A Phlaming Phoenix

I’m not adopting the conspiracy here, but if they can’t find the shooter with the whole country getting behind him, then they would want the optics of finding the shooter. Which could backfire, of course. It would be very telling, for example, if the cops got real confident about it and then the real shooter made some kind of public display with the false shooter in custody.

I think the general reception of this news shows that any successful prosecution would be seen as such an injustice, and likely to spark further acts of rebellion. I almost think it’s in the ruling class’s favor to let this one go.

I don’t know what you’re currently accustomed to or what the feature/workflow differences would be, but I’ve had some music folks I know be successful with Ardour and Reaper. Have you checked to see if those would let you do your thing? The other problem I’ve had is audio interface support in Linux, but that seems to have improved a lot. I’ve got an old Axe I/O Solo that didn’t work at all a few years ago but now seems to have full support.

Isn’t the core of jazz improvisation and breaking the “rules” of music? If that’s what they’re doing, why would we disqualify it as jazz? A lot of folks had this opinion of Miles Davis doing jazz fusion in the 70s on Bitches Brew and Live/Evil with his squeaky, borderline abusive trumpeting, or of Herbie Hancock doing weird space synth stuff on Sextant and funk fusion on Headhunters. I don’t see how what you’re saying isn’t just gatekeeping that’s not really in the spirit of jazz.

Awful take. Last weekend I saw Mike Dillon with Phunkadelick playing with Brian Haas on the Rhodes organ. They played a wild punk-jazz show that is one of the best shows I’ve ever attended. There was a mosh pit at a jazz concert where a primary instrument was a vibraphone.

In recent years, I’ve greatly enjoyed things like AKU!'s album Blind Fury (drum/trumpet/baritone sax trio) and Ambrose Akinmusire’s Origami Harvest. A lot of modern jazz is blending in electronic influences, like Sungazer. Maybe you don’t like these things, but I can’t imagine calling jazz dead.

This is a literary device called a “bookend narrative.” If you want more stories like that, there’s your search term.

Wheel! Of! Fish!

Really, the media finally realized millennials don’t care if we killed Applebee’s or whatever, and they’ve moved on to the next thing to scare boomers with. “They hate us because we buy bags of paper napkins” becomes “They hate us because we can use old style keyboards.” Generations are not a monolith. You can compare them, but it’s stupid to pass judgment in that way.

Hah, I love this track, but kind of ironically. It’s fun when it comes up on shuffle.

White Pony is accessible and everyone knows it. Around the Fur has the best snare I’ve ever heard recorded.

With polyamory, Brokeback Mountain is a light hearted comedy about some queer friends who like to escape to the woods sometimes.

God damn you.

I stand corrected on that one. I assumed it was sumac bark, and you know what they say about assumption. It makes an ass out of u and mption.

Cinnamon and sumac are two common spices that are made from grinding up tree bark.

I really dislike superhero movies in general, especially this non-stop Marvel/DC stuff, and a primary reason for that is the way they tend to go in and out of live action and animation. There’s an uncanny valley thing that happens in that transition, and you can obviously still tell that large portions of the live action stuff is shot on a greenscreen. It all looks fake as a result. My suspension of disbelief is shattered.

But when a movie like this admits it’s animated, things improve a lot. I watched the first Spiderverse movie the other day with my kid, and I absolutely loved the art style. I had other problems with the movie, but the visual style was not one of them. I wish there were more animated movies targeting older audiences with unique art direction like that.

It’s very, very costly, both but the hardware and the electricity it takes to run it. There may be a bit of sunk cost fallacy at play for some, especially the execs who are calling for AI Everything, but in the end, in AI doesn’t generate enough increase in revenue to offset its operational costs, even those execs will bow out. I think the economics of AI will cause the bubble to burst because end users aren’t going to pay money for a service that does a mediocre job at most things but costs more.

I don’t want thinner. I want more functionality. Don’t expect me to pay 2 grand for a laptop with no external USB or HDMI ports, for which privileges I can pay an additional $100 or so. I’m frustrated enough by the lack of Ethernet jacks on my Lenovo. The last time I had a Mac (work shipped me one), I was even more frustrated by how bad the built in trackpad and keyboard were and the fact that using an external device to replace them came at a premium price.

The article quotes extensively from the study about this and gives examples regarding what kinds of tasks qualify for those levels.

There was a post here a while back about how younger generations often don’t understand concepts like file system structures because concepts like that (which are still relevant in a lot of contexts) have been largely stripped out of modern user interfaces. If your primary computing device is a cell phone, a task like “make a nested directory structure and move this file to the deepest part of it” is a foreign concept.

I guess my point here is that I agree with yours about this being cyclical in a sense. I feel crippled on a cell phone, but I’m also in my comfort zone on a Linux terminal. Using web apps like MS Teams is often difficult for me because their UIs are not things I’m comfortable with. I don’t tend to like default layouts and also tend to use advanced features which are usually hidden away behind a few menus. Tools built to meet my needs specifically would largely not meet the needs of most users. A Level 1 user would probably have a better experience there than a Level 3 like me. It’s hard (maybe impossible) to do UX design that satisfies everyone.

Some of it is a fad that will go away. Like you indicated, we’re in the “Marketing throws everything at the wall” phase. Soon we’ll be in the “see what sticks” phase. That stuff will hang around and improve, but until we get there we get AI in all conceivable forms whether they’re a worthwhile use of technology or not.