I think that you and I could have been very good friends in real life. I went through my bigotry phase because it was just everywhere around me. Escaped through music and food. A playlist that goes from Sabbath to AIC to Mark Lanegan to Black Pistol Fire to 21 Savage to BigXthaPlug to Whiskey Myers to Amigo the Devil. And that just scratches the surface. That doesn’t even get into the 1920s folk blues or 50s jazz and soul. Pretty much the only thing I won’t listen to is Nashville country.

I had to go back and look to see if I wrote this comment.

Alt-country and dark Americana are my jam. Whiskey Myers is from my neck of the woods and actually calls out the titty bar that was down the street from where I worked (I passed that thing at least 10 times a week) in Broken Window Serenade. Used to go watch them play local shows in the late 00s and early 10s before I moved to Houston. They are all pretty good guys.

I feel like a few weeks ago I called out Cocaine and Abel as being one of the saddest songs I know somewhere on Lemmy.

I’ll also say that smack gave us a lot of grunge music.

Yee haw.

I don’t use them but I follow the news about them loosely. The reason for this is epistemic humility. Claude has a pretty good idea of what its capabilities are and where the ceiling is. Chatgpt has no clue what its limits are so it believes it can do everything. Basically chatgpt has a lot of info and no idea where the gaps live and Claude has a fair idea when to search or use some external function to handle something. Gemini has less than Claude but more than chatgpt. Grok has little to no epistemic humility, but it did manage to accurately portray Musk as a world champion piss drinker, something none of the others were able to do.

I say that, but it’s been a few months since I looked. That could have changed because shit moves fast. By the looks of what it’s trying to do with the timer chatgpt has less than it used to. Possibly because of the way the model is trained to be helpful and confident.

Augustine of Hippo did a huge amount of damage to the Western world because he was so terrified of his own turgid member. Without his dumb ass ramblings about how much he hated all the orgies he was having we wouldn’t have

• Original sin through sexual reproduction
• The Just War
• Irresistible Grace
• All sex being impure except for baby making
• Purgatory

People were afraid to go against what Augustine had to say to the point where one of his teachings (the filioque) was a major part of The Schism. The current war that we (the US) are in and our whole puritanical bullshit can be traced to this man whose most famous quote is “O Lord, make me chaste, but not yet!”

Some of it has some basis in the bible. If you read it sideways. A lot of it was just his own hangups that the western church said “Welp, this is our shit now!”.

Not that he wouldn’t have been able to do it without “be nice to your slaves” Paul, and not that he’s the absolute originator, but he’s the prolific source of a lot of the views espoused by a bunch of shitty people and used to treat others like shit.

Some women like the gesture. Some women like practical things. I’m a dude who actually prefers a cheap gesture showing that you thought about me rather than anything practical that might cost someone something real. Because I already get anything practical for myself and I’m super particular about consumable practical things that I need extras of.

I’ve heard the phrase “set myself on fire to keep them warm” and variants thousands of times in my life. This is the first time I’ve heard it where I really felt it.

Congrats on the payoff, friend! It’s a great feeling and welcome to the club.

I had an ex who loved growing flowers. The third time she came over to my house she came with a big bouquet of flowers she had grown.

Can confirm, I did not receive them in an appropriate way.

What I discovered was that I love having flowers around the house. Not the fake ones that match seasonal tablecloths or whatever. But like actual fresh flowers in whatever variety was available at the farmer’s market every few weeks. I don’t match them to anything or have a favorite. I just pick up whatever looks nice. They make me smile.

It’s weird that Macaroni and Cheese is closer to Kraft Dinner than Kraft Mac and Cheese colored. They should rename it to Dinner.

I don’t do it anymore, but back when I was a young man I had a short metal straw, a metal credit card looking thing (not sharp, it crushed things more than chopping them), an aluminum tray, and a snuff vial with a tiny spoon.

I’m wondering how much of it were the companies that spun up and never delivered (or delivered substandard products) since then. I never had to do a chargeback in my life until 2020 and I’ve been using a credit card since 1998.

I ordered a box from a clothing company. They missed my size, preferences, never called for the consultation, and sent accessories that were supposed to be specifically excluded.

They had a no returns policy. I was ok with that. But the box was entirely wrong. Exactly one item in it was the right size and style on the form I filled out.

I tried solving it through them. They wouldn’t call me back. Email was spotty. I said I was going to do a chargeback and they immediately called me to explain their no return policy means they can send me whatever they want and it’s my problem (in corporate speak). So I did a charge back with the call recording, screenshots of the styling stuff, call logs showing they never called me, everything.

Since then I’ve had roughly the same experience from a couple of other places where someone spun up a good idea with no plan, no support, and looked like they were panicking by trying to fill orders as close to the letter as they could get them hoping no one would notice. And none of them want to refund when they fuck up.

Yep. They only look similar to people trying to win points or defend the guy over rampant hypocrisy.

This is the one I was looking for. Many years ago I worked construction and these big burly dudes who hated gay people at the time and likely hate trans people today all wore them under their clothes in the winter.

I remember those days! I used PdaNet because whoever I was with (AT&T? Cingular?) sold tether data like it was being brought to me by a parade of half nude sexy folks bit by bit.

I remember the on-hook and off-hook commands, and I remember calling the cradle that old land lines sat on/in being called the hook. When was the tether called the hook?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not being rhetorical here as a gotcha. My memory just ain’t what she used to be and I’d like to remember.

I just looked at it. You’re absolutely right. The only thing I would add is the word “seemingly” before reasonable.

I liked dogpile back in the late 90s because it would aggregate from several sources and wasn’t terribly cluttered comparatively. I think I swapped to Google around 2000ish because it was so minimalist.

You said more than I did in my whole fucking rant. That’s exactly right.

Abso-fucking-lutely. I don’t think it’s quite there yet, it puts too many strange artifacts in the music currently, but it’s getting damn close to “good enough”.

Too many people think the danger is that it’s awful. The danger is that it’s mediocre. Because cheap, easily reproducible, and mediocre beats excellent, expensive, and messy every time because AI doesn’t get tired. It doesn’t go on a bender or get caught doing something reprehensible or burn out. It’s never late. It just sits there waiting to be told what to crank out next.

So you’ve got this thing that can’t move art forward. It can’t inject that one really fucking cool thing in there that changes everything. AI can’t hate a song it’s creating so it emphasizes things in a weird way.

Compare it with Max Martin productions. He didn’t invent manufactured music but he created a hell of a pipeline for folks to rhyme fire with desire. But even that relies on people who can sing with the timidity of youth and the confidence of a person who has been told the world is theirs. Or someone with no real understanding of a song singing it in a way that gives it a different meaning than the original intent. Or someone barely hanging on and pouring their entire person into their performance because they have nothing else.

AI can’t do any of that. It can’t turn a word into a god damned grenade. It’s going to remix everything that came before. Not in new and exciting ways. Not in thought provoking ways. But in algorithmic ways. It’s flat. The lyrics will tell a story that resolves. The rhymes will be perfect. You won’t get a banjo in metal or a calliope in video game music unless it’s a game about a clown. It’s not going to give you soul and wit. It will give you a snapshot of where music has been and is up to the point of its last training data.

I have an entire tangent about how it’s being used politically currently (go look up Danny Bones) and how it does not get tired or embroiled in controversy and being “good enough” makes it the perfect propaganda machine. But that’s for another day.