In "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat," there's a chapter where Oliver Sacks makes a similar argument about music stemming from the case of two autistic twins who couldn't do arithmetic but played a game with each other where they named increasingly large primes. Basically says that music/harmony is a kind of innate appreciation of the numerical relationship between sounds, much like naming primes is an appreciation of the _lack_ of a numerical relationship between numbers. The experience of a resonance between two different things (frequencies, numbers, and in this blog's case words) can exist extremely strongly outside of the ability to operate on those things in the first place. Interesting read.
I've read that music and dancing memory is mainly handled in the cerebellum, which is separate from many other types of memory. This is also theorized to mostly explain why playing familiar music can help "stabilize" people with dementia who otherwise feel lost (funny enough also something Sacks has talked about[0]), because the cerebellum is typically less affected than the neocortex by whatever process is causing the brain to break down.
I'm a multimedia / digital artist and this is the first in an in-depth multi-part series of posts I'm doing documenting the the whole process from start to finish (er... maintenance)!
thanks rob! yeah, my favorite learning was the one about CSS. this project really helped me understand where the AI and I understand things the same way, and where me being a human and the AI being an LLM will necessarily have friction
The artist is not consuming them for free. He spent their time and effort creating something. They are not monetizing what is provided for free, but their creation. If someone wants to pay him for his work, what is it to you?
Separately, based on my life experience, this notion of "exploitation" is truly harmful to those who subscribe to it. You'll never outdo your limiting beliefs. You don't have to take my word for it, but I encourage you to explore who was it that instilled that belief in you and what you stand to gain from subscribing to it. I mean this in earnest, as advice from a stranger, for what it's worth. <3
They could spend the same time and effort arranging blank slides creating the exact same thing without the pictures, and it would have far less value
The value does not come only from the arrangement of the pieces, but also from the pieces themselves. To say the only value comes from the artist is just as wrong as saying its only value comes from the source material.
A painter cannot paint a picture without a canvas, and yet the canvas itself is generally not free, with the canvas-maker earning something from the sale of the canvas itself.
The rest of your comment is wildly condescending, and while I am open to reconsidering my beliefs, I generally do not follow the advice of condescending people. My life experience tells me such people are generally both more close-minded and more morally bankrupt than those who can evangelize their beliefs without condescension. Perhaps consider changing your approach to providing unsolicited advice?
I nerd sniped myself a week or so ago when I had a full day of stuff to do and had this idea in the shower. Tried to make it in Python, then tried to make it in Node, then when both failed miserably I said screw it they're both trying to wrap C libraries so I putzed with Claude till I got it working in C.
The repo is only missing the original moan folder, which you can record yourself. I'm loath to give mine away for free ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
