See I also think that there is something to be said about how there’s people still out there making new music, performing it, recording. But business has captured the market and is drowning out the smaller players. The signal to noise ratio gets so skewed that even if the best song you never heard is only a web search away you may never listen to it because your streaming service will never play it. But the soulless corporate remix of a remix of a cover of a song from the 80s, you hear that 4 times a day because they have a marketing budget and algorithmic influence.

Maybe I am misreading your comment here, but I am going to take it on face value, I have never written a song. In an interesting note I believe cutting pages out of a bunch of books and sticking them together in a new binding wouldn’t make a compelling read, I also have never written a novel.

I seriously respect people who can write songs, I would imagine they have or had passion for the art. I seriously doubt any song writer is out there thinking "Holy fuck this song is amazing, I really hope some shithead producer crops the chorus and mashes it together with a bunch of other tracks to make it completely meaningless. That would make it perfect.’

Ahh down votes in lieu of a substantive argument. Love it. If there wasn’t a thread to pull on in all that word salad that would unravel the tapestry do you think maybe there’s something to my take on this matter?

Anyway, don’t care, this isn’t Reddit so a downvote doesn’t mean shit, and you at least read some of my post. To quote a somewhat famous Doctor “Don’t you think she looks tired?”

I got stuck today in a part of my workplace where they have one of the local shitty radio stations playing, couldn’t have my headphones in as people kept coming up and talking to me, and a shitty pop music mashup plays and it struck me, this is AI.

To clarify there is some shitty artist who gets the credit, but its just a selection of clips crossfaded and slightly processed into each other to make a new “song” out of a dozen pop songs. No actual creativity, no new material, just a quasi algorithmic blending of songs so that some soulless talentless grifter can claim they are an artist.

It gets deeper though, as mixed in there are songs that couldn’t actually be performed live and acoustic due to the amount of sound engineering and vocal processing that went into the original versions of these songs.

The whole thing is turning into an Ouroboros, they have worked out how to make perfectly bland, meaningless music and now the snake is eating its tail as the industry consumes that slop to manufacture more slop.

Yet deeper, why does this beige bullshit get air time… Why its our old friend capitalist market forces, no one passionate about music wants to make this shit, its the people who want the fame and money and view music as the means to that end.

We know that AI makes people dumber, we know that it leads to the atrophy of skill and talent, and we know the only motivation for its use is capitalist. AI is pop music.

For what its worth I used italics on AI as I categorically refuse to believe this garbage is actually artificial intelligence. I am reasonably certain that actual artificial intelligence is the next fusion power, it’s going to be “only a few years away” from being viable until well after I die, but its just too good a marketing term to leave it alone while we make do with these stunted chinese rooms.

Wow that rant blew up.

And give up on making you explicitly hand over your identity… Sir/Ma’am/Other I believe you have misjudged the ever beneficent Google. This will simply be to augment the other fingerprinting methods they already use regardless of what they might say.

I keep seeing this suggested and while I think that would be amazing I really don’t think its likely. These incumbents are set up to make things difficult for new entrants to their market. With political will and engagement it would be possible, but in the current world political environment these payment processors would simply buy the right politicians & court officials to ensure that any legislative challenges would be killed in the nest.

In the world we are in right now we need to instead focus on making the payment processors bend to the will of the majority not a vocal minority.

We also need to start finding strategies to fight back against paedophilia as an accepted permission slip to let the worst people in the world get away with whatever they want. If its not a disqualifying status for the office of president of the US, then why does the existence of paedophiles mean we (vast majority not paedophiles I hope) have to sacrifice our rights, our privacy, and our free speech?

Well yea, but also no. I think a lot of their ability to operate is the veneer of legitimacy they have, my suggestion above, while funny, was mainly facetious, however if we could figure out a way of stripping that legitimacy away they might see more pushback from the next company they try to convince they represent a statistically large chunk of the population.

In this exact situation if Visa had just said to them: “We will take that under advisement.” Then filed the whole thing with the crayon scrawl “letters” they get from a certain “BLEACH BLONDE BAD BUILT BUTCH BODY” about not letting the Jews buy any more space lasers. Then no one would be getting rights taken away from them.

Posted this elsewhere so just going to copy paste here but with regards to Collective Shout:

I think we need to get this group to weigh in on the content of certain holy books. Surely as a secular organisation they will have no problem demanding that the bible and qur’an be banned (I bet I know which one they actually would like banned).

After all we don’t want kids exposed to books that contain incest, sex, violence, rape, etc. I’m sure there are some parts of Ezekiel they will want editted at the absolute minimum.

I imagine balkanisation would be one way to make them slightly less visible/insufferable, and you know they would love some factional infighting.

Every time they get brought up they should be forced to confront that the people pulling their strings are most likely engaging in all the things they want banned from culture (regardless of culture or intent). Once they are forced to start lobbying Visa and MasterCard to block transactions to religious bodies I will accept they genuinely believe in the drivel they leak. Until then its performative puritanism.

P.s. not a fan of religion of any stripe, but I would feel as violently opposed to censoring them as I am to censoring anything else, I will accept it if its the only responsible solution until then alternative can be found.

Oh and just re-read your comment and sure back in the 70s and 80s when the US was looking to stitch up as much of our resources and industry as they felt like we were likely important to secure, these days… I’d bet you it takes three wranglers to get Trump to mispronounce Anthony Albanese’s name. We are boring and if it wasn’t for the fact that we have so much American ownership and a bunch of US military bases we wouldn’t be important enough to even consider. You know our position on the tariff list is primarily based on our previous dumbarse Prime Minister getting preferential rates in the past then allowing other countries to siphon their products through our ports otherwise we might have been given the same rate as the penguins got.

Well aware. Seeing the US crash out the way it is make me hope that as a tiny consolation we might start to extricate ourselves even a little.

I did tell some friends once that I thought the best idea if the US goes ahead with tariffs on us, is we should start reconsidering the rent on Pine Gap. Would be hilarious if we looked at how much damage the tariffs did to our markets and then passed it on that way… What are they going to do, relocate the number 1 “definitely not a spy base” in this part of the world somewhere else… And where… Indonesia… But guess why that would never happen?

Hey, I take offense at that phrasing, Vassal implies that we occasionally merit a thought on the part of our overlords… I seriously doubt we warrant that much consideration. Reckon we could be termed sycophantic rubes instead?

I was going to ask how he knew it was Arch, but I feel like that is just setting up the next comment.

I have written and rewritten my response here trying to find the right tone. I feel like we are closer to agreement here than might be immediately obvious. I think a lot of what we are seeing now is a result of 50+ years of people who find the idea of your republic distasteful seeking every method they can to erode it away. All the details are just components of this project, seems to me that MAGA is a result of years of stoking xenophobia and anti-intellectualism. Turns out if you spend decades laying the groundwork you can make the situation seem completely hopeless to a whole populace. I sincerely worry the long term goal is to perfect the formula for dismantling democracy and then start exporting it to the rest of the world.

Or I could be a fool, I don’t know and I don’t want to rewrite this again. Sorry that this was so rambling.

From my detached non American (but still a citizen of the planet so likely to get fucked hard by the way Americans vote) point of view, seems like Americans are continually letting perfect be the enemy of least bad. “Well since Democrats are kinda bad in these instances maybe we should just go fully fascist theological doom cult. That will force the Democrats to improve, or kill us all.”

Actually I am misremembering, apparently capacitors are bad for audio, so to get the best you have to have chunky inductors and circuitry to do powerfctor correction to get a PF of 1. I was remembering big chunky power conditioners that look like batteries but are actually huge iron core inductors. They get your audio equipment “closer” to the power generation, which “improves your soundscape”. I’m sure he was using the stupid crazy priced audiophile powercords as well.

Oh, I was going to say you know a higher grade of audiophile than I do, but then I remembered that no I have met one. He had installed what was in effect a powerwall with supercaps and was generating his own waves through. His speakers cost more than my car, individually. I want to say Palladium Studio References. Wow yep. Thanks for that little blast from the musty vaults of deep memory… Well a 10 minute conversation 20ish years ago and a lot of “Ohs” and “Ahs” at his photo album.

Oh and the latencies, the really minimal processing that a CRT does compared to an LCD means that input lag could be insanely low. Subtlely different to refresh rate, I always felt it was the gamer equivalent of audiophile grade speaker cables personally, but some people swear they can detect it.

Oh that’s OK I just wanted to reminisce on the glory days, my backlog is so long already I could use all my spare time for the next year and still barely make a dent.

First time I attended a LAN party was with a group of 40 people who hired out the two conference rooms at the local library. First medal of homour game was a blast, especially 1 moment where I ended up last alive getting advice from the other 7 people on my team who were clustered around trying to coach me through taking on the last three Germans from the other team. Also helping to cart all the monitors in was some good cardio, kinda miss moving 24" Sony Trinitron CRTs around… Oh wait no I don’t at all.

You should give the Amiga version a go via an emulator. You might be interested in the differences. Loved that trilogy back in the day.