Nice service to get an initial overview. I am a regular festival-goer, but I prefer to go to more "underground"-ish festival (for the lack of a better word). Those festivals don't necessarily want to be easily discoverable (i.e. the Fusion festival in Germany goes great lengths to suppress the hype around it).
For me the discoverability problem is another one: In recent years, I am listening to so many new bands and musicians, that I am totally loosing track of their names. It occurred to me more than one time, that someone was talking about a band, whose name I thought I never heard before, to later find out that they did a song or album, that I actually listened a lot. This also goes for festivals: I walk around at a festival and hear a familiar song playing somewhere and realize, that there is a band playing that I enjoy a lot, but whose name I didn't remember at all. I know other people have this problem too and I assume this is a by-product of the UX of streaming music (when you have to put a CD or vinyl on every time you want to listen to a band, ofc you learn the names much faster).
So what I actually need is a service, where I can paste a link to a festival website, which the service scrapes and does entity recognition on. Then the resulting list of bands should be matched against my Spotify history and tell me the matches (either because I actually listened to the bands, or by some means of collaborative filtering). I am thinking about doing this in script form for this years Fusion festival, but would also like to know, if more people are interested in a service like this.
Songkick does exactly this. Links with various music and social media accounts, then matches concerts and festivals in areas that you specify. Whenever a concert is announced by an artist I listen to in a city I have selected, I get an email with details on where and when tickets are on sale.
Thanks for mentioning Songkick, I just registered there and looks like a good service overall. Reminds me of some of the last.fm functionality I was using in the past for that matter. What its still missing, is support for the functionality I described for festivals. Yes, they match festivals for you, but they don't tell you, which bands you should see there. Also they would have to update their database pretty often to i.e. work for Fusion festival, which announces the line-up only a few days prior to the festival, or to account for additions to/changes in festival line-ups.
IIRC bands that you track are in bold on an events page. No predictions on who you should see though, that's probably out of their wheelhouse. I do think they have some kind of API acces to ticketing sites though because more than once the emails I get had working links to artist presale that I could use. Another app that I use is Dice. Not sure what the avaibility is outside of the UK but I have got (relevant) suggested events based on other tickets I bought from them.
Similar issues here a while back, now when I find a show like dj sets from Miami or Vegas on youtube I immediately look for comments that show the tracklist, or majority of it. Those who post those in comments are so helpful. I've copy pasted several.
Now I need a script to suck in all the tracks I've checked with shazaam, and tracklists I've copy pasted into notepad, and bookmarked via chrome and liked on di.fm combine them, then spit out a spreadsheet showing cost to buy single mp3s and associated albums. I would buy much more music and have is accessible when mobile more often.
> (when you have to put a CD or vinyl on every time you want to listen to a band, ofc you learn the names much faster).
"Back in the day", I was getting new music every Tues/Thursday. It always amazed me how quickly I could catalog artist/trackname/what it sounded like in my brain. Later, if I heard another DJ play that track, I could recall the artist/track/cover art/record label info very quickly. It's kind of like any other skill really, when you do it all day every day, it's easy for you. Stop doing it for awhile, and the skill diminishes. I think it's also another example of that physical/tactile interaction with learning. Reading the info on the record, associating the visual of the cover, associating the sound of the track all while physically touching the vinyl/CD really embeds the data in the brain.
You are right about that, I lived in Trier, a German town next to the border to Luxembourg. A lot of people in the area went there just to fill their tanks (gas is around 20 cent less per liter) and stock up on cigarettes and coffee.
Like a Universal Health Care you could have a "Universal Law Care", a per se legal costs insurance for every natural person. You might have to pay low fares measured in daily rates calculated from your rate of income/wealth for any legal action you take, but nothing that would put your way of life at risk. With automated processes in law becoming more and more of a thing, it would be possible to handle cases faster and on a much finer grained basis, without sucking so much time and resources. Think of a fully-automated arbitration process. There would still be "manual law", where you could always escalate to, if you think Robo-Judge is wrong. Meanwhile wet-ware judicature would also get much more efficient/cheaper by help of automation (I think a wide-spread acceptance of teleconferencing into court would also help).
In a scenario like this, such obvious fraud would not be a thing anymore imo. And we could be there soon (except maybe for the Universal Law Care part).
Legal aid (and no-win, no-fee class action lawyers for "obvious" cases) already exists. But that doesn't mean that corporations don't have deeper pockets and a stronger interest in winning in many circumstances. And unless you've got hard AI, RoboJudge isn't going to understand the intricacies of how PayPal markets its donation service to consumers and distributes revenues and whether its disclaimers were sufficiently clear and obvious to its intended audience
"Obvious" to whom? There's been a lawsuit filed, that doesn't mean it's "obvious." We are certainly aware of PayPal's history as slimy (and my inclination is to side with the plaintiff in this suit), but suppose the plaintiff also is aware of this reputation and is lying in an attempt to simply cause PayPal harm?
Halite also looks interesting, but I think with generals bot-makers will have much more possibilities, because there are no limitations for your implementation. The game mechanics might also a little more challenging in generals, especially the fog of war makes a huge difference imo.
You'd be surprised how many implementation options there are in halite. People have come up with starter packages for just about every language you would ever want to use.
This will be super interesting. I think this game makes very much sense as an intermediate frontier on the road to a StarCraft AI. Here are my reasons:
* The playing field is relatively limited, just a little larger than Go. This makes it much more approachable than StarCraft as you will not need a server farm to get started.
* It has a fog of war, so a bot needs to handle uncertainty and have a memory.
* It's controlled through a web API and allows total freedom for the bot implementation by that.
* There are very competitive humans players.
* There is already a very huge dump of replays to train on.
I really hope this will get traction and establish as an ongoing AI competition. Also it will be very interesting, when the first bots will be better than the top humans here.
This just made my jaw literally drop. Not only is Prüm my former hometown (of roughly 5000 people), but I actually worked at Grohmann at holidays and as a part-timer during my school and student days.
This place is filled with prototypical German engineers (in the good sense) and the company was always in growth-mode. I think this might be a very good acquisition for Tesla.
It depends on the kind of people you want. Even if the town is "remote" if seen by German proportions, it is still only an hours drive away from the next major cities and the countryside is very rural and beautiful. It's true that these are not the conditions that attract a lot of people straight out of college, but they are very attractive to more senior people, esp if they have family.
I know Grohmann has been very good at binding talent for long times, i.e. by giving loans for houses at much better conditions than a bank would. So these people build their homes in the area, which ofc gives them a much greater tie to the place.
They strike me more as an example of the traditional German "Mittelstand" than a fancy tech startup. The location seems perfectly reasonable, although 5000 is indeed a bit on the tiny side even for Germany.
There doesn't seem to be any public transit but in rural Germany most commuters use cars anyway. The next biggest nearby town seems to be Trier, which is one hour away by car.
There's also a US airforce base nearby and the town is relatively close to the borders of Luxembourg and Belgium.
I don't think they'll have trouble with recruiting. If the jobs are appealing enough, people will be willing to relocate -- if not to Prüm itself then probably to one of the nearby towns.
Housing seems to be less of a problem in Germany. I've heard that the majority rent because it's just much cheaper. Another story mentioned there's constant house building, along with the regulation that demands that e.g you must build on the land and not wait for the return to increase.
That plus good infrastructure and moving around isn't that big a deal.
I wasn't thinking about whether housing exists there (if anything, the general rule is that it's easier to find housing in cheaper places, because the cost of land is lower), but rather whether most skilled professionals would find such a small town an attractive place to live.
> They're buying an existing company which is HQ'd there.
I understand that, but it sounds like they are also planning to try and add a lot of people in the future.
> Why would they? People can easily move around.
Perhaps in Germany the attitudes are different (I recently moved here so maybe I'll find out!), but in the US you'd have an extremely hard time recruiting talented engineers to a city of just 5,000 people. Most educated people in the states want the amenities of a larger city.
The difference probably is that the scales are different in Germany. The largest city in the general area is Cologne with 1 million residents. There are a lot more much smaller towns in between and it's perfectly normal to drive from one town to another for shopping and services because the towns tend to be very close to each other.
You don't generally get these vast empty stretches of land between places in Germany, especially not in the West (the most densely populated region of Germany). But you also don't get American megacities like NYC, SF or LA.
Not really. An hour drive is still an hour drive. The physical distances don't really matter much though if you don't happen to own a helicopter or it's short enough that you can walk or ride a bicycle.
The autobahn is frequently overestimated by foreigners. That there is no speed limit in principle doesn't mean that you can go any speed in practice. Most of the autobahn has speed limits and road works.
> Not really. An hour drive is still an hour drive.
An hour drive is an hour drive, but 60 miles is an hour drive in the US, it might be 30~45mn via the Autobahn or Schnellstraßen.
> s. That there is no speed limit in principle doesn't mean that you can go any speed in practice. Most of the autobahn has speed limits and road works.
Sure, but speed limits tend to be much higher than they are on US interstate.
In reality, few drivers on German roads go faster than 70-80mph. Mostly due to traffic, but even with free flowing traffic the minority drives much faster. It's nice to be able to drive fast if you have to, but a lot of people (especially on the country side) are very environmentally conscious, which doesn't go well with driving 120mph.
Many Large Engineering companies in Germany have their headquarters in relatively small towns. See Waldorf for SAP, Wolfsburg for VW, Zuffenhausen vor Porsche... There's many examples. Germany is pretty dense so many services are available Nationwide, and even the smallest towns usually have a few food delivery places that deliver to them. Normally the next larger city is less than an hour's drive by car away, so it's very doable to live in small towns. It also has a bit to do with salaries in Germany, which tend to be on the low side, even for highly qualified engineers if you compare it to SV levels.
Walldorf at least is 15min from Heidelberg/Mannheim. Zuffenhausen is literally a district of Stuttgart. And Wolfsburg is a city of 120.000 people, and already VW has to pay a good "Wüstenzulage" (desert bonus) to get top talent, so they can afford taking the ICE (fast train), which takes an hour to/from Berlin.
Sure, but neither Heidelberg/Mannheim nor Stuttgart and Wolfsburg really are that meet the criteria that american people consider "big cities".
We don't have that many million people hubs in Germany so it's more common. And even with "Wüstenzulage" many Engineering salaries at VW are nowhere compared to SV salaries for engineers.
How many automotive engineers in the US do you think live in a larger city? Even those in Michigan mostly don't live in Detroit proper--because it's Detroit, gentrification by the river notwithstanding. (The area around Dearborn, Troy, etc. is relatively built up of course but I'm not sure it's what a lot of people here think of as an urban lifestyle.)
Prüm is in a seemingly rural yet heavily populated part of Germany. There are villages and towns every few kms, sometimes less. Many people in the region commute to major cities such as Cologne and Aachen daily. Luxembourg, Trier, Cologne, Bonn, and Koblenz are all within manageable distance.
I come from Aachen. I don't think that people commute from here or colognen to Prüm. It's too far away for daily commute.
This could change with fully autonomous cars ;)
I don't agree. From Cologne you can stay on the Autobahn/Schnellstraße pretty much until you reach the Grohmann front-door. I think that's a much better kind of commute for reading/sleeping than going through urban traffic.
Couldn't read our sleep while being driven on the B51 ( from experience). But not everyone will be as prone to being car sick as I am. Didn't Audi once develop suspensions that cancel the effect of curvy roads?
Initially thought that but Prüm does seem a bit isolated. Google recons it is 1h 23m to Cologne. Liege and Koblenz a little closer.
I was going to say hope it has good train links for a more relaxed commute, but then relevantly the engineers might use Teslas on autopilot to work....
According to Wikipedia there are no longer any passenger trains that stop in Prüm.
The good thing is most Germans living in rural areas are used to commuting by car anyway. I doubt there will be many commuters from Cologne (commuting by car from within Cologne is bad enough without having to drive for over an hour once you've managed to escape the city) but it seems like a nice region to settle down.
Wait. Based on my reading here I thought it was only in the US that public transportation wasn't ubiquitous and people drove everywhere :-) And that in other countries you didn't even need to own a car.
It's not wrong. You don't need a car in Germany to move between most cities. But you do need a car to get around in rural Germany, especially between small towns.
This was a bit of a culture clash for me when moving from a city of one million to a much smaller city of fifteen thousand. I was used to being able to take public transport to get everywhere and I can actually take the train to move between the two cities, but in the smaller city everybody has or shares a car.
I am also very satisfied with these headphones: http://www.thomann.de/de/beyerdynamic_dt990pro.htm The sound is crystal-clear and due to the big and soft earpieces you can wear them for hours without noticing. Perfect for home use.
This looks interesting at first glance, but to be honest, I don't fully get it from the description. Is it some kind of Storm/CEP/Graphite combination? Where does the actual "processing" happen? Do you have rent additional EC2 resources for your workers?
It looks like a potentially powerful and interesting service, but the documentation could be a little more clear and maybe include an example of a DAG layout for a typical application.
Hey thanks for listening =)
Although I own some fun toys (e.g. Nord Modular), most of my stuff is just made in Ableton with the suite effects, Max 4 Live samplers, etc. And the synth I use for pretty much everything from pads to toms to stabs to leads is the Audiorealism ABL Pro. Such a good synth.
For me the discoverability problem is another one: In recent years, I am listening to so many new bands and musicians, that I am totally loosing track of their names. It occurred to me more than one time, that someone was talking about a band, whose name I thought I never heard before, to later find out that they did a song or album, that I actually listened a lot. This also goes for festivals: I walk around at a festival and hear a familiar song playing somewhere and realize, that there is a band playing that I enjoy a lot, but whose name I didn't remember at all. I know other people have this problem too and I assume this is a by-product of the UX of streaming music (when you have to put a CD or vinyl on every time you want to listen to a band, ofc you learn the names much faster).
So what I actually need is a service, where I can paste a link to a festival website, which the service scrapes and does entity recognition on. Then the resulting list of bands should be matched against my Spotify history and tell me the matches (either because I actually listened to the bands, or by some means of collaborative filtering). I am thinking about doing this in script form for this years Fusion festival, but would also like to know, if more people are interested in a service like this.