Yodeller

Today, after work we will once again have our psychological safety groups organized "deep talk" evening. Last time the event was fantastic and I stayed with a few fellow colleagues until the wee hours discussing various things.

When I saw the invite for this second session I was immediately in. Really looking forward for more of these discussions. Unfortunately I have a relative early morning tomorrow as I need to leave for our upcoming larp project's prep event so this time I can't hang out for too long (and need to skip the wine as well).

It's a shame I can't stay later. The discussions, while being really good already at the beginning of the evening really elevated towards the midnight. But as these seems to have become quite popular afterwork events I'm sure there will be many more opportunities to dig deeper into this fascinating topics and discussions in the future.

I was quite bummed yesterday when I got my new freezer in place and saw how much it protruded out from the cabinets. Even with my prior knowledge of the size difference I wasn't expecting it to stick out that far. I already considered returning the appliances and continue my search for more fitting ones.

I however decided to continue and installed the fridge in place today. To my shock it went all the way back and indeed only left the door (which is still quite thick) sticking out from the cabinet line. Were they different sized?

After a careful measurement and conclusion that no, they are exactly the same size I had to pull out the freezer for more close investigation. And there it was! An electric cable running up to the back of the cabinet above the space for the freezer into the socket where it is supposed to be plugged in was coming out from the right side panel, 4 centimeters from the back wall. The cable was thick enough that it was holding back the freezer so that it was not possible to push it sll the way to the wall.

Now I just need to figure if it's possible to move the cable so that it would be coming out closer to the back wall so the freezer would also fit as snuggly as the fridge does.

I knew this already before, while I was doing my research on the new freezer (and fridge) I noticed that all the new models were deeper in dimensions than the old ones. Only the integrated kind had a bit less depth, but I assume even those would have the same problem: the freezer sticks out from the surrounding cabinets!

Sure, the old ones did too, by the thickness of the door. So they weren't either flush with the cabinets. The new ones just do it more. And they even have thicker doors to add to that :( So while the old ones came out about 5 centimeters the new ones are out by almost 10.

I don't know why the manufacturers have done this. Perhaps just to be able to advertise their equipment have more volume inside or something. I'm sure most of the kitchens still have those 60 cm deep cabinets even though there are "xl" versions also available that add 5-10 cm to the depth of the cabinets and counters as well.

If only I had known this two years ago I would definitely have gotten those bogger cabinets to better fit these new "standard" sized kitchen appliances to them.

After discovering the joy, and should I say magic of making music with the help of an A.I. I also wanted to understand it better. I've always been curious of what makes things work as they do and this wasn't any different.

While I haven't formally studied artificial intelligence beyond the basic courses in university I've always kept myself up to date with the latest development in the field and understand the principles of it at least in elementary level. But with my background knowledge I wasn't able to come up with the theory behind making something so abstract as music. For a moment I was geeling hopeful that there is some emotional we have finally managed to teach to the machine.

But just like the generative models spitting our wise sounding words, yet still being just statistical models adhering to the wisdom of humankind and imitating it the "creations" of the music making models are as mechanical as anything. I would say even more so as they don't even really generate music.

How the text-to-music models work is that they are actually just an image generation models that are trained on visualized waveforms of different sounds, in this case music. Then those waveforms are just transformed back into sounds.

Sometimes you just should keep the magic alive and not peek behind the curtain.

After a thorough investigation of different brands and models of freezers and refrigerators I was able to narrow down my choices to two manufacturers. It was not an easy taks and I thought the final decision between these two would be that much more effort. How wrong I was!

There were almost as many different models from these two makers tham there was different manufacturers. Choosing a price range helped a little, but still too many options remained. Also the variations between different models made it hard to compare between brands.

If that wouldn't have been hard enough the retailers brought some additional challenges to the mix. Availability, wrong model number markings and retail specific versions didn't make my choice any easier.

After a while I was becoming proficient reading all those cryptic model numbers. At least for these two brands. While there was certain structure and logic to them it was different for each of them. A skill that will be useless for me hopefully for the next ten years (abd obsolete by then anyway!).

I don't really understand why they want to make so many models that have very little difference between them. Or why some features are tied together (or exclusive) so you still don't have all the possible combinations available.