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Showing posts from April, 2024

New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: Sonauto – A more controllable AI music creator

Show HN: Sonauto – A more controllable AI music creator 441 by zaptrem | 231 comments on Hacker News. Hey HN, My cofounder and I trained an AI music generation model and after a month of testing we're launching 1.0 today. Ours is interesting because it's a latent diffusion model instead of a language model, which makes it more controllable: https://sonauto.ai/ Others do music generation by training a Vector Quantized Variational Autoencoder like Descript Audio Codec ( https://ift.tt/lDz3dZt ) to turn music into tokens, then training an LLM on those tokens. Instead, we ripped the tokenization part off and replaced it with a normal variational autoencoder bottleneck (along with some other important changes to enable insane compression ratios). This gave us a nice, normally distributed latent space on which to train a diffusion transformer (like Sora). Our diffusion model is also particularly interesting because it is the first audio diffusion model to generate coherent lyrics!

New best story on Hacker News: Show HN: I made a new sensor out of 3D printer filament for my PhD

Show HN: I made a new sensor out of 3D printer filament for my PhD 534 by 00702 | 100 comments on Hacker News. Here's a "behind-the-scenes" look at my development of a cool sensor during my PhD (electrical engineering). This sensor is only about 1/3 of my total research for my degree and took about a year. I've been on HN for a while now and I've seen my fair share of posts about the woes of pursuing a PhD. Now that I'm done with mine I wanna share some anecdotal evidence that doing a PhD can actually be enjoyable (not necessarily easy) and also be doable in 3 years. When I started I knew I didn't want to work on something that would never leave the lab or languish in a dissertation PDF no one will ever read. Thanks to an awesome advisor I think I managed to thread the needle between simplicity and functionality. Looking back, the ideas and methods behind it are pretty straightforward, but getting there took some doing. It’s funny how things seem obviou

New best story on Hacker News: Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on?

Ask HN: What is the most useless project you have worked on? 589 by panqueca | 640 comments on Hacker News. If you're feeling useless, remember that I exist. Let me give you some context. I work in the pipeline automation department of a company. Last month, our team decided to deprecate an internal tool due to several maintenance issues. So we created a pipeline that automates the implementation of this legacy tool, in case other teams needed to use it. (WHAT???) This month, a guy in my team found some improvement scenarios in the automation. So I was chosen to implement this changes in this legacy internal tool. The thing is, after I finished the adjustments, my pull requests are not getting approved due to adjustments meticulously requested by this guy in my team. Adjustments to make the pipeline automation even more resilient in complete unlikely scenarios. But this same week, my TL sent notices to all the other teams informing them that this internal tool has been deprecate