I like non-generative AI. Early artificial life sims (e.g cellular automata) are super interesting, and machine learning and xAI are great for science.

Just not that big a fan of the infinite slop machine helping the rich get richer at the cost of degrading our knowledge base and arts

Fuck yeah

1. That they give a shit about other people, and contribute in some way to their community/society.
2. Capacity for/evidence of personal growth. This one’s not always easy to see, but it’s amazing when you do.

Also it’s building on top of existing fragility (the thin pillar below), and only making it worse

There are certainly less immoral companies though. Avoid arms manufacturers, fossil fuel, big tech, the police and chemical manufacturers, obviously.

There’s vaguely ethical jobs in manufacturing, retail, government (e.g. parks, urban maintenance), academia, the NGO sector, and many other spaces

I get the vibe that it’s a lot easier if you’re not in the US. I guess there are a few worse countries as well…

I don’t?

That seems a lot like a reason to judge those accounts as not people? More than accounts that don’t match that format, anyway… Who uses an auto-generated username??

Some random things:

• lots of René Magritte’s work
• F♯ A♯ ∞ by Godspeed You! Black Emperor
• Gravity by Rone (the film clip)
• lots of Lorn’s music, in particular the filmclips for Timesink and Anvil

Edit:

• A Wizard of Earth Sea, by Ursula Le Guin. I think a lot of her stories have that vibe, but that one’s probably the strongest in that regard.

My partner just asked me this the other day. Answer is nope, never had a reason to want it.

Never had a partner with a problem with it either. If someone was ever grossed out by something that’s just the way I was born then they can learn to deal with it, or fuck off.

I was thinking show some breakbeat to some early house producers, but now I’m thinking Venetian Snare’s Cubist Reggae.

I guess enshittification has been moved off the backlog then…

On par for Microsoft software in general. Seems like every week I discover new bugs in outlook.com…

The developer who was there when I started my last job believed that libraries should be avoided at all costs. He wrote a CSV reader from scratch in python. It didn’t work in many edge cases. He didn’t like it when I pointed that out. Nor when I showed him that his “better way” in another case was more than 10x slower using a profiler… At least he was using git, but the git history was full of long series of identical commit messages unrelated to code changes, because PyCharm has an option to reuse the previous commit message on a new commit…

He eventually quit and I spent 3 years refactoring his garbage before we finally had a tech team who could take over (I’m a scientist, with self taught coding skills). Pretty sure even after we had a tech team of 7 if was still a better coder than most, purely because I was interested in how coding works, and trying to understand underlying concepts.

Weird

Everyone is weird in some way. Some of us try to hide it, some don’t. How much you do is a choice (but also heavily influenced by how conformist your communities are).

Oh yeah, I saw that a while back. Hilarious! Also kind of unusual (though lots of people have used smaller samples from toys and instruments)

All good, was just wondering.

I do DJ (non-professionally). I generally think there are two skills with DJing:

• Taste, library management and music choice, which is not a technical skill, but does take a bit of effort in preparing for a set
• Actual technical mixing skills, which many DJs (including me) barely have, but some take to a level that is on basically a form of musicianship.

I don’t think AI can really help you do either… but I guess it could make a mixed set and you could pretend to play it, like a Casio keyboard

Are you speaking from experience? 'Cause that’s not even vaguely related to how any of the DJs I know (including a couple of professionals) got started. The prime motive for most DJs is sharing cool music, and Casio keyboards don’t do that…

Vision is a strong word. I think it’s a vague idea in most cases