P.S. i’ve tried my best to follow titling guidelines by using almost the original title, but removing extra clickbaity words. Let me know if I’m off target.
Sonic Pi is missing imo. (Some have mentioned Strudel, it’s a similar live-coding music platform). Admittedly Ruby-based, but it seems some of the other ones on the list are libraries/forms of other langs too.
Sonic Pi is by far the most accessible way to play with these tools. It's designed to teach music and coding to kids and has great starter tutorials, and a ton of depth as well. Check it out!
This post makes me wonder - does anyone else think there is a need for a term to more strongly differentiate between procedural generation (like this knot-drawing program) and genAI? I feel it really diminishes the impact of the work of programmer-artists nowadays to say they make “computer-generated” art. Or maybe we already have such a term?
> From one point of view, for a work of art to be considered algorithmic art, its creation must include a process based on an algorithm devised by the artist. An artist may also select parameters and interact as the composition is generated. Here, an algorithm is simply a detailed recipe for the design and possibly execution of an artwork […]
Creating art by AI certainly also uses an algorithm to some extent but it cannot be said to have devised that algorithm and arguably also not to clearly define all parameters to the algorithm.
I instinctively agree there is an important difference.
If you try to define systematically what that difference is, though, it's not obvious. At the end of day, I think it's something like "degree of difficulty" or "amount of thought", which are vague concepts. Yet most would agree what the author here did requires more skill and thinking than typing "image of celtic knot" into Gemini.
I used to work on procedural graphics, and to me the clear difference is that all the training involved happened inside my brain. This author's article describes a similar process. He's not throwing a lot of existing examples into a black box, letting it learn their features, then driving it to emit new images with similar features: he is learning, himself, what those features are, inventing a process which fits those bounds, then automating it with code.
Yeah fair enough. I don’t think of genAI either when I hear “procedural generation” (or CGI - “Computer Generated Imagery” - for that matter). But the word “generate” has taken on new significance for the broader public now and I’m not sure that non-technical folks know the difference.
If you want to find academic sources arguing against the possibility of measuring and confirming synesthesia or denying its existence, you'll want to dig back to the 1970's. It's not a tenable position in the 21st Century.
Meta-HN question from a newbie: Can someone help me understand why my 9-day-old submission is suddenly on the front page and says it’s from 3 hours ago?
Yeah I felt the contradictions here too. Doesn’t the feeling of “magic” directly proceed from abstraction and non-tractability (or at least, as you say, not needing to understand every part of the system)?
I agree that the "magic" feeling involves abstraction from nuts and bolts, but a kind of notable responsiveness to, say, preferred trains of thought that are optimal for a workflow or project management or for rich functional interaction. I use the word "liminal" in the sense of the aesthetic term "liminal spaces" to indicate a presence of a kind of lightweight logic not necessarily fully articulated.
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