I work for Sony Picture on projects as a sound designer from time to time, I wasn't there yesterday.

Sony Pictures is an almost completely distinct operation from "Sony." The studio itself is just the old Columbia Pictures, that Sony bought in 1990. The lot itself was the old MGM/Lorimar lot-- all the long-time staff at Sony are either Columbia people or MGM people. You can go years there without meeting a Sony corporate exec, they leave the place alone and just a let it do its thing.

No that's a different thing. The event horizon is a spherical region around the singularity from which light cannot escape. A singularity is a zero-dimensional point in space lying within the horizon. The gravity at the event horizon is not infinite.

Now, it's very likely that what is meant by "cross connects" in the context of AI is substantially different than the "cross connect" capability that global networking enables, but it's equally true that people generally fail at understanding exponential growth.

Paramecium can grow exponentially in a jar. This does not mean that, once you have as many paramecium as there are cells in your brain, the jar will start talking to you. The difference between a computer and a mind isn't just quantitative, it's qualitative.

But there are a lot of very unglamorous diseases that kill more people every year.

Yes, but in southern Africa the AIDS prevalence rate between 15-25%, and those numbers go UP when juvenile cases are counted. It's "glamorous" because in Africa it's a pandemic comparable to the great 14th century plagues of Europe.

Reverberation *should* be the easiest kind of noise to remove, because it has a simple mathematical model:

S(t) = signal(t) + f(signal(t - delay))

It's not that simple, a reverberant space can have dozens of different discrete delay taps, add secondary (and tertiary, etc) reflections and the resulting spectral envelope is just a fog with an effectively continuous system of delay. Also keep in mind that all "functions that attenuate frequencies" are themselves just delays whose length is a function of a particular wavelength of interest. The spectral changes a reverberant space imparts -- attenuating and resonating -- are a function of cavities in the space, modes, and surface diffractions that have the effect of filtering the signal due to multipath interference.

In practice, reverb removal is impossible to do perfectly. Techniques for doing it do things like modelling the reverberant space as linear time invariant system and then inverse-convolving the recorded signal. This is sortof what you described, by getting the LTI model in the first place is the difficult nut to crack, some systems simply do blind deconvolution, where the spectrum of the dry signal is guessed or some kind of average in the spectral domain. And once you have the model, it can change the moment a source moves in the space or the space changes configuration, by say opening a door. Good systems for speech often involve psychoacoustic modeling...

But I am also sure that there will be recruiters that work in film and some of them will specialise in sound. I was working on the premise that you were getting a call to talk about your line, not something totally random. Hence not understanding why you would yell at them.

Oh no, they were specifically asking me if I wanted to do software development. People in my business have below-the-line agents, there are established firms and players though and they don't recruit this way. A lot of my Github projects are CoreAudio and DSP stuff, and I have a lot of StackOverflow points on audio dev, and I know audio is sortof a black art for even experienced developers, so I assume maybe that had something to do with it to. I never yell, I wait and see what they want and then politely decline.

Hello iluvcapra, My name is Harlequin80 and I specialise in the recruitment of sound specialists in the TV and film industry. Have I got you at a time you could talk?

The term "sound specialist" and "TV and film industry" and even the term "recruitment" are clumsy and inappropriate, and would signal to me that you don't know what I do, what my job is, who my competitors or even who my clients are, and lacking that, you probably wouldn't know how to sell me. I wouldn't engage a rep unless he had 10-15 years in the film industry in some capacity, let alone he got the lingo right. An agent relationship for "specialists" in the "TV and film industry" is a very particular skill set, it implies that you'll be finding me a new job every six months, from among a pool of maybe two dozen people at any one time with hiring authority--people who everyone knows and who you'd better be on ideal speaking terms with (preferably you're talking to them every day selling your other clients).

Obviously this is show business and a lot of people calling themselves "agents" and "business managers" are scammers, you have to be really careful about who you talk to and all business is done face-to-face, with people you've either known personally and worked with for years, or are one degree of separation from these. LinkedIn provides a simulacra of this kind of interaction, but it's really not the same. I'd never engage with someone who found me through "LinkedIn," even if it was through a recommendation, that's a big red flag.

(All of this just FYI.)

I work in film sound, really my only gig for last 15 years. I have never been a professional software developer, I have no such work on my resume, I have a BA in film, I didn't even take an engineering course in school.

However, every 6 months or so, I get called by some recruiter somewhere to ask if I'd like to "make a move" and start doing iOS development at some shop he's working with. The only reason I get these calls, that I can figure, is because I have a Github account and a few public repos with Objective-C code. It's a nuisance and these people are total flakes. The most irritating thing is the utterly phony conceit of "trying to find me a better fit" or "develop my career": They don't know fuck-all about me, all I am for them is a possible lead conversion.

I don't know what's so fucked up with software development that cold-calling random people basically out of the phone book is considered a workable strategy. You guys need a union or something...

Right, but does that mean that pull-ups are part of the essence of masculinity?

The main attack against "sexism" is that it's essentialist, it holds that even if a woman can do 20 pull-ups, even if she has her gonads changed, she'll never "truly" be a man, there are irreproducible properties to maleness and femaleness that are natural and determinative.

The problems are that no one ever lays down a marker and say what these properties exactly are, because just about everything a man can do, a woman can do, and many other man cannot do. I can't do 20 perfect form pull-ups either, but that doesn't mean I'm not a man or any less of a man. And then essences break down completely when we deal with the case of hermaphrodites, or transsexuals, or queer people who decline either identification, or people that identify in some way at variance with their chromosomal sex. In the end the best we can come up with when it comes to sexual essence is chromosomes, but if that's all it is, or even if all it was was pull-ups, aren't these really irrelevant to things like "damsel tropes," or male gaze, or sexual fetishization? And then, even when it is relevant, it's a naturalistic fallacy to assert that because women are X, a depiction of them as X in a video game is justified. That's an appeal to nature to settle question of aesthetics or morality.

I'm not disagreeing with your position, a lot of feminists agree with your basic point (though they'd take issue with your presentation). I'm just pointing out that the question is irrelevant for the most part and is probably intractable, due to its reliance on a metaphysical worldview that's disputed.

"If they don't express anything, there's nothing to censor. If they DO express something (even something banal) they're protected."

Maybe protected from censorship, but not from criticism. The previous comment asked why advocates of free speech didn't defend video games, and I tell you, it's because the people who make video games themselves are highly equivocal about what they are trying to do aesthetically and morally, and the only thing they can agree on is that they want to make a lot of money.

This argument is not likely to sway activists and academics who are motivated by their belief in the moral power of art and are in general agreement that money corrupts art...

Hmmm.... See the thing about feminist criticism and theory is that it's really not had much of an effect on fine art, or even very commercial art forms like film or music. A lot of movies are really sexist and chauvinist, and we can still say they're good. Fucking Casablanca is sexist, this does not have any effect on its value as a work.

I don't know why "gamers" would think it would be any different for video games. Unless they actually have doubts that video games actually have any redeeming social value, or are in fact art, and maybe most of them are just crappy retread storylines, which brings up the second point...

When there have been such outcries, they've rightly been countered by those who believe in free expression, even if free expression involves naked bodies, degrading imagery, etc.

Well you see that's kinda begging the question of wether or not video games are art in the first place; I'm a real skeptic on the question, I really don't think most video games rise to that level, and I'm pretty sure that if something isn't art, if its purely a commercial good, it may be regulated. This is basically consistent with US law and custom on the issue -- films in the US, for example, weren't entitled to 1st amendment protections until the 1950s.

Does Madden NFL 15 really deserve the same benefit of the doubt as Lolita? Does Electronic Arts really have the same moral rights as Ai Wei Wei? I think if a video game is going to be protected by "those who believe in free expression," the people making the video game, at a minimum, should have to cop to the fact that the game is actually trying to express something, but a lot of people on the gamer side of things seem convinced that video games are just "fun" and shouldn't have to "mean" anything.

Which is not to say that video games can't be art, I think many are, but appealing to artistic droit moral in the context of Call of Duty rehashes and the bland consumer experiences that video games traffic in nowadays is tawdry and completely unearned.

Bechdel is a dyke, it's no surprise that she only wants to see women who have nothing to do with men.

I'm not sure if "two female characters having a conversation about something other than a man" is the sort of misandrist rallying cry you make it out to be.

Strange how a society that is allegedly inherently bigoted constantly caters to deviants

A deviant with a MacArthur Fellowship. We beat deviants into the ground all the time, she's not a deviant, she's a parvenu: a deviant the rich have invited to the table, simply to prove that they have the power to invite people to the table.

And I'm not telling them what they should be doing, I'm demonstrating how vacuous their cause is, how duplicitous their motives are, for focusing on something so utterly trivial in the grand scheme of things.

Art is trivial? Are people not allowed to talk about art, unless they've shut down abortion clinics or done some "real" activity that passes deadbeef's standard of seriousness? Only then do they earn the right to talk about video games?

(Meanwhile I suppose gamers need do nothing to earn the right to to talk about video games, apart from buy them...)

And games are FINE the way they are.

Who gets to decide that? Status quo is as much an "agenda" or a "narrow-minded interest" as much as anything...

You have not been paying attention to games or any other form of creative media. Every anti-hero in any game is a character given degrading properties.

I think there should be a clarification. Sexism isn't the belief that men are better than women; that's actually male chauvinism. Sexism is the belief that men and women are essentially different, that the masculine and feminine are ideal and that there are certain things a men and women cannot be and do and still remain male or female. At the risk of generalizing, second-wave feminists broadly hold sexist views, third-wavers believe that gender is a social construction and thus they are broadly anti-sexist.

Giving an anti-hero degrading properties is still sexist, if those attributes are still intrinsically male. The problem with anti-heroes is that even if they have "negative" properties, they're still the hero and these are being valorized. The deeper question is, do the video game developers use "anti-heroes" because they're trying to critique heroism, or are they just lazy and stealing archetypes from 90s action movies? Or are simply crafting tradition heroes that have some negative aspects tacked on in order to appeal to cynical, philistine gamers.

He may have only narrowly avoided ruining his life.

Never discount the virtue of appropriate, professional attire. Particularly when you know you're going to be representing your organization in public. Just saying.