jrajav

The entire premise of this essay rests on the idea that musical performances are necessarily played live (particularly, with a live drummer), in the tradition of rock music. This just qualitatively does not apply to much modern music, where drums are played by a machine or computer. Top on the '2025' list is two good examples from totally different genres: Kendrick Lamar (hip hop), and Billie Eilish (vocal-forward electronica).

Are electronica and hip hop worse for this? I suppose that's up for debate - but we now have multiple full generations of music listeners and critics who obviously, passionately love those genres, and they've been growing for decades. This is easy to see not just via charts but online discourse and the zeitgeist.

Do those genres 'groove' worse and feel less human? This is more subjective, and more debatable, but I would argue that hip hop has redefined what 'groove' can even mean, with its very off-the-grid, loose feel despite the technically very precise machine looping the beats (because producers nudge each beat off the grid, usually in very intentional ways, or play the beat in live then adjust it). And it's hard to argue that electronic dance music in its many forms hasn't made people move and connect with the music's rhythm in powerful ways, despite almost complete quantization in most dimensions.

I think purely looking at tempo stddev and not much else papers over these aspects a little much.

This is nitpicky. The MARRS case was 1987, and Biz Markie and Vanilla Ice are way higher on the list in terms of actually getting attention on the issue and influencing culture.

High oil prices affect them less than any other country in the world. They have the largest oil stockpiles by far, eclipsing even the US, and they have unique access to oil sanctioned by the west.

China is essentially the only actor in the market that is able to weather this conflict in marathon fashion.

I make beats with Patterning on iPad all the time. It's a fantastic sequencing surface. The main advantage over a traditional horizontal sequencer is that time at the measure level is represented much more naturally (as a loop), which makes polyrhythms and track offsets (both common when putting together more interesting sounding, swung beats) easier to visualize and manipulate with confidence. It's also arguably a bit easier to visually reason about symmetry / 'rhyming' across beats, when making step changes - a much more minor improvement but noticeable to me (I'm highly visual).

Let's roll with the futilist attitude for a second; what is it you suggest that we actually do, once we're focusing the anger on the correct source?

Grassroots campaigning and hardline support for candidates running on rule of law and overturning Citizens United. Overturning any status quo is possible in a functioning democracy - it just takes a lot of unskippable effort.

This was certainly the rallying cry behind DOGE and the general push to rip the entrails out of many federal agencies. Combatting "waste" and "inefficiency," with strong implications that most of what those agencies do is pointless government meddling.

Whether he's actually driving towards small government with that or anything else - in the good-faith spirit of that policy - that's definitely up for debate.

This is conflating businesses that solve billion dollar problems with people who individually contribute so much to a business that they solved the billion dollar problem all on their own. The latter is probably possible, but it's not necessarily the case that all billionaires and up today were such individuals.

It might be that if personal wealth alone were (effectively, by taxation) capped to $100m, we would still have exactly as much collective wealth, innovation, and value creation as we do today. Possibly more, because of more wealth distributed onto shared infrastructure and into the fluid economy.

Not much stops them from saying it's due to national security, when it's actually due to the guy in the chair having a fit of emotions. And the current admin has a very long streak of declaring things as national emergencies when those things just so happen to be something they recently lost face on.

Who's breaking down your door with muscle to make you pay for Ryobi?

It can be simultaneously true that the US has a serious wealth inequality problem (and other serious problems), and that other countries have problems far more severe, causing people to want to relocate to the US.

This is exactly the remedy to the PR issue. I've "lucked" into owning a Prettier formatting pass at two different places now, and did the same process at each - full pass on master, simple step-by-step process to follow to update any PR by running the format script.

Thanks for your well considered response. I disagree with the notion that extensive classical training is required in order to make beautiful, noteworthy music. There are innumerable counterproofs of this in every era of music. I also disagree that fully and deeply owning/designing one's tools is required - though I understand that we are more specifically talking about generative tools, I personally argue there's not enough meaningful distinction. One chooses to exercise intent, whether the tool is acoustic or digital, general or hyper-focused. And fully understanding the workings of every tool is a fool's errand in this modern age.

Whether these then extend to AI and LLMs I still can't fully say. There is, obviously, some kind of qualitative leap here. I'm not fully settled.

But I guess I lean more towards - it is a tool, let people use it to make their own beauty.

Can I ask what the specific markers / qualifiers are for you to consider (let's call them) 'classical' generative and algorithmic techniques fair game in creative composition, but LLM agent based techniques not so?

To me, it seems like the "do it for me" aspect is similar, just at different levels of abstraction.

I guess the guidelines don't apply to you, as long as you disagree vehemently enough with the OP's basic intent.

It's not _completely_ shrouded in mystery - it started after Facebook got slapped by the EU for irresponsible handling of underage users, and since began a heavily funded lobbying push to drag competitors down with them. https://github.com/upper-up/meta-lobbying-and-other-findings...

Of course, it's probably also been coopted by the neverending stream of nanny-state political power grabs in both the US and EU.

This is almost verbatim the same argument that people make in support of allowing child labor in factories.

Children do not need, nor are they entitled to, any kind of "freedom" to work for a living.

Only one of the individuals in this comparison has a Wikipedia page dedicated to the event and coverage of it.

Why is Safari as bad as Chrome?

I daily drove Zen for months. The design and implementation are overall fantastic. Unfortunately it still has chronic performance issues, gobbling up CPU randomly - and they don't seem to be too focused on despite it being a commonly reported issue.

I don't want to burn out my battery quicker than usual, so I was forced to switch off. I'm currently trying Orion instead and have been loving it - aside from several poorly implemented websites just not working on it. And the Cloudflare false positives, but that's as much or more an issue on Zen.

Allegations of cherry-picking scant bits of evidence to support a claim are less effective when that claim is held up by vast quantities of distinct, high-quality evidence.

> This is more like “optimal wage to live alone in my own apartment with a car.” Which of course, people would like to have but certainly isn’t required to be comfortable.

This is a debatable goalpost. It seems more reasonable to me to assume that meeting basic shelter needs includes having a private room to oneself. The only reason to argue otherwise is to try to drive down the wage further, and is that at all necessary? Renting a private room was possible on nearly any wage 50 years ago, and the only reason it seems out of reach for many now is because purchasing power has been slowly stagnating for decades, while housing costs have soared in recent times. Yet this whole time, GDP continues to rise. It seems that our society can easily support much higher minimum wages (and this would likely have only a positive effect of stimulating the economy), but simply chooses not to.

Signal reproduction matters quite a bit more for music production than it does for music listening and enjoyment. That's why producers and engineers look for 'monitors', rather than hi-fi speakers.

Hi-fi speakers, tube amps, and other accessories generally "degrade" the sound with added harmonics and natural smile EQs. That's what makes them sound more pleasing.

(I'm not disagreeing with you, just adding more color.)

You've either been very lucky or haven't been using much older software. macOS updates routinely cause issues early in the release cycle, particularly with backwards compatibility. Working in creative fields with lots of niche applications and plugins in use makes this a lot more apparent. Catalina in particular was a total nightmare.

China is the only country that is not aligned with the US and has the military might and production capacity to go toe to toe with the US in an all-out war. Russia would drain their coffers within a year. China is likely to start out producing the US on a similar timeframe. It is pretty reasonable to assume that China is top of mind for any war planning.

Not quite a counterexample, since piracy derives all of its value from commercial works, and those who want access to them.

What makes you think the decline is _mainly_ due to this, and not due to other events this year that could plausibly have a significant effect on the value of the dollar?

What does this have to do with anything here? The only common thread is that it's related to PhDs. You just have a bone to pick with our higher education being so desirable that people upend their lives to come and participate in it at great expense? This has been a significant source of soft power for the US, as both a self-reinforcing function ensuring we attract and retain top research talent, and by seeding American-educated intellectuals back to their home countries to increase our global influence. Nothing about this was bad for any party involved.

Of course, with the rampant anti-intellectualism burning a path through our institutions, we're currently doing our best to kill that and make sure we fall behind in every respect.

Dumb frat-boy innuendos count as personality now, huh?

Let's just leave aside the fact that the name genuinely made many people uncomfortable and unwelcome there (it did), it was also just cringe. There's ways to inject personality and fun into a social experience without giggling about sex. Talk about lowest common denominator...

I'm not following your reasoning. Your only objection is that this technology has the potential to meaningfully replace meat production? And therefore, because it is so amazing, no one should be allowed to profit off of it after they do a big chunk of initial R&D?

This legislation is not doing anything at all to help the research go further. It's a bare-naked stifling of a technology that threatens to thin the wallets of a few rich, loud constituents with lobbyists in the building, and probably a healthy dose of emotional whining about some kind of values or tradition being under attack.

Make sure no one is cutting corners in a way that will poison people when food is involved, but otherwise, just let the free market do its thing. I thought that was meant to be the American way.