SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
No bio...
User ID: 84
Does it?
I’ve met my fair share of public school administrators. They were 1) very small in number compared to the total school staff and 2) did the necessary ground level admin work mandated by the law and city, required planning (eg. resource allocation depending on student numbers, scheduling classes etc), hiring teachers and so on. They had zero input into any of the ”improved” education styles and similar foolishness (that was all mandated at city / ministry level). Of course this wasn’t in the US, but I’d be surprised if it was all that different.
Now university administration is a whole different game.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
16d ago
You have to be willing to dive beneath the surface, long enough to find the pockets of original and specifically high quality work that the indie scene is putting out.
So, how many hundreds or thousands of hours would you say is it acceptable to use to find more than a tiny handful of such gems? Please give a serious answer with actual numbers.
I've spent a lot of time looking for good music. When I do find some I haven't run into before, it's almost inevitably tracks made 30+ years ago, some new tracks from legacy artists (who may be rich enough to keep doing much the same thing they did 40 years ago, nevermind commercial viability) or some very occasional niche stuff. The last time I found an entire new album worth of good material was when Loreena McKennitt released Lost Souls in 2018 (and she was in her 60s by then, so not exactly a "modern" artist). Finding new indie releases on the level of say Depeche Mode's Violator, Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works 1 or Roxy Music's Avalon just isn't going to happen.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
16d ago
Its like 10 second segments stitched together
I'm pretty sure it's more or less exactly that: short segments stiched together.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
16d ago
Meh. That just sounds like a collection of shitty djent cliches.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
16d ago
And perhaps more importantly, using Suno or other service might be quite a bit faster than trying to find a suitable backing track from collections of free tracks.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
17d ago
Also, like two years back I talked about how I was still collecting music to my local devices through force of habit. It seems even more laughably futile now in the face of tech which can keep producing songs faster than I can even listen to them.
Why would it be futile if you actually cared about those songs? Unless you mean you collect music in the same way warez people collect releases, ie. without any real care about the actual content.
Unless AI music generators achieve near true sentience level understanding of music and prompts and can use that understanding to analyze a database of my preferences, I just can't see AI music in any way competing with the music I have collected (and slowly keep adding). If anything, the problem with collecting more music is that it's so hard to find something I'd like that I didn't already know of (and Spotify's piss poor recommendation system certainly doesn't help there *).
*: Would it really be that difficult for them to add options to "never suggest this artist / album / any variant of this song for this playlist / ever"?
The idea of relying on the feedback loop of remixed AI slop for entertainment and it drowning out genuine good stuff evokes in me disgust that is hard to convey.
I can't find myself caring one bit about it because the good stuff slowed to a teeny tiny dribble over two decades ago. As far as I'm concerned there is nothing left for AI to drown.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
17d ago
Beethoven and Mozart were "pop" for the upper crust of society.
Sure, but that was an economic divide, not a divide based on artistic qualities. It doesn't change the fact that 1) they were widely popular and 2) they have inarguable artistic merit. If anything, they were more pop music than what general folk listened to as folk music was anonymous and lacked any of modern pop music's parasocial relationship that Mozart and Beethoven had among parts of their audience.
Music is perhaps not the point of pop music
Certainly not today, but it used to be, at least for the better tier pop. Just take the Beatles. Are they pop? Inarguably. Were they musically good? Without even the tiniest shadow of a doubt.
There are gobs of excellent pop music all the way up to the 90s. Then it went to shit for reasons I haven't been able to fully articulate yet but involves the concentration of labels, rise of solo artist & built groups and of course modern production methods (and a bunch of other things).
Edit: The music being a major point of pop music goes back centuries: For example Mozart and Beethoven were "pop" artist in their time.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
17d ago
The question of the hour: Is that really different than most songs produced by human artists?
Does it even matter? The world is already full of slop and having one more way to produce slop isn't helpful for anyone except some SEO spammers.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
17d ago
Can it do The 80s?
Not just completely forgettable fourth rate slop or faux-80s but actually good stuff that resembles songs like this, this or this, without forgetting this absolute classic.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
17d ago
Suno, the AI song generator, just released version 5. And now I think we are 100% past the uncanny audio valley.
At least to the extent that the examples trigger my ctrl-w reflex in exactly the same way and for the same reasons as modern human created music does. I suppose that could be considered "progress".
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
18d ago
Most people who go out and shoot at strangers are not.
Imagine your typical terminally online redditor whose day consists mostly of complaining about politics. Then imagine someone like that but with better executive function and some basic familiarity with guns.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
20d ago
Not to disagree with your main point but I’ve never seen anyone get asked that after having a bike stolen. They might be asked how heavy duty lock and cable they used to lock it to a concrete holder etc but half the time this would be just to find out exactly how thick steel is niwadays vulnerable to cutters.
Yes, bike theft is a major problem over here and has been for years.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
20d ago
I will absolutely concede that this correlates pretty strongly with race
It's the "black" vs "nigga" thing again combined with black culture having serious issues that make many people end up as niggas (sometimes irrespective of skin color). As you said, middle class black guys on their way to office are never the ones that cause these problems.
I'm reminded of when I visited San Francisco as a young guy 25 years ago and had my first proper encounter with a beggar. That guy was obviously black instead of "nigga" as he was reasonably well dressed, very polite and all "Excuse me sir, would you have any spare change" and very thankful when I gave him all the small coins I had wanted to get rid of anyway. The complete opposite of what I hear things are like these days.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
21d ago
The first Katherine was blonde, pretty in a plain way, and had a brown paper bag during show-and-tell in Mrs. Rice's 1st grade class in 1974.
This is not about ick or ASMR but your story reminds me of a peculiar memory I have. It was late summer in the mid 90s, a few weeks after our confirmation camp (it's a Lutheran thing in some of the Nordic countries). The setting was a "party" (as much as 14-15 year old well behaved kids had a "parties" back in those days anyway) and there was A Girl there. To this day I remember roughly how she looked, her hair, her name and particularly the scent of the perfume she used that day to the extent that on the few times I've smelled that same scent, it's always taken me back to that moment even several decades later. This would otherwise be par the course for an infatuated 14 year old except I wasn't particularly interested in her. She was just an acquaitance I interacted with during the two weeks at the camp and maybe half a dozen times afterwards but for some reason that specific smell has stayed in my memory forever since.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
21d ago
Assume you will only get reactions from a handful of friends and then a bunch of strangers who hope that by doing that, you'll follow them and they'll get a boost from that.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
21d ago
Mormons are structured like an actual cult
What strikes me is that from European point of view, most of the denominations you listed would be considered to be somewhere between "somewhat weird ultraconservative sect inside the mainstream church" to "They're weird ass cultists, be careful when dealing with them". And I don't mean by young liberals but by people like my friend's retired father who spent 40 years as a pastor with mainline church beliefs before retiring a decade ago.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
22d ago
Wild ass guess: It switches to a different internal search engine that's more classic style instead of "recommendation" based.
You can remove a lot of the infrastructure if you don't mind slowing down the unloading. Even oil pipelines can be replaced with tanker trucks if those are available.
Imagine bombing a large parking lot with cruise missile or two. Sure, it'd lower the capacity and temporarily halt the use but it wouldn't take all that much effort to continue operation again. A port at its basics is just a dropoff point / parking lot for ships with the most basic structures being inherently resistant to any secondary effects of bombing (ie. anything outside the literal crater).
Just for comparison I used Nukemap to simulate dropping a 20 kT nuke on the Beirut port and there's no way to position that such that it'd take out more than half of the port with heavy damage (a heavy concrete pier is probably going to shrug off 5 psi overpressure). You'd have to use a dozen precisely aimed 10 ton bombs (roughly the yield of the largest non-nuclear bomb in US arsenal, not exactly something to be fired from a normal jet) to actually destroy all the piers themselves.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
22d ago
Every single antivaxxer I can think of here in Finland is either part of some specific religious subgroups, a new age hippie or a "bro you need to watch this youtuber to get The Real Truth"-pseudo conspiracy theorist. The religious groups are mostly concentrated in specific parts of the country (which presents a real local problem with herd immunity for some dangerous diseases). Hippies are obviously much more urban.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
22d ago
The number of living humans who are actually interested in "talking philosophy" is minuscule. Even among people who are otherwise highly intelligent and capable.
And that's for a good reason. Philosophy is by and large pointless intellectual wankery with anything real world applicable either few and far between or already invented centuries or millennia ago.
It's a bit like the number of living humans interesting in talking math except even higher mathematics has plenty of useful or even revolutionary real world applications.
it’s just increasingly
not produced by the typical blue tribe producerspushed out by enshittified recommendation algorithms trying to force feed everyone with the worst clickbait the mankind has ever seen.
I have to be extremely meticulous about deleting any watched video that even slightly deviates from my regular feed of photography and musicianship related videos as well as hit "hide" on any recommendation that deviates from those or my feed will inevitably be invaded by shit tier clickbait crap. Just the other day simply watching one astrophotography video was enough to make a bunch of "nobel winner warns about new voyager discovery" crap videos enter my feed.
The same way if I try to find anything with search, I have to add "before:2026" or within a page or two the results are polluted by clickbait shit.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
22d ago
Yeah. It's a "kill it with fire and nuke the entire site from orbit just to be sure" type of feeling.
I have no problem with closeup photos of plants, eyes, amphibians or lizards but as soon as it's insects or arachnids (and probably some arthropods), I nope the hell out.
That's pretty much par the course for the current administration, so really not that surprising (eg. recall the formula used to calculate the initial tariffs).
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