Hacker News: alberto_balsam

New comment by alberto_balsam in "Brian Eno: What Art Does"

alberto_balsam — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 21:30:30 +0000

That is a great quote.

Eno knew what made music powerful, and created many powerful pieces himself and with others, but the article captures well how artists can lose touch with that energy:

"When I listen to that song again, I think, ‘Jesus, I would never do that now.’ I could not leave that in that condition ... It’s so badly played but actually that is the character of the piece. I just wouldn’t make it now like that."

New comment by alberto_balsam in "What Is the Fourier Transform?"

alberto_balsam — Mon, 08 Sep 2025 18:52:38 +0000

Great explanation, thanks for sharing

New comment by alberto_balsam in "A simple way to generate random points on a sphere"

alberto_balsam — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 06:44:10 +0000

Note that the author is not referring to the accept-reject method here

New comment by alberto_balsam in "Show HN: I Built a Prompt That Makes LLMs Think Like Heinlein's Fair Witness"

alberto_balsam — Tue, 20 May 2025 09:29:18 +0000

This is quite a fascinating approach. The system prompt is quite succinct. Does the LLM always follow it in the manner shown in the examples? Do you plan to do any benchmarking?

New comment by alberto_balsam in "The greatest soccer player never to play soccer"

alberto_balsam — Sun, 04 May 2025 13:24:12 +0000

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Dia

This is an infamous example of something similar in England. It is impossible to imagine anything like this happening in the modern game.

New comment by alberto_balsam in "Arsenal FC AI Research Engineer job posting"

alberto_balsam — Sat, 25 Jan 2025 20:10:24 +0000

Arsenal are doing very innovative things in AI and I believe have Karun Singh on their team who is extremely influential in the football analytics revolution that has occurred over the last decade. Exciting role (that due to other interests I cannot go for!)

New comment by alberto_balsam in "Spotify Shuts Down ‘Unwrapped’ Artist Royalty Calculator with Legal Threats"

alberto_balsam — Sat, 28 Dec 2024 20:36:16 +0000

The Spotify app started suggesting me albums it labels as "Sponsored recommendations" a few months ago and it's really put me off. Now it's hard to trust how good it is at finding new music if Spotify is admitting to deliberately excluding most of its database and prefiltering down to its sponsors.

You're right though, the rest of the things you mention do make it much tougher to decide on whether to switch and what to switch to.

New comment by alberto_balsam in "Show HN: Experiments in AI-generation of crosswords"

alberto_balsam — Mon, 23 Dec 2024 21:43:06 +0000

Do you know if there is a solution to this by humans? I'd be interested in seeing it.

New comment by alberto_balsam in "Show HN: Get any domain's brand data via API"

alberto_balsam — Sat, 16 Nov 2024 11:40:27 +0000

Nice idea. Have you tried it with sports teams?

New comment by alberto_balsam in "Nearly all of the Google images results for "baby peacock" are AI generated"

alberto_balsam — Mon, 07 Oct 2024 20:26:25 +0000

What makes you say this? I just tried a few Reddit searches about events from the last few days and they work as expected (tested in Kagi)

New comment by alberto_balsam in "Legalizing sports gambling was a mistake"

alberto_balsam — Fri, 27 Sep 2024 23:14:01 +0000

There exists big sports betting exchanges like Betfair, where there isn't a "house" and where they don't really have an incentive to limit big winners. I have friends who make consistent profit from these sites - though it must be said they do ramp up the commission

New comment by alberto_balsam in "Just got doxxed to within 15 miles by a vision model, from only a single photo"

alberto_balsam — Thu, 02 May 2024 07:33:26 +0000

It's only mentioned at the end of the video but the AI is using features of the camera like locations of smudges. However it does appear to also heavily use genuine geographic fingerprints like telegraph poles. I wonder how it would fare against a human on a test set that is completely independent of the training set in terms of camera characteristics.

New comment by alberto_balsam in "Things unexpectedly named after people (2020)"

alberto_balsam — Thu, 22 Feb 2024 08:44:32 +0000

But more than that, they are named after Linda Kasabian, a member of the Manson family who testified against Charles Manson in court.

New comment by alberto_balsam in "The day I canceled my Spotify subscription"

alberto_balsam — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 13:22:46 +0000

Spotify uses a pro-rata model, so your favourite indie band would only get $0.12 in your example.

This effect does not drown out once you scale up to a full user base either - it appears that the most popular artists benefit disproportionately. Other music streaming companies like Deezer apparently are pushing for a fairer model. See here for example: https://musically.com/2018/03/02/user-centric-licensing-real...

New comment by alberto_balsam in "(Unsuccessfully) Fine-tuning GPT to play "Connections""

alberto_balsam — Tue, 16 Jan 2024 07:28:40 +0000

There is a UI for the game without the upper bound at connections.swellgarfo.com. Personally that annoys me as my friends are prone to sharing massive walls of incorrect guesses when they do badly on that site, but it sounds like it would be a good fit for you.