We need to implement tarpits: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/01/ai-haters-build-tarpits-to-trap-and-trick-ai-scrapers-that-ignore-robots-txt/

There are examples yes, Dr Fatima on youtube talks a lot about the philosophy of science and how it’s not such a rigid, prescriptive process as a lot of people - including scientists - seem to think.

When Pseudoscience Beat Science: Three Stories About Knowing Things

That video has three stories of phenomena that were unknown to western science until ancestral knowledge revealed them. The first two you could argue are just traditionally acquired knowledge that has gained a veneer of supernatural language, but “voodoo death” is literally named after the fact that a voodoo curse can kill someone.

I’d reccommend her whole channel if this stuff interests you. Particularly Gravity is a Social Construct, and How Galileo Broke the Scientific Method.

Edit: the downvotes on this with absolutely no explanation of what’s wrong are a perfect example of why science struggles with these concepts. Anything that doesn’t immediately fit the schema of what western respectable rational people expect gets dismissed out of hand.

I know by making this edit I’m inviting the most incurious assholes to mansplain to me why I’m wrong, but maybe someone will actually engage with the points.

I will never forget the moment I alt-tabbed to this video that I’d started in the background to see who the other vocalist was.

It’s a bit like learning that Russian cargo ships don’t get boarded by pirates because they’ll just start fucking shooting.

Say what you want about Russians, but that kind of rules.

Well the point here is not that China is cool and based actually, but that people definitely did some lying on this point and those same people definitely think it means that any and all forms of communism are authoritarian and there is no alternative to capitalism.

There has to be some percentage of people who let this be the thing that radicalises them, and I don’t want to hear any doomer takes about how these people are impossible to reach. I’ve heard loads of stories over the years of this or that particular moment being the moment that snapped someone out of their fascist sympathies.

“We are legion.”

I’m just perusing my old comments and came across this, 7 months later. This is an amazing article, thank you.

Dunno if you know dimension 20 and their Misfits & Magic mini-series, but it was basically a satire of Harry Potter, really attacking some of the unquestioned tropes in that series.

Anyway, this is a beautiful clip of Erika Ishii, who is NB, at the start of the series, saying what they think of TERFs:

https://youtu.be/4GiVpELykaE

Honestly less frantic gameplay sounds good to me, I got sick of the “oh god they’re after me now I fell oh well try again” parts of the gameplay. I might take a look. Thanks!

I played the first game and thought it was okay but not great. What were the changes? Maybe they’ll suit me since I’m not so attached to the original.

There’s nothing hornier than religious sexual purity culture. Add perfoming arts & fame and you have a very sordid cocktail.

Okay, that’s all very interesting and I love the idea about dynamic music, I’ve had similar thoughts myself but wouldn’t have thought to go this far to make it happen. I’d love to see what you come up with!

My only real thoughts are about the transpiling, so the editor uses relative time codes but the format itself uses absolute, if I understand you, and you’re converting between the two?

That to me hints of code smell, because I wonder why that’s necessary. For example, could you program the editor to display and work in absolute time codes, or is there something stopping that from happening?

Alternatively you could simply make the format capable of natively understanding both relative and absolute commands, so whichever is more appropriate to the context is what gets used.

Keeping them different seems like it will require you to program two formats, make them compatible with one another and deal with bugs in both of them. Essentially you’ve not only doubled the number of places where bugs can arise within the formats, you’ve added the extra step of transpiling which also doubles the number of interactions between the formats, adding even more complexity, even more places where inconsistencies can show up, even more code to sift through to find the problem.

It’s the sort of thing that shows up in legacy systems where the programmers don’t have the freedom to simply ditch one of the parts.

Personally if I had the freedom of programming the system from scratch I would rather commit completely to a single format and make it work across the entire stack, so then I only have one interpreter/encoder to consider. That one parser would then be the single point of reference for every interaction with the format. Any code that wants to get or place a note for any reason - for playing, editing, recording, whatever - would use the same set of functions, and then you automatically get consistency across all of it.

Edit: another thought about this: if you need some notes to be absolute and others to be relative, it might be worth having an absolute anchor command that other commands can be relative to, and have it indexed, so commands are relative to anchor 1, 2, etc. Maybe anchor 0 is just the start of the song. Also maybe you could set any command as an anchor by referring to its index. That way you can still move around those commands in a relative way while still having the overall format reducible to absolute times during playback. Also a note “duration” could just be an off command set relative to its corresponding on command.

I say that because as another principle I like to make sure that I “name things what they are”. If the user is programming things in the editor that are relative, but under the hood they’re translated into absolute terms, that will probably lead to unexpected behaviour.

It’s a good thing literally every critic of yours sounds like that ridiculous strawman or else you might have to think critically about your worldview.

The argument could be made that because the image generator is essentially a regurgitator with no artistic interpretation, there is no transformative artistic value in it. It’s like applying a filter with extra steps.

Also the generators charge for access, so they are profiting off of the IP. That’s quite different to making something for personal use or releasing it for free.

Honestly a lot of this post is very inside-baseball with a lot of lingo, and the last paragraph is very dense, so it’s hard to know what you mean, especially by the term “transpiler”. What is it transpiling to & from, and where does this happen in the overall process of implementing the editor?

I’m sorry I don’t have a lot of insight other than: it sounds like you know better than anyone here, so just try it and see what works. Sometimes rewriting a system is unavoidable as you figure out the logic of it.

Also as someone with some interest in programming my own physical MIDI instruments, I’d be interested to hear what limitations of MIDI you’re talking about and what your system does differently. It sounds like you’ve got a pretty advanced use-case if MIDI isn’t up to the task.

Did anyone get consent from all the artists whose work was scraped to make the shitty AI that made their comic?

You can, but I find that if I have the tabs there, I use them or close them. I don’t use bookmarks after I make them, so they just acrue. You’re right I don’t need 7000 open tabs, just like I don’t need 7000 bookmarks. Part of the point of tab groups is you can more easily determine what tabs aren’t relevant and get rid of them, so you don’t wind up with thousands to start with.

If they’re open as tabs, even in groups, I’m incentivised to close them when they’re no longer relevant. For longer term notes I use a note-taking app that doesn’t rely on my browser or computer staying the same. I don’t like using a browser for that because it’s just not a good tool for it.

People should look into tab groups. Firefox has a tab grouping feature built-in now but this is a plugin that is a bit more feature-full.

So I have tab groups for different dev projects, games, podcasts, shows, music, etc. It reduces the size of each tab group which makes it easier to actually return to the important stuff and close the stuff that doesn’t matter.

And I’ll keep saying this: you can’t teach a neural network to understand context without creating a generalised context engine, another word for which is AGI.

Fidelity is impossible to automate.

He proposed a moon cannon. The moon cannon was wrong, as wrong as thinking an LLM can have any fidelity whatsoever. That’s all that’s needed for my analogy to make the point I want to make. Whether rockets count as artillery or not really doesn’t change that.

Cannons are not rockets. LLMs are not thinking machines.

Being occasionally right like a stopped clock is not what “fidelity” means in this context. Fidelity implies some level of adherence to a model of the world, but the LLM simply has no model, so it has zero fidelity.