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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   3918 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 8, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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My personal definition of GenX:

  • if you remember the Kennedy assassination, you’re too old.
  • if you don’t remember the Challenger explosion, you’re too young.

I've got a framework that has served me well in which:

  • cultural generations are 20 years
  • the first and last 5 years of these generations exhibit notable similarities with the adjacent generation, but not quite to the point where they may be usefully considered a separate identity (Xennials = not a thing)

So:

  • people born from 1940-1945 are most like standard boomers, but depending on their specific peer group may have more of a pre-war outlook
  • people born from 1955-1965 are on a spectrum from boomer --> X outlook (basically optimism --> feeling shafted); 1960 is a good inflection point
  • similarly, 1975-1980 exhibits a clear X outlook, and as you move past 1980 people become much more earnest and hipsterish -- by 1985 you are into core timid millenials by and large.

My test for this hypothesis will be "is 2005-2015 core Zoomer, and what are these people like" -- I've got one in the house, and he & his peers do seem to have a different outlook from his older cousins so far -- COVID will clearly be a defining event for these guys, but it remains to be seen exactly how.

Do we have anyone running local offline LLMs here?

How are they coming along? Do you need to load them into VRAM, or can you load them into RAM or something and use either CPU or GPU from there?

If you use llama.cpp, you can load part of the model into VRAM and evaluate it on the GPU, and do the rest of the evaluation on CPU. (The -ngl [number of layers] parameter determines how many layers it tries to push to the GPU.)

In general, I strongly recommend using this over the "industry standard" Python-based setup, as the overheads of 1GB+ of random dependencies and interpreted language do tend to build up in ways beyond what shows up in benchmarks. (You might not lose so much time per token, but you will use more RAM (easy to measure) and put more strain on assorted caches and buffers (harder to attribute) and have more context switches degrading UI interactivity.)

...

Thanks! Do you use it?

Yes, though I haven't paid attention to it in about half a year so I couldn't answer what the capabilities of the best models are nowadays. My general sense was that performance of the "reasonably-sized" models (of the kind that you could run on a standard-architecture laptop, perhaps up to 14B?) has stagnated somewhat, as the big research budgets go into higher-spec models and the local model community has structural issues (inadequate understanding of machine learning, inadequate mental model of LLMs, inadequate benchmarks/targets). That is not to say they aren't useful for certain things; I have encountered 7B models that could compete with Google Translate performance on translating some language pairs and were pretty usable as a "soft wiki" for API documentation and geographic trivia and what-not.

Do we have anyone running local offline LLMs here?

How are they coming along?

There are some really good models available to run but they require beastly graphics cards. Here are some llama benchmarks, for a rough idea.

Do you need to load them into VRAM, or can you load them into RAM or something and use either CPU or GPU from there?

In theory, they can be ran on a CPU but GPUs are way better at this task.
The best places to find information on local LLMs that I'm aware of are https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/ and https://boards.4chan.org/g/ and especially the LLM general there.

Thank you.

I can run 7B models on a Macbook M2 with 8 GB of ram. This is because of how Macbooks handle VRAM.

It's pretty slow, and 7B models aren't great for general tasks. If you can use one that's fine tune for a specific thing, they're worth it.

Frankly, however, I'd just recommend using something like together(dot)AI or OpenRouter to run larger models elsewhere. Normal caveats about not pushing sensitive info out there, of course. $30-$50 worth of credits, even for monster models like Meta's 405B, will take you easily though a month of pretty heavy usage (unless you're running big automated workloads 24/7).

I think there's going to be a race between local AI specific hardware for consumers and just cloud based hyperscaling. I don't know which will win. Privacy definitely plays a part. I'm quite optimistic to see a new compute hardware paradigm emerge.

I'm using openrouter.ai daily. The credits last for a surprisingly long time. Sonnet 3.5 is my go-to model.

I'd like something offline and private for sensitive use though.

I am enjoying Songs of a Lost World immensely thus far. The themes of aging, sadness, and loss speak directly to my experiences, even more so since 2024 has turned into another, "buckle up, buckaroos," kind of year of sweeping changes for me personally. I'm thrilled that The Cure has released an album this damn good in this day and age (and with multiple vinyl and cassette versions to boot!) and it's quite the poignant experience to listen to something that is so on point to my middle-aged self and that also makes my inner Goth Kid squee in delight.

Star Trek: Lower Decks is actually quite good. There’s some wokeness, but for the most part it’s a solid work with good characters, hilarity and normal Trek things. It is also definitely not for children.

They make new writers watch every star trek episode from TOS - VOY before they start, so there are a lot of throwbacks. It's fun if you're a fan.

But Mariner is extremely obnoxious in the first three episodes.

I had some fun trying out some of the army field manual on homemade explosives at the local bomb range. (didn't make all of them but made a few of the ones I've never seen before) I gotta say these instructions are dangerous though less dangerous than the Anarchists cookbook but boy safety was definitely not their top priority.

Glad I could be of service.

How did you find out about your bomb range? How common are those? I’m in Texas, so I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a few nearby…

I literally typed "bomb ranges near me" onto google and pressed enter.

Sadly I can't be of much more help than that

It typically takes a while to get permission, but when you have a Federal explosives License (from the ATF) it's a lot easier to get allowed in.

I feel like if I typed that I'd get a visit from some agency.

Thankfully the only agency that has ever knocked on my door is ATF

Look I'm giving you this advice under my real name, Bomb ranges are completely normal places to go if you have a Federal Explosives License especially for practice.

I’d imagine you could file that under “still worth it.”

So the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight is tonight next friday.

I'd like everyone who's watching to take some time to watch Mike Tyson Mysteries, a four season cartoon Tyson did.

It features Norm MacDonald as a talking pigeon and Jim Rash as a victorian ghost.

My vote is for stalemate. I had the misfortune of paying for the Tyson–Roy Jones, Jr. fight a couple years back, and it was the stupidest fight I've ever seen (and in today's world of boxing that says a lot). Tyson didn't look like he was even interested in winning, and in the end he said the important thing was the money it raised for his charity. Jake Paul was on an undercard and he looked like he was just flailing wildly, but I believe he won his fight against a retired NBA player. I'm of the opinion that Tyson is one of the most overrated boxers in history. He came up at a time when their wasn't any real competition (Trevor Berbick? Michael Spinks?!) and he was totally reliant on being able to knock a guy out early. When that didn't happen he was completely out of his element. The whole Evander Holyfield ear biting thing is a direct result of how he couldn't hang when he was losing.

Tyson–Roy Jones, Jr. fight

That wasn't a fight, it was an exhibition. It didn't count toward anyone's record and they literally could have had Hulk Hogan run in and hit Mike with a folding chair if they wanted. Evander Holyfield once had an exhibition against Mitt Romney. Exhibitions are fake and any resemblance they bear to actual fights is incidental. In short, you got fleeced.

On the other hand, this Jake Paul thing is actually a sanctioned boxing match. It's going on their records. Either Jake carries or we watch an old man get his ass beat.

In short, you got fleeced.

Well, my brother got fleeced. Anyway, we knew it was an exhibition, but it was marketed as though the participants would actually be trying.

I think it's next Friday.

Jake Paul manages to do his can crushing in fun and exciting ways by fighting old people who used to be good, MMA fighters who can't actually box as well as you'd expect Though now that he's lost his 0 (Honestly I fucking hate how Boxers value the "undefeated" mantle so much it doesn't mean much other than you ducked good competition) he seems to be more willing to fight real boxers.

Also isn't it next week?

I'm powering through an enjoyable book recommendation from friend, and it's reminding me of how much I've recently thought about how much - or if at all - people send messages through art.

I miss mixtapes, dearly. I still have a few scrawled CDs in sleeves that never get played, most of which I did make myself. It's a bit arrogant to say, but I have historically gotten positive feedback from those I distributed to others. Truthfully, I'd put some effort in - parsing through a wide collection to find things I truly believed the other person would like. And yes, sometimes, sending a message. I suspect that thrashing genres thew some people off occasionally, but I think it was worth it to get them hooked on something new.

As time has gone on I've found that people's recommendations of books and music haven't hit the spot as much as they once did. We've spoken endlessly about the degradation in quality of art on this forum, and yeah that's part of it, but I also see it as a consequence of the distance we keep from each other as we become adults.

Books are particularly challenging. I think sharing a great novel with someone has a sort of intimacy that is matched by very few things, perhaps as a result of how long of an investment it requires. But I also think the medium just has more emotional potential than movies/TV (definitely) or music (probably).

I love fiction and tend to stay in the realm of fiction focused on anything other than people, but I do occasionally treat myself to more "realistic" interpersonal fiction. I still think "This is Where I Leave You" was one of the best books I've ever read. It either helped process some trauma or inflamed it, not sure, but the recommendation that set me off on this rant is of the genre. It's kind of nice to be back after what's probably been a 4 year hiatus from it.

In any case I'm not sure how common talking to each other indirectly through this stuff is. It feels like most people view the exchange of entertainment recommendations as somehow related to status - like they're just pushing something to you to get the endorphin hit from you saying you liked it. Given how much content is available, how freely it flows, that's all anyone has time for. But it seems like a waste of time, even if "sending messages through art" is presumptuous or paranoid.

...

He then nailed me to the wall by saying, “Surely a man of your diverse intellectual interests and wide-ranging curiosity must have tried to find God?”

(Eureka! I had it! The very nails had given me my opening!) I said, smiling pleasantly, “God is much more intelligent than I am — let him try to find me.”

This answer from Asimov pleases me immensely. To be a humanist Jew, a top-notch scientist, and world-famous author, and to taunt the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in this way, pretty much guarantees a response.

I’ve been trying on a bit of theology recently, the idea that YHWH is the “God of the lost,” in the way other people call Thor the god of thunder and Hera the goddess of marriage. My dad has always instructed my siblings and me to pray as soon as we notice something is missing, because God knows where it went. It only makes sense to start any search by asking the One who knows literally everything and has a O(0) search time complexity, and can have prearranged everything in the universe since the beginning of causality to decrease my own search time.

...

I didn’t bat an eye at the “bloody altar” or “evil [god]” comments, misunderstandings of my faith I expect from unbelievers, but it’s fascinating how much I bristled at the “gnostic” comment.

I’ll return to this thread later, just wanted to post first thoughts.

"Misunderstanding of your faith" implies they have the wrong understanding of why you believe. Having the view on what your religion is that you don't agree with is not misunderstanding.

Bombastic language aside, I think what's actually being stated is the problem of evil. And I agree it's a serious objection, though it's not one I personally struggle with.

Additionally, I think the gnostic comment wasn't directed at you, but more generally at the concept of religion grasping for answers to the problem of evil that can seem bizarre or improbable. It can be surprising, but the congenitally irreligious often find it hard to distinguish between the various tenets of faiths: they all glom together as one gurgling mass of irrationality. What's the difference between Nicene Christianity and gnosticism to someone convinced that the supernatural is an invented cope?

Before engaging in protracted apologetics, I would invite you to consider that your interlocutor has gone on record that he prefers a child rapist to a man whose worldview he found insufficiently nihilistic, and judge your likelihood of a productive exchange accordingly.

...

"Normal People" by Sally Rooney

No - it has a high Rotten Tomatoes rating but that's not as solid a thing to have faith in anymore. Have you?

...

I'd say I've been diverse in what I've read, and haven't disliked much. Also read a good amount of fantasy though scifi is my first pick.

  • Classics - Asimov, Heinlein, Bradbury.
  • Midrange - Niven, the aforementioned culture series, Orson Scott Card, William Gibson, Michael Crighton, Dan Simmons
  • New school? - I really liked Peter Watts, Paolo Bacigalupi, and read some of the tie-in novels for video games.

If I had to pick what I'm into I'd say harder scifi appeals to me far more than the alternative. Once you have that, I tend to like grittier/dystopian stuff I guess.

Last year my girlfriend bought me the book A Hero of Our Time by Lermontov, as I discussed here.

I think being compared to what appears to be a braver and more charismatic character is... pretty positive. Nice.

Increasingly it seems like recommending any kind of media to anyone is a fools errand. People just have very little tolerance to anything outside of their media comfort zone. Even short YouTube videos are usually a dud.

I heard The Band cover of Atlantic City today in the car and it got me thinking, why did people stop doing covers? When did the cover begin to be treated as kind of corny and second tier? Is it just a Rockist thing where everyone has to kinda pretend to write their own stuff? When did the Great American Songbook go out of the mainstream as a concept? Was there any conflict over the way it faded out? Were there any efforts to revive the concept in a new form?

I don't think musicians do enough covers anymore. Fast Car performed by Luke Combs was the last one I can recall being a true hit, and there was significant attempt to delegitimize it as a performance by certain parts of the music media. And I have to wonder how we got there. Because honestly, I'd love to hear talented older performers do cover albums of new standards. I want Jay-Z doing a full album of classic Hip Hop, or Ke$ha doing 90s bubblegum pop.

I don't know a ton about the for-sale or streaming industry, but I can say that cover bands that do live performances seem to be pretty common and popular. It's a pretty good deal for everyone. If you want to see an actual big-time popular band, you probably have a wait a long time for them to go on tour, pay out the nose for tickets, especially ones that aren't terrible, navigate the hassles of going to and from some huge venue that might be far away, paying for overpriced food and drinks to maybe parking too, etc. Cover bands play the same songs, even a bunch of popular songs from various artists of the same genre, and usually do it for cheap tickets at smaller local places that are easier to go to and have much more affordable food and drinks, and do it regularly. If you just want to jam/dance/mosh/whatever to your favorite songs and aren't that concerned about exact musical quality or seeing the actual band in person, it's arguably a better experience.

I heard The Band cover of Atlantic City

That song is a fucking epic novel or movie in just a few minutes. And The Band's cover blows Springsteen out of the water. When you listen to Springsteen on his own, it's great and poignant. But side-by-side with that cover, you realize how melodramatic and overwrought a lot of the emotionalism is. Levon Helm's more subdued vocals tease out the desperation and forlorn feeling of the song's protagonist so much better.

Probably not what you want since it's more of a niche thing, but there's this genre in Japan called Utattemita (歌ってみた), the basic premise is that first you have the producer make a song, usually with Vocaloid/artificial vocals. And then the songs are covered by amateurs. You can see so many different covers of the same song, male, female, and kinds of different singers, although the oldest are probably in their 30s. Sometimes the producer themselves also sings it.

It's used to listen to it a lot, but if you don't like the music style, it won't do much for you.

A Moronically Detailed Explanation

Buckle up, because the answer is complicated. In the first half of the twentieth century, there was a clear delineation between performers and songwriters. There were obvious exceptions like Duke Ellington, but writing and performing were considered separate roles. When recording, record labels would pair performers up with A&R men. The primary job of the A&R man was to select material for the performer, based on the performer's strengths and what they thought would sell. The repertoire largely came from American musical theater, and popular songs would be recorded by numerous artists. "Covers", as such, weren't really a thing in those days, as the earliest recorded version often wasn't the most well-known. For example "The Song Is You" is most associated with Frank Sinatra and his time with Tommy Dorsey, but it was first recorded ten years earlier. No one, however, thinks of the Sinatra version as a "cover" of a song by Jack Denny and the Waldorf Astoria Orchestra. Another way to think about it is that if the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra releases a new recording of Beethoven's Fifth next week, it won't be described as a cover of the Berlin Philharmonic's "original" 1913 recording. It's also worth noting that the heyday of the Great American Songbook was also the period when jazz was effectively America's Popular Music, and the focus wasn't so much on songwriting as it was on individual style and interpretation.

A critical factor in all of this is royalties. Every time a song is included on an album, played in public, played on the radio, etc., the songwriter gets a flat fee that is set by the Copyright Royalty Board. For example, if you record a CD the rate per track is 12.4 cents or 2.39 cents per minute of playing time, whichever is greater. So if a songwriter has a song included on an album that sells 40,000 copies, they'd get $4,960 in royalties. With the development of the album following WWII, the industry limited albums to ten tracks to keep royalty costs down. This is why the American versions of Beatles albums are significantly different than the British versions—the UK industry allowed 14 tracks. The Beatles hated this practice (and rebelled against it with the infamous "Butcher Cover"), and by 1967 they had enough clout to ensure that the American albums would be the same as the British albums.

The more important legacy the Beatles would have on the music industry was that they mostly wrote their own material. From the beginning, rock and roll musicians like Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly had been writing their own material, but the Beatles were making the practice de rigeur. A&R men were now called producers and were beginning to take a more involved role in the recording process. Beginning in the 1950s, Frank Sinatra was turning the new album format into a concept of its own. While most albums were simply collections of songs, Frank Sinatra had the idea to select and program the songs thematically to give the albums a cohesive mood. He also made sure his fans got their money's worth, and didn't duplicate material from singles. For the most part, though, albums remained an "adult" format, with more youth-oriented acts focusing on singles. While albums did exist, they were often mishmashes of miscellaneous material. A band didn't go into the studio to record and album; they went into the studio to record, and the record label would decide how to release the resulting material. The best went to single a-sides. Albums were padded with everything else—b-sides, material that didn't quite work, and, of course, covers recorded for the sole purpose of filling out the album. These would often be of whatever hits were popular at the time, and maybe a rock version of an old classic.

The Beatles and other British acts took up the Sinatra mantle of recording cohesive albums, but other musicians, particularly in the US, didn't have that luxury. The strategy of American labels in the 1960s was to shamelessly flood the market with product to milk whatever fleeting success a band had to the fullest extent possible. My favorite example of this trend, and how it interacted with the changing trends, is the Beach Boys. They put out their first studio album in 1962, 3 in 1963, and 4 in 1964. These were mostly short and laden with filler, but by the time of All Summer Long Beatlemania had hit and they were upping their game. As rock music became more sophisticated in 1965, Brian Wilson began taking a greater interest in making good albums, but Capitol still required 3 albums from them that year. By this time they were deep into Pet Sounds and didn't have anything ready for the required Christmas release. So they got a few friends into the studio to stage a mock party and recorded an entire album of lazy covers, mostly just acoustic guitar, vocals, and some simple percussion. It's terrible; even the hit single (Barbara Ann) is probably the band's worst. Two years later ripoffs like this were going out of fashion, but, with the band in disarray and no new album forthcoming, Capitol wiped the vocals from some old hits and released it as Stack-o-Tracks, including a lyric sheet and marketing it as a sing-along record. They were truly shameless.

During this period, there was still a large contingent of professional songwriters who specifically wrote for pop artists. The Brill Building held Carole King/Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann/Cynthia Weill, Neil Diamond, and Bert Berns, among others. Motown had its own stable of songwriters to pen hits for its talent (and when they had to put together albums they covered other Motown artists' hits, Beatles songs, Broadway tunes, and whatever else was popular at the time). But times were changing. By the time Sgt. Pepper came out in 1967, rock bands were thinking of themselves as serious groups who played their own instruments, wrote their own material, and recorded albums as independent artistic statements. What criticism of rock existed was limited to industry publications like Billboard and teen magazines like Tiger Beat; the former focused on marketability and the latter on fawning adoration. Rolling Stone was launched in 1968 as an analog for what Down Beat was in jazz—a serious publication for serious criticism of music that deserved it. Major labels clung to the old paradigm for a while, but would soon yield to changing consumer taste. Even R&B, which largely remained aloof from this trend, saw people like Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, and Isaac Hayes emerge as album artists in the 1970s.

This was the status quo that continued until the early 2000s. Pop music meant rock music, rock music meant albums, and albums meant cohesive, individual statements. Covers still existed throughout this period, but the underlying ethos had changed. If a serious rock band records a cover, there's a reason behind it. The decision to record the cover is an artistic one in and of itself, unlike in the 1940s, when you recorded covers because you had no other choice, or in the 1960s, when you recorded covers because the record company needed you to fill out an album. At this time, the industry itself was in a golden age, as far as making money was concerned. The introduction of the CD in the 1980s eliminated a lot of the fidelity problems inherent to analog formats. When they were first introduced, CDs were significantly more expensive to manufacture than records. But by the 1990s, the price of the disc and packaging had shrunk to pennies per unit. The cost of the disc itself was no longer a substantial part of the equation. And the increased fidelity led to increased catalog sales, as people, Baby Boomers especially, began repurchasing their old albums. These were heady times indeed.

And then Napster came along and ended the party. The industry spent the next decade flailing, going before congress, sued software developers, sued their own potential customers, and implemented bad DRM schemes, all in a vain attempt to stop the tidal wave. Music was no longer something you bought, but something you expected to get for free. After a decade of this nonsense, the industry finally did what it should have done all along and began offering access to a broad library for a reasonable monthly price. For once, it looked like there would be some degree of stability; profits went up, and piracy went down. Which brings us back to those royalties.

Earlier I gave an example where a songwriter gets paid a statutory fee for inclusion of a song on physical media. This doesn't work for streaming; if I buy a CD I pay the 12 cents but I have unlimited access to the song. Streaming works different because I technically have access to millions of songs, but the artist only gets paid for the ones I play. Paying them 12 cents a song doesn't make sense. So instead, streaming relies on a complicated formula involving percentage of streams compared with total revenue blah blah blah. The thing about royalties is, they come off the top. If a label releases an album with 12 songs by 12 different songwriters, none of whom have any relation to the label, that's $1.44 right there. But if the songwriter is also the performer under contract to the label, then the label can negotiate a lower songwriting royalty (these are called Controlled Compositions). But it gets better. Songwriting royalties don't go entirely to the songwriter, but are split between the songwriter and the publishing company. An artist signed to a label is probably required to use a publishing company owned by the label, so there's a 50% discount right there. A typical record contract grants a 25% discount on controlled compositions, so that $1.44 the label owes in royalties is down to 54 cents if the artist writes all his own songs.

In the world of streaming, where the royalties are paid every time a song gets paid, this can add up quick. There's no real downside to releasing a few covers for streaming as album tracks or as part of a miscellaneous release because the streaming totals aren't going to be that high. The problem comes when the recording becomes a hit; when there's a lot of money at stake, being able to recoup 62.5% of the songwriting royalties you'd otherwise have to pay means a lot of money. To be fair, most labels use outside songwriters to pen hits for their pop artists. But these songwriters are almost always affiliated with the publishers owned by the labels, and are thus cheaper on the whole than going out into the universe of available songs and picking one you like. The Great American Songbook existed in an entirely different world, where paying these royalties was an accepted fact of the industry. After the Rock Revolution, this was no longer the case, but the culture still existed, and the industry was making so much money that it didn't care. After 2000, extreme cost cutting became the norm, and songwriting royalties were an easy target in a world that had largely moved away from outside songwriters.

BTW I thought that "Fast Car" cover sucked. First, the song wasn't that good to begin with, and Tracy Chapman is possibly the most overrated singer-songwriter in history (aside from her two hits her material is the definition of generic). Second, a cover should try to reinvent the song in the performer's image. Here, it sounded like Luke was singing karaoke.

Covers still live. But also sampling serves a similar function.

People still do. I think it was shunted through YouTube for a while; there are pretty large groups that moved from video game covers to mainstream covers to live shows. For all I know this has moved to TikTok.

We still have things like an Avett brother doing a ten piece tribute album. Here’s Duran Duran covering all sorts of stuff. I personally loved the covers on Adrian Quesada’s Boleros Psicodelicos.

And then there’s Europe. I was going to say Eurovision, but the song I had in mind was actually X-factor. Talent programs may have peaked twenty years ago, but they’re still a source of covers!

I'll echo that the creation of covers still goes on, and I think people still do really well. In fact, I maintain a playlist of great covers that continually expands. Some suggestions from the past few years (I'd do the whole playlist, but I'd be dipping into early 00s covers etc.):

One of my favourite aspects of reggae is that when they get a hit they'll recycle and reinvent it dozens or even hundreds of times. It's become customary to release entire compilations of one instrumental with multiple vocalists taking a turn to record a new song over the top. It's like if, to use pop stars, you had Taylor Swift, Bille Eilish, Post Malone and Lady Gaga all recording over Beyonce's Crazy In Love, topped off with an instrumental remix by Daft Punk. "People like it, let's make more!"

As it is if you want to hear different versions of most artists' songs you have to go to YouTube and either look for live performances by the original artist or covers/remixes by bedroom nobodies, which can be interesting in their own right but they'll never be as polished as a studio recording.

Literally as I read this comment I am listening to a reggae-fied cover of the Gorillaz song Punk.

The "Laika come Home" Album is pretty damn good.

I've also spent a good portion of this year searching up Metal or Hard rock covers of popular older songs and finding that this has been a burgeoning area/genre, and there is a lot to choose from!

Mostly for my gym playlist. But there's covers of songs like Running up that Hill and "Lose Yourself" that are just GREAT MUSIC on their own merits, because they are remade by talented artists who can maintain the basic structure of the original but give it a distinct feel and play around with the architecture. That is to say, not just slapping on a new paint job.

Feels like this is an ample vein to mine, to get distinct sound out of well-known songs by converting them to a differing genre.

I'm reminded of how The Animals created a massive hit out of their cover of a folk song "The House of the Rising Sun" back in 1964.

Writing 'new' songs is probably overrated, since you're just adding a few footnotes to an insanely large library of material. But talented artists don't need to be entirely novel to make great works! Fork off an existing property, make it their own, and it could be a hit too.

Also, I genuinely believe that we've mostly 'tapped out' the possible genres of songs that can actually become popular, there doesn't seem to be much room left for any distinctly novel style of music that has heretofore been untapped. I'd blame the rise of electronic music for rapidly squeezing out the entire space of 'sounds it is possible to produce' and so even if we haven't tapped the entirety of all musicspace we're going to have a harder time finding ones that have mass appeal.

Plenty of musicians still do covers. Especially in live performances. As just one example, eurodance group Cascada has been releasing singles from their upcoming album Studio 24, which is all covers of classic disco hits. Punk bands still routinely release covers of pop songs. (The Punk Goes Pop series is still going strong, with its 7th installment released in 2017.) Even megastars still perform covers; when I saw Kanye West in concert on the Yeezus tour, he performed a cover of Chief Keef’s “I Don’t Like”.

Like, I agree with you that the idea of a bunch of different musical acts all recording different versions of a limited number of standards, written decades ago by professional songwriters, has declined somewhat. I think that’s very different from covers as a whole going out of style.

...

The only downside is, it's not 3d.

Am I the only one who likes discrete legible units in most of my games? AFAICT, that's what ties together my preference for 2d grids and turn based gameplay.

Do you know what one of the earliest improvements I do in Satisfactory is? I build foundations for my factory, so that it can be grid-based. Same with any basebuilding in Fallout 4 or Valheim: The first step is to build foundations to remove the unique geography and provide a consistent grid, and the second step is to fight with the actual construction because first-person gameplay is a terrible way to translate your thoughts into (virtual) reality.

...

Am I the only one who likes discrete legible units in most of my games?

Nope. That's my preference too.

I'm almost done with it and all in all I've been very pleased with it. There are several design choices Earendel made for SE that I much prefer over SA though, mostly related to ships and platforms.

Reaching the derelict platform in SE is both a really cool moment. But it also serves as a good introduction to working in space as you can very quickly see which buildings you might want to rocket up. Its also provides a very tactile and satisfying experience of scavenging for new toys. In SA you launch your first platform and you get a popup about building out your platform. It's not particularly well explained, noob traps abound and unless you had the foresight to build a lot of rocket silos you will be waiting awhile before you even start building out your platform simply due to the time it takes to launch stuff into space.

SE's focus on doing research on your space platform also makes SE feel very distinct from the vanilla experience of working on terra firma, and it acts as a focal point to your interplanetary activities. You go planetside, you build a base, you rocket your new widgets back to your platform to do more science. SA has you shipping all your science back to Nauvis, it's the vanilla experience but more so.

All that said most of what I haven't mentioned is lightyears aside of SE. SE's planetary outposts felt like setting up mining outposts with 10-20x the busywork. Each planet in SA provides fresh and unique challenges that require novel approaches to factory design, especially Gleba. Interplanetary logistics mostly just works compared to the SE's which despite my best efforts I never managed to master.

I'm pretty iffy about quality, it's too good not to use, but simply unlocking introduces UI frustrations, never mind actually trying to design and deploy it at scale.

SE logistics gets a lot simpler once you get antimatter since you can make a minimalist shuttle design, copy/paste it a bunch of times, and then send them back and forth like super large expensive trains. (technically you can do this with rocket fueled shuttles, but then you have to worry about producing and refueling and having enough fuel capacity to get there and back). But that's late enough to unlock that you've already spent a few hundred hours dealing with the more complicated and expensive. methods.

I actually haven't played SA yet because I'm still in the middle of Pyanodon and am not allowing Factorio to update and break my mods. But I am very excited for what happens when some of the mod people take the new infrastructure and ideas in SA and then combine them with their crazy mod expansions.

SE logistics gets a lot simpler once you get antimatter since you can make a minimalist shuttle design, copy/paste it a bunch of times, and then send them back and forth like super large expensive trains.

Leave Nauvis and settle on the smallest non-dry, non-vitemelange moon in the system. You need to build a ground base somewhere, but the planet with a deep gravity well, no special resources, and many biters isn't that good of a choice.

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I actually think the no special resources is a point in Nauvis' favor for the main ground base, because it means the core miners give an even distribution of resources instead of overloading you with one thing for export (which is what I want my mining outposts to do, not the main base). But the gravity and biters are points against it. I chose it anyway and tolerated the downsides partly for sentimental reasons, since all my pre-space stuff was already there, but mostly for the respawn. If I make spare space suits for each planet then I can return home by stripping all my stuff, sticking it in a warehouse, and then suiciding and respawning on Nauvis. Makes it way easier to go exploring and building outposts if I don't have to budget for a return trip. I could be mistaken, but I don't think you can do that effectively with other planets, since if I recall correctly, the respawn options are something like (Nauvis, nearest space station, nearest occupied planet) or something like that, which will only work reliably if your chosen base is near (or you have shuttles from Nauvis to the new base I guess).

I chose to move to a moon just to see what happens rather than any well-considered reason, but I think it worked well.

The lack of core miners wasn't an issue given the ease of importing materials (I ran out of local copper and uranium, and local oil was very very insufficient) because the other planets had nigh-infinite amounts of ore. I got copper from the belt, uranium and oil from the oil moon, and all of the advanced materials from around the system. Low gravity is extremely important for using spaceships, as it allows you to use just one fuel tank for a full set of chests (to 300 integrity) and still have enough range to make a round trip.

I hadn't thought of the respawn trick, but I'm not sure if I would use it if I had. It feels like an exploit IMO.

It's Factorio but more, where each flavor of "more" is different in its own way. If the base game came out in the early 2000's, the DLC would be one of those really good expansions whose purchase would be thoroughly justified, like TA: Core Contingency or SC: Brood War.

I cobbled together a space platform and set forth. Thoroughly underestimated my fuel and ammo needs and got smashed to bits by asteroids while traveling. Now I'm stuck on a volcanic hellscape where none of the production chains make sense, I didn't bring enough stuff, my base back home isn't really set up for remote construction, and I'm having a great time.

Vulcanus is actually the best place to end up stranded on, you got very lucky there. There are almost no threats to worry about and you have easy access to an almost infinite amount of every resource (except for uranium). Gleba is the actual hell-planet.

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I really hate Gleba too. In hindsight, the biggest problem is you essentially have to beat the entire challenge before you get a reliable source of iron and copper. But you're going to get attacked regardless of whether you're doing well or not. There are other problems but the 'you're getting attacked and you have no good way to get bullets' is just an awful design decision.
In the end, I also went with the 'army of logistic bots' solution. I really wish there was some way to get future technologies without the Gleba science though, having to keep a space platform constantly running there and back is incredibly annoying.

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I ended up just brute forcing via log bots, but I did read an interesting post on the subreddit that suggested a "main river" architecture (compared to the typical "main bus"): all spoilables go on a giant belt that ends with a bunch of heat towers where they're promptly incinerated for power. You pull from the river, process the material, feed the results back onto the river. The result is that all your spoilables are always fresh, the "river" never stops flowing, and you avoid any awkward clogs. Viewing Gleba as, basically, a flow system vs. the stock system you see on the other planets seems like it'd greatly simplify logistics. Personally I didn't build a single heat tower until Aquilo which is an obvious missed opportunity in retrospect.

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My current strategy for Gleba is to think about it later. I'm not yet sure if it's going to be fun or "fun", but I'm hoping for the former.

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The only downside is, it's not 3d. Why, I can't tell you,

I prefer Satisfactory because I like the 3d.

However there are definitely people who strongly prefer the circuit diagram type problems that Factorio makes you solve.

It could be a visual thinker thing. Or possibly a electronics vs software background.

I briefly tried Satisfactory and trying to align the machines in gridless, first-person 3D was too much of a hassle.

For what it's worth there is a grid if you build on foundations. But I don't disagree that it's a hassle. Building stuff is a veritable chore in Satisfactory, not helped by the fact that the devs have refused to implement blueprints big enough to actually be useful.

They’ve since added an optional (hold Control) ‘world grid’ to Satisfactory, which helps a lot with alignment. But it definitely does get overwhelming still, and not a problem specific to just this game: Manufactio and Space Engineers struggle a lot because of it.

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Yeah, I meant more in the sense that intersections of two grids (or more, or where subgridding) can be annoying to line up at best, and Clangtastic more often.

The PCU limits are really conservative, especially with modern computers. The defaults can be easily disabled and the hard limits are a lot more reasonable, but it’s definitely a thing I hope is much improved for the vrage3 version.

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Yeah, that's fair, especially the frustrations about the game itself not really existing. Having some level of self-imposed limits on guns and ship complexity can keep a server moderately performant even with bigger ships -- I have had several 2m-5m kg multi-ship combat scenarios that were reasonably playable physics-update wise -- but the lack of reason to do it is more serious for the game.

It's realistic that space doesn't really have a ton of choke points, but it has a very First Year No Man's Sky feel to it, without a lot of the charm that NMS had. Keen's put into a wide variety of game modes that just don't really exist in the vanilla game. Even with Contact finally adding a reason to actually use the combat system after literally ten years, it ends up resulting in a couple dozen randomly-placed encounters with nothing but GPS waypoints to push toward them. MEMS and similar mods show solutions to these things, and I can understand not wanting to be quite as overwhelmingly common as in those mods, but it's disappointing in many ways.

KSP is definitely more 'complete' as a game (and more realistic, as you mention on the orbital mechanics stuff), even if some of the mechanics in the non-sandbox mode are kinda dumb. In exchange, it's a good deal more limited on the construction side.

I remember merge blocks being fairly okayish. I used them for docking without issues.

They're a lot smarter than Connectors, but there's some hilarious stuff that happens if you have too many around, or if certain blocks are on the subgrid (eg, magplates, short wheel suspensions, rotors oh god rotors).

Dyson Sphere Project had a respectable pseudo-3d grid system, made somewhat annoying by the wierdness of mapping the grid to a sphere.

Flashbacks to Planetary Annihilation ruining the best part of Supreme Commander by making bases guaranteed messy

I just like sprites more than 3d models, maybe that's weird. Plus it means my next PC build can be a 9800x3d with the same GTX 970 I've had for 6 years.

Might be critical for late game, who knows.

I only read the developer diaries. I can't play the game, because I have a family and a career that would be destroyed by it. But I've heard this is the case.

The only downside is, it's not 3d. Why, I can't tell you

There are a ton of 3D imitators in the genre, so it's 100% possible, and I know a couple people who can't play Factorio because of it. I think the devs are obsessed with the quality of the code and design in the game to such a degree that they believe 3D will never allow such precision and control of the player's viewpoint. I think they're right.

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Factorio is a uniquely addicting game for me. I love it - however I can't escape the fact that the time I spend playing it is the same muscles as programming (which has a high $ROI compared to gaming), and I just don't have the time right now. If my battletech group takes a sabbatical I may be able to schedule 1-2 days a week to play.

I suspect that most of the 3d games use a grid system somehow. My buddies have really liked Satisfactory if you'd prefer to get the 3d experience.

Also, speaking of factories, I watched an awesome little sci-fi vignette about it recently: https://youtube.com/watch?v=cntb3wcZdTw (Mid voice acting/writing but can't have it all)

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Earlier this week, I said that everything I've learnt about Chappell Roan was against my will. But after repeated exposure to her single "Good Luck, Babe!", I must confess that it's grown on me and the hype might be warranted: this didn't top the singles chart here for no reason.

I still don't understand how the absolute banger Hot To Go wound up being used in a TARGET ad. HOW DID LITTLE CAESARS NOT COWBOY UP WITH THE CASH TO GET IT?!

I love Chappell Roan, unironically. My Kink is Karma is one of the best joke songs I've heard in a while, Hot to Go and Red Wine Supernova are great workout songs. She's killing it right now. The dislike of her really confuses me.

I liked "Hot to Go". It inspired a similar reaction as when I heard "Gimme Chocolate" by Babymetal: you can't help but smile at the sheer audacious silliness of the thing.

I could take or leave the music, but I do have to admit that PowerPoint-97-looking music video is amusing.

She seems to have some impressive vocal control, though. Flipping through other videos, it sounds like this one is way above her usual register, and yet she's still doing smooth glissandos up to the highest notes?

One of the comments on the video:

Video: Graphic Design is my Passion

Lyrics: Sapphic Desire is my Passion

That’s the only one of her hits I don’t find obnoxious. I mostly can’t stand the new crop of pop girls. Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter have some okay singles but their most popular songs are annoying, Espresso has some of the worst rhymes I’ve heard in a while. On the other hand, I’ve liked Charli XCX since 2013 and she’s only gotten better since.

I liked Rodrigo's latest album actually. Almost like... rock? Sabrina's "Taste" is a fantastic cuckquean anthem, but the rest of her stuff is only OK, but she's nice to look at when building a youtube playlist so it's fine.

I don't get Chappell Roan at all.

It is funny that these women essentially have to pay homage to Taylor Swift though.

Taste is her best single. The opening line “I leave quite an impression/ 5 feet to be exact” is hilarious and on-brand for someone whose image is built around being short and horny. Isn’t she cucking the other girl though?

Oh and in her live performances of Nonsense, she changes the last line of the song to a different innuendo every time. The original is “woke up this morning thought I’d write a pop hit/ how quickly can you take your clothes off? pop quiz”. When she played on BBC she changed it to “BBC said I should keep it PG/ BBC I wish I had it in me/ There’s a double meaning if you dig deep”

nightcore version

Gen Z "listen to a song at the tempo at which it was originally recorded" challenge (this is impossible)

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Hang out with girls, or at the gym.

Listen to the radio. The only reason I've heard Chappell Roan's music is because I recently started a new job in which the office has a radio tuned to a local station playing chart music all day.

Alternatively, join a gym and don't bring your own Airpods. You will hear a lot of chart and dance music.

Or have female friends (this is how I first heard Olivia Rodrigo).

Olivia Rodrigo

I thought that song "Vampire" was alright, if a bit melodramatic. Can't imagine getting that bent out of shape about some dude you probably didn't even have sex with.

I’ve liked Charli XCX since 2013 and she’s only gotten better since

There were a few songs off the How I'm Feeling Now album I enjoyed, but I found the marketing campaign surrounding brat so annoying and inescapable (not least of which the "Kamala is brat" "endorsement") that I'm refusing to listen to her as an act of protest.

Vampire does shamelessly rip off Creep but that song also rips off an older 70s hit so I can’t complain

I like the Sabrina Carpenter cover of it.

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@MadMonzer comment:

It is worth pointing out that the Kingdom of Canada is still technically a vassal of the British Empire, so pressing the claim would mean with war with the top liege and all his vassals, which probably include nuclear Gandhi.

(1) It is somewhat interesting to note that Victoria 3 has introduced a new tier above empire, called "hegemony". (It reminds me of my abortive attempt to make a Crusader Kings 2 mod with all the titles shifted down by a step, so that "mega-empires" like India and Rome could be on their own tier separate from regular empires like Bengal and Italy.) In-game, India is a hegemony, Britain is an empire, and Canada is a kingdom. Personally, though, I think it makes more sense to call Canada an empire, with each province afforded the dignity of kingdom status in the federation. (The USA's states, with their tradition of "dual sovereignty", definitely should count as kingdoms.)

(2) Canada is not a vassal of Britain. Rather, the title is still personally held by Charles himself, though he has delegated the administrative minutiae to local steward Trudeau. Call it a personal union. (India does count as a vassal.)

In one of Canada's few contributions to the English language, it's actually the Dominion of Canada.

It's meant to convey a large self governing territory that's part of a larger empire where there are sparsely populated areas and native tribes that aren't exactly under the control of the government, but don't have the population or organization to be recognized as their own territories.

Given that a Duchy can be meaningfully sovereign (they have their own laws, for example), I don't see why the US States and Canadian Provinces can't be Duchy-tier titles. The average present-day population of a US state is 6 million, and the median is 4.5 million. The typical present-day population of a CK2 de jure Duchy in Western Europe looks like 2-3 million (much higher in England because of industrial-era population growth) vs about 15 million for a Kingdom. Also, the nearest equivalent to US states in terms of their shared sovereignty are the Electorates of the HRE, which are Duchy-tier. I think the US was a Kingdom-tier title at the time of the founding (given that it was plausible for the British Empire to vassalize it) and became an Empire in the usual way once it de facto controlled 80% of its de jure territory.

population

But what about area? Personally, I feel that a useful statistic for comparing the "sizes" of geographic entities with significantly different population densities is the product of population and area.

  • K. of Bavaria: 9.4⋅1011 people⋅km2

  • K. of Austria: 7.6⋅1011 people⋅km2

  • K. of Pennsylvania: 1.6⋅1012 people⋅km2

  • K. of Virginia: 6.3⋅1011 people⋅km2

Also, what really matters is the inherent prestige of the title, not what the title actually controls. The ERE was an empire even when reduced to one province.

I think the US was a Kingdom-tier title at the time of the founding (given that it was plausible for the British Empire to vassalize it) and became an Empire in the usual way once it de facto controlled 80% of its de jure territory.

Well, we can imagine that the de jure map changes as population density skyrockets with the colonization of virgin land. Start with the sparsely-populated colonies as duchies, the Dominion of New England as a failed kingdom, and the USA as a successful kingdom. Then at some point (between EU4 and V3) population density becomes high enough that the states now are important enough to be considered kingdoms. The sea-to-shining-sea USA can be a hegemony, encompassing the empires of New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the South, the Midwest, Louisiana, and the West. (Or something vaguely similar to that.)

K. of Bavaria: 9.4⋅1011 people⋅km2 K. of Austria: 7.6⋅1011 people⋅km2

Per ck2wiki, Austria is a de jure Duchy and the Kingdom of Bavaria covers a much larger area than modern Bavaria, including most of modern Austria. So those numbers are too low for a CK2 Kingdom. I don't have time to boot up a game right now, but will check when I do.

Come for the politics, stay for the Paradox nerdery. Brett Devereaux for antipope!

CK2Wiki

The kingdoms of Bavaria and Austria as they existed in the Victoria 3 time period are more relevant for comparison to US states, IMO. I think those borders are essentially identical to today's borders.

I haven't played any Vicky or HOI titles, unfortunately (and I haven't played enough EUIV). This thread began with a Glitterhoof post, so I assumed we were playing CK2.

I was imagining a CK2-ish game extending from the CK2 time period all the way through the V3 time period—like [insert one of the vaporware yet-to-be-released Paradox competitor games].

One of my favorite half-joking proposals: Either the US should get 50 seats at the UN, or the EU should get one. They are both unions of sovereign states under the umbrella of a larger entity, after all.

There's actually a precedent to that - Ukrainian SSR and Belorussian SSR used to have its own seat at UN, along the USSR seat. So USSR essentially held three seats, despite the SSRs being much less independent than US states. USSR wanted all 15 SSRs in but the US said if they do that, then they get 48 US states as members. So they bargained and since USSR had pretty strong position they agreed on every nominally independent state being in, despite being de-facto dependent (e.g. Philippines at the time) and even British India being in, but USSR gets three seats.

One of my favorite half-joking proposals: Either the US should get 50 seats at the UN, or the EU should get one. They are both unions of sovereign states under the umbrella of a larger entity, after all.

The individual states of the US are prohibited by the Constitution from signing treaties, which means that they can't join treaty-governed international organisations. If UN voting power was weighted by some combination of population and budgetary contribution (as it should be) then this argument would be otiose.

EU countries continue to have separate foreign policies. Sure, they're coordinated, but there's no larger mechanism to ensure absolutely unanimous action in foreign and security matters, as Hungary demonstrates.

It's been a fun week, hasn't it, guys?

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Imaginary girls?

From the "... and giving my GPU a well-deserved rest", I take it to mean he's been having a lot of fun prompting local (and presumably less censored) image generation models.

Factorio is single monitor and so easy on the GPU you could multi-task it with the imaginary girls until pretty far in the late game, I'd have thought.

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