SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
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User ID: 84
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
2d ago
Political correctness had barely begun to seep in thankfully.
And political correctness was almost universally seen as a bad thing by younger people as something out of touch moral guardians were trying to impose to remove everything fun.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
2d ago
I would agree with that except the fans of said genres themselves make the claim that they're "retro" to those decades when that is very obviously not the case. One such claim is right here in this thread. More commonly this happens with synthwave where people always claim it's "back to the 80s" when the actual 80s were nothing like that either in vibe, compositions, arrangements or sounds (the only thing "80s" about synthwave is the drum sounds and the visuals which harken to a very specific subset of 80s cover art).
I could see having a PC or Mac being a big deal in 1987 but to get one in the family only in 1997 would have been either intentional ludditism (typically by old people), a rare Amiga holdout or a major outlier here (likely due to never recovering from getting laid off during the early 90s recession). The question in 1997 was whether you already had dialup internet or were only planning on getting it soonish. If someone had suggested then that "computers were just for 50 year old suits in IBM and insurance companies", they would have been laughed at by the normies.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
2d ago
The TV ads were stuffy garbage but it's not like consumers cared about those. Those ads were aimed at companies (and particularly managers) due to a 486 still costing a small fortune in 1992 and showing typical "manager pie chart" on the screen. There's a reason Apple made this campaign to poke fun at the corporate PC ad aesthetic.
And yes, I'm very sure my experience was typical for the era. If anything, I personally was lagging behind my peers with us only getting a computer in 1990 (money was somewhat tight with my mom being a single mother with three kids). When I started high school in the mid 90s, I distinctly recall all the teachers going out of their way to say "For gods sake, please write your home essays on a computer instead of by hand" (which stuck in my mind because our bitchy upper elementary school Finnish teacher liked to claim "You'll need to write everything with cursive in high school" which turned out to be the exact opposite of the truth). Computing was ubiquituous but the TV ads and similar "official" media representation lagged behind the situation on the ground. In 1994 when I had finally saved enough money to buy a decent computer of my own (a 486sx with a whopping 4 MB of ram - far from what would have been high end at the time), a school acquaitance practically begged me to play dialup Doom multiplayer with him and he was the very opposite of any sort of computer nerd (I had to walk him through the modem setup on the phone).
The problem with basically all the -wave "genres" (except new wave which looked to the future instead of to a fake past) is that they get the timeline wildly incorrect and mix and match made up fake "memories", assumptions from a bunch of hand drawn magazine cover art and only bits and pieces of what was the historical reality of the purported eras.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
2d ago
People don’t go to stock image sites for AI. The problem is ”creators” flood the sites with AI images that then drown out ”manual” images while being almost entirely slop with a few very similar looks.
If they want AI images, they’ll just prompt AI themselves.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
2d ago
it is not supposed to be nostalgia for the general 90s/00s but nostalgia for the computing of the era. This was when computing was still primarily by and for 50 year old suits working in drop-ceiling cubicles at IBM or some insurance company, plus their occasional tone-deaf attempts at reaching out to wider markets.
Lolwhut?
That might describe the early to mid 80s but in the early 90s nearly every one of the people in my upper elementary school class had a computer at home and gaming was usually one of the main uses. By the mid to late 90s every desk job was computerized and IBM and insurance companies were known mostly for being particularly stuffy.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
2d ago
Yes but no. Many were sloppy but now they've been flooded with very specific looking slop and it's not just stock clipart but also stock photo sites that have been the target where the difference is much worse.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
2d ago
AI has already essentially destroyed stock imagery. Both in terms of being able to make any meaningful money from stock images but also from the other side by polluting stock image sites so badly that it’s becoming harder and harder to find suitable non-AI-slop images.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
2d ago
I just had people get mad at me for saying that a shower curtain having intentionally generic flower pattern made by AI should be a complete non-issue because it’s a fucking shower curtain, not anything that even pretends to be art.
Sometimes the past actually was just better.
There's something about vaporwave that's deeply resonant for me. I was a small child in the 90s, but I do still have a number of distinct memories of those years.
I basically only listen to polular music from the very late 70s to 1990 or so. The catch: I only started doing so in my early 30s. I didn't really listen to music seriously until in my late teens at which point I started with metal and then classic rock and prog from the late 60s / early 70s. If the "we get stuck to what was popular when we were teens / young adults" actually applied, I'd be listening to completely different music than what actually I listen to.
Anything made after 1990 is tainted by either what they now call r'n'b (aka ”urban contemporary”), rap / hiphop or grunge influences or is generic shitty pop or EDM slop and I’ve always detested all of those. I can take any number of pop hits (as in actual ”pop” genre, not just pop rock) from the 80s like Madonna, Michael Jackson, A-Ha, Duran Duran, Phil Collins etc and they still sound massively better than any pop music made since. I’ll even take what would now be considered ”B-list artists” like Bananarama any day over any modern popular music.
I recall literally discussing about our favorite 80s action movies with my friends as a teenager in the mid 90s. The transition to 90s wasn’t super abrupt but Terminator 2 clearly started to look and feel different compared movies made in the mid 80s.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
3d ago
otherwise you’d have to discard 90% of the franchise including the prequels too.
I rather liked the first season of Mandalorian (never got around to watching the second) but discarding the prequels would be a complete no-brainer. Jar Jar Binks, anyone?
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
4d ago
Don’t know about that but very few people could beat him in sound and sample design back in the day. There was a very noticeable drop in the quality of new sounds and sample rom contents after he left Roland. D-50, JDs, JVs and the early expansion cards were brilliant and iconic in all sorts of popular music. Anything for the next 15+ years was solidly meh at best and total garbage at worst even though being technologically far more capable.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
6d ago
The problem is that the entire educational establishment is absolutely dedicated to keeping them in the same classroom
I don't think that's actually the case. It's more accurate to say that the educational elite (who design curriculums and whatnot) is dedicated to that. These are the same people who keep thinking that "open classrooms", major emphasis on group work and so on are a must have even though the people on the ground tell them those are just making everything shit.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
6d ago
I learned way back in the reddit days that I should add any writer commonly referenced on The Motte to my "never read them"-ignore list.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
7d ago
I suspect it's something to do with this, and also the Protestant roots. Protestants took the infernalist rhetoric and turned it up to never before seen extremes. Contemporary Protestant churches have chilled out a lot, but besides the Quakers, most of the early sects were all-in on motivation through fear via fire and brimstone preaching.
Didn't Martin Luther, the OG protestant, basically say that as long as you Believe, your sins are forgiven and you avoid hell?
I'm far from a theologian or historian but to me it seems that the "fire and brimstone" preaching was less a general feature of protestantianism and more related to those denominations that originated from Calvinism.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
7d ago
Yes, US and UK were retarded about it. That does not mean that the only options were "do nothing" or "be completely retarded" and we have examples of western nations that had generally sane responses that didn't involve locking everyone indoors or forcibly shutting down workplaces but also didn't literally tell people to go out to bars and restaurants (which Sweden did in 2020 spring) or keep elderly and other high risk groups during the highest case peaks without masks or any visiting restrictions.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
7d ago
That’s been common advice for voles locally for decades because the only native hantavirus is transmitted by vole droppings. It isn’t deadly but can be nasty, particularly if you have any kidney issues and applying basic precautions is so easy that you’d have to be a stupid not to take them (ie. wear a mask).
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
7d ago
I’m reminded of when Covid hit Finland in early March 2020 and within a week everything shut down (except workplaces that couldn’t go remote, stores and so on of course).
That had nothing to do with any government decisions. You can’t exactly run eg. a restaurant when 95% of your customer base disappears overnight. Business owners were outright begging for official restrictions because then they could at least apply for some types of benefits.
One industrial equipment manufacturer was in the news for major furloughs right in the beginning. The catch: They did that two weeks before things shut down locally because their international customers had already canceled or delayed so many orders due to general disruption in the far east.
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
7d ago
Agreed. What most frustrates me about Covid talk on The Motte is the insistence that there were only ever two situations in the western countries: a full lockdown or the Swedish "let's do nothing"-approach. As if my country (you know, right next door to Sweden) with zero legally mandated "lockdowns" but a bunch of voluntary recommendations and public health response changes didn't exist.
I kept track of restrictions during the Covid era and the only government mandated ones were restrictions to large events, bars, restaurants and gyms. Everything else was voluntary (including bar / restaurant closures when the pandemic started) or just recommendations with no penalties. The officials outright recommended that "going out in the nature is a very good idea now".
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
8d ago
Whoosh... (see also and from 1:10 onwards)
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
8d ago
Do you use commercial models/implementations or do you have a recommendation where to start if I want to set it up myself?
For photo noise reduction I've used Lightroom and (free but specific to Olympus / OM cameras) OM Workspace. I don't think there are good open source models as the models are camera specific due to different sensor and bayer filter characteristics (and why they can produce really impressive results - check the OM-1 original vs denoised comparison here where the original is far from what I'd consider usable while the Lightroom one is perfectly fine).
For audio stem separation Ultimate Vocal Remove is my tool of choice (you can download the models from the settings page). I start by removing vocals with MDX-Net / Kim Vocal 2, take the residual and remove drums with Demucs and then possibly remove the bass from the residual of that. Be aware that if you just split the stems from the original they will not sum to 100% and thus you want to go the recursive route. I'm sure there are some newer models that you can install manually but I haven't used those as the existing ones work well enough for my purpose (removing distracting vocals or emphasizing instrumental part to better hear what's happening).
SkoomaDentist
The Greater Finnish Empire
8d ago
Also extremely impressive considering it predates any non-research AI models by at least half a decade or more.
LLMs and other generation AIs are much more HW intensive than domain specific neural networks. 500M - 1B parameters is plenty when the model doesn't have to understand instructions or global context (hell, there are some task specific audio models in wide use that can fit in just a couple of megabytes while performing well). Sure, a more powerful gpu will run the models faster but when you're doing noise reduction on a dozen culled and selected photos it doesn't really matter if it takes 15 seconds or a minute to run the process when on cpu it would take half an hour. Likewise stem separation taking a few minutes is a non-issue when you only need to run it once or at most a few times for a song (such as when remixing or isolating instruments for practising the lines).
There are apps that can run in the cloud but they're (expensive) subscription or credit based and having to pay $30-$50 per month per app gets really expensive. Not to mention they tend to have ridiculous censorship (think photos of people on a beach where you want to remove some distractions and the cloud version complains that your content breaks the terms of use).
Why would that be the case?
It won't allow them to get their ideas in same detail as a trained artist but it's worlds better than getting nothing onto the page which is the remaining option when you take away AI.
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