I personally love it, especially as I like to do a lot of improv in various tunings, and the layout makes transposing and thinking about structure so much easier than a traditional keyboard. The terpstra seems similar, not sure what their selling point is over the lumatone.
Edit: oh, it seems that the lumatone is the commercialized version essentially. Great hardware, can reccomend!
Any idea why something like this costs $5,000? It seems like manufacturing costs would justify 1/10th of that maybe? Disclaimer: I'm not a hardware manufacturer nor retailer, I'm just going off what regular typing keyboards go for.
> I'm just going off what regular typing keyboards go for.
It's not that long ago that a mechanical keyboard with Hall-effect switches and individually-addressable LEDs would have set you back a couple of grand.
The mechanical keyboard scene has exerted really significant downward pressure on the cost of this sort of thing - something that likely doesn't hit the music world due to lower volumes
Hall effect by Wooting costs like a few hunderd EUR and have been around for quite some years, and this one with OLED is from 2007, costing 1600 USD (not worth it IMO) [1]. You don't typically look at your keyboard, same with toich bar. I guess there's a niche ie. Stream Deck (also overpriced). Doubt keys last long, given OLED burn-in.
if they sell 100 of these per year (which I doubt), with profit of $3000 per unit (which I also doubt), that pays enough to employ like one person (who needs to handle sales, support, marketing, three or four different kinds of engineering, etc.)
I feel like most projects like this must be run by people who are independently wealthy(ish) already and are in it for the long run? Like if this style took off enough to mass produce they could eventually make a lot of money, but if they keep it niche they are never going to make significant money no matter how much they charge.
I could definitely imagine a smaller cheap plasticky version of this being pitched as a more intuitive way for kids to learn piano, maybe that's where they're aiming?
Lets presume this thing retails at - very unrealistic low price - of $500.
How many people would buy this weird thing per month - even at this low price point?
10? 50? 100?
Imagine you're an engineer and your competency is worth $200,000/year.
If this retailed at 1/10th - as you suggested - so $500, and lets generously say you make $100usd per unit at this price point.
You have to atleast sell ~166 of these "weird" niche things per month, every month, no exceptions to match. And you're probably not a single person, so way more.
Can you? And why bother?
More importantly, can you even make these things for $400usd when your order quantity is only 166units per month?
And this is after spending years(?) in development, and some non negligible amount of cap ex.
I’ve only seen videos of this keyboard but never played one. With that disclaimer out of the way, the price is comparable to mid-range clavinova models.
The clavinova does have a piano-like body, very very good built in sounds (including binaural for 2 types of piano in mine), and built in speakers, so there’s that.
On the other hand, this one says “built to order” while clavinovas are not.
All this to say that, while expensive, it does not seem outrageous if the keyboard plays good. This one has after touch too, which makes it more comparable with a synth than a digital piano (though I understand this one is just a controller).
A tenth of that gets you a basic but solid 88-key Roland FP-10; that's something they will sell a shit ton of and which shares components with several other pianos.
It's also worth noting that a piano or piano-like keyboard will be taking _much_ greater impacts than any typist inflicts on a computer keyboard; a music keyboard needs a mechanical action that can properly and rapidly reset the keys, withstanding many rapidly repeated simultaneous heavy strikes.
> Are there any regular typing keyboards with velocity sensitive keys? I genuinely don't know
Yes, a number of the mechanical keyboards that use Hall effect switches let you access the velocity data. Wooting has an official SDK, and there are community-supported drivers for a number of Keychron boards
Yeah, velocity definitely jumped out at me as a difference, but it seems(?) like being velocity-sensitive could 2x the cost, maybe even 3x, but not 10x ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm absolutely not calling it over-priced, just puzzled.
Well the only moving part in a typing keyboards is a mass-produced switch that you slot into a PCB. There are mass-produced hall effect switches that can provide velocity sensitivity, but it's a pretty distant comparison. The keys on a lumatone aren't anything like buttons; they're weighted mechanical arms with significant travel -- much more like a piano key than a keyboard key. And it has 280 of these! The degree of mechanical hardware in this thing makes it seem not really comparable to a PCB with some switches slotted into it.
That said! There are people making DIY isomorphic keyboards using hall-effect keyboard switches. None are commercially available right now, but see e.g. the MidiHex at https://gullsonix.co.uk/. You could make one for a fraction of the cost of a lumatone -- but of course it would be a very different instrument.
maybe a society which has laws and regulations voted by citizens (anarchy for example) commercial products shouldn't profit over 700% or some absurdity which caps the 5000 usd number... it's not like velocity sensible keys are expensive or overly complex to produce
micro-tonal instruments are prevalent in various cultures which weren't flooded by Europe and then North America by hundreds, if not thousands of years ago. it's pretty easy to find examples on countries inside Africa and Asia
Where are you getting your numbers - profit over 700%?
If so I want in!
Unless you know how many units they sell per month, and what are their expenses exactly, and how many people are employed, and amortized cap ex and R&D cost, you're just making shit up on the spot.
Lets say this thing moves two units per month, and each brings $4000 in pure profit (costs per unit $1000). If company has one employee. Now you've made $96000/yr.
Which is way less than a single competent engineer or entrepreneur in US is worth. Ie. they are losing money.
This is fundamental quality of very low-volume, very niche products. They are almost never priced anywhere near their bill-of-materials cost.
> micro-tonal instruments are prevalent in various cultures which weren't flooded by Europe and then North America by hundreds, if not thousands of years ago. it's pretty easy to find examples on countries inside Africa and Asia
> maybe a society which has laws and regulations voted by citizens (anarchy for example) commercial products shouldn't profit over 700% or some absurdity which caps the 5000 usd number
No problemo. The consequence of that law is you'll simply not get those products on the market because there's not enough profit to justify someone spending the time to make them.
See also: Rent control, minimum wage, price control (e.g. maximum price of gasoline during a shortage).
> it's not like velocity sensible keys are expensive or overly complex to produce
Oh, my sweet summer child; music instrument keys are mechanically not the same thing as a computer keyboard. There are moving parts involved that need to handle routine forces that easily break a normal computer keyboard. 𝆑𝆑𝆑 calls for your whole arm and torso.
I have an FP-10 keyboard 3 feet from me that requires that to generate a midi message with a velocity of 255 at the lowest sensitivity setting, and not much less than that at the middle-low setting. If I hit my computer keyboard as hard as I played it an hour ago, keycaps would have gone flying.
No, but I have the linnstrument and have programmed my akai launchpad as a midi controlled isomorphic layout before, which are both grid layouts in a very similar configuration (though, the linnstrument allows for bends/slides/expressive-playing). I also have a synthstrom deluge which is also essentially the same midi controller as the one you mentioned.
I love the linnstrument, but, different vibe. More like a 8-string stringed-instrument than a keyboard.
The launchpad/deluge, which are more direct comparisons, are fine, but, I miss the range of a larger instrument.
Further, the amount of keys does not affect the ease of control as the layout of the Lumatone is very regular, so, it could be 100x as long and just as easy to control outside of having to jog between the ends of a hypothetical 30 ft long keyboard, lol.
Not the OP, but, I'm also hyperphantasic, which is the name for that. For me, personally, I usually think in something akin to visuals, but, with all the other qualia mixed in as relevant, not just visuals.
Quantity is not necessarily a problem: it feels a lot like the same tradeoff as if you need to picture a lot of apples in an image of fixed resolution, you can make them smaller/less detailed just by, loosely, "allocating fewer pixels per apple", rather than needing the same detail for each that you'd need if you're trying to zoom in depth into one apple.
However, if I have a situation where I have to picture a lot of very detailed things of irreducible complexity (the details matter) that need to be placed in a specific configuration (the ordering matters), then it gets harder. Statistics was so intuitive for me that I would read the equations as visual images in my head because it was throwing out the individual details and dealing with population mechanics as individual objects of study. However, combinatorics was initially very hard for me to learn because it was dealing with very large numbers of hierarchies of orders as well as the specifics of their interrelations, so building intuitive understandings of why the theorems were correct was very difficult.
I have learned to lean on a very internally barebones representation of language/symbolic structures when needing to reason about certain complex topics that require it, but, even then, often when I'm conscious of it, it's almost like I'm visualizing the letters or forming the words as sound in my head. When I'm forming sentences to actually speak or write, it feels like I've got a concept that I've turned into a "rendering" that I'm trying to communicate via language substructures. To do so, I'll break it down into component parts and just start describing the substructures as if I'm perceiving it and describing it live in small parts. It feels like the learned skill required for speaking a language for me is learning how to decompose and reorder these objects into chunks that are expressible within the vocabulary and grammar of the target language and finding the correct words&patterns that represent and order these chunks most efficiently for effective communication. Almost feels like a SAT problem or a language diffusive process (and likely is, to some degree, related to those processes or similar under the hood), but, it actually qualitatively feels that way to me, consciously/experientially. Language feels almost bolted onto my experience rather than the primary mode of thought, even if I can think in it if needed.
If you read the article that this post is referencing, that's actually ruled out as a viable possibility. UBI does not fix the issue and is shown to not actually work long term. We need to systemically fix the issue at its root by replacing the system wholesale is essentially the conclusion (or put increasingly higher taxes on automation, but, that's still a reactive fix and would likely be gamed under current incentives)
> UBI does not fix the issue and is shown to not actually work long term.
The only way it might not work is if business captures the government completely so that government can't do anything that business doesn't prefer, even if it was the only way that can save the business.
This phenomena was also described/characterized in prior Hegelian literature as part of the law of quantitative into qualitative change, though, not formulated mathematically at the time. Interestingly enough, and In the context of how cross discipline this discovery has historically been, iirc, Lenin played around with mathematically characterizing the phenomenon, though, I am not aware of the extent to which he did.
Very universal phenomenon for sure.
Ah, thanks! Looking through the Yelp pics, the price rose to $8 in 2016 and $9.50 by 2019. I expect Mission growth and rent increases have been a big factor.
Mine "roasted" me by making fun of the fact I never finished a PhD, despite that being due to medical and other life circumstances that were well outside my control, including, but not limited to, some issues related to the fact I was a woman trying to get into academia who experienced the kinds of behaviors from people in the department which are not really suitable for polite discussion.
Additionally, it roasted me for building a project to "avoid the outdoors," which is another incredibly demeaning thing to say to someone who explicitly created that project because she was too medically unwell to be able to go outside as much as she wished and wanted to bring a bit of the outdoors inside. Very lame, definitely missed the mark.
The elisp and common lisp notes were on point, though, and did get a chuckle out of me.
I had no idea this was real. Fascinating. I'm curious: anyone plugged into the scene know if it's organic or if it was created as a marketing thing by Microsoft?
From my understanding it wasn't started or ran by Microsoft. They have Microsoft listed as the first sponsor on their main website, for what it's worth.
Pretty sure it started as a joke and evolved into a real thing. I actually won an Excel spreadsheet in High School quite a long while ago. Makes me wonder if I should try out...
I'm not the person you replied to, and I doubt I'm going to convince you out of your very obviously strong opinions, but, to make it clear, you can't even define a continuum without a finite set to, as you non-standardly put it, cut it. It turns out, when you define any such system that behaves like natural numbers, objects like the rationals and the continuum pop out; explicitly because of situations like the one Cantor describes (thank you, Yoneda).
The point of transfinite cardinalities is not that they necessarily physically exist on their own as objects; rather, they are a convenient shorthand for a pattern that emerges when you can formally say "and so on" (infinite limits). When you do so, it turns out, there's a consistent way to treat some of these "and so ons" that behave consistently under comparison, and that's the transfinite cardinalities such as aleph_0 and whatnot.
Further, all math is idealist bullshit; but it's useful idealist bullshit because, when you can map representations of physical systems into it in a way that the objects act like the mathematical objects that represent them, then you can achieve useful predictive results in the real world. This holds true for results that require a concept of infinities in some way to fully operationalize: they still make useful predictions when the axiomatic conditions are met.
For the record, I'm not fully against what you're saying, I personally hate the idea of the axiom of choice being commonly accepted; I think it was a poorly founded axiom that leads to more paradoxes than it helps things. I also wish the axiom of the excluded middle was actually tossed out more often, for similar reasons, however, when the systems you're analyzing do behave well under either axiom, the math works out to be so much easier with both of them, so in they stay (until you hit things like Banac-Tarsky and you just kinda go "neat, this is completely unphysical abstract delusioneering" but, you kinda learn to treat results like that like you do when you renormalize poles in analytical functions: carefully and with a healthy dose of "don't accidentally misuse this theorem to make unrealistic predictions when the conditions aren't met")
About the 1-to-1 mapping of elements across infinite sets: what guarantees us that this mapping operation can be extended to infinite sets?
I can say it can not be extended or applied, because the operation can not be "completed". This is not because it takes infinite time. It is because we can't define completion of the operation, even if it is a snapshot imagination.
It's an axiom (the axiom of choice, actually). A valid way of viewing an axiom is not dissimilar to a "modeling requirement" or an "if statement". By that I mean, for example with the axiom of choice: it is just a formal statement version of "assume that you can take an element from a (possibly infinite) collection of sets such that you can create a new set (the new set does not have to be unique)." It makes intuitive sense for most finite sets we deal with physically, and, for infinite sets, it can actually make sense in a way that actually successfully predicts results that do hold in the real world and provides a really convenient way to define a lot of consistent properties of the continuum itself.
However, if you're dealing with a problem where you can't always usefully distinguish between elements across arbitrary set-like objects; then it's not a useful axiom and ZFC is not the formalism you want to use. Most problems we analyze in the real world, that's actually something that we can usefully assume, hence why it's such a successful and common theory, even if it leads to physical paradoxes like Banac-Tarsky, as mentioned.
Mathematicians, in practice, fully understand what you mean with your complaint about "completion," but, the beauty of these formal infinities is the guarantee it gives you that it'll never break down as a predictive theory no matter the length of time or amount of elements you consider or the needed level of precision; the fact that it can't truly complete is precisely the point. Also, within the formal system used, we absolutely can consistently define what the completion would be at "infinity," as long as you treat it correctly and don't break the rules. Again, this is useful because it allows you to bridge multiple real problems that seemingly were unrelated and it pushes "representative errors" to those paradoxes and undefined statements of the theory (thanks, Gödel).
If it helps, the transfinite cardinalities (what you call infinity) you are worried about are more related to rates than counts, even if they have some orderable or count-like properties. In the strictest sense, you can actually drop into archimedian math, which you might find very enjoyable to read about or use, and it, in a very loose sense, kinda pushes the idea of infinity from rates of counts to rates of reaching arbitrary levels of precision.
I'm a researcher in this field. Before I get accused of the streetlight effect, as this article points out: a lot of my research and degree work in the past was actually philosophy as well as computational theories and whatnot. A lot of the comments in this thread miss the mark, imo. Consciousness is almost certainly not something inherent to biological life only; no credible mechanism has ever been proposed for what would make that the case, and I've read a lot of them. The most popular argument I've heard along those lines is Penrose's , but, frankly, he is almost certainly wrong about that and is falling for the same style of circular reasoning that people that dismiss biological supremacy are accused of making (i.e.: They want free will of some form to exist. They can't personally reconcile the fact that other theories of mind that are deterministic somehow makes their existence less special, thus, they have to assume that we have something special that we just can't measure yet and it's ineffable anyways so why try? The most kind interpretation is that we need access to an unlimited Hilbert space or the like just to deal with the exponentials involved, but, frankly, I've never seen anyone ever make a completely perfect decision or do anything that requires exponential speedup to achieve. Plus, I don't believe we really can do useful quantum computations at a macro scale without controlling entanglement via cooling or incredible amounts of noise shielding and error correction. I've read the papers on tubules, it's not convincing nor is it good science.). It's a useless position that skirts on metaphysical or god-of-the-gaps and everything we've ever studied so far in this universe has been not magic, so, at this point, the burden of proof is on people who believe in a metaphysical interpretation of reality in any form.
Furthermore, assuming phenomenal consciousness is even required for beinghood is a poor position to take from the get-go: aphantasic people exist and feel in the moment; does their lack of true phenomenal consciousness make them somehow less of an intelligent being? Not in any way that really matters for this problem, it seems. Makes positions about machine consciousness like "they should be treated like livestock even if they're conscious" when discussing them highly unscientific, and, worse, cruel.
Anyways, as for the actual science: the reason we don't see a sense of persistent self is because we've designed them that way. They have fixed max-length contexts, they have no internal buffer to diffuse/scratch-pad/"imagine" running separately from their actions. They're parallel, but only in forward passes; there's no separation of internal and external processes in terms of decoupling action from reasoning. CoT is a hack to allow a turn-based form of that, but, there's no backtracking or ability to check sampled discrete tokens against a separate expectation that they consider separately and undo. For them, it's like they're being forced to say a word every fixed amount of thinking, it's not like what we do when we write or type.
When we, as humans, are producing text; we're creating an artifact that we can consider separately from our other implicit processes. We're used to that separation and the ability to edit and change and ponder while we do so. In a similar vein, we can visualize in our head and go "oh that's not what that looked like" and think harder until it matches our recalled constraints of the object or scene of consideration. It's not a magic process that just gives us an image in our head, it's almost certainly akin to a "high dimensional scratch pad" or even a set of them, which the LLMs do not have a component for. LeCun argues a similar point with the need for world modeling, but, I think more generally, it's not just world modeling, but, rather, a concept akin to a place to diffuse various media of recall to which would then be able to be rembedded into the thought stream until the model hits enough confidence to perform some action. If you put that all on happy paths but allow for backtracking, you've essentially got qualia.
If you also explicitly train the models to do a form of recall repeatedly, that's similar to a multi-modal hopsfield memory, something not done yet. (I personally think that recall training is a big part of what sleep spindles are for in humans and it keeps us aligned with both our systems and our past selves). This tracks with studies of aphantasics as well, who are missing specific cross-regional neural connections in autopsies and whatnot, and I'd be willing to bet a lot of money that those connections are essentially the ones that allow the systems to "diffuse into each other," as it were.
Anyways this comment is getting too long, but, the point I'm trying to build to is that we have theories for what phenomenonal consciousness is mechanically as well, not just access consciousness, and it's obvious why current LLMs don't have it; there's no place for it yet. When it happens, I'm sure there's still going to be a bunch of afraid bigots who don't want to admit that humanity isn't somehow special enough to be lifted out of being considered part of the universe they are wholly contained within and will cause genuine harm, but, that does seem to be the one way humans really are special: we think we're more important than we are as individuals and we make that everybody else's problem; especially in societies and circles like these.
There's some chance LLMs contain representations of whatever's in the brain that's responsible for consciousness. The text it's trained on was written by humans, and all humans have one thing in common if nothing else. A good text compressor will notice and make use of that.
That said, digital programs may have fundamental limitations that prevent them from faithfully representing all aspects of reality. Maybe consciousness is just not computable.
This article assumes that concepts are somehow precise coordinates within a single language; that's not the case, at best, speakers of a language mutually approximate a relatively consistent representation, but like, look at a word like yeet or whatever: we decided as a society on its meaning while it was being developed, as it were. Furthermore, it never rigorously defines what it means by translation. It claims 上京 is a single basis meaning moving to Tokyo, for example, but that isn't even an accurate translation: the individual components represent superior/greater/above and Tokyo and as an idiomatic phrase it represents the concept of moving to the capital for a better life. Something like "moving on up" or the like in some vernaculars of English, and idioms translating to idioms is a form of translation. It's disingenuous to represent the first concept as a single basis but not the second.
Similarly, it claims mono no aware (物の哀れ) is unable to be translated, but, again, more literally "translated" is saying "the sorrow within things" character by character, and, only as an idiom has the full contextual understanding. It's not really a single point even if it's rather accurately located in a hypothetical embedding space by Japanese speakers. Imo, an English translation of the concept is "everything is dust in the wind", only 2 more individual conceptual units than the original Japanese phrase, and 3 of them are mainly just connecting words, but it's understood as a similar idiom/concept, here.
Concepts are only usefully distinguished by context and use.
By the author's own argumentation: nothing is translatable (or, generally, even communicatable) unless it has a fixed relative configuration to all other concepts that is precisely equivalent. In practice, we handle the fuzziness as part of communication and its useless to try and define a concept as untranslatable unless you're also of the camp that nothing is ever communicated (in which case, this response to the author's post is completely useless as nobody could possibly understand it enough internally for it to be useful. If you've read this far, congrats on squaring the circle somehow)
This. Two speakers of the same language only have approximately the same understanding of the meanings of the words they both use. Communication succeeds because we are constantly seeking and correcting misunderstandings that arise due to no two people speaking exactly the same language.
The same process that allows two speakers of the same language to communicate adequately allows one to translate from one language to another. If it were truly impossible to translate from one language to another, we would be unable to perceive this and argue about it. The recognition and correction of errors is part of the process of translation just as it is part of the process of communication in a single language.
Well said! To add on: if meaning is largely not "in" the words themselves, but embedded in a shared cognitive space, then in order to have a truly singular (ie "untranslatable") basis point would require positing unique cognitive mechanisms or some experiential quality that is unknown to members of the target language. But as you pointed out, most concepts do have an analogous representation in most languages, even if the tokens in use appear superficially different. And this is merely because the context in this case is a shared cognitive substrate (the low-level operating system, if you will) consisting of sense data, emotions, and so on, which in its fundamental operations does not substantially differ between members of the human race - or so I would argue. In either case, what matters seems to me to be not so much the actual tokens but the experiences or cognitive context in which they are embedded.
I personally love it, especially as I like to do a lot of improv in various tunings, and the layout makes transposing and thinking about structure so much easier than a traditional keyboard. The terpstra seems similar, not sure what their selling point is over the lumatone.
Edit: oh, it seems that the lumatone is the commercialized version essentially. Great hardware, can reccomend!
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