Remote Rounds

June 11th, 2016
bucket_brigade, ideas, music, tech
If you've ever tried to sing "happy birthday" with someone over the internet, you've seen how the delay keeps people from being able to sing together coherently. Once a delay gets above a few ms our ability to create a synchronous piece of music falls apart. This isn't something we can fix with faster connections: lightspeed delay means if you want 10ms of round trip latency you can't be more than 1000 miles apart, and in the real world things will be slower than this.

Instead of trying to sing at the same time, however, what if we make there be a large fixed delay? Then we can sing rounds! Each person would think they were singing the first part, and hear the other person singing the second part. You do need your delay to be completely consistent, and fully symmetric, but this seems doable. This would probably have to be a native app, since low level control of delay like this isn't something the web lets you handle.

Referenced in: Series Singing

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Coping with shame

[Mod note: comments on this post about how I’m a good person who should feel better about myself will be deleted.

via Thing of Things August 4, 2026

Using AI to analyze life patterns

If you’re anything like me, you may have a lot of notes from various introspective activities – annual / monthly reviews, worksheets, therapy notes, etc. Often these notes are just gathering dust in a paper folder or some forgotten corner of Google Drive.…

via Victoria Krakovna July 30, 2026

Exercises in benchmarking and evals, part 7: DeepSWE, Senior SWE-Bench, napkin math, and winter tires

This is part of a series of exercises on benchmarking, evals, and experimental design (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6)1. We're going to look at three questions, which are presented before the answers to give you time to think about the questions before seeing the a…

via Posts on July 23, 2026

more     (via openring)