You’re a relatively large mammal. Your body is not designed to be productive all the time. It’s designed to have frequent periods of doing absolutely nothing. You’re also a pack animal whose survival depends on being social with other members of your pack.

So, wasting productive time by conversing nonsense? That’s how we evolved. It’s good for us.

The Beatles thing is a myth. Nobody connected to the Beatles has sued anybody over Paul’s Boutique. Most of the samples on Pauls’ Boutique were cleared, especially the most obvious ones.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/pop-hiss/story/2012-05-10/beastie-boys-sampling-in-pauls-boutique-again-in-spotlight

He adds that there are two myths about the samples and licensing on the Beastie Boys’ classic. One is that when the record was first released, neither the group nor its label, Capitol, had cleared any of the rights to the snippets of recordings that they and producers the Dust Brothers used. ‘They and their label were really cautious. They cleared tons of songs,’ McLeod says, citing the ballpark $250,000 figure that’s often reported, and the fact that the Jimmy Castor Bunch had sued the group soon after ‘Licensed to Ill’ was released.

Was GamerGate really only 11 years ago? That’s spun my head a little, TBH. I mean, it’s the root of QAnon, from there Trump, and just so much about the current US. I could have sworn it was 10 years before Trump got elected, not 2.

I blame google. Seriously.

I almost exclusively use Perplexity to search for things now. When it gives me reliable information and actually answers the question I ask it, it’s fantastic. But that’s still only around 80-90% of the time. That’s actually not very reliable at all by any metric which is worth paying attention to.

But once upon a time you could search google and it’d look for the words that you searched for. But for years now it’s used “natural language” searches, which means that if you’re searching for a specific word it might not even look for that word at all. It might even take a definition of that word that you didn’t intend and search instead for a synonym to fit that definition.

Add SEO, ads, and paid search boosting, and you end up with results that are far less useful than they used to be. Add to that the fact that a lot of the actual sites being searched are now AI-generated themselves, and google is now a bad way to try to find something. And every other search engine has followed suit.

So I use Perplexity because even with an objectively bad hit rate - and the fact that it basically returns one answer from multiple sources, rather than multiple sources some of which might not be related to what I’m looking for, and therefore when it misunderstands is perhaps worse than google - it’s better than a traditional search engine for almost all text-based searches.

It’s clearly unsustainable, though, and for many different reasons. It’s certainly an iteresting time to be observing all of this. I can’t help but wonder what the landscape will look like in 10 years.

Remember when the excuse for allowing subs dedicated to jerking off to pictures of children was “free speech”? What a difference a few years makes.

I love how the photo of the inside of the place looks like it’s ai generated

One of the Tomb Raider games was some ridiculous discount on Steam, so i bought it. Cue interminable cutscenes and being given very brief control in order to walk a couple of paces forward before another cutscene. Or, even worse, the game taking over control of Lara for you.

I’d been playing 15-20 minutes - maybe even a little bit longer - when i decided “fuck this”, turned it off and never booted it again. Call me weird but i play games to play them. If it’s been that long and I’ve not experienced any gameplay then I’m not interested.

For a metal waltz, try Cheval by Igorrr

For jazzy pop with an upfront floor tom, try Humanised by Sola Rosa

For messy disjointed verses and flowing choruses, try Giant by Bear Hands

For a shuffle-y groove with some slightly unusual snare patterns, try Home Away From Home by Cut Chemist - nothing too wild here, but it sounds like it’d be fun to play

For setting up random stuff like dustbin lids as percussion, try Sick Kids by Fjorka

For being kept on your toes by something with several distinct sections, including an unusual shuffle, tru Walking Headz by STUFF. The full stop is part of the band name

For rhythmic patterns not common in Western music, try Gnawa Beat by Bab L’ Bluz

For noisy punk with lots of fills, try Bakuro Book by Otoboke Beaver

For laid-back funk with some unusual percussion, try 3 On E by Vulfpeck

For if you’ve ever wondered what it would sound like if bossa nova and drum & bass had a baby, try Drum ‘N’ Bossa by Carbuncle

For fun swing-y jazz try Forgotten Places by Alif Tree

And, just for funsies, why not pit yourself against the most sampled song in history? Amen Brother by The Winstons - you know the drum sample (1.26, for anybody who wants to skip to it to see if they’ve heard it - spoiler: you have), but the tune itself is also a banger with a fun drum part

Thank you

I remeber an article form a decade or more ago which did some research and said that basically, yes there are inaccuracies on Wikipedia, and yes there are over-simplifications, but** no more than in any other encyclopaedia**. They argued that this meant that it should be considered equally valid as an academic resource.

How is it with nVidia?

This is such an interesting read. Thank you for posting it.

And this is because 99% of our press is explicitly right-wing and has a somewhat fuzzy relationship with truth.

Thanks, Murdoch!

What I mean is I know that a lot of things done online in China are done with WeChat, including it being something that some apps run in. If the same is true for what’s being discussed here, then the Chinese government doesn’t need people to prove their ages first, because they already have that data.

Would you need to in China? i genuinely don’t know if downloading apps is something that’s done through WeChat but, if so, the government’s got direct access anyway.

Well, it was found that water pools in the chassis of the Cybertruck, corroding it. They dealt with this by telling consumers not to get it wet and make taking it through a carwash void the warrantee.

Also “LGB drop the T”. Once all the trans people are in camps, who do you think they’re coming for next, LGBs?

At the moment OpenAI can’t pay back anything, becuase they’re hemmorhaging money. Losing billions a year. And there’s no path to profitability.

That’s why they make investors confirm that they’re considering their investments a donation. That’s also why it’s unusual.

It’s not unusual for the opening phases of big tech companies to be “operate at a massive loss until the competition has gone out of business”, as companies like Netflix and Uber can attest, but it is unusual for that to be done where the investors aren’t expecting to make a profit.

VCs typically want a return on their investments

Not framed like that. You have to acknowledge that investments can depreciate rather than appreciate and that you may lose your money, sure. That’s very different to saying that you acknowledge that you probably will lose your money and that you consider your investment a donation.