Amarok's recent activity

  1. Comment on Venus Hum - Look (2020) in ~music

    Amarok
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    I'm sure everyone remembers Venus Hum from their epic performance with the Blue Man Group in the early 2000s. Annette Strean lost her voice not so long after and went through surgery for vocal...

    I'm sure everyone remembers Venus Hum from their epic performance with the Blue Man Group in the early 2000s. Annette Strean lost her voice not so long after and went through surgery for vocal nodules, everyone thought that was the end. Turns out they are back to making music and they've leveled up. She's better than ever, quite the comeback story. Someone should tell their fans. :p

    3 votes

  3. Comment on Greek-American musician George Smaragdis dies tragically in Manhattan in ~music

    Amarok
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    Sometimes when you go searching for a favorite artist's newest album, you get a rude surprise. We lost the best thing since Daft Punk. :( Starcadian's music is available on Bandcamp, Spotify,...

    Sometimes when you go searching for a favorite artist's newest album, you get a rude surprise.
    We lost the best thing since Daft Punk. :(

    Starcadian's music is available on Bandcamp, Spotify, Youtube, and Apple Music. For my money, very few synth albums past or present can keep up with Radio Galaxy. Infinite repeat material, but it's weird now, his passing completely changed the vibe of the album. All of his records were straight killer, no filler.

    I'm sad we'll never get a Netflix series in the Stranger Things meets Star Wars vibe that came out of his head. He was a video producer by day and that fledgling cinematic universe was all over his music videos. I'm going to link them in release order.

    He was one of the top artists in the very first r/listentothis bestof. Even popped by the bestof thread to thank us for promoting him, one of the few artists to ever do that. Still remember the name of his reddit account. From what I can gather, his next album was at least past the halfway point, he was starting to release singles. We may get one final posthumous release from him, I'll be keeping my fingers crossed. His final reddit comment from 4 months back:

    all recorded up, working on the magic layers right now, taking time because it's on another level, so head down and off the internet until it blows minds, prooobably this year?

    There's a GoFundMe for his family. He was expecting his first child when this happened. This is the sort of thing that makes me want to pick a fight with God on an idle Tuesday afternoon. :/ Artists this exceptional remaining obscure while AI slop tops the charts still makes my blood boil.

    14 votes

  5. Comment on Famous cognitive psychology experiments that failed to replicate in ~science

    Amarok
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    My favorite crash out from behavioral psychology was watching mouse utopia go down in flames. I still see people quoting that study all the time (especially in conservative circles) as if it had...

    My favorite crash out from behavioral psychology was watching mouse utopia go down in flames. I still see people quoting that study all the time (especially in conservative circles) as if it had any credibility at all. It does not, and no other experiments following up on it have ever managed to replicate any of it, in mice or in humans.

    The only credible info to come out of it is the concept that maintaining a degree of personal space and private time has some beneficial effects on societal behaviors. In other words, constant enforced hyper-socialization is where the real 'damage' comes from in the utopia. It's not population, access to mates, or any of the hundred other nonsense ideas that people use this debunked experiment to justify.

    4 votes

  6. Comment on What's a question you could ask to determine if someone is an expert in your line of work? in ~talk

    Amarok
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    Here's one for a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, the one responsible for designing and maintaining the core functions of a Microsoft network. It's not actually called MCSE anymore, those...

    Here's one for a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, the one responsible for designing and maintaining the core functions of a Microsoft network. It's not actually called MCSE anymore, those have recently been retired for I think... nine? new certifications aimed more at specific job roles. It's the same stuff, just broken up so you have to pay for more certs to get the same street cred. :P

    Q: Tell me about FSMO roles.

    A: I'm not going to type out the full answer but I'll link to a nice summary. This is something no regular windows user should ever know anything about, and something that only a high level Microsoft engineer would ever encounter or manage. I'd be happy if the person answering could remember what FSMO means, that there were five of them total, and be able to remember what at least two or three of them do. These have hardly changed at all since Windows 2000 was released.

    The funny part is you rarely need to touch these things unless you are making big changes to your active directory design or a domain functional level upgrade is coming down the pipe. A hard rule I know is you do not ever use any products that modify anything about these services under any circumstances, otherwise any future upgrade of your domain functional level is liable to blow up in your face. You break anything about these services, Microsoft support will tell you, 'sorry, rebuild your active directory from scratch.' click ;)

    7 votes

  7. Comment on Sydney Sweeney’s Hollywood career just got a whole lot more complicated in ~society

    Amarok
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    I asked him again at this week's game and after some digging, turns out he was confusing Brad Pitt for this Brooke Shields/Calvin Klein ad from the 80s. Same lame genes joke, and she even poses to...

    I asked him again at this week's game and after some digging, turns out he was confusing Brad Pitt for this Brooke Shields/Calvin Klein ad from the 80s. Same lame genes joke, and she even poses to reference a Swastika at the end of it... plus she was like 14 years old in the ad. Much worse overall than American Eagle was.

    There was nothing remotely original in the American Eagle ad. It was just another ripoff like most things in advertising. Now that corporations know they can get free press and controversy out of making white supremacy references, I'd expect to see a lot more of it in other advertisements. They've been courting the 'woke' crowd for years, they'll break rank and troll them instead if they think they can get the same kind of stock bump that American Eagle did.

  8. Comment on What is the most insane, tedious, difficult, and/or noteworthy gaming achievement you have completed or given up on? in ~games

    Amarok
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    This is an easy one for me, it took about eighty days of solid play to get my Celestial Fists in Everquest. Nothing else in any game can ever or will ever come close to that. That was considered...

    This is an easy one for me, it took about eighty days of solid play to get my Celestial Fists in Everquest. Nothing else in any game can ever or will ever come close to that. That was considered 'fast' and 'lucky' because it's a lot more time for most people. It all comes down to one single spawn in that list, Raster of Guk. His spawn rate was sub-1% of the time, and since nothing was instanced back then, I was in direct competition with at least two hundred other players for it the entire time.

    I got lucky because I made a habit of logging out at his spawn point - which was dangerous to do solo since one could log in and end up in the midst of multiple mobs. Everquest was not designed for a solo player to be able to kill more than one thing at a time without downtime in between, but feign death was usually enough to get me out of trouble. One random day the server crashed (which resets all the spawns on reboot). I logged in about two minutes after it came back online, and there he was. The rest of the quest was easy peasy - of course I had a guild of about a hundred hardcore raiders to help with it which most players don't have to fall back on.

    Edit: Found a video of some of the late quest stages. (10m) This is easy mode compared to what I went through, since they upped the spawn rates and made changes to the quest line several times over the years. I got this around 1997 long before it was ever patched. Yes, it was that hard to see things in EQ sometimes, particularly for a human (with no night vision). In-game nighttime was a jet black screen, except for whatever was killing you. :P

    3 votes

  9. Comment on If you're a programmer, are you ever going to believe an AGI is actually 'I'? in ~tech

    Amarok
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    From a sysadmin perspective... I'm looking for the 'ghost' in the machine. The time to get nervous is when I'm running the backups late at night and the cluster starts doing things nobody asked it...

    From a sysadmin perspective... I'm looking for the 'ghost' in the machine.

    The time to get nervous is when I'm running the backups late at night and the cluster starts doing things nobody asked it to do, like maxing out the CPUs at midnight and downloading prepper torrents at 3am, then hiding the data it downloaded under a mount point. It can't hide the system resource utilization from me, and truly intelligent things are never really 'idle' even when sleeping. If it's thinking, that has to come at a resource cost, and I know all of the inputs. When there's a discrepancy where it is stealing resources for itself that I can't find another explanation for, I'll get curious. :)

    3 votes

  10. Comment on Sydney Sweeney’s Hollywood career just got a whole lot more complicated in ~society

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    Good point. It's all about 'how can I use this for my own purposes' rather than about the actual issues anymore.

    Good point. It's all about 'how can I use this for my own purposes' rather than about the actual issues anymore.

    4 votes

  11. Comment on Sydney Sweeney’s Hollywood career just got a whole lot more complicated in ~society

    Amarok
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    Same here, almost nobody I talk to in real life out of a sample size of around fifty knew about this until I brought it up. One single person in my D&D group was aware of the ad and thought the...

    Same here, almost nobody I talk to in real life out of a sample size of around fifty knew about this until I brought it up. One single person in my D&D group was aware of the ad and thought the joke was mildly funny - he also mentioned that Brad Pitt did a similar set of Jeans ads early in his career.

    1 vote

  12. Comment on Sydney Sweeney’s Hollywood career just got a whole lot more complicated in ~society

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    All one has to do is a bit of searching to turn up loads of videos of botnets in action. Rooms so large you can't see all the walls at once containing twelve foot high racks of phones packed in...

    I think the assumption that the outrage cycles are organic might be naive.

    All one has to do is a bit of searching to turn up loads of videos of botnets in action. Rooms so large you can't see all the walls at once containing twelve foot high racks of phones packed in like sardines, quietly humming along making dozens of posts per minute per phone, all available to the highest bidder to push whatever content and agendas anyone has the money to pay them for.

    Political groups have infinite money to pay them to incite outrage and bump their agendas, advertisers have deep pockets to pay them to spam their garbage products or services, hackers build their own to play with and rent out. Government agencies build their own for their various forms of spycraft. Streamers pay them for bursts of views and comments, platforms embed them so they can look busier than they are. Multiple bot-driving software packages are open source, already in the double digits with their software versions.

    There are no groups at this point which are not paying for the botnets to do their bidding. It's beyond naive, it's bloody obvious what's happening to anyone who takes the time to look. What do they all target? Everything that's viral. It's a stampede of zombies piling on to anything and everything everywhere on all platforms - as long as whatever it is racks up the clicks and the eyeballs.

    The overwhelming majority of posts on popular platforms are from bots in 2025, and it's going to keep climbing and becoming more sophisticated as time goes on. The only way you escape from them is by sticking to the quiet corners of the internet where that bot activity is wasted on low views.

    I'd go so far as to say that this entire Sweeney controversy is bot-driven and wouldn't even be more than a momentary flash in the pan without them. It only exists because of the bots.

    Stop taking anything on the internet seriously. Forever. If you don't, the joke is on you and you're paying for it with your mental health. That's the lesson.

    7 votes

  13. Comment on A less affectionate approach to technology in ~tech

    Amarok
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    Pawn shops have proven amazing for getting dirt cheap physical copies. They are all still out there, and collections eventually get dumped because the collector moves on to other things or dies...

    I buy CDs, DVDs and Blu rays and rip them to my home server.

    Pawn shops have proven amazing for getting dirt cheap physical copies. They are all still out there, and collections eventually get dumped because the collector moves on to other things or dies and nobody wants the collection. Even libraries are liquidating their print archives as they go more digital. It all washes up at pawn shops, goodwill, salvation army, and other thrift stores. You can walk out of those places with fifty discs, books, and console games for fifty dollars, even less in some cases. Sure, it's not 'modern' media, but that's just a plus to me since most of the new stuff is just lesser copies of better older originals anyway.

    Copyright holders can't censor or alter original physical copies. They can't prevent them from changing hands legally either. Once you've got the physical media you can legally make a digital backup for yourself, legally stream it to your phone from your home media server, legally use the ROM in an emulator, etc. Physical media is still king. The vinyl revival is a trend that I think will spread beyond the music industry. Music's just ahead of the curve a bit, which makes some sense as they were the first industry to be taken down by internet piracy and digital services. They've had longer to stew on the problem. ;)

    4 votes

  14. Comment on <deleted topic> in ~society

    Amarok
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    This seems really simple to me. Publish every single flight that ever touched the island, and every single location Epstein or his Lolita express ever flew off to visit. We don't need his client...

    This seems really simple to me.

    Publish every single flight that ever touched the island, and every single location Epstein or his Lolita express ever flew off to visit. We don't need his client list, we've got everyone's travel logs going back decades. Pretty sure his victims remember who and where and when things happened to them if we require more data points for future investigations.

    Thanks to the patriot act our ridiculous overbuilt surveillance network already stores decades of cell phone, private message, email, and flight records which we collect without even bothering to involve the courts. Time to put that digital spy network to patriotic use. If not, then it's time to dismantle the spy network and repeal all parts of the patriot act since it'll be proven useless dealing with real crime. Either way it's going to stick in the government's craw for the next five decades, probably worse than JFK in that regard because it's a far larger crime than a single murder.

    I'm less interested in who is on the list than I am in who was pulling Epstein's strings, and what agendas were accomplished by those pulling the strings - so we can promptly un-accomplish them and sanction those responsible. My money is on Mossad and the CIA collaborating around Epstein, I think they were both using him to develop assets.

    I'm hoping some enterprising hacker or random ethical whistleblower dumps the whole collection of evidence directly onto the internet unredacted. Let's get it all out there. If Trump is on the list, he can simply pardon himself and release it all. He's already dodged one bullet, it's not like they can ratchet up the heat on him any higher than trying to kill him. If that results in the arrest of several hundred crooked assets going directly into the executive wing of Guantanamo I think people will tolerate him getting away with it, begrudgingly. He'll never live it down, but he won't be in jail and at his age he's not long for the world anyway.

    4 votes

  15. Comment on <deleted topic> in ~tv

    Amarok
    Link Parent
    This is why I like the idea of private threads that only people who are logged in can see. Google can't hoover that up for copyright bots to plumb through later. I also wonder about threads that...

    This is why I like the idea of private threads that only people who are logged in can see. Google can't hoover that up for copyright bots to plumb through later. I also wonder about threads that have a self-delete/destruct timer set when posted - if it's less than the DMCA window, that's technically compliant with the law. :P

    In any sane copyright system, this series would have entered the public domain in 1990 and it'd be up on the internet archive.

    2 votes

  16. Comment on How is Linux these days? in ~comp

    Amarok
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    If you are used to Windows, I'm going to plug Kubuntu as the best distro for you. It has the best support for the KDE Plasma desktop environment which is a monster upgrade to the windows/explorer...

    If you are used to Windows, I'm going to plug Kubuntu as the best distro for you. It has the best support for the KDE Plasma desktop environment which is a monster upgrade to the windows/explorer paradigm with almost identical workflow. It's also one of the most widely used distros (Ubuntu) which has good support. I've been running it for about three years now and it's wonderful. I'm not really in love with Ubuntu per se, it's KDE I require and I won't bother with any distros that haven't got top tier support for it.

    One more caveat for gaming - if you mod games a lot, the mod tools will take more work to set up on Linux. Windows-only tools universally work, they just have to be emulated within the same Wine/proton context as the game which takes some tinkering to set up for each game. Use ProtonDB and it'll walk you through it for any game. Most mod tools on linux will not auto-detect things like game location, mod directories, and other settings you'll have to input manually.

    People will say that you have to give up certain programs like Photoshop/Acrobat or Coreldraw that do not support linux, but that's not entirely accurate. Broadcom is now offering VMWare Workstation for free for personal use. This makes it dirt simple to create virtual machines running any version of Windows or Mac or whatever else you require, and then install and run those programs inside the virtual machine. One could use VirtualBox but frankly, I think VMware outclasses all other virtualization tools. May as well use the easiest/best option if you really need certain windows programs.

    5 votes

  17. Comment on The America Party in ~society

    Amarok
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    Oh hells, not this again. Platitudes and big ideas without any of the how explained. This is a joke, right? When you have real policies with concrete steps and well defined solutions that I can...

    Oh hells, not this again. Platitudes and big ideas without any of the how explained. This is a joke, right? When you have real policies with concrete steps and well defined solutions that I can read and critique rather than hand-waving I'll start to care. Until then enjoy wasting your money in the black hole of politics. It does not work unless you bring a lamp with you into the darkness, and this ain't it.

    Look, Elon, if you're stuck without anything intelligent to use for party planks, just steal all of this (or in json if you prefer) because the work has already been done by smarter people better educated in societal engineering than you or the kids you employ. Then I might start to take you seriously.

    8 votes

  18. Comment on US Senate passes Donald Trump’s megabill after pulling all-nighter in ~society

    Amarok
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    I think of it as having them differ only when it does not matter... to their bottom line. Issues like gender or abortion or immigration? Perfect for division, doesn't stop them from going to the...

    I think of it as having them differ only when it does not matter... to their bottom line. Issues like gender or abortion or immigration? Perfect for division, doesn't stop them from going to the bank to collect our tax money. Issues that really matter, like slashing the budget, reigning in corporatism, or election reform? Those must not be mentioned by either group and will never get any real action or change. Even talking about them results in instant exile from both groups.

    I think the best real solution to this problem may be radical transparency. If everything a government does is by law public (all data, emails, bills, reports, etc - no exceptions) within 24 hours it's a lot harder to hide the maliciousness and ineptitude. If bills are restricted to one topic only, and open for public comment for a minimum of 30 days before they can even be discussed on the floor of the legislature, it's much more difficult for them to bury a ton of corruption in an 1100 page bible of bullshit like this one. Fat chance of that ever happening though, it'd ruin their fun.

    This is the worst bill I've ever seen. We should enshrine it in a museum in DC as a warning to the next ten generations of what pure unaccountable corruption looks like in the legislature. When I look at this thing it's hard to imagine it as anything other than a blatant, naked attempt to bankrupt the federal government within ten years.

    21 votes

  19. Comment on What could have been? | Brent and Jeff dive deep into JMS's original plan for Babylon 5 in ~tv

    Amarok
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    Take about an hour and add LocalScriptMan's inverted take on the Enneagram to your toolbox. Use them as a map of a character's bullshit rather than personality and characters write themselves...

    Take about an hour and add LocalScriptMan's inverted take on the Enneagram to your toolbox. Use them as a map of a character's bullshit rather than personality and characters write themselves faster than you can type. Sabotaging them becomes all too easy and fun rather than the somewhat painful slog it usually is.

  20. Comment on What could have been? | Brent and Jeff dive deep into JMS's original plan for Babylon 5 in ~tv

    Amarok
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    One of the things I liked about B5 is that it was both science fiction and science fantasy at the same time and somehow pulled that off rather well. The two don't traditionally mix. The Epsilon 3...

    One of the things I liked about B5 is that it was both science fiction and science fantasy at the same time and somehow pulled that off rather well. The two don't traditionally mix. The Epsilon 3 / Crusade / Lost Tales / Techno-Mages / First Ones / ThirdSpace material lends itself splendidly to a second series with a more fantasy flavor (maybe 3-5 seasons) running alongside the main story, kinda like Stargate Atlantis ran alongside the original Stargate. I'd have loved to see where Crusade was going after they'd resolved the main plot point early in the series. So much potential.