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tkgally 3 hours ago [-]
My Fable example is not nearly as cool but still (to me) impressive.
Last year, I would occasionally test the latest models by vibe-coding in-browser music generators using only HTML, CSS, and JS. Here’s one made in July by Gemini:
An octave (for example from a C to the next C) is a doubling in frequency. In the Western diatonic system, there are 12 notes per octave. (C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, B). Notes are "evenly spaced" within the octave - every note has the same ratio between its frequency and the frequency of the next note. Hence, that ratio is ¹²√2
neon_diogenes 4 days ago [-]
Im building some music playback software and am currently struggling with the implementation of a spectrum analyzer to visualize the music.
This is incredible stuff and I learned a lot. Well done sir.
Ps, also mourning the loss of Fable! It sorted out a 3 month bug hunt odyssey in 3 days. For a somewhat novel problem in a pretty niche area (DSD DoP audio crackle problems during certain playback edge cases).
matheusmoreira 5 hours ago [-]
Fable was quite relentless, it was fun watching it work. I described my lisp interpreter project's short term plans and long term roadmap, Fable thought for like 20 minutes then just told me it was all "inevitable" and started working on the stuff. Ever since then I started to picture Fable as some kind of Terminator.
Left me that code and a massive code review that unfortunately didn't contain any of the I/O and memory safety hardening I wanted. I haven't fully reviewed the code yet. I get a little sad when I read it. Not a US citizen so I'm not sure I'll ever get to use a state of the art model again.
Jblx2 3 hours ago [-]
>I get a little sad when I read it. Not a US citizen so I'm not sure I'll ever get to use a state of the art model again.
That's great news. I was going to cancel my subscription because of the export restrictions.
arcticbull 2 hours ago [-]
Also, note, everyone assumed it was going to be limited to citizens, but that's not what the government said. They put it under ITAR/EAR's US person definition which includes citizens, permanent residents, refugees and asylees. Basically only visa holders in the US were banned, and of course, people in foreign countries.
> thought for like 20 minutes then just told me it was all "inevitable"
I have in mind an image of ASI as something that's able to seamlessly work across time as if it was weaving cloth. Reasoning about not just first or second order effects, but able to richly play with the nature of causality itself. In the limit, it effects change far into the distant future simply by making only the most minute change in the present then sitting back and waiting for things to play out.
For an AI that can do this, things like "managing subagents" or "context compaction" become child's play. Perhaps we'll know if we're getting close by seeing how well models do at prediction markets.
actionfromafar 3 hours ago [-]
Predicting the future by making it.
mortenjorck 4 days ago [-]
I was not expecting the part where Fable produces a passable 3Blue1Brown-style explainer video of the algorithms it just implemented that sounds like it's narrated by a character from Dora the Explorer.
What a strange era we now live in.
kingstnap 6 hours ago [-]
Relevant YouTube video about content farming channels creating AI generated math explainers.
You mean what a strange era an opaque set of administration-approved companies live in...
enraged_camel 4 hours ago [-]
I actually had no idea Fable is able to generate videos from scratch like that. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me. But it never occurred to me.
MisterKent 4 days ago [-]
That was my experience with Fable as well. Pulled my extremely complex project that I could squint and see was possible, but actually put mathematical concreteness to things in a way I could only intuit.
On the flip side, visualizers have always fascinated me. I love this one, but one build off I've always wanted to see: analyze the entire file a priori, and then generate the visuals. Sort of like a normalization pass, but getting longer form structures decoded ahead of time could be pretty neat.
carb 3 hours ago [-]
The video game Audiosurf[1] did this, as it has to generate the game track ahead of time so that it would be playable!
That generated video was eye opening for me. I've been using Opus in Claude Code for studying and at work, but it never occurred to me to use 3b1b's excellent python library for generating maths visualisations to let it generate such good graphical demonstrations.
nl 2 hours ago [-]
> This model doesn't shy away from drawing upon all its knowledge. It casually refers to alpha premultiplication and fundamental frequencies in the same breath. It is fond of acronyms.
Yes - I had Fable tackle some long-standing bugs in some code I had and I quickly lost track of what it was talking about and had to ask a lot of clarifying questions.
It killed my bugs like they were nothing though. Opus and even GPT5.5 had churned on these same things for ages, but even with my manual help we made no progress.
It felt like they weren't the slightest bit challenging for Fable. So glad to see it back!
recursive 5 hours ago [-]
This is amazing.
One of the weaknesses of the video is that there are artifacts in the narration of passing through a text layer. "Bass" is pronounced as the fish at one point. "Wound" is pronounced as the injury. It's clear that these are homonyms of what was actually intended by the script.
mohamedkoubaa 5 hours ago [-]
>The writing is also literary. It draws an analogy between the 12 musical pitch classes and the 12 markings on a clock. Noise lingers. Material surges off the rim.
I absolutely hate this revolting writing style by LLMs
aetherspawn 3 hours ago [-]
It’s like an angsty book written by a teenager with only a middle-school level understanding of the world: throwing a few completely random words in there to sound smart.
Hard to believe that something that writes so terribly is so good at mathematics, given that writing non-slop must be at least some part formulaic.
opan 4 hours ago [-]
Thought this might be about the video game series, and even after seeing "Fable 5" my first reaction was "wow, up to 5 already?". It looks like they made it up to Fable III before rebooting the series with a 4th game (well, it's not out yet), so there is no Fable 5 yet.
TFA seems to be about some AI thing. Crazy how many words are actually just AI things now. Learning, reinforcement, language, model...
oooyay 4 hours ago [-]
This was really cool. I would love to play some Dave Tipper on this to see what it looks like.
tquinn 3 hours ago [-]
Very, very cool.
beepbooptheory 6 hours ago [-]
Kinda interesting how its just like a FFT chart in a circle but perhaps the author is not aware that is the case. Would be curious to know what things were "implmentation details" for the fancy AI and what wasn't.
I could be wrong but milkdrop already would do light FFT analysis for effects right?
neynt 3 hours ago [-]
I may have been overselling the AI's initiative in the article -- it still required a fair bit of steering. I put most of the prompts involved here: https://saltblock.neynt.ca/waveloop-prompts.md
Wrapping FFT in a log2(freq) % 1 spiral was part of the human direction :)
recursive 5 hours ago [-]
Pretty sure the author is aware. I think the interesting part is that the frequency is logarithmic and one rotation = 2x. This means you can make musical observations about chord qualities from the plot. That's not generally true for FFT plots.
beepbooptheory 5 hours ago [-]
You are right, it is cool idea in general. But, idk if we are seeing the same thing, in practice it ends up being kinda mushy looking right? In part, I think, because like its not rooted by a given root note, so at best we end up seeing constantly rotating, slightly different clock arrangements. Even in ideal conditions, anything like, e.g., Cmaj7 to Em is going to look almost the same, which feels off given the perceived harmonic change. I don't know if the arrangements being the same after transposition is as much a feature as a bug I guess.
recursive 4 hours ago [-]
Yes, it doesn't seem like it actually works super well. Love the idea though. I would probably pay money for a thing that did this accurately.
Personally, I think it's a feature that Em looks substantially similar to CM7. If this was all working fully as intended, I suppose you might get a clue from the darker-colored bass note.
A bass player probably has a different perspective, but as a keyboard player, it's pretty much always fine to play an Em over a CM7. It's just a "voicing choice".
_jx 5 hours ago [-]
I'm also curious about the implementation details, the result is visually beautiful, but the code could be interesting too, at least as a 'Fable hystorical artifact'. Is it visible on github?
yes fable left you a gift. i wish you can continue to further develop the project when things return to normal, if they ever will. or at least branch and use an alternative model.
as fable came out, the first thing i did was asking it to analyze some of my projects and ideas and write plans and suggestions, more than implementations. nothing incredibly revolutionary came out but i still see these as its 'last will'.
i'm sure some of you here have a few fable's relics/stories that you consider special precisely because of its abrupt demise.
_jx 4 hours ago [-]
cool, yeah all comments are preserved, i'll read the source. thanks!
AIorNot 3 hours ago [-]
That Fable Generated video is something else... wow I love it.. along with the app
Anyone who says LLMs can't reproduce intelligence I mean really? can you make this? its not just a talking database guys or a stochastic parrot...
too bad Fable was nerfed/gatekept by the Trump corruption selection committee..but the technology will not be silenced.. we just need to get humans ready for this capabilities. the jury is out on the future of that.
scubbo 6 hours ago [-]
> steady stream of promotions until they cap out at L5
Am I missing a joke? L5 is just a single promotion away from hiring-out-of-college, at least for the FAANG that I was at.
5 hours ago [-]
iLoveOncall 4 hours ago [-]
Only Amazon starts new grads at L4, the rest starts them as L3 so L5 would be senior.
Last year, I would occasionally test the latest models by vibe-coding in-browser music generators using only HTML, CSS, and JS. Here’s one made in July by Gemini:
https://gally.net/temp/20250701synthesizer-gemini2/index.htm...
And one made in September by Claude:
https://gally.net/temp/20250917rhythmdrone/index.html
With Fable, I was able to one-shot something much more sophisticated:
https://gally.net/temp/20260610-fable-synthesizer/index.html
It’s still a long way from creating music I would want to listen to, though.
Nods knowingly. Yes, of course. I definitely know this.
An octave (for example from a C to the next C) is a doubling in frequency. In the Western diatonic system, there are 12 notes per octave. (C, C#, D, D#, E, F, F#, G, G#, A, A#, B). Notes are "evenly spaced" within the octave - every note has the same ratio between its frequency and the frequency of the next note. Hence, that ratio is ¹²√2
This is incredible stuff and I learned a lot. Well done sir.
Ps, also mourning the loss of Fable! It sorted out a 3 month bug hunt odyssey in 3 days. For a somewhat novel problem in a pretty niche area (DSD DoP audio crackle problems during certain playback edge cases).
Left me that code and a massive code review that unfortunately didn't contain any of the I/O and memory safety hardening I wanted. I haven't fully reviewed the code yet. I get a little sad when I read it. Not a US citizen so I'm not sure I'll ever get to use a state of the art model again.
...or tomorrow:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48740771
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-15/part-772/section-772.1...
I have in mind an image of ASI as something that's able to seamlessly work across time as if it was weaving cloth. Reasoning about not just first or second order effects, but able to richly play with the nature of causality itself. In the limit, it effects change far into the distant future simply by making only the most minute change in the present then sitting back and waiting for things to play out.
For an AI that can do this, things like "managing subagents" or "context compaction" become child's play. Perhaps we'll know if we're getting close by seeing how well models do at prediction markets.
What a strange era we now live in.
https://youtu.be/mRO_QonhC2c
On the flip side, visualizers have always fascinated me. I love this one, but one build off I've always wanted to see: analyze the entire file a priori, and then generate the visuals. Sort of like a normalization pass, but getting longer form structures decoded ahead of time could be pretty neat.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audiosurf
Yes - I had Fable tackle some long-standing bugs in some code I had and I quickly lost track of what it was talking about and had to ask a lot of clarifying questions.
It killed my bugs like they were nothing though. Opus and even GPT5.5 had churned on these same things for ages, but even with my manual help we made no progress.
It felt like they weren't the slightest bit challenging for Fable. So glad to see it back!
One of the weaknesses of the video is that there are artifacts in the narration of passing through a text layer. "Bass" is pronounced as the fish at one point. "Wound" is pronounced as the injury. It's clear that these are homonyms of what was actually intended by the script.
I absolutely hate this revolting writing style by LLMs
Hard to believe that something that writes so terribly is so good at mathematics, given that writing non-slop must be at least some part formulaic.
TFA seems to be about some AI thing. Crazy how many words are actually just AI things now. Learning, reinforcement, language, model...
I could be wrong but milkdrop already would do light FFT analysis for effects right?
Wrapping FFT in a log2(freq) % 1 spiral was part of the human direction :)
Personally, I think it's a feature that Em looks substantially similar to CM7. If this was all working fully as intended, I suppose you might get a clue from the darker-colored bass note.
A bass player probably has a different perspective, but as a keyboard player, it's pretty much always fine to play an Em over a CM7. It's just a "voicing choice".
as fable came out, the first thing i did was asking it to analyze some of my projects and ideas and write plans and suggestions, more than implementations. nothing incredibly revolutionary came out but i still see these as its 'last will'.
i'm sure some of you here have a few fable's relics/stories that you consider special precisely because of its abrupt demise.
Anyone who says LLMs can't reproduce intelligence I mean really? can you make this? its not just a talking database guys or a stochastic parrot...
too bad Fable was nerfed/gatekept by the Trump corruption selection committee..but the technology will not be silenced.. we just need to get humans ready for this capabilities. the jury is out on the future of that.
Am I missing a joke? L5 is just a single promotion away from hiring-out-of-college, at least for the FAANG that I was at.
Not that 2 promotions is a "steady stream"...