerage Team, Refocuses on Search

The search on the homepage is confusing to the point of seeming broken. I clicked 'Areas' and selected a few different neighborhoods in SF. Nothing happened. Clicked away. Nothing happened. Clicked the out-of-the-way, 'search' button (which was confusing because it was too wide to be a button and looked almost more like its true calling life was to be an input field). I don't think anything happened? Closed page.

georgebonnr | 11 years ago | on: How I Taught My Computer to Write Its Own Music

Makes for an impressive read... perhaps too impressive. Reeks of curve-fitting to me. "For instance, if I heard something—a melody, a chord progression—that had an emotional attraction for me, I would draw attention to it in the mix, repeating it and developing it further if necessary." Sounds like a dressed-up version of n monkeys at n typewriters. Let them go, and when you finally see something that's identifiable to you as a word – "dog", tell them to type that more often. So every 20th word is "dog", with pseudo-randomness continuing underneath. We would never enjoy reading a short story consisting of this, but because repetition is one of the most important foundations of music listening (http://aeon.co/magazine/culture/why-we-love-repetition-in-mu...), this works.

To me, while the project seemed interesting to work on, and most people would call the music beautiful, it doesn't really amount to what it's purported to represent.

Another (to me) important point: a lot of the compositions, with some notable exceptions, don't stray far from the pentatonic scale – or the individual elements are pentatonic in relation to themselves. The pentatonic scale is 5 notes that, to western audiences, always sound relatively pleasing in relation to the other 4. You could play something literally completely random in a pentatonic scale (perhaps with certain broad rhythmic restrictions), and western audiences would enjoy it. If anything, I think this is just evidence that the process was actually carefully shaped at every step of the way by human tastes and intuition. The computer was truly more of a servant than a collaborator.

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