Amarok's recent activity
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Comment on A new era of intelligence with Gemini 3 in ~tech
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Comment on Some people can't see mental images. The consequences are profound. in ~health.mental
Amarok LinkDamn, how many aphantasics do we have on Tildes?! I'm one too. Best I can manage is a dim wire frame that pops into my mind for about the duration of a camera flash in a pitch black room, and I...Damn, how many aphantasics do we have on Tildes?! I'm one too.
Best I can manage is a dim wire frame that pops into my mind for about the duration of a camera flash in a pitch black room, and I can't flash that camera more than once every couple of minutes for any given scene. No colors or textures, just vectors, shapes, edges. I can't remember dreams at all, not even a tiny fraction of them.
I've got the omnipresent visual snow and tinnitus to go with it, though the migraines stopped once I was out of my 20s. Even magic mushrooms and LSD hit my mind like a brick wall - I don't think it's possible for me to have hallucinations, I've tried on several occasions. The closest I get is some washed out almost transparent pastel rainbow stripes if I stare at a bright white wall while under a heavy dose. I do get enhanced color perception and the 'breathing' visual effect while tripping, but no trails.
Never seemed to bother me when reading books, doing calculus or physics, or various engineering tasks. Never bothered me on the art either, but then I don't imagine an image and try to draw it, I just start plopping things down onto the paper and working with them once I can look at them. I'd say the only thing about it that bothers me is the reflexive irritated eye-roll I do every time I hear someone say the word "visualize" when trying to explain something. That technique is utterly useless to me.
My audio memory is probably better than normal, though. If I listen to your voice for about five minutes and we don't talk again until twenty years later on the phone, I'll recognize you from just your 'hello' even if your voice has changed. Using this to freak people out is kinda fun. I can play back complete songs I've heard in my head like there's an embedded mp3 player in there if I've heard it enough times, though it's not instantly memorized and I do forget them over time.
I was doing some digging on this out of curiosity some time ago and found some anecdotal evidence that Ayahuasca and DMT can 'cure' it for some people - and not just while high, I mean permanently after one dose. Doesn't work for everyone, but apparently the heavy psychedelics do work for some people. Haven't tried either of those yet myself. In fact being able to remember everything I'd seen before seems like hell - all that visual crud in the brain would clog up and slow down my thinking like a Tildes front page full of cat pictures.
I also found some meditation techniques that presented a method for training that visualization process. I tried it out of curiosity and after some practice it did seem to work - I could lift a small image off a page and keep it around like the tiny spot you'd see from staring at the sun, and lasting about that long. Didn't bother keeping up with it though, as I said it doesn't seem useful to me.
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Comment on Twenty-five movies, many stars, zero hits: Hollywood falls to new lows in ~movies
Amarok Link ParentYou need one police officer around to supervise the public and the shooting location, but now you've got to pay for ten because codes, that sort of thing. Expect to have to pay for many times the...You need one police officer around to supervise the public and the shooting location, but now you've got to pay for ten because codes, that sort of thing. Expect to have to pay for many times the manpower you require. Loads of people who make movies have been complaining about it forever, and it's a major reason why film is leaving California. Goes back at least as far as New Line building an entire alternate film industry for LoTR in NZ including WETA - it was about more than just the gorgeous location. Even in the spaghetti western days it was cheaper to shoot in Italy and avoid Cali's bureaucracy.
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Comment on Twenty-five movies, many stars, zero hits: Hollywood falls to new lows in ~movies
Amarok Link ParentIf they'd gut the budgets down to 20-50 million apiece, they'd have few genuine flops. Wasteful spending (and usually double the budget in marketing) is what has destroyed it all - well, that and...If they'd gut the budgets down to 20-50 million apiece, they'd have few genuine flops.
Wasteful spending (and usually double the budget in marketing) is what has destroyed it all - well, that and the lack of any writing above the level of a pre-school. Cinema is now a bloated, union-laden, nepotistic industry that is so choked on its own legacy bullshit that it's suffocating.
They keep beating dead horse franchises (guaranteed losers) rather than making dozens of smaller productions for the price of that one tent pole property. Time was you made every movie cheap as you could in the hopes that one of them would run away at the box office and fund the next fifty films. Now they think they know which ones will run away to a billion ahead of time - that's pure arrogance.
That's alright, though. Hollywood is in its final death throes and it is never coming back, good riddance. Cheaper productions can increasingly be done by anyone anywhere with no need to cater to California's bullshit unions, institutions, or politics. Good cinema will live on, the tiny region of the world that has had film in monopolistic chains for decades will not.
Doesn't look so good for the theaters, though. Hollywood hasn't got the writing talent or the acting chops to fill every seat in them every single weekend like they once did. In fact, that's been the case for so long that at least two younger generations of people don't know why they would ever bother going to a theater in the first place. Once that habit's broken, it's broken. Took decades to instill it the first time around. Good luck bringing that back.
I'm still waiting for dinner theaters to become more common, and for my theater ticket stub to get me a rebate on the blu-ray. I can only assume no one is genuinely serious about solving this problem. :P
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Comment on Valve announces new hardware: Steam Frame, Steam Controller, and Steam Machine in ~games
Amarok Link ParentThe main draw for me is longevity and quality of the hardware. Valve's been good at that, and frankly, I'm tired of controllers that break after a couple years of use and don't allow for battery...The main draw for me is longevity and quality of the hardware. Valve's been good at that, and frankly, I'm tired of controllers that break after a couple years of use and don't allow for battery replacement.
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Comment on Valve announces new hardware: Steam Frame, Steam Controller, and Steam Machine in ~games
Amarok LinkI have to commend Valve for nailing down precisely what gamers want out of their hardware. My hat is off to a marketing team that listens to customers rather than dictating terms to them. I think...I have to commend Valve for nailing down precisely what gamers want out of their hardware.
My hat is off to a marketing team that listens to customers rather than dictating terms to them. I think I'll take at least three, possibly four of these... just one VR headset (because VR tourism is fun), with lots of extra controllers. I was looking at making some home theater PCs to replace my aging Nvidia Shield devices, something built out better for gaming and emulating older consoles. This is the perfect replacement. This machine can handily emulate every prior console, run HTPC software like Kodi or Plex, and run about 98% of all PC games that exist. I'd be hard pressed to top the hardware with any of my own builds.
Since this is a real PC, the modding scene will operate here with total freedom. That's never happened in the console space before, though the modding scene for the very first Xbox is about as close as we got. That was a lot of fun, so many programs and apps and emulators were ported to it and grew out of it (including Kodi). Actively stamped out by all latter generations of every platform, of course, because it defeated their walled garden mentality. Valve is going the other way, jungle mentality, and that's going to profit them handsomely.
If this platform hits a certain level of critical mass, the mod tools are going to start supporting it (and linux by extension) directly on Valve's standardized hardware. That's a swift path to one-click installs of mod collections for thousands of games and better linux mod tools. I hope Nexusmods is paying attention, wouldn't take much for Valve to become a competitor if they put some more effort into the steam workshop.
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Comment on An AI-generated country song is topping a Billboard chart, and that should infuriate us all in ~music
Amarok Link ParentJust to pile on, I can reality-check that assumption with this pure-AI track. Those actually are AI-written lyrics, too. From the actual human who created this (imo rather delightful) little...There’s no question that AI generated music lacks the heart and soul you find from artists who live and breath their music. There’s no depth to the lyrics, no intricacies to the music, and nothing particular interesting about the crap they’re putting out.
Just to pile on, I can reality-check that assumption with this pure-AI track. Those actually are AI-written lyrics, too. From the actual human who created this (imo rather delightful) little track:
Music is mainly all generated using AI. Only 0% to 5% of the generated lyrics get manually adjusted afterwards by me, so there definitely will be some lyrics which will play with your imaginative interpretation skills. I'm mostly intrigued with the AI mathematical manipulation, instead of following the common musical compositionsI'm a software developer who also, as a side project, does coding of AI + RAG using Python. I love listening and appreciating all forms of musical sounds and patterns of all things living (which includes us humans) that internally move me or makes me wonder.His little AI experiments are all right here. There are a lot of them. So, this track was created by a software developer, not a musician.
If you want to discover the track you've still got to play it live, give it a chance to breathe and echo at a few shows, play with it on tour. I want to hear this AI track covered by The Greyhounds. They would embarrass any AI with the final cut. ;)
I'd also like a tool that could track the influences the AI used creating this track back to the original sources. If it's just lifting and remixing, seems like it's on the scent of some artists I'd like to hear... no credit is given to whatever sources the AI cribbed this from. Gotta admire capitalism for impossibly reinventing theft yet again, in an entirely new way. I think all the artists suing over AI right now have got a point. No attribution, no compensation.
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Comment on Tilderinos in ~talk
Amarok Link ParentSome of us would, had we not nuked our accounts from orbit on the way out the door of that other place. ;)I would bet a bunch of the first Tilderfriendos have even older accounts :)
Some of us would, had we not nuked our accounts from orbit on the way out the door of that other place. ;)
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Comment on An AI-generated country song is topping a Billboard chart, and that should infuriate us all in ~music
Amarok LinkLet's note that Billboard has been the textbook definition of slop quality for several decades at least. This is 'secondhand smoke at the airport' music we're dealing with here. The charts are...Let's note that Billboard has been the textbook definition of slop quality for several decades at least. This is 'secondhand smoke at the airport' music we're dealing with here. The charts are politics and payola, that is all they have ever been. At no time in history did charts ever cover the 'best' music. They listed whatever was being pushed by the industry at the moment, typically via backroom deals with labels for radio exposure and market trend capitalization.
Charts exist as advertising to create popular music, not simply catalog it. The one who controls the catalog gets to choose what is popular, that's the scam. They pick the artists that make them the most money, period. If you didn't pay into that system in some way (usually by giving up more of your rights and a lot more of your profit), you didn't get radio play, and you didn't get to be on the charts. It's 'product' and all about moving 'units'. Even the language used by the people in the industry does its level best to divorce the art from the end product. Now ask yourself... does AI music make them more money than real artists do?
Put another way, Billboard charts are what people who don't listen to music consider to be music. The kind of people who if you asked them to name seven genres, they couldn't do it. I look forward to watching AI slop devour the charts permanently - if there's one thing an AI is going to be good at, it'll be cranking out basic 4/4 popcorn for elevators and bad DJ mixes for dull dancefloors.
I think musicians who make library music are the ones who are truly doomed. That large and quiet segment of the music industry just went up in digital smoke. If artists want to make money in this world, the old way is still the best way - get good live, go on tour, sell tickets, sell your albums and swag at the shows. Retain your rights, remain independent, keep your entire revenue stream to yourself - do not share it with corporations.
Here's an unpopular take - if an AI can kick your ass as a musician, perhaps it's time for a career change. It wasn't so easy back in the day to set up a digital audio workstation for a couple grand and compose your magnum opus. You had to have real talent and be at least good enough to keep up with the session musicians without them kicking you out of the million dollar studios where the music was made, because you were a chump who hadn't put in the work to develop chops yet.
On some level, all this kicking and screaming about AI strikes me as panic from pretender musicians who were never good enough at their craft to be offered a record deal in the first place. Cheap production and savvy computer software convinced them they could make millions without bothering to learn their chords and scales. Auto-tune trivialized singing for people with zero vocal control, and now it's replacing those same people. Now that AI is here to challenge them, they don't want to put in the work to do it live and go on tour.
I'm strangely cool with that as a cutoff point. If you can't beat the AI, you don't get to play this game. Turns out it's not hard to beat the AI - just show up as an actual live person and know how to jam. If you can't do that, I haven't got a lot of sympathy. Life is competitive, and learning how to play well is real, hard work even if you have natural talent. You were never promised a record deal as part of your basic human rights package - some things have to be earned the hard way.
That reminds me, have we killed Ticketmaster yet? It's a bigger problem for every touring artist than AI will ever be. Kill that malignant racketeering cancer and musicians get to double their ticket profit at the same time they cut the ticket price in half so the rest of us can afford to see the show.
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Comment on US judges say Donald Trump administration must continue food aid during shutdown in ~society
Amarok Link ParentYep. Essentially if you are a farmer and the deer are making a habit out of eating into your crops, you can send in photo evidence of the damage and they will issue you some number of nuisance...Yep. Essentially if you are a farmer and the deer are making a habit out of eating into your crops, you can send in photo evidence of the damage and they will issue you some number of nuisance tags. You can use them yourself, or you can give them to other people to do the hunting for you - it's the only transferable tag in the NY hunting laws. The fellow I was hunting for this year had ten tags to hand out, highest number I've ever seen. He had several other hunters use their own tags too, I'd guess around twenty deer were taken off his farms total.
It is genuinely surprising how fast white tail deer populations can explode in size. They can get from a handful to multiple herds in just two or three years. The doe have twins much more often than single births, sometimes three or even four fawns, and they are ready to breed at six months old as long as they've had plentiful food sources. They can reproduce more than once a year but that usually doesn't happen in winter climates. They are on the short short list of nature's most prolific and well-adapted mammals.
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Comment on US judges say Donald Trump administration must continue food aid during shutdown in ~society
Amarok Link ParentI usually top off all family and friends' freezers and leave the rest with the butchers. I could butcher them myself but I hate the smell and the mess isn't pretty... plus the pros are better...I usually top off all family and friends' freezers and leave the rest with the butchers. I could butcher them myself but I hate the smell and the mess isn't pretty... plus the pros are better equipped for it and to sort out anything that's tainted. They'll also make use of the leather. I haven't added tanning skills to my portfolio yet. :P
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Comment on US judges say Donald Trump administration must continue food aid during shutdown in ~society
Amarok Link ParentI hope you're right. I just wonder how long we can keep tempting fate with idiotic policy before something more permanent breaks.I hope you're right. I just wonder how long we can keep tempting fate with idiotic policy before something more permanent breaks.
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Comment on US judges say Donald Trump administration must continue food aid during shutdown in ~society
Amarok Link ParentNeither does Trump's government. I'm almost certain he'll stall this court order as best he can. I've been on EBT before, and I have friends who still rely on it. I know how it works. I give away...Advice doesn't fill bellies
Neither does Trump's government. I'm almost certain he'll stall this court order as best he can. I've been on EBT before, and I have friends who still rely on it. I know how it works.
not how much you were donating, or how many families you're feeding
I give away more meat than I keep, I haven't got the freezer space for it all even if I wanted to keep it. The deer really are a nuisance. I have no idea what the odds are that the food donated around here will ever make it to a city, though. It's the cities I worry about. They are the most sensitive to the disruptions.
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Comment on US judges say Donald Trump administration must continue food aid during shutdown in ~society
Amarok Link ParentJust take a look at global shipping over time if you want to see the collapse. I must have missed the part where Trump's trade and tariff policies are working... or the part where the terminally...Just take a look at global shipping over time if you want to see the collapse. I must have missed the part where Trump's trade and tariff policies are working... or the part where the terminally aging demographics in the majority of world countries lead to a good resolution. Then we can mix in the ongoing wars on every continent and their trade disruptions just for kicks. Even ignoring all of that, the one single method the government has to pay off this much debt is by inflating it away and monetizing it. That means the dollar is going to go for a nice long steady ride on the inflation train.
So yes, I'm rather bearish on the near term worldwide economic situation right now. It's not hopeless but it certainly looks like a bumpy trip for the next two decades, and largely at the expense of those who are living paycheck to paycheck (northwards of 70% of all US citizens right now). We've also got accelerated job losses from automation coming. I guess I brought it up because I see this food stamp mess as just another nail in the coffin coming from a government that is too dysfunctional to handle reality.
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Comment on US judges say Donald Trump administration must continue food aid during shutdown in ~society
Amarok Link ParentIt is life saving advice for any humans in this situation and I'll continue repeating it. The best way to offset the food disruption is for people to prepare for themselves and their immediate...But your solution of "buying beans" and hunting is not actually helpful.
It is life saving advice for any humans in this situation and I'll continue repeating it. The best way to offset the food disruption is for people to prepare for themselves and their immediate family - and if possible for their neighbors. If everyone stocks up as best they can they'll have it much easier when things get bumpy. Without that resilience, things get desperate quickly, and desperation turns into violence. Frankly, I think that's what some of our leaders are hoping for pushing this shutdown on so long. I'd like to see us all disappoint them.
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Comment on US judges say Donald Trump administration must continue food aid during shutdown in ~society
Amarok Link ParentI think the real issue is that everyone expects the food stamps to come back and never considers the possibility that they won't. We're on the edge of globalism collapsing - words won't solve this...I think the real issue is that everyone expects the food stamps to come back and never considers the possibility that they won't.
We're on the edge of globalism collapsing - words won't solve this problem. People need to do what is practical for their survival more than they need feelings or illusions about status protected. That bag of coffee will last a lot longer if it goes to the basics, and if one hasn't got the basics covered, then skip the coffee. Tea costs less and still delivers the caffeine. This economy can get far, far worse in a hurry if the wrong things happen.
If it was up to me I'd cancel all other social welfare and turn social security into a healthy UBI, then back it up with a gold/asset backed crypto dollar... but that is not going to happen. The only way it could happen is if robotic manufacturing starts delivering on its potential for post-scarcity production, but we're still several years away from that best case. Be ready for depression-era living until that happens.
I'd love to be wrong here, but I don't see a happy ending for Trump's presidency.
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Comment on US judges say Donald Trump administration must continue food aid during shutdown in ~society
Amarok Link ParentNew York is frankly too broke and in debt to handle the benefits. The budget hasn't recovered from covid, and as usual it's because of being forced to subsidize red state freeloading from our...New York is frankly too broke and in debt to handle the benefits. The budget hasn't recovered from covid, and as usual it's because of being forced to subsidize red state freeloading from our federal taxes all of the time. In lieu of food stamps, they are recommending everyone connect with local food banks and other programs.
This has already made several people I know in real life pretty angry - and not 'rant and shake fist' angry, more like 'gun toting shoplifting spree' furious. Older people on fixed incomes are being hit the hardest and that tends to piss off their children. Out here in the countryside it's not such an issue - this is where most of the food is grown after all. People living in the city, however, are in much worse situations.
Rice and beans, folks. Rice will keep you alive and it's a plant, healthier and far superior to any pasta. Keeps for literal decades without refrigeration. Beans will keep you hale and are a functional substitute for meat protein. Pick up any cheap gravy or broths or sauces and spices along with some other canned or frozen vegetables and you're set for a wide variety of meals. It's all still dirt cheap. Don't waste food stamps on stupid things like soda or hot pockets - switch to basics, you'll eat better and enjoy it more.
For myself, I've already filled up two full-sized freezers with almost two hundred pounds of venison to top that off. We get nuisance tags around here and a proper butchering and rendering of the meat is still about $50 for the whole animal. No supermarket on earth can touch that price or the meat quality. Sometimes it's more economical to just cut the supermarkets out of your food chain entirely.
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Comment on What the hell are we doing with hierarchical tags? in ~tildes
Amarok Link ParentI think it's worth pointing out that no matter what nomenclature is used, it'll fail when it comes into contact with reality. There's no cloud of tags one can point to on the entire internet that...I think it's worth pointing out that no matter what nomenclature is used, it'll fail when it comes into contact with reality. There's no cloud of tags one can point to on the entire internet that is correct or even standardized. Large data systems are always messy, that's an inevitability. It's also nothing to worry about - in fact it's better to embrace the chaos. There's no point in going into wikipedianesque flamewars over minor nomenclature issues that only a tiny fraction of people even care about. At some point one has to leave OCD at the door.
The tags are for pedantic geek-centered categorization and all they really are is search++. They do a great job of zipping around the cloud of submissions for similar topics, and if a topic is important and busy enough, it gets a group which is where the tags yield to the community. I don't see any problem with that or even any missing features for the tags themselves. It's surprising how well even this simple system handles the organization.
I think it works great as it is. It'll work even better if an LLM or smart script is importing and tagging everything that's submitted. Then the humans only need to tweak the bits it gets wrong and set up some aliases from time to time. Should scale just fine to any size data set, and since the tags aren't arbitrary they remain versatile for any nodes to use any way they like.
I can't really think of a way to improve on it. I suppose some sort of confirm / reject / revert / pin mechanics might be useful to prevent vandalism on large nodes, but since there are no large Tildes nodes it's silly to bother about. Solving problems early usually leaves one a slave to old / bad assumptions. Best to wait until the problems materialize, at least then you've got better data on the causes and some real world use cases.
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Comment on Venus Hum - Look (2020) in ~music
Amarok Link ParentNew Venus Hum track dropped recently - I sense a new album coming within a year. ;)New Venus Hum track dropped recently - I sense a new album coming within a year. ;)
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Comment on Death in D&D 5e, the various revival spells, and their impact on the game in ~games.tabletop
Amarok (edited )Link ParentThey don't tend to follow the armor class into the high numbers that melee characters do - but they do often end up in personal combat, and I don't want them to be gimped by taking wounds at...They don't tend to follow the armor class into the high numbers that melee characters do - but they do often end up in personal combat, and I don't want them to be gimped by taking wounds at double the rate of a Fighter class. That makes players not want to engage, and Rogues are meant to engage. Giving them the dex bonus just makes them a little bit harder to injure in combat particularly at lower levels, which is when I think they need it the most. I chalk it up in RP to Rogues just knowing how to roll with a hit. I'd extend this to anyone using a light armor proficiency, not necessarily Rouge-specific. Barbarians in leather armor get it too.
One could let the Fighters add in their Strength mod on the basis of being able to push back against a hit, but this sends the Fighter class wound thresholds up too high too fast for my tastes. Very quickly it becomes too hard for most level-appropriate encounters to have creatures that can actually wound them. That's less of a problem at around 12th level when monsters are hitting harder.
Obligatory video covering Gemini 3 from AI Explained.
The short version - this AI embarrassingly beats the pants off of all other AI models on every benchmark, and Google is now in the lead where he expects they will remain for some time.