23 Comments

I just got some earbuds and the noise cancelling tech is amazeballs

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I've been using ANC headphones for a couple years during walks. It's not perfect, but way quieter!

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Oh these are all kinds of magic. Audio engineering was kind of my thing for a while with Skype and all so I appreciate the tech. I wrote a piece about how this is part of a much more complex audio pipeline that includes speech recognitions and language processing here https://open.substack.com/pub/wirepine/p/talk-to-the-wizard

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That's great! How often are you publishing? I'd like to subscribe as long as I have the bandwidth.

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Just once a week - that's all I can manage!

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I'm in!

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Tx man!

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🤓 well if I ever get them it’ll be something to write about. One of my early articles was about ‘glassholes’ which is what we called all the tools walking around SF in google glasses

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Google Glass caught a lot of flack for putting AR out there during the innovator phase, but I like that they were willing to experiment. I've always liked that about Google.

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Brin was such an egomaniac about it tho! They sure went big; here they drop an army of flatbrim bros out of airplanes to BMX bike across the Moscone convention center while on google hangouts. Points for the spectacle https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7TB8b2t3QE

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This was an idea 12 years ahead of its time, no doubt. They tried!

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Side note: would be interested in reading about the egomania and how that drove those decisions.

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Nov 6Liked by Andrew Smith

What I love about the McGurk effect is that it's one illusion you can't override even if you're fully aware that it's happening.

Usually, when you find out how an illusion works, you can sort of force yourself into no longer falling for it. But with McGurk, your eyes will still convincingly lie to you about the sounds you're hearing.

It's especially clear in this "ba ba ba" vs. "fa fa fa" video: https://youtu.be/2k8fHR9jKVM?si=UcQQZarwc5AsD6bg

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Very convincing!

I hope folks are able to take another look at their perception of reality after seeing that video (and having read what I wrote). I can't stop thinking about where the line between perception and cognition is crossed, and this is one of those perfect in-between spots.

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Okay: now when I watch old movies I have to look for the McGurk effect, and listen for Shepard tones, along with the Wilhelm scream...

Although the biggest reason for the former is the fact that Asian languages have considerably different grammar and word length than English, and there is no effort being made to reconcile the difference at all.

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There certainly was little effort being paid to overall production quality, and yeah, there were few attempts back then to do this. Usually, I prefer subtitles to overdubs, but I did watch Squid Game in the overdub version, and it was actually really good. I think that's the first time I've seen that done well enough so that it didn't really bother me.

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