Yodeller

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.

My freezer was once again starting to melt. The same thing that happened last summer. This time it lasted less than a year and I don't know how long it would last if I'd still have given it another try as it might have still worked for a while. So I decided to order new one.

Those things aren't cheap. Especially if you want to invest a bit in quality. In the end I chose a brand well known for their high quality and longevity, but which was still on the reasonable price range.

Incidentally I happened to notice I have been a loyal subscriber for Netflix for ten years (no sign of gratitude from their side for such loyalty 😒). Anyway, I calculated that I have paid them around the same amount of money over these ten years as I paid for my new freezer!

As such home appliances are something I would expect to last at least then years then in comparison the freezer really wasn't that expensive, or the streaming service is. After all a freezer is probably more essential in today's homes than a service that allows you to "waste" your time.

Hearing weird noises around the house can be scary. Especially at night when you are alone. There is usually a natural explanation to all those noises, but it can still make your imagination run wild.

Living with cats for over two decades have gotten me used to hearing such noises all the time. I bet there could be anything happening outside my bedroom door and I wouldn't even bat an eye for those sounds, accounting them for the cats. They are often having zoomies during the night, tipping over stuff and dropping things from the shelves etc.

Last bight my wife dropped our youngest one to my place at the middle of the night. I was already sleeping and while I did register them entering the house at some level through my sleep I didn't even fully wake up to those sounds. Not until they started to talk. Even though they were keeping their voice low it was still something unexpected and did wake me up fully, but as I did recognize their voices it didn't get me startled. I was only wondering why they were here all the sudden.

This wasn't in any way a hard day, or week. Yet still I'm feeling really tired. I didn't even sleep badly last night although I woke up what some people might consider early - at six o'clock.

Yet I've just veen staying up. It's only half past ten, felt too early to go to sleep any earlier on a Friday evening. But I don't really have a schedule, at least bow during the weekend. I could go to sleep early, wake up early.

Even though I usually sleep well and am accustomed to wake up early weekend is still the time to rest. It's not just being physically tired from which I need rest. In a sense staying up later is part of that. I don't need to worry waking up early enough (even if I do, despite how log I stay up) as there is not obligations waiting foe me in the morning.

I would like to stay awake a while longer, but the tiredness disagrees. There is plenty of time in the morning to enjoy this resting time instead of forcefully staying up now to maximize it.