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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   2843 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for September 26, 2025

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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Is there any way to have known, back in medieval times, that there were two massive continents across the Atlantic ocean?

I was just thinking about the popular image of Columbus. How he was this irrational madman, who believed in almost his own totally wrong calculations about the size of the Earth, when everyone already knew the true size and that he had no hope of making it all the way to India by sailing west. By pure dumb luck, he stumbled upon the New World and the rest is history. What a lucksack. Although some will admit that he was an excellent sailor, who had read widely in the astronomy and geography of his era, and carefully planned his route to use the trade winds.

If that continent didn't exist, it seems like it would substantially alter the Earth's climate. There would be nothing to stop the wind and tides from going all across the Pacific and Atlantic, so you'd have much stronger winds and storms. East Asia and West Africa would be absolutely rocked by massive storms. Instead of a useful express route, the trade winds might be way too strong to be used by ships of the time. Earth would wobble more, with it's mass much more uneven, causing a larger seasonal change. Whales could freely migrate from East Asia to Western Europe, but not much else could cross the distance. But maybe some artifacts like float all the way across by chance.

I don't know, I haven't really thought this through seriously. It's just fun to think about how that would affect the Earth's climate, and if it's possible for a gifted navigator of that time to actually realize that there must be something out there. Apparently the polynesians could find islands by looking for birds or clouds in the sky from long distances, so people really were interested in this sort of long distance exploration.

Is there any way to have known, back in medieval times, that there were two massive continents across the Atlantic ocean?

I imagine since there were Vikings - and probably others - that reached them by then, there could be sources that at least describe the presence of land there. Though probably not about what kind of land and whether that is the same land mass as Asia probably nobody knew definitely by that time. In fact, one could imagine a world where Bering land bridge stayed above water - would it then indeed be Asia?

You know, before reading your comment I had the impression that Leif Erikson had only been there briefly and then his trip was completely forgotten. But apparently there were more records than I thought. Reading his wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leif_Erikson#Legacy

I found this:

Knowledge of the Vinland journeys spread around medieval Europe, although to what extent is unclear; writers made mention of remote lands to the west, and notably the medieval chronicler Adam of Bremen directly mentions Vinland (c. 1075) based upon reports from the Danes.[note 2] It has been suggested that the knowledge of Vinland might have been maintained in European seaports in the 15th century, and that Christopher Columbus, who claimed in a letter to have visited Iceland in 1477, could have heard stories of it

I’m going to go with “no.”

Not that people weren’t interested, but the distances involved are just so much more than you might realize. A very tall thunderstorm with its top at 20 km might be visible from 500 km. The Galápagos Islands are 900 km off South America, and were discovered only by drifting off course. The Atlantic is 3-5,000 km across.

You won’t have any luck from wobble, either. The Earth’s crust represents the outer 20 km of our 6,371 km orb. Distributing that skin slightly differently isn’t going to change the orbital mechanics. We can confirm this because, well, we’ve tried it. Previous geological eras saw completely different continental arrangements, including one mega continent paired with a mega ocean.

Which leaves us with the wind. I…think you might be on to something here? I don’t know nearly enough about the current macro-scale winds to say. Does the polar jet stream count? Does it have a bigger companion over the Atlantic or Pacific? Ultimately, I’m going to guess they didn’t have the data to estimate ocean size based on wind.

Sure, I'm not suggesting that anyone could literally look across the Atlantic and see something directly. Just that humans were always fascinated by the idea of unknown land masses, and were using some pretty extreme methods to try to find it.

I guess what I was thinking for Columbus was that he could compare the wind and currents of the Mediterranean, North Sea, and Eastern Atlantic (and maybe some vague rumors about the Indian Ocean and Pacific Oceans). It's enough to see that the larger bodies have stronger winds and currents. Everyone knew to stay close to shore in the Atlantic because once you go out there the storms are rough. But he might have had some instinctual understanding as a sailor like "hmm, this is rough but it's not that much rougher than the Mediterranean. if this was really a 20,000 foot nonstop Ocean all the way to East Asia, the storms would be much worse." or even measuring the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volta_do_mar and seeing how it seems to loop in the central Atlantic, in a much tighter loop than you'd get if it was all one big ocean.

Having some thoughts about 4 dimensional spaces.

I've heard it said before that humans can't conceive of or perceive 4d spaces.

I was thinking that this isn't a mental limitation it's a perceptive and specifically a visual limitation.

Vision is basically a 2d sense, so it is limited in that it can only accurately perceive 2d environments (like a map). Our brains are able to do some juggling and work this 2d sense into perceiving our 3d environment. And it helps to have more than one eye to convert the 2d senses into a 3d understanding.

Some of our other senses are what I might consider 1d. Hearing and smell are just intensity detectors. They aren't really for navigating our 3d environment so we don't often think about how limiting they are in that way. Hearing doesn't feel 1d because we have ears that alter the sound and allow our brain to figure out directionality.

Here is the fascinating thing: we do in fact have a sense that it is 3d. Our sense of touch or our basic bodily self awareness.

If you try to imagine 4d spaces visually they make no sense, but if you instead imagine being able to contort your body inside a 4d space it can seem a little weird but not 'my brain is totally broken' levels of weird.

Simple exercise:

Imagine a bag of holding from dungeons and dragons. It's a small 6 inch round bag. But if you reach inside there is about a circular yard of space. This is a 4d space. Visually it's confusing as all hell, especially if you imagine the outer material of the bag being see-through. But imagining reaching in their with one arm while your other hand holds the bag is not all that confusing.

So by string together multiple 3d senses, via our sense of bodily space and touch, we can perceive 4d environments. We don't really have 4d environments so our brain doesn't have any built in hardware to make this easier.

5 spacial dimensions is where things might actually go off the rails. I have no idea how to even describe such a space. Certainty nothing as simple or widespread as a bag of holding. Curious if anyone else can think of 5 dimensional spaces used in fiction?

Inability to perceive 4D spaces just kills me. It turns out that "imaginary" numbers are actually at the root of reality, and most functions we're interested in are rooted in analytic multivalued functions, visualizable in ℂ×ℂ. That's a 2-complex-dimension space, so it's 4-(real)-dimensional, so we're screwed. Best you can usually do is to switch back and forth between plots of output magnitude and phase (or between real and imaginary components of output), or plot magnitude as height along with phase as color. Fortunately we don't have to be able to visualize something to describe and compute with it, but I feel like it could have helped a lot.

The "bag of holding" trick is clever, it gets you the topology of a 3D manifold that can't be embedded in less than ℝ⁴, but to me it "feels" like a very fixed geometry - two parallel 3D spaces, with the "hole" of the bag's opening connecting them.

TVTropes is shockingly empty of 5-D spaces in fiction. There's a Greg Egan book that takes that seriously, there's a Douglas Adams joke, there's a corny Superman villain, and it's sparse and downhill from there.

It turns out that "imaginary" numbers are actually at the root of reality, and most functions we're interested in are rooted in analytic multivalued functions, visualizable in ℂ×ℂ. That's a 2-complex-dimension space, so it's 4-(real)-dimensional, so we're screwed. Best you can usually do is to switch back and forth between plots of output magnitude and phase (or between real and imaginary components of output), or plot magnitude as height along with phase as color. Fortunately we don't have to be able to visualize something to describe and compute with it, but I feel like it could have helped a lot.

I don't think I understood any of this.

The "bag of holding" trick is clever, it gets you the topology of a 3D manifold that can't be embedded in less than ℝ⁴, but to me it "feels" like a very fixed geometry - two parallel 3D spaces, with the "hole" of the bag's opening connecting them.

Its the simplest 4D space I could think of, but I think our touch perception would still work just fine on the most complex 4D space available. In an unobstructed 4D space your 3D senses would continue to work just fine, just as in an unobstructed 3D space your 2D sense of vision works just fine. Its when the space is obstructed that the lower dimensional perception becomes difficult or confusing. A wall obstructs 2D vision. But if there are no obstructions there isn't much to perceive either. In 3D outer space you can turn any direction and see infinite nothing (except the stars). In 4D outer space you'd be able to turn more as you twist into that 4th spacial dimension but you'd feel nothing different. You could do some visually weird things like phase your hands through your own body. But the actual sensation and mental model of you doing that wouldn't feel weird. You can sort of do it right now if you have a big enough beer gut, just press your hand into some soft tissue and move it out of the way, your hand is now where your body normally is. The only difference is that in 4D you wouldn't have the dual feedback of the skin pressing against each other.

I think the best spacial sense would work something like knowing the fluid shape of the area around you. Going back to fantasy, imagine a slime monster. A gelatinous round ball that can only feel its "skin". For a slime navigating any dimensional space is all the same. If you magically found yourself in a 4D space you might be best off acting a bit like a slime by closing your eyes and feeling your way around. Your eyes will lie, your touch won't.

I don't think I understood any of this.

My apologies. I'll back up, if you're still curious.

Think of the function sin(x).

We can take a number, like x=π/3, and plug it into the function, and we get another number, in this case sin(π/3)=√3/2. (here π/3 is in radians, which when we start doing calculus turns out to be more natural than 60°) We can imagine doing that with every real number, and plotting every (x,y) on a plane, and we get a "sine wave" picture like this. That "plane" gets called ℝ×ℝ, or ℝ², because it's defined with 2 real number (ℝ) lines that form a cross intersecting at one point. It's a great picture! I can think about the function inputs as being the length of lines in one direction, outputs as the lengths of lines in another, derivatives as slopes of angled lines, etc.

But ... how about sin(i), where i=√-1? On the one hand, who cares, because it seems like √-1 shouldn't exist: there's no real number whose square is negative, and even when we found such numbers to be useful intermediate results in algebra problems we still decided to call them "imaginary" as opposed to the newly-named "real" numbers; you'd still expect to have a real number in the end. On the other hand, we soon found "complex numbers" (ℂ, all the numbers x+yi you can make by adding a real number x to an imaginary number yi) to also be useful in engineering problems (they represent oscillation a way similar to how positive numbers can represent growth and negative ones decay), and then we found them to be useful in physics problems (where a "quantum wave function" takes complex values), and at some point it's hard to ignore something as not "real" when it's at the foundation of our understanding of reality.

We can plot a collection of complex numbers on the "complex plane": for every complex number z=x+yi you just plot it as (x,y). One complex number can be described with two reals.

But how do we plot a function that takes complex number inputs and gives complex number outputs? We would need to plot it in ℂ×ℂ, two complex planes that form a cross intersecting at one point. "But two planes meet in a line, not a point", you might object, and that's true, in 3D. ℂ×ℂ only fits in 4D. If I wanted to clearly plot part of a real function y=f(x), I can plot each point as (x,y) in a square, but if I want to clearly plot part of a complex function f(x+yi)=u+vi, I need to be able to plot each point as (x,y,u,v) in a hypercube. I don't have any hypercubes lying around! I can't even visualize a hypercube.

So, we plot garbage like this instead. The xy plane there is the complex plane of inputs x+yi, and for each output u+vi=sin(x+yi), the height z of the red surface is u and the height z of the green surface is v. We plot (x,y,u) and (x,y,w) in the same cube and try to picture the true (x,y,u,w) from the result. Those two 2D surfaces twisting through 3D space are really two aspects of a single 2D surface twisting through 4D space. They're easier to understand if you use that web page to rotate them back and forth and turn them translucent, but still I can't picture the single surface in 4D that they represent. If I could actually visualize 4D then the plot of that single surface would fit in my head as naturally as that first "sine wave" plot did.

If you magically found yourself in a 4D space you might be best off acting a bit like a slime by closing your eyes and feeling your way around. Your eyes will lie, your touch won't.

I think here it depends on what you mean by "in a 4D space".

If my movements were naturally restricted to a 3D manifold (a "surface" is just a 2D manifold) curving through 4D space then you're probably exactly right. Let's back up to 2D. Imagine as an analog a 2D version of me, living on the surface of a globe. Open my eyes, and if light also follows the globe surface then in any unobstructed direction I look I see the back of my own head one globe-circumference away, but if I'm small enough compared to the globe then it feels almost like I'm in good old flat 2D space. Even if the globe is made of taffy and some 3D monster stretches spikes out of it, mushes parts of it together elsewhere to make a torus or worse, whatever. I can still move around any weird surface I'm stuck to so long as it's smooth enough, to any part of it I want to go to so long as it's it's connected. When I'm on the globe, or on any points of "positive curvature" on a more complicated surface, I might feel a little weird (there's more "room" inside a shape than you would expect from its boundary, so it might be like my skin is getting compressed or my innards stretched). Or, on points of "negative curvature" on a more complicated shape, I might feel like my skin was getting stretched or my innards compressed. But either way, if I was small enough compared to the curvature then I'd still be just a slightly squished-around version of me.

Your "bag of holding" example actually is a 3D manifold - locally I can move parts of my body in no more or fewer than the usual 3 dimensions: up/down, left/right, or forward/backward. But those things are only consistent locally - if I stick my arm 10 inches forward into the bag and then reach 10 inches up, it won't be in the same place as if I reach my other arm 10 inches up (outside the bag) and then 10 inches forward. This 3D manifold has geometry that can't exist in 3D space, but only embedded in a space with at least one more dimension.

But with the same one extra dimension, if my movements were unrestricted? Local senses like touch would get weird too. Imagine that 2D me, previously stuck to the globe like a flat sticker (though free to move parallel to the globe surface), suddenly peeled away into the air. I can still wiggle around in my accustomed two directions, but my orientation with respect to that third direction is at the whim of the breeze. On a globe I might be able to look or propel myself north/south vs east/west, but 2D me has no muscles that can turn his limbs up/down. Even if someone took pity and stuck me back on the globe so I could move around its surface again, if they stuck me on backwards then I'd be backwards for the rest of time; clockwise would seem to be counter-clockwise and vice-versa. 3D me in a true 4D space would be in the same boat; my arm has no way to reach hyperup/hyperdown.

I think I understood the latter half of that and it was a fun ride, thanks for writing it.

Thanks! If you haven't already read Flatland, you might enjoy it. It lacks some of the mathematical sophistication (when it was written, general curved manifolds were still a cutting-edge idea) and brevity (though it is only 100 pages, and a fast read) of my ripoff here, but it does retain some attributes I had to drop like "social satire" and "literary quality".

I don’t understand any of this.

Stuff with boundary conditions is modeled by differential equations. Differential equations have wave-based solutions. Waves must be represented with 2 numbers, and one way to do this is to separate the “real” and “imaginary” components. If we treat these like (x,y) pairs, we can graph them on a plane just like any other pair of numbers. The set of all these complex numbers is denoted ℂ.

Royst is talking about a different (but similar?) class of equations which have solutions that require 4 numbers. To graph them, we’d need two simultaneous planes: ℂ×ℂ. So we’re out of luck unless we want to get cute with color.

Wake up, babe. The release-date trailer for Menace just dropped, plus a Steam demo. The short version is that I am trying to remain calm about it and failing.

The premise sounds like someone took a Marine logistics officer, asked him what keeps him up at night, and then turned the list into a video game. You are the XO of a cruiser that is definitely not the USMC, dispatched to a distant system where governance has failed. You arrive underprepared, underequipped, with no resupply on the calendar, and your job is to impose order on chaos using a handful of professionals, some local goodwill, and whatever spare parts and recruits you can charm out of the nearest settlement.

The tactics layer feels like a love letter to small-units reality. We are talking platoon-scale fights, weapons that behave like their modern cousins, and engagements where suppression and angles decide the story more than crit rolls. The core loop is the canonical four-step sermon your squad leader gave you on a hot range: find, fix, flank, fuck. If you execute it cleanly, the map opens. If you skip a verb, the map closes on you.

Randomness exists, but it is escorted to the party and kept under supervision. Shots are not coin flips. They are more like probability distributions with manners (it helps that each bullet is individually simulated, and there are plenty of bullets). A poorly placed team can still win a duel through luck, just not reliably, and the game keeps reminding you that reliability is what we pay commanders for.

Structure matters too. There is very little of the superhero problem. No demigod hero units, no psychic artillery, no cool-downs that feel like a designer handing you a hall pass. The interesting choices happen at the margins: where you put your machine gun, whether you burn a smoke grenade now or save it for when the geometry gets unfriendly, how much risk you accept to clear a compound while you can overhear pirates shooting civilians. You're usually outnumbered, often outgunned, so it's handy that your cruiser can provide orbital fire support (in very limited doses).

Between missions the logistics fantasy takes over, and by fantasy I mean a spreadsheet with narrative lipstick. You have relationships with locals to cultivate so you can recruit and scrounge. Your ship is an upgrade tree with personality, and your squad leaders are upgrade trees with mortgages. The campaign asks you to befriend people not because friendship is abstractly good, but because friendship can be exchanged for 5.56.

I tried the demo after watching a few early-access runs. It is good in the way that makes you reevaluate other games that you thought were good. The maps push you to care about frontage and interlocking fields of fire. The suppression system punishes recklessness and rewards audacity, which is the correct moral. There are customization options tucked into every seam. I kept having the sensation that someone had finally smuggled doctrine into a toy and gotten away with it.

I have quibbles. My biggest is ammunition. LMGs and MMGs seem to go dry after roughly half a dozen bursts. Thematically it tracks with scarcity, and yes, machine gunners really do live at the intersection of mass and logistics. Still, there is a difference between teaching conservation and turning your base-of-fire element into a limited-use power-up. If the goal is to model the discipline of sustained fire, the numbers might want a second look. After all, a dedicated AT launcher modeled on a Carl Gustav allows you to fire 3 rounds, which is pretty realistic. The MGs need to scale better.

There are a few other aspects where there's a clear concession to game design over realism, such as RPGs or AT vehicles only killing a single unit of an infantry squad even on a direct hit, but eh, I can live with that.

But if this is what the vertical slice looks like, I am comfortable being publicly optimistic. The demo is already doing that annoying thing where you start composing post-mission AARs in your head while brushing your teeth. If the full release lands early next year on the same trajectory, I suspect it will become the default recommendation for anyone who ever said they wanted tactics that reward adults.

This appears to be an accidental comment in place of an edit.

Thanks for the catch. I have a habit of rewriting comments I'm not happy with, and apparently I fat fingered it.

You forgot to mention that it's from the developer of Battle Brothers, an acclaimed game in the low-tech end of the same genre. (Unlike those of Battle Brothers, the characters of Menace do have legs.)

a Steam demo

The game will also be available on GOG.

Can someone help me understand horror as a genre? I really don't see the appeal of it. I categorize it in 3 types, either it's jumpscares with loud music suddenly which would startle pretty much everyone, a slow burn of building anxiety with no payoff or just really gross stuff, neither which make any sense as to why someone finds appealing. What do you like about it? Is my categorization off, or maybe missing some angle? Am I just incapable of enjoying, in the sense of that ssc post how some people don't have that "coming as one" stadium/church/large gathering sense?

Pretty much all of the most stirring and wondrous fiction I have read is inextricably tangled up with existential horror. Oddly enough, I think this feeling is most straightforwardly illustrated in a 1908 children's book, The Wind in the Willows - it's all based on bedtime stories the author told his son, and in line with this the vast majority of the book consists of extremely comfortable and idyllic stories of life in the English countryside. But there's one chapter that's completely distinct from the rest, named The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, in which the Mole and the Rat venture into the woods to look for a lost baby otter, and start being lured into the wilderness by a pagan god:

Slowly, but with no doubt or hesitation whatever, and in something of a solemn expectancy, the two animals passed through the broken tumultuous water and moored their boat at the flowery margin of the island. In silence they landed, and pushed through the blossom and scented herbage and undergrowth that led up to the level ground, till they stood on a little lawn of a marvellous green, set round with Nature's own orchard-trees— crab-apple, wild cherry, and sloe.

'This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me,' whispered the Rat, as if in a trance. 'Here, in this holy place, here if anywhere, surely we shall find Him!'

Then suddenly the Mole felt a great Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head, and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror— indeed he felt wonderfully at peace and happy— but it was an awe that smote and held him and, without seeing, he knew it could only mean that some august Presence was very, very near. With difficulty he turned to look for his friend. and saw him at his side cowed, stricken, and trembling violently. And still there was utter silence in the populous bird-haunted branches around them; and still the light grew and grew.

Perhaps he would never have dared to raise his eyes, but that, though the piping was now hushed, the call and the summons seemed still dominant and imperious. He might not refuse, were Death himself waiting to strike him instantly, once he had looked with mortal eye on things rightly kept hidden. Trembling he obeyed, and raised his humble head; and then, in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fulness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.

'Rat!' he found breath to whisper, shaking. 'Are you afraid?'

'Afraid?' murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. 'Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet— and yet— O, Mole, I am afraid!'

It is only a side story unconnected to the main narrative thread - this brief delve into the cosmic is completely out of place and comes out of nowhere, and plays no part in the story going forward - but it's by far the most memorable chapter in the collection. It was removed from many versions of the book because it was deemed too strange or too creepy for its target audience. Now, this chapter certainly has a lot more of a positive and uplifiting tone than much horror, Pan here is depicted as a benign presence, but it does carry with it a haunting supernatural vibe that's merely incidental and necessary for such an encounter.

I feel as if a lot of the best horror fiction gives me a more extreme version of that same feeling - it isn't gratuitous; it's just an intrinsic part of confronting something (an entity or a concept) that by nature inherently threatens your sense of security and place in the world. It's the deep-seated, queasy emptiness and awe you get when you first realise on a gut level just how truly vast and gaping the distances between planets are even in our own stellar neighbourhood; it's the kind of memetic virus that has you staring absent-mindedly into your morning coffee once it crops up in your train of thought. Shock (the thing a lot of bad horror films optimise for) is one thing. Horror is another. Done right, it's deeply affecting in a way I barely find in any other fiction.

For much of horror it is an amplification and expansion of a mystery. Instead of who killed whom and why, it becomes how is this possible and how do we stop it? And often the answers will not be available but that's part of the appeal of horror that it can't answer everything or more often that it won't. You get what the story provides, horror makes it easy to be sloppy, yeah, but it also makes sure it's a genre that can allow anything to happen.

Now, what you're describing is the tone of horror. The telltale signs that show or trick the audience into believing that anything can happen. In other genres it's very rare for things not to work out, for evil to triumph, for the protagonist to lose and die, but it's accepted as part of the genre of horror. If characters can die horribly than it's more possible that important characters can die. If important characters can die then evil can win. If evil can win then you're watching something that you can't predict.

But this goes beyond plot contrivances. Unless a story goes out of its way to tone-match to another genre then horror is the catch-all bottom of the pit for anything weird. If it's time travel and it doesn't go out of its way to try to be a comedy or make damn sure known that it's scientific then it ends up in horror. Horror is the genre without a safety-net to make sure that it stays within certain boundaries. Sure, it makes it easy to have things end up worse because genre boundaries usually exist for a reason to make things more enjoyable but for a lot of people the risk is worth the reward because they crave things that are different, odd, unexplained or even gross.

Aside from the rest, the gross, the gore, is a taste that not everyone has but it's a human appetite that's really not served elsewhere but there are people that watch pimples being popped, or surgeries, or even actual people dying. There's an aspect of just straight up visceral response to the thing be it disgust or awe but just a shock out of the humdrum of thinking that someone being murdered doesn't matter or is nothing. A movie about a serial killer that strangles victims doesn't destroy is disrespect the body enough to make people care or be invested, the deeper we go the more we force the audience to get invested in what's happening. For most of Saw the people in the traps are people that are bad and a lot deserve to die but the horror at the disfigurement, destruction of their bodies, the struggle against death, we suddenly care whether they live or die when we probably wouldn't before if it was a just .22 to the back of the head or a rope around their necks. I don't like the saw movies, really, but I have to admit the entirety of the gore and grossness makes the deaths inside it feel closer to real than they would have otherwise and each successive one makes you want the next character to survive the trap(s). It's more expensive than swelling violins but it's probably more effective as well.

But I'll go back to what I said before, you're describing the tone of horror movies which is basically a costume these days and it's specifically trying to make you believe that anything can happen to heighten excitement. There are quite a lot of horror movies that aren't horror but just wear it as a costume these days and there are quite a lot of movies that are called horror just because they have more gore than is acceptable or set a large expectation that good guys can lose. Maybe tone is what horror actually is but I don't think that Silence of the Lambs or Green Room are horror just because they have some or a lot of that tone.

It sounds like you just don't enjoy horror and that's fine. Horror is the bottom of the pit avoiding every other genre's safety nets for good or ill.

It's feeding your need for cognition for threat and survival scenarios with superstimulus parameters. Also, supernatural horror has a lot of the same general appeal as fantasy fiction.

I told someone ages ago I was going to write an effortpost on horror and then I never did, but if there are multiple interested parties then that might motivate me to finally get around to it...

Long story short is that the sublime is intrinsically horrific.

Most "contemporary horror films" are pretty bad (for many of the same reasons that formulaic genreslop in general is bad). But there are many works that have horror "elements" (David Lynch films are my go-to example) that are brilliant.

Even the most hardcore fans of mainstream horror movies tend to look down on jumpscares. They're fun every once in a while, but ultimately a jumpscare is just a pure physiological response, like pinching someone on the arm; it's the lowest form of horror, there's nothing conceptually interesting about it.

The fundamental problem with horror is that it's a great example of Sturgeon's law - 90% of it is crap.

There is definitely good horror out there - however, a large part of its appeal for people is that it lets them examine and process scary and uncomfortable concepts through a filter of fantasy. If it's a topic that's doesn't personally scare you enough to engage, or too scary/uncomfortable for you to maintain that separation, it's not going to resonate.

There's also the problem that Torture Porn is really cheap to produce and it's absolutely flooding the market with shit, but that's a problem with the market and not the genre.

If you can tell me some examples of movies you've liked or disliked, and why, I can suggest some options if you're interested.

Can someone help me understand horror as a genre?

Sure.

either it's jumpscares with loud music suddenly which would startle pretty much everyone

The appeal of these is (a) date night with your girlfriend/boyfriend, since it's a good excuse cozy up, (b) a quick endorphin hit, like going on a rollercoaster (c) as a social bravery game, usually by young boys, where a group tries to see who will crack and get ripped by their bros.

So, social lubricant.

a slow burn of building anxiety with no payoff or just really gross stuff

The appeal of ugliness in horror, or cosmic and existential horror, is that it stirs the sense of beauty by remotion. Silent Hill 2 and 3 are games I remember not because they were scary or fun (in fact playing them could often be tedious) but because they evoked a deep longing for meaning, sympathy for suffering, and a desire for catharsis. Horror also works to make you more emotionally vulnerable to such themes, because being scared is tiring, and tired people are less emotionally regulated.

Recommended video from the Distributist. The framing is political but IIRC he discusses the psychological hole filled by disturbing horror.

Cute 3d world browser game: https://messenger.abeto.co/

An instant classic in the PvC (player versus camera) genre.

Very impressive for a 3D browser game.

…bot post? (Sorry to be suspicious!)

Saw it go viral on Twitter. Does kind of read like a bot post but it’s just a cute 3d world game you can play in browser without signing up

Probably just browsing HN. It was on the front page recently.

Some murder cases create such intense media circuses that they inspire numerous fictionalised "true crime" depictions thereof, sometimes years or even decades later, with varying degrees of historical accuracy and queasy exploitation. There have been dozens of movies and TV shows made about Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy and Charles Manson respectively; even less notorious killers like Aileen Wuornos has been the subject of two movies and numerous documentaries. Oftentimes, one of these films comes to be seen as the definitive account of the events in question: David Fincher's film Zodiac is widely considered the "canonical" film about its titular serial killer, despite being neither the first nor last such film.

This got me thinking about the most famous serial killer of all time, Jack the Ripper: a case which, like Zodiac, remains unsolved decades later. There have been dozens if not hundreds of attempts to depict the murders more-or-less historically accurately in feature films, along with further hundreds of fictional works inspired by the case (even one of the first films directed by no less than Alfred Hitchcock, released thirty-nine years after the actual case - the same interval as that between the Zodiac murders and Fincher's film). This got me wondering: is there a film which is to Jack the Ripper as Zodiac is to the Zodiac killer - a film with a scrupulous regard for historical accuracy comparable to Fincher's, which takes few if any gross historical liberties, and which scholars consider an accurate portrayal? (Right off the bat this would immediately exclude Alan Moore's From Hell or its film adaptation, which were never intended to be historically accurate; or any of the various fanfic works which depict the murder being investigated by Sherlock Holmes.)

More broadly, what are some of your favourite films or TV shows in this sub-genre of "historically accurate, non-exploitative true crime"? The other night I watched the film Harvest starring Caleb Landry Jones, who I recognised from supporting roles in Get Out and the Twin Peaks revival. (Harvest was interesting and gorgeous to look at, but ultimately rather dull, and its runtime felt unearned.) I went on Jones's Wikipedia page and found that he recently won a Best Actor award at Cannes for his starring turn in Nitram, a fictionalised portrayal of the infamous Port Arthur attack in 1996, the worst mass shooting in Australian history and which directly precipitated that country's gun buyback program which American gun control advocates often seek to model. Nitram's director Justin Kurzel previously directed Snowtown, a fictionalised account of a group of serial killers operating in the titular Australian town in the 1990s, which I've heard is an excellent but gruelling watch. If any of you have seen Nitram or Snowtown, are they worth checking out?

One of my little hobbies is examining historical evidence and trying to make a reasonable guess at the truth of things. I thought an example of such might be fun enough for people here, so here you are.

Bret Devereaux writes of Roman weavers:

That said, while the production of clothing was an essential task, it was not a well-remunerated task. Regular weavers – not specialized in rare or fine fabrics – are some of the least well paid individuals in Diocletian’s Price Edict, paid just 12-16 denarii per day (20-40 for those working high quality linen, 25-40 for those working on silk), compared to 25 denarii per day for an unskilled farm laborers, mule drivers, shepherds and 50 or more for skilled artisans working wood, stone or metal (Carpenters: 50; mosaic workers, 60, wall painters (fresco, one assumes): 75, shipwrights, 50-60, blacksmith or baker, 50, etc.).

First, the reason this passage drew my attention: that an at least partially skilled laborer could draw half the wage of a farmhand does not pass the smell test. Why would such individuals not simply up and leave? The farms await with their great bounties. Such a discrepancy demands explanation. Bret attempts one, but his is that capital ownership was much more important in the labor-rich premodern environment, and that therefore the earnings of weavers could be driven down. This explains nothing of the discrepancy between weavers and presumably equally disenfranchised hired hands. So what could account for this?

First, background on Diocletian’s edict. Normally we think of price controls as a minimum cost or wage for this and that, typically as a socialist dictator’s ploy to stay popular. Diocletian was setting a maximum to try and halt inflation. So in each of these, we should consider: given an environment where labor is in a relative position of strength, Diocletian forbids the worker demanding a wage beyond a certain amount. If labor is not strong, and currency is not too greatly debased, then we should expect actual prices to stay lower than these marks, or else for wages to float beyond them on the gray market.

In the edict itself, however, low-grade weavers were not paid by the day, but rather by the pound. This is likely what is generating Bret’s estimate range here, as it’s hard to know exactly how much a weaver can weave. But there’s another confounder here, which is that the edict does not specify the quality of the weaver, but rather the quality of the wool, which is coarse. Wool’s weight per yard is not fixed, but varies on the thickness of the thread - so a weaver using coarse thread is simply going to be producing more pounds per yard and per unit of labor than one using fine thread. Flax is finer than wool, and presumably is going to be priced higher per pound.

And since our estimates on historical productivity are at best sketchy, we really can’t rely on our figures here. Modern estimates are typically given by historical reenactors. Not to put too fine a point on it, these are amateurs and historians who are bookish and unlikely to be either driven or particularly skilled with their hands. Premoderns, on the other hand, were going to eat or starve based on their productivity, and starvation was not so very far away. They would be working hard (perhaps 12h/d instead of 8 max), and with no end to practice, and likely with more dexterity than book learning. We should expect their productivity to be substantially greater than our contemporaries. And, given that we know Diocletian was trying to set reasonable price caps to halt inflation, we can assume that he was working off of estimates to keep the overall income of these similar workers in line. The farmhand shares wages with a water carrier and a mule driver. The equivalent for the wool weaver would be the day-wage linen weaver, who made 20d. That should actually make us strongly suspect that a weaver of coarse wool fabric was making a pound and a third, or a yard and change, of cloth a day, rather than making much less money. (Also interesting: women make much less a day, down to 12d. Was this because women worked slower, because they were expected to work part-time alongside childcare, or because they were understood to be exceptionally vulnerable without a working man and therefore easy to exploit? The wage gap persists.)

Lastly, a couple considerations on the nature of the work. Farmhands are presumably not sharecroppers, but rather hired help during the backbreaking and urgent plowing and harvest seasons. They would not be needed the rest of the year. In contrast, given that thread does not spoil like food, a weaving workshop can operate year-round and would likely prefer to so distribute the work in order to fully utilize workspace and looms. So our farmhand is hired for a few weeks of brutal but reasonably paid work, while our weaver is steadily employed throughout the year. Even though the farmhand likely picks up additional work to cover the gaps, the needed rest after these periods means he is all but certain to average below his sticker price. How much lower is a hard estimate, but 20% of the time out of work is sufficient to bring his wage down to the linen-weaver. And we have to assume that Diocletian was completely aware of this fact.

So, in summary: looking at the actual numbers and the actual purpose of the edict, alongside some reasonable assumptions about the comparable nature of the work and our own limited ability to produce, yields a plausible interpretation of the evidence where the astonishing anomaly of Bret’s assertion that weavers were paid like women (on its own an anomaly) vanishes. And this is a technique, for what it’s worth, that Bret has used himself for things like military equipment weight, so I think he most likely is just less familiar with this field and took someone else’s uncited estimate as gospel instead of examining the strange details like he would for military matters.

If something doesn’t make sense on the roughest estimates, that’s almost always because one premise or another is false or misunderstood. This mutation of syllogistic reasoning holds quite broadly.

Why would such individuals not simply up and leave?

—Having the freedom to change jobs

—In Diocletian’s Rome

Anon, I....

How did this work? What was the gears-level social fabric (heh) that prevented people from changing jobs?

Taxes.

Diocletian is credited with starting the process of tying tenants to their land as part of a combined land/labor tax regime. So it’s technically the opposite.

Fun exercise, but I’m not sure why you’re so dismissive of “amateurs and historians.” Surely they could price in the same factors you’re considering?

A translation of the edict can be found here. You’ll want sections VII, XIX and XX.

I suspect the 12-16d number comes from “women weavers of tunicas,” the only wool worker listed with a daily wage. It’s hard to line up the terminology, but this seems to be a different job than either the linen or wool weavers in the next section.

Wool weavers are paid 15d/lb for the lowest quality fiber. If the weights and times further down the page are remotely accurate, that pound is closer to a week’s work than a day’s. Maybe it doesn’t include spinning? But that raises its own set of questions.

I’m dismissing their physical abilities.

I’m surprised you quoted XX when XXI is pretty clearly what he’s referencing.

Okay, but what makes you think the historians didn’t account for that already?

And you’re right; XXI has the weavers. XX has the “woman weavers of tunicas”.

Diocletian’s Price Edict

Fun fact: One well-regarded Dungeons & Dragons offshoot, ACKS (the Adventurer Conqueror King System), uses this document as a basis for some of its economics.

How ACKS Prices Were Set

To correctly set the relational price of any given good or service in ACKS, we needed a historical price for the good, and the historical price for wheat, extracted from the same time and place. Otherwise we'd just have Cargo Cult prices [as in D&D and other offshoots of it].

Fortunately, while developing ACKS II, we were able to find an English translation of all of the known fragments of the Edictum de Pretiis Rerum Venalium, better known as the Edict on Maximum Prices. Issued in 301 AD by Emperor Diocletian, the Edict sets the maximum price for hundreds of goods and services in denarii.

What makes the Edict so useful for ACKS is that it is set in the time period that the Auran Empire campaign emulates, Late Antiquity. By knowing how much a Diocletian denarius was worth in ACKS, we were able to use the Edict to establish historical prices for the huge number of goods and services that it covers. Since ACKS prices were benchmarked against wheat, where 1 quarter of wheat costs 4 GP [gold pieces], we were able to use the price of wheat in the Edict to work out the value of the denarii.

The Edict tells us that 1 modius kastrensis (“k. mod.”) of wheat sold for 100 denarii. The modius is a unit of dry measure equivalent to 8.73 liters. The modius kastrensis is equal to 1.5 modii, hence 12.93 liters. 12.93 liters of wheat weighs 22.15 lb. Since a quarter of wheat is 480 lb, there are (480/22.15 =) 21.67 k. mod. per quarter. Therefore the price of a quarter of wheat, under the Edict, is (100 denarii / k. mod.) × (21.67 k. mod. / quarter) = 2166.33 denarii. We have established that 1 quarter of wheat is worth 4 GP. Therefore 4 GP/quarter = 2166 denarii/quarter; and 1 GP = 541.58 denarii.

With this conversion rate established, we are able to establish wheat-relative prices for all the various goods and services extracted from the Edict and convert them into denominations of GP, SP, and CP. However, as we did so, we discovered that just because a price is in the Edict doesn't necessarily mean it's the proper price for ACKS. For one thing, the Edict itself was a price fixing statute, and governments have a long history of getting price controls very wrong. Diocletian might have been—for all we know—as bad at pricing goods and services as the typical RPG. In addition, the very particular conditions means that some prices might be peculiar to that place and time. From time to time, we even encountered prices in the Edict that were mathematically impossible—goods selling for less than their cost of production, for instance. In such cases we have revised the prices based on other research. Finally, we must also note that certain adventuring equipment in ACKS II are simply not priced historically. In particular:

  • While the medium and heavy armors are correctly priced, padded and leather armor are too expensive relative to historical norms. Padded armor should probably be 2–5 GP while leather armor should be no more than 5 GP. For simplicity we standardized at 10 GP = 1 AC = 1 stone.

  • Grappling hooks and other climbing gear do not seem to have been in wide use during Late Antiquity. Their use in naval warfare (with grappling ballistae) is notable enough that the ancient historians go out of their way to mention it. We have retained them in ACKS II, but raised the price to reflect that they are a specialized technology not otherwise in use.

  • Healing herbs with the potent efficacy of those found in ACKS II are simply fantasy. No poultice of comfrey or woundwort had anywhere near the curative power we have assigned them. However, healing herbs with a realistic level of efficacy would have almost no discernable game effect. Therefore we have magnified the efficacy of healing herbs to a playable (albeit fantastical) level, and increased their cost to an ahistorical level to compensate. If verisimilitude is a worry, assume the healing herbs are rare, fragile, and hard-to-find varietals of the real-world herbs.

  • Lanterns of the sort described in the Adventuring Equipment section did not exist in Late Antiquity. However, they probably would have existed in a Late Antiquity in which legionaries had to enter dungeons to fight monsters. Therefore we have included them in the game but at an ahistorical high cost. The same is true for adventurer's harnesses, disguise kits, thieves' tools, and other adventuring equipment. All of these items were well within the capabilities of the ancients.

  • The carts and wagons that existed in Late Antiquity were relatively primitive in the construction of their harnesses, yokes, and wheels. Rather than force adventurers to endlessly deal with broken axles, oxen choking on poor harness[*], and so on, we have included vehicles more appropriate for a later era and raised the price accordingly. You can simulate historical carts and wagons by applying some of the cost reduction and penalties from the scavenged equipment tables.

*A different well-regarded tabletop RPG, GURPS (the Generic Universal Roleplaying System), claims that this is a misconception:

Breast-Strap Harness

TL0

This is a rope or leather harness that wraps around the animal’s chest. Initial research suggested that this and other early harnesses rode up and choked horses wearing them. Recent reconstructions have shown this to be incorrect. The real drawback is that, on horses, these harnesses appear to be inefficient when used to pull plows or drag loads on the ground (again, halve the pulling divisor), as opposed to when pulling wagons.

Another possible error here could be that the weaving the compensation is intended for isn't actually skilled labour.

Basic weaving mass producing basic cloth isn't skilled labour. It's extremely simple and repetitive. You could be shown how to do it in 10 minutes. Furthermore, it's not physically strenuous (unlike the farmwork you describe) or dangerous and you can do it indoors.

Given the above the relative compensation makes sense.

There is weaving that absolutely would count as skilled labour but that is explicitly excluded.

Basic weaving mass producing basic cloth isn't skilled labour. It's extremely simple and repetitive. You could be shown how to do it in 10 minutes. Furthermore, it's not physically strenuous (unlike the farmwork you describe) or dangerous and you can do it indoors.

I also think this is the reason. You can be too frail to work as a farmhand, or lame, or half-blind, but as long as you have two hands not destroyed by arthritis, you can still weave.

Today I had Gemini CLI call the oncall scheduler program with various preference weights, write a python script to compare the outputs, explore different weights on its own, suggest a configuration, and write a message to my team about the proposed change to our official weights.

Step 0 was to convince it that it was incorrect in its assertion that it lacked access to my shell to run the thing in the first place. I ultimately told it to try it and tell me the error.

This is the future. I'm not sure if I hate it or not. We used to just ask each other to swap shifts.

My son is of that age now so we watched the 1960s 101 Dalmatians which has a delightful little sketch where a fake TV show, "Whats my Crime" is playing. I think now is the perfect time for someone to actually make a show like that.

What are some other fake shows that need to be made in 2025?

It's a crime that no one has made Sick, Sad World yet.

You probably already know this, but “What’s My Crime” was a parody of the popular show “What’s My Line,” which originated in the United States, but which also spawned over a dozen international versions. Almost all known surviving episodes of the US version can be found in their entirety on YouTube.

"Worker and Parasite"

"Alice's Adventures Through the Windshield Glass"

Maybe AI will do what Ron Paul failed to do and make anime real.

Sticking with the Simpsons, I’d love to see the nature film “Man vs. Nature: The Road to Victory.”

Wheel of Fish from UHF

The little ads and bits from that film are amazing! I love Conan the Librarian and Spatula City and when the little boy wins a drink from the fire hose after finding the marble in the oatmeal! I know Is have watched that every day if it had been a Saturday morning show.

Red snapper... umm very tasty.

"ow my balls" from Idiocracy

Video games thread:

Back to Silksong after a few weeks break. A difficulty tweak mod made the game much more enjoyable for me. If you're in a similar boat to me — if you enjoyed HK1 but thought the Radiance ending challenges were too much, enjoyed the difficulty of early FromSoft games but thought they crossed a line around Sekiro/Elden Ring — I recommend the following changes to the config file, as the defaults trivialize the game a bit too much: 2x -> 1.5x Player damage, 2x -> 1.6x rosaries, disable Tool regen. On the other hand, consider changing the health regen to every 1 second; it only starts after you're 12 seconds damage free, so it won't make the boss gameplay much easier, but will make runbacks less tedious.

On my first post I complained that there's not enough exploration in Silksong. I'm glad to say the situation improves a lot once you read the Citadel at the top of the map. It acts as a massive hub area disconnected from the main fast travel network, with many hidden areas you can discover and tackle in different orders, lots of unlockable shortcuts, etc.

I can now recommend the game with a few reservations.

Battlefleet Gothic Armada II. Basically a Total War game for space navies. Lots of factions, lots of ships. Hard to tell them apart, a lot of the time, but at least I can pause and check. Gameplay is satisfying. I don’t love the focus on casting abilities and maneuvers; they feel too reactive, like a very low APM tax. I’d rather set up the pieces and watch them duel. Boarding, though, easily earns its keep. I particularly enjoy that it distinguishes subfactions like Space Marines. Why are enemies terrified of a puny 1,000 marines? Because they’ll teleport onto your bridge.

Excellent visual and sound design, as expected from a GW license. The biggest exception has to be the protagonist. His deliveries are flatter than the literal undead. We’re talking VN levels of white bread. Which, since it’s the Imperium, has that self-abnegating zealot crunch…but come on.

Some extra Clair Obscur thoughts (I'm at the second Axon fight rn)

  • the party composition reminds me of adult-only VNs: there's a hard cap on one human male in the party to avoid accusations of NTR. Maybe this changes in Act 3 (I've seen cosmetics for party members I don't have yet), but don't spoil this for me
  • the Act 1/Act 2 changeover reminded me of D&D stories about players that only play one character build with different names. It's totally a different dude, he has a white forelock and a scar!
  • I feel like Sciel is missing her share of character development. She's just... there.
  • Gradient counters are my bane

I will need a different build soon, as the damage cap is spoiling my current approach:

  • Lune is there to put the initial burn on the enemy party, then heal when needed or use Mayhem (the one that burns all your taints)
  • Sciel exploits the burn with the skill that jumps to burning enemies and hits the remaining one next turn if necessary
  • Maelle doesn't use the skills or stances at all (other than the shield-busting one). I've put a bunch of Luminae on her basic attack (double strike, +50% attack, +50% attack on the first turn, +50% attack after a free shot, +Powerful on self, +Defenceless on the enemy etc) and gave her the rapier that applies burn, this allows her to deal 3-5k per hit and keep the enemy Defenceless and everyone else to deal 5k-9999 damage per skill hit, plus 9999 burn damage every turn.

The problem with this is that 9999 burn damage per turn used to be the reliable killer of everything, but the bosses are getting too tanky now. If Lune or Sciel run out of AP or are incapacitated, the damage output drops quickly. I could theoretically mod the game to have 99999 damage cap and keep burning, but I'd rather look for a new build that can reliably hit the damage cap on multi-hit skills.

As substantialfrivolity says, the damage cap can be removed later, but honestly I'm wondering why you're concerned. In Act 1 and 2, none of the enemies aren't really tough enough that you need to break the damage cap to win easily. If I had any criticisms of the combat in the game, it's that a lot of mechanics seemed to be balanced around post game and new game+, such that you never need to learn or use them in the course of beating the game's story.

I'm wondering because I've noticed a negative trend. I sometimes need more than two turns to plow through trash mobs.

UPD: After calming down I have rehashed my luminae and can now reliably eliminate trash mobs in one turn again:

  • Lune starts with 8AP and can either cast the highest level fire-all spell or shoot down fliers and shields and cast the regular fire-all spell
  • Maelle uses either her base attack if there's a tanky mob left or the skill that makes everyone Defenseless
  • Sciel uses either her multi-hit skill if there's a tanky mob left or the skill that propagates to burning enemies
  • anyone left standing dies to 9999 burn damage when they try to take their turn

The only potential annoyance is fire-absorbent mobs.

FYI, you get the ability to break the damage cap in act 3. So hang on to those big hit builds, they'll come back in usefulness.

Interesting tactical puzzle game: Tactical Nexus

If Into the Breach can be considered a degenerate version of X-Com, then Tactical Nexus can be considered a degenerate version of Into the Breach. But "degenerate" in this context is not necessarily pejorative.

The goal is to beat towers full of static enemies. As enemies are defeated, the player obtains experience, attack, defense, health, and keys. Multiplicative upgrades to experience and health are rare and valuable. When the player character levels up, he can upgrade his attack or defense, or he can get keys. The player must strategize regarding the order in which the enemies should be defeated and the items should be obtained. Depending on how well the player does in beating a tower, he can unlock medals that can be used to make other towers easier.

The first two of the game's eight "chapters" are provided for free. The developer claims that the full game can satisfy a player for ten thousand hours, and that even the free parts are good for one thousand hours.

I haven't retro gamed in a while, and an earnest revisit of Mechwarrior 3 has been on my todo list forever. So I installed it on my K6-2+ with a CH Flightstick.

The good! If you pine for the days of mech construction following tabletop rules, rejoice! Every mech is a virtual blank slate, limited only by it's max weight. This is a feature modded into virtually every Mechwarrior game without it, although it does tend to render mechs a purely aesthetic choice. This is probably the most simulation oriented Mechwarrior also, developed by Microprose in their heyday.

The different. Heat and ammo are brutal. Painfully accurate to the tabletop, one ton of AC10 is literally 10 shots. 10 shots easily missed with the slow speed of the projectile and poor feedback IMHO of how you need to lead. The shot just isn't terribly visible to see where it's gone, whether you hit or miss. I also find myself overheating virtually 99% of the time. Firing medium lasers. I'm not sure that's possible in MW5, but maybe my expectations are set with all the end game goodies I've grown accustomed to in that game. But still, all tabletop accurate. Pulse lasers are weird, and you need to hold a beam on the target for them to do anything. I think I prefer just regular old lasers at this point as they are the most reliable virtually hitscan weapon.

The ugly. MW3 has issues. On systems that are too fast the physics are horribly bugged. The slightest jostle and the physics over react and send objects into orbit at light speed. This isn't noticeable on my K6-2, and I think it's a good fit for the game, but I notice the keyboard randomly stops working, or I get stuck a lot. No clue what that's about, but it's caused me to have to alt-f4 the game and restart it. Joystick never stops working though. And once shutting down my mech and restarting it got me unstuck on whatever had hung me up.

Anyways, wish me luck.

I played 3,4 and 5, 3 was by far my most favorite(people saying 2 is best but its 3D is way too early for me). Best mission briefings i ever saw in milsim\simulation games. Im very picky about what i believe in games, MW3 briefings felt authentic.

Never really had your issues, have you looked up guides on pcgamingwiki and reddit? My only problems was what they give you Bushwalker from the start, which is one of best medium mechs ever. Not easy to go up from here.

Well, so far as heat/ammo problems, I think I just need to commit to be ER LLaser sniper with lots of double heat sinks.

As for the others, who knows. One thing I did notice was that it appeared my mouse was only registering inputs sporadically. My working theory was that a click only registered if it occurred over the span of a frame. I'd noticed it in other games, but it finally annoyed me enough to start trying shit. So I uninstalled the Logitech Mouseware drivers I put on the system to get the mousewheel to work, and it went away. I'm curious if that had anything to do with the keyboard problems too, but we'll find out.

Old hardware, amiright?

MW2 will always have a special place in my heart. Something about the ambient music, the flat shaded graphics, and the utterly alien and somewhat abstract level design felt like a perfect encapsulation of how terrifyingly other the Clans are.

yeah, this looks like framerate bug, check this: https://old.reddit.com/r/mechwarrior/comments/504h3z/stonewalls_tips_to_fixing_bouncing_apcshd_gaming

This hardware is legitimately too old for it to be that. Its a K6-2 system only a year removed from its release date.

I remember back in MW3 my best setup was 2 or 3 ER large lasers + the rest heat sinks. You can snipe most enemy mechs from out of their range that way, with some heat management.

ER PPCs are good for a similar approach. My personal favorite (not best) setup Mech was in MW4, a Daishi crammed full of clan MGs. It's not necessarily the most powerful (though it does a surprising amount of work), but it's just so much fun to have that much dakka.

I just keep going back to Starship Troopers Extermination. Its 16 player player vs computer (bugs). Not a perfect game by any means, but I just don't want to be in PvP matches, and this game saves me from that.

I play with a light military sim discord which makes things way more fun. 1stmi.gg

Ahh I remember joining one of those back in the day it was fun. Maybe I’ll hop on with you sometime.

Is it me or does Silksong gameplay make the player rely on tools and spells way more than Hollow Knight? In particular, flying enemies seem much more of a menace, constantly dipping out of reach of the primary weapon while often chucking projectiles at you. If I'm stuck in an arena with multiple of those I basically have to blast them quickly with a spell or I'll be toast. I don't envy the "nail only" gimmick players.

The first vendor sells traps that hang in midair, they're very good on flying enemies but I do resent having to keep refilling them.

I got up to the swamp biome before moving on from SilkSong, but from my understanding all flying enemies were programmed and placed to be as annoying as possible. Also for some reason they share the same hp as tankier, slower, ground based enemies.

Some parts of the game are very high qualities, but in others you can tell that it could have used more QA or a larger consensus on what they were doing.

I am far more nail reliant in Silksong than I was spell-reliant in HK, partly because the upgraded spells in HK were just completely OP. It always kind of hurts to use tools because shards are not actually that easy to rapidly acquire if you are aggressively using tools.

I do greatly appreciate tool repair being free for some tough act 3 battles.

Still playing Clair Obscur. It kinda reminds me of Wes Anderson's films (before he completely fell into self-parody). My lexicon utterly fails me in my quest to describe what I mean without somehow confusing it with Whedonesque snark. I can only explain it by using an analogy.

Have you ever been to a Bobby McFerrin concert? The first few minutes are quite unsettling if you're there in person: an old black guy takes the stage with his co-singers and waits for the applause to die down, the audience falls silent, he raises the mic to his lips and starts babbling like a crazy hobo. You know that's what was supposed to happen, but you are still gripped by the "wrongness", that "that's not how you do things" sensation that quickly dissipates as the babbling turns into a melody, and you sit back and enjoy the next ninety minutes.

In that metaphor, what's the babbling?

The Gestrals, I guess. And Esquie.

Hades 2 came out yesterday! I just got into Act 3 on Silksong but........ now I have Hades 2!

Like Silksong, I find difficulty in describing it other than "more of the same game, in a good way". New enemies, new weapons, new buffs, new mechanics, but the same general gameplay loop and overall feel. I especially like that since the main enemy is Chronos, there's a rare event where he ambushes you and temporarily sends you back in time for a level. And back in time is the first game! It's only happened to me once so I'm not sure how robust it is, but it was an instance of an old map with old enemies that would be in the same spot in the run that I was when I got ambushed. That's definitely a cool throwback mechanic.

I will note that the artstyle and characters seem a little bit.... woker? It's nothing too egregious, and it was a little bit like this in the first game, but just the levels of androgyny, the ratio of more female characters, the lore of being Witches, and the weighting of visual sexualization weighted more towards male characters than female ones generally gives off lefty vibes. Heck, Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual love, beauty, pleasure, and procreation, and is straight up naked in the game (though conveniently self-censoring with arms and hair) looks like a lesbian.

Again, it's nothing too egregious, and the gameplay and story are still good overall so far. It's just a mild annoyance.

Heck, Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual love, beauty, pleasure, and procreation, and is straight up naked in the game (though conveniently self-censoring with arms and hair) looks like a lesbian.

I don't know what sort of lesbians you're hanging out with, but that is definitely not lesbian presenting.

https://www.lovepanky.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/lesbian-stereotypes-1.jpg

Not like the short haired butch kind, the feminine one in the pair. I don't think lesbians adhere to the top-bottom dynamic quite as strictly as male homosexuals due, since there isn't a sexual requirement to, but often you'll see a masculine obviously lesbian paired with a more feminine one who sometimes passes for straight but is sometimes almost-but-not-quite-straight-presenting. I dunno, I haven't put a ton of thought into pinning down a strict definition, it's just a sort of vibe I've seen in certain lesbian pairings. But I think it makes sense in theory, given that some lesbians are attracted to feminine features, some will maintain enough feminine features to attract them.

But on further thought, I'm not sure if I've seen it in real lesbians or only games/tv/movies...

This is your brain on online gender war.

I don't think it's a war thing. Different archetypes of personality just tend to look certain ways. Have you never noticed? Like nerd glasses or problem glasses, or dark eyeliner, or cowboy boots, or tank tops, or half-buzz-cut, or high heels. You can't automatically and definitively ascertain someone's entire personality from how they look, but you can often make a decent guess. Because people tend to dress like and emulate people they respect and admire, which often happens to be people with similar personalities, so they end up looking similar to each other.

I will note that the artstyle and characters seem a little bit.... woker?

Most obvious with Hestia, who they drew as a fat black woman with vitiligo. That one attracted enough notice at the time that it has a KnowYourMeme page. The vitiligo representation thing always feels a bit surreal when I encounter it outside of Tumblr art. It's the sort of thing I didn't predict penetrating the mainstream corporate world, but apparently there's no actual limit and SJW Tumblr art fads will show up at Target years later.

The architecture behind her is fucked up too.

Would have been too spicy to make her a white woman with soot on her face, I guess.

While i have issues with wokeness in Hades 2 Hestia isn't really it.

She is the goddess of the hearth and having skin like coal and ash feels like a thematically appropriate take. I didn't even consider that they tried to do something ridiculous like vitiligo representation.

I got more irritated at retarded stuff like Hephaestus wheelchair or the uglification and darkening of Athena making her look like a racist caricature.

The "which way, Western man?" memes really do write themselves. On the topic of shameless box-checking representation, disabled Hephaestus was a pretty good one too.

I prefer Western Hestia over Japanese Hestia, at least the western version refers to her myth (the embers on her head referring to the hearth) and isn't just "generic large chested girl of ambiguous age".

Hephaestus is disabled in the lore, though.

Hephaestus is described in mythological sources as "lame" (chōlos) and "halting" (ēpedanos). He was depicted with curved feet, an impairment he had either from birth or as a result of his fall from Olympus. In vase paintings, Hephaestus is sometimes shown bent over his anvil, hard at work on a metal creation, and sometimes his feet are curved back-to-front: Hephaistos amphigyēeis. He walked with the aid of a stick. The Argonaut Palaimonius, "son of Hephaestus" (i.e. a bronze-smith), also had a mobility impairment. Other "sons of Hephaestus" were the Cabeiri on the island of Samothrace, who were identified with the crab (karkinos) by the lexicographer Hesychius. The adjective karkinopous ("crab-footed") signified "lame", according to Detienne and Vernant. The Cabeiri were also physically disabled.

In some myths, Hephaestus built himself a "wheeled chair" or chariot with which to move around, thus helping support his mobility while demonstrating his skill to the other gods. In the Iliad 18.371, it is stated that Hephaestus built twenty bronze-wheeled tripods to assist him in moving around.

However in those cases when he is described as lame, such as in the Illiad, he is depicted as limping, dragging his foot, and/or using a stick to walk, not a wheelchair. I strongly suspect the reason why they put him in a wheelchair is similar to why WOTC printed a Wheelchair Accessible Dungeon for D&D, because wheelchairs specifically are treated as an icon of "disabled representation".

I was wondering where the Wikipedia article you quote got this:

In some myths, Hephaestus built himself a "wheeled chair" or chariot with which to move around, thus helping support his mobility while demonstrating his skill to the other gods.

So I followed the citation and it's an essay in Rhetoric Review using "theory from the field of disability studies", and it doesn't use the term "wheeled chair" even once. Rather it describes him as riding a "proto-wheelchair" on the basis of a single cup showing him on a winged chariot. Nothing indicates this winged chariot is serving as a substitute for walking rather than as a chariot, nor is there anything about it "helping support his mobility while demonstrating his skill to the other gods". (Is it even specific to him or does there exist art of other gods in winged chariots as well?) And then the Wikipedia article makes it even worse by creating the term "wheeled chair" and putting it in quotes, so that people who don't follow the citation and get past the paywall will interpret "wheeled chair" as a literal translation of some Greek source.

In the Iliad 18.371, it is stated that Hephaestus built twenty bronze-wheeled tripods to assist him in moving around.[96]

And then this is just an egregiously false reading, it says nothing about helping him move around. They're tripods (a pot/cauldron with 3 legs to straddle a fire) that move themselves around. The same passage says "he moved to and fro about his bellows in eager haste".

I'd argue this is actually one of those areas where you can get away with it; Hephaestus is specifically the god of the forge and crafting, and does have a limp. It fits well within his character to have him develop a mechanism for easier mobility. I wouldn't object, for instance, to Artemis and Apollo being portrayed as redneck hunters armed with rifles, as it still fits well within their characters.

I feel like when situations come out like this, it's important to save ire for when the diversity for diversity's sake actually ruins the end product; like, the 2016 Ghostbusters wasn't bad because they chose an all female cast - it was bad because they didn't realize that the reason the original Ghostbusters was good was that it was more about the realities of starting a small business than it was about the paranormal. You could easily have made a 2016 "female leads" version of Ghostbusters that wasn't garbage; were I writing it, I'd have set it up as an allegory for the realities of balancing working at a small business with raising children and maintaining a household. You can even make the lead women in the show the daughters of the original cast; that way you don't shit on its legacy, while continuing to explore the themes that made the original great.

I think as long as you're sticking with the correct themes and characterization, you can get away fairly easily with including extra diversity; however, most of the people including the diversity have long since had their brains dissolved by the woke milieu, and can't write anything interesting that isn't just "diverse = good." It's not bad because of the diversity - it's bad because it's bad, and you're only seeing it because a lot of people have had their brains rewired to think 'diversity!' is the same thing as a good and interesting story, so approved it despite it's terribleness.

And, of course, religion is the perfect way to shield an inferior story (and writers), since you can just launder your failure with claims of the audience’s irreverence.

The parallels between being woke and being in a religion have definitely not gone unnoticed.

I've been playing the game for quite a bit in early access and while I enjoy it well enough this does feel like "safe horny" the game, but extended to every single character and interaction. Everything is so HR approved and "safe" that I find myself just skipping through all the dialogue. Nothing is said and while it's mildly witty at times it's never funny.

I think a major issue is that they've replaced many of the major roles with women for the sequel and they don't think it's ok to make jokes at the expense of women so what we get is a whole load of anodyne nothing.

I think a major issue is that they've replaced many of the major roles with women for the sequel and they don't think it's ok to make jokes at the expense of women so what we get is a whole load of anodyne nothing.

2015+ in a nutshell.

How do you make the goddess of beauty look that ugly? She looks like someone drew a man and then added breasts. It's truly a remarkable feat of bad art.

How do you make the goddess of beauty look that ugly? She looks like someone drew a man and then added breasts. It's truly a remarkable feat of bad art.

Have you seen any women by Michelangelo?

Can't say I have.

...she's fine? Like I can normally see where female uglification complaints are coming from even when I disagree, but I have no idea what you're on about here, she's perfectly goonable as is. Is it the shadowing on her face making her features too angular or the bracelets accentuating her pointy elbows or what?

I couldn't care less about elbows. The problem is that is straight up a man's face on a female body.

I think it’s broadly the total lack of anything approaching softness or sensuality. Hades 1 Aphrodite I’m not super keen on either but she has a coquettish pose appropriate for the Goddess of Love and Lust. This one in holding a sword and shield and looks like she wants to beat you up. Aphrodite is always dangerous but not like that.

I’m reminded of a previous post saying that one reason people liked Sydney Sweeney was that she’s one of the only models to have doe eyes and look soft and approachable rather than glaring at the camera.

Is it the shadowing on her face making her features too angular?

This, IMO.

Wait, I think that might actually be the art from Hades 1. Hades 2 is this

Slightly less masculine, slightly more lesbian.

Which I suppose partly undercuts my point about it changing. I think it's largely deliberate. They're trying to portray a sexual character but not like... actually sexy. They're trying to say "this character is sex positive, but we're not trying to appeal to straight white men, because that would be gross.

This also is related to the race-swapping of many of the Olympian gods to be black or Asian. Again, it's not like super obnoxiously egregious: it's not like the story goes out of its way to talk about them being oppressed by the white gods or something. But it's anachronistic in an obviously post-2010 progressive way.

Unfortunately your second link is broken (it goes to some decade old reddit post), so I still don't know what the Hades 2 version looks like. But it sounds like the devs are kind of slaves to the culture war, and feel the need to make everything reflect it. Which is unfortunate.

I wouldn't say "slaves to". Again, it's not too egregious, and not enough to ruin the game. But their earlier games didn't seem to have this issue quite as badly. Or maybe I just didn't notice as much because they were original fantasy worlds so they weren't race swapping classic mythology.

You can tell throughout the time that they're definitely left-leaning. Bastion had a bunch of stuff about xenophobia and colonialism being bad. I never finished transistor but it was generally anti-establishment. Pyre had a made up religion that was abused by corrupt leaders to excommunicate people they don't like. But it's never so terrible that it ruins things. None of them are ever obvious and stupid ripoffs of current events, and Pyre still has you participating in the religious rituals because it wasn't the religion itself that's bad it's just the corrupt people exploiting it.

And most importantly the core gameplay remains good enough that it makes up for the slightly offputting lefty vibes (with the exception of Transistor, which I didn't find very compelling)

But yeah, they're clearly embedded in lefty culture, if not the actual war part of it. And they seem to be gradually slipping further and further into it.

Try: https://old.reddit.com/r/TopCharacterDesigns/comments/1cctx3h/aphrodites_design_from_hades_and_its_sequel/

Thanks! Weirdly the second iteration looks way better, because she actually looks female in that one. No idea what happened in the first game.

It's the wrong way around. The armed one must be from H2, because the unarmed version was in H1.

Yeah I figured that it was the H2 version first, then the H1 version. So I did have the right order in mind when I said that the second iteration looks better.

I haven't tried patch 1.0 yet, but I did play back when the alpha was released.

From what I remember, it's not bad, but I much prefer the vibe of Hades 1. Hades 1 is just very strong thematically - at first you think your dad is kind of a bad guy, keeping you down, but as you fight your way to the surface for your first glimpse of paradise, it becomes apparent that the curse is much deeper than you know: it's in the blood. You were born condemned, to a Sisyphean quest to seek paradise but be denied access, and yet... through your failure, you make lots of friends, realize your troubles may not even be that bad compared to theirs, and well, I won't spoil the ending, but one can almost imagine Sisyphus content. It's a very deep game.

Hades 2 isn't bad, it just... it feels like Arcane season 2 compared to Arcane season 1. It would feel a lot better if its predecessor hadn't set the bar so high. And yes, as you mention, it does feel a bit woker.

Now, admittedly, I haven't played the new 1.0 patch for Hades 2 yet, so I may be missing key aspects of the story that pull things together in ways that make the game deeper. But from what I remember, Chronos sure felt like an actual bad guy, in a very cookie-cutter sense, and there didn't seem to be much thematic depth behind this, like the passage of time rendering the gods increasingly impotent or something (the main character is a witch, after all). It just felt quite shallow.

You were born condemned, to a Sisyphean quest to seek paradise but be denied access

One of the major thematic turn-offs of Hades 2 for me is that, back in Hades 1, getting to the surface distinctly felt like a proper goal given everything you have to overcome on the way. The ...events that transpire once you finally get to the surface (to avoid spoilers) only add to the payoff; Zagreus is cursed, his kin was not meant for the surface world, and even with all his willpower he cannot manage more than a few minutes to try and come to terms with what he has found, and attempt to salvage it, before he is inevitably dragged back to the underworld and has to throw himself at the challenge again and again. There is no escape, as it were. Despite only getting a small sliver of dialogue every time you beat a run, the story still visibly progresses and you can't help but get invested in it. I think Hades 1 is easily Undertale-tier meta storytelling and one of the best in-story explanations ever for the bog standard "you must do X successful runs to get the ending", it is so immaculately arranged that you barely notice the seams, especially with the little twist of not having to fight a boss on the final run.

Compare this to Hades 2, where gaining access to the surface stages is... literally just a cheap early meta unlock for Melinoe; it is complete and total immunity, and the matter is never brought up again afterwards.

I understand this was largely gameplay-story segregation since they wanted to make the surface stages actually playable, but I still feel there should have been a better way to go about it. It solidly soured the initial impression of all the overpowered witchy bullshit for me, and so far it doesn't really get better - there does not so far seem to be a problem the protag's Quirky Cast of Strong Women doesn't immediately think of a meta unlock solution for.

On my first post I complained that there's not enough exploration in Silksong. I'm glad to say the situation improves a lot once you read the Citadel at the top of the map. It acts as a massive hub area disconnected from the main fast travel network, with many hidden areas you can discover and tackle in different orders, lots of unlockable shortcuts, etc.

Lol yeah I got to the final boss of act 2 and I didn't have double jump so I knew I was missing an area, so I went hunting and I found six more biomes.

Is anyone else playing Silent Hill f? I believe @Fruck expressed interest?

Is anyone else playing Silent Hill f?

I played a bunch of it (80-90% of a first playthrough). The main complaints online I've seen are about feminist rhetoric. I think the original idea was "Hinako was traumatized by her father -> her nightmares are dominated by male-inflicted trauma". But it takes a certain amount of awareness to realize these are her own issues rather than the developers making a statement about all men.

As far as my experiences with the actual game, I've played both SH2 and SH4 in the past and it's very reminiscent of them. The combat is very awkward, difficult, slow and tedious. About what you'd expect if a teenage schoolgirl found herself in a monster-infested town with nothing but random pipes and improvised melee weaponry to defend herself with.

The main new feature is the ability to donate consumables like food and candy to shrines and get faith in return. Faith can be used to regain sanity and buy minor stat upgrades. Sanity is essentially an extra health bar that can also be used to do a bit more damage.
There's also a somewhat limited inventory system. It's not quite as suffocating as Cronos' but many people will be annoyed they can't just bring a warehouse of consumables everywhere.

There isn't much of a story for the first 8 hours or so, just "confused schoolchildren wander around the monster-infested town". But there are some eventual plot-twists and happenings I won't spoil.

Overall, I would recommend the game to Silent Hill fans and urge fans of other horror games to set their expectations low. The combat and story are very slow, especially compared to something like Leon Kennedy throwing grenades and shooting at zombie hordes with a shotgun.

Oh I am loving the absolute shit out of it so far. I have two complaints - the inventory management system is stupid, just needlessly convoluted, although that might be compounded by the second issue - I want a combat difficulty between story and hard, because the refilling of all your health and sanity with each save makes most of your inventory useless, but my heart can't handle the tension of fighting disturbingly sexy scarecrows while three hits from death at all times.

I don't know what the story is about yet and I don't want to speculate, but the characters are great so far. I am both terrified of my friends and desperate to save them, especially after the beginning and Hanako is such a melancholy protagonist, which just makes the game feel more claustrophobic.

Has anyone figured out how much acetaminophen I should be adding to my supplement stack for autismmaxxing? Ideally, I wouldn't want to go full "memorize every detail about trains", but I'm on a Civ 4 kick and I would appreciate a bit more attention to detail during the late game slog.

I just use extra-strength Tylenol, since it's extra strong. Supplement with Brain Force and a good huff of a helium balloon.

It's too late for you, it must be done on pre-natal stages. You can still have severe liver damage up to fatal, if you like, but that's all you're getting from acetaminophen now.

It depends on how much you’re already boozemaxxing. What’s your star sign?

Ophiuchus!

Suno, the AI song generator, just released version 5. And now I think we are 100% past the uncanny audio valley. Version 4/4.5 was at the level of "Convincing, occasionally incredible, but still flawed enough to notice." Version 5 is 'tricking' my ear 9 times out of 10. Studio quality. We have a fully functional infinite music machine available for the monthly cost of a cheeseburger.

A few examples:

https://suno.com/s/N86w28eQjBWbI6fA

https://suno.com/s/BsKe5OnQpUhPj2Zx

https://suno.com/s/voPPxtsXxRjFRF93

https://suno.com/s/Yqe3pzUQHIPAQ4g4

I think people get too focused on the apparent 'slowing' of progress in the LLM space and think its proof that Machine Learning itself is not living up to the hype.

Meanwhile stuff like Video generation, Music, and Protein Folding/Drug Discovery are still improving rapidly.

Arguably LLMs are just the interface by which we can access these other powerful Djinns to provide us with the particular services we want, as we await the "one true superintelligence" that can do anything to arise.

There's probably a small window right now to write a Sci-Fi novel that features humanity invoking individual AI patrons that specialize in particular aspects of the world, in the same vein as 'old gods' (Stockfish God of Chess, Suno God of Music, Midjourney God of Aesthetics).

Anyway, if there was ONE arena you would want AI to reach superhuman capability, one particular application that would improve your life even if AI progress stalled out otherwise, what would that be?

For our purposes, lets just grant "customized pornography" as the killer app.

Me, I think I want the ability to produce bespoke episodes of older TV shows that I enjoyed but were cancelled or went off the rails and/or had horrible conclusions. GoT and Firefly are obvious examples there. But I have several others in mind.

It'd be cool to live in a world where the "Canon" of a given series was not defined by any particular "official" source, but instead you had a whole library of 'forks' in the plot and character development that fans can choose from, or generate their own as they like, with maybe some curation done by the rights holder to identify the entries they deem 'high quality' and consistent with the original vision.

Loved "Moonshot Rider". "Fight" isn't bad, either. You are correct; Suno 5 smashes the Turing Test.

But I was a fan of AI music even before this release. AI music didn't have to be as good as human music to be competitive; it just needed to be good enough to allow someone with creativity to create things that could have never existed otherwise. For example, demonflyingfox's parodies of Family Guy and Game of Thrones, or corridos like "Luigi Magione" and "Nariz Grande".

Just two months ago I played through a visual novel called Stains of Blue (NSFW). It's still in development, but when you reach the end of the prologue, you get hit with the theme song and a montage of images from the game's various cutscenes. And even though the music is clearly AI generated, the way it was presented and tied up perfectly with the game's themes and story was so beautiful that I almost cried.

From Quarantine by Greg Egan:

Bella, as always, delivers on time. I download the records into CypherClerk's generous intracranial buffers, and I’m on the verge of transferring them to my desktop terminal when, in a moment of caution, or paranoia, I change my mind and decide to keep the data in my skull, for now.

I’m tired, but it’s barely after nine. I don’t want to sleep, but the prospect of plowing through the Hilgemann’s records strikes me as unbearably tedious.

I invoke Backroom Worker (Axon, $499) and guide it through what I want done with each name: first, check my own natural memory for any associations (after all, the chances are that the next-of-kin of anyone worth kidnapping will be a public figure to some degree); then contact the Credit Reference System, obtain current financial details, and append them to the record. I think of triggering notification if the assets cross a threshold value, but I can’t be bothered deciding on a figure, and in any case, when the whole thing is done, I can rank everyone by net worth. I instruct the mod to interrupt me only if it comes across a name I know.

I flop onto my bed, and switch on the room’s audio system. The controlling ROM I’ve been playing lately, “Paradise” by Angela Renfield, is one of hundreds of thousands of identical copies, but each piece it creates is guaranteed unique. Renfield has set certain parameters for the music, but others are provided by pseudorandom functions, seeded with the date, the time, and the audio system’s serial number.

Tonight, I seem to have chanced upon an excessive weighting for minimalist influence. After several minutes of nothing but the same (admittedly, impressively resonant) chord, repeated at five-second intervals, I hit the RECOMPOSE button. The music stops, there’s a brief pause, then a new variation begins, a distinct improvement.

I’ve run “Paradise” about a hundred times. At first, I could hardly believe that the separate performances had anything in common, but over the months I’ve begun to apprehend the underlying structure. I see it as resembling a family tree, or a phylogenetic classification of species. The metaphor is imprecise, though; one piece can be judged to be a near or a distant cousin of another, but the concept of ancestry doesn’t really translate. I think of the simplest pieces as being primordial, as “giving rise to” more complex variations, but beyond a certain point it’s an arbitrary decision as to who begat, or evolved into, whom.

I’ve heard some reviewers assert that, after a dozen playings, anyone who is musically literate should fully understand the rules that Renfield has chosen, making further actual performances unbearably redundant. If that’s the case, I’m glad of my ignorance. Tonight’s second piece is like a brilliant scalpel blade, prising away layer after layer of dead skin. I close my eyes as a trumpet line builds, rising in pitch, then mutates, impossibly, effortlessly, into the liquid sound of metaharps. Flutes join in, with an ornate, mannered theme – but already I think I can discern in it, hidden beneath the fussiness and decoration, hints of a perfect silver needle which will recur in a hundred guises; which will be honed, muted, then honed again; which will be held up for my admiration, one last time, then plunged into my heart.

Suddenly, four lines of glowing text appear at the bottom of my visual field:

[Backroom Worker:

Natural memory association.

Casey, Joseph Patrick.

Head of Security as of 12th June, 2066.]

I’d forgotten that I’d asked for staff records, too – or I would have excluded them. I think about waiting for the music to finish, but there’s no point; I know full well that I’d be unable to enjoy it. I hit the STOP button, and one more unique incarnation of “Paradise” disappears forever.

Yeah.

To add to the shock, OpenAI just put out Sora 2, which is also gobsmacking me with how good it is.

https://sora.chatgpt.com/p/s_68dc49d67ce0819194ea5d9f24bdb28e

This video is completely 'convincing' to me, between the reflections, the dog, and the traffic in the background and road noises. I can still reason out that it's AI, but my natural intuition is not picking it up automatically anymore.

It is also pretty damn good at quality-looking animation and voice-acting. albeit in very short bursts.

Basically, as these tools improve, the amount of actual creative skill and free time needed to create 'passably decent' media drops by like 50% every 6 months.

Someone's going to figure out how to hook Suno, Veo and/or Sora, together with a 'director' LLM and make full on music videos or contiguous scenes with soundtracks and everything.

https://suno.com/song/106b0e6b-6345-42ba-91b6-0e2e0d6c5d82

This is a jam - they would play second stage at Ozzfest cut a 1999-2003 and have a following.

Color me impressed.

My favorite ways to use the tech thus far:

  1. Producing truly weird Genre mashups. Japanese Folk Music + Bagpipes? Mariachi Sea Shanties? Oops, almost forgot: Heavy Metal Ska.

  2. Producing novel content in the vein of certain genres or bands of the past that I miss/wish had more content.

  3. Converting songs between genres with as few changes to the melody as possible to hear how the emotional tenor of the song changes even if the lyrics and melody (mostly) don't.

Strange sense of nostalgia to hear something that very easily could have come out during your childhood, even though you know with 100% certainty that you never heard it before this moment.

Your sea shanty sounds Irish more than anything, at least the vocals.

I specifically requested an Irish accent for maximum dissonance.

I haven't played too much with asking it to do different languages with different accents, but it does a pretty good job of adding Indian-accented English to songs.

Oh, neat.

Also, strong argument that almost all the well-known Sea Shanties are directly derived from Irish musical heritage.

Does this melody sound familiar?

(About 6-7 years ago I went on a kick researching European Maritime culture and learned a lot of interesting stuff).

My benchmark is an actually good language learning tutor LLM. The task seems pretty much perfect for the current crop of LLMs, and there is infinite VC funding for literally anything that involves LLMs. As long as something so obvious isn't mastered yet, LLMs are hardly more than a gimmick imo.

Depends on your definition of tutor? My go-to is:

[JAPANESE SENTENCE]

Can you pull this apart for me?

I'm at an intermediate level already but this can break pretty much everything down and explain the grammar points that I'm having trouble with.

There is a large abundance of beginner resources for any language out there, and yes chatgpt is fine for this sort of grammar explanation tasks. But this is not a human tutor that can converse with you or give you reading tasks with a specific goal in mind, noticing and focusing on your weaknesses etc. You have to be your own tutor and can get some help from chatgpt

Sure, I'm just saying it's a real game-changer for me. I've been stuck at a reasonably advanced plateau for a long time now because a lot of literary Japanese structures are hard to look up, and having something that can reliably figure out what structure is being used and what the referents are is incredibly helpful.

Personal Assistant.

"AI, please do my taxes, handle the car damage insurance case in a maximally profitable way, and tell me which area of work to focus on today. Also, which one of my friends have I neglected to catch up with the longest? Remind me to call them this evening, but not too late."

v5 is much better but it still sounds Suno... It's indescribable, something about the clashing sound (if I was a musician I could be more clear).

Is what I was going to say, till I found one that didn't sound Suno at all. Wow.

Anyway, if there was ONE arena you would want AI to reach superhuman capability, one particular application that would improve your life even if AI progress stalled out otherwise, what would that be?

Writing long-form fiction to even a high-human standard. Turn all my neverfinished story ideas into full stories, better than I ever could.

Writing long-form fiction to even a high-human standard.

I like this one. The ability to create a fictional world that has 'infinite' branching plotlines and arcs to follow, or to produce the exact sort of one-shot novel you've been craving.

I actually found it comparable to a lot of the early GPT3 written content. The models were able to produce grammatically coherent text that mostly stayed on topic, it just didn't go anywhere and after reading a few paragraphs you'd get pissed having been duped into reading essentially verbal diarrhea.

This music is much the same, there is no purpose and it doesn't go anywhere. Its like 10 second segments stitched together without much thought except having smooth transitions and staying in the sameish genre.

Perhaps there are decent songs produced and it's down to prompting and iteration, but I haven't heard them yet.

This music is much the same, there is no purpose and it doesn't go anywhere.

What do you mean? Why does music need a purpose? It just needs to sound good. A purpose and meaning are optional.

Now the lyrics, when they're AI, can have a samey, obvious vibe. But that's just the lyrics.

Principles such as tension and release, foreshadowing, thematic development, chord resolution are the essential tools of virtually every composer, regardless of genre and whether the composer is actively aware of it or not. While often discussed in a classical context, their application is universal and apply to pretty much all genres.

This seems like a consistent weakness in at least current AI-generated music, which often does well with short-term musical grammar but fails to build a cohesive, long-form structure, resulting in a piece that feels aimless and unsatisfying, IE "it doesn't go anywhere".

These same concepts of building expectation and providing resolution are fundamental to other time-based art forms, such as literature and film, and to effective communication in general.

I think this feels similar to how earlier text generating models wrote and similar to how they still struggle to write longer form text. Perhaps the issue is an insufficiently large context window or perhaps it's something else more fundamental to how the models function, I don't know.

Its like 10 second segments stitched together

I'm pretty sure it's more or less exactly that: short segments stiched together.

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.

This is the part where the whispering earring tells me "better for you that you take me off".

Why do you hate fun?

"Oh no, hundreds of millions of humans will be able to express themselves artistically in ways that were never possible before, resulting in an explosion of creativity and human expression"

You don't have to scroll the Facebook newsfeed or Tiktok brainrot. Both of which were absolute slop even before ChatGPT 3.5

It's not like HBO is going anywhere. In fact, I would assume AI lowering the cost of VFX, etc will result in more prestige TV, not less, as lower costs allow for increased scale and more risk taking. Plus lower barriers to playing with art may mean more people discover/develop latent artistic talent and get into the industry.

Low quality fan fiction has been available in infinite quantities for decades, and yet there are still high quality books being published. Low quality digital art exists, and there are still excellent artists. Quality art will always rise to the top (AI will probably help you discover it).

All I can think about when people get cranky about AI art is what portrait painters in the 1800s must have sounded like sneeding over how cameras aren't real art because it requires no skill as the camera does it for you.

I am not sneeding about no skill, I am sneeding about no expression - or at the very least, significantly less expression. How many prompters are going to painstakingly describe every detail they just don't have the painting skill to put on canvas, and how many are going to go "hot woman in cyberpunk armor, in the style of studio ghibli" or whatever? At least the photographer actually has to discover/set up the shot.

How many prompters are going to painstakingly describe every detail they just don't have the painting skill to put on canvas, and how many are going to go "hot woman in cyberpunk armor, in the style of studio ghibli" or whatever?

Very few, but who cares? The person who has the hot cyberpunk studio Ghibli waifu picture is now happier than they were before. Maybe 1 in a million will be so inspired (or so good) by this that they'll get super into prompting and become a legitimately good "chimera" artist who blends AI gen and human taste to make actually great art. That's a (tiny) win for the human race as a whole.

I have no interest in seeing their stupid waifu, but I also don't go on DeviantArt or whatever so this won't effect me at all. Maybe I'll see their great art 15 years later in an art exhibition on AI digital art.

I agree this will lead to massive explosion in slop, but human-generated slop was already at functionally infinite levels prior to AI, so I'm not sure if there's a net loss here.

human-generated slop was already at functionally infinite levels prior to AI, so I'm not sure if there's a net loss here.

I expect the ratio of slop:epic to rise by at least an order of magnitude and I do consider that a loss.

That's fair

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.

Tell me you haven't listened to The Alex Jones Prison Planet without telling me etc...

Meh. That just sounds like a collection of shitty djent cliches.

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.

My perspective is that this isn’t strictly true. It just seems that way because algorithmic media (Facebook to Netflix), instead of expanding the window of exposure, narrowed it and homogenised everything within it. Thirty years ago in my small town in Europe, I had more choice in my local video rental store (where there was a whole section of foreign language films, that was updated frequently) than I get on all my home screens and feeds now, no matter how far I drill down.

Edit: I believe the “good stuff” is still being made, but its audience and distribution network is not part of the great algorithm fork. It’s elsewhere, it’s curated, and it’s often offline. Interested in the new avant garde. I suspect it’s here, it’s just not where 50-98% of people spend their time.

Edit: I believe the “good stuff” is still being made, but its audience and distribution network is not part of the great algorithm fork. It’s elsewhere, it’s curated, and it’s often offline. Interested in the new avant garde. I suspect it’s here, it’s just not where 50-98% of people spend their time.

Yep. 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.

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.

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.

You'd want it to be somewhere around a 1:1 ratio of [Time spent searching:Time spent enjoying] if you ask me, although the search can be rewarding in its own way, since you stumble upon curiosities and learn new things in the process, often.

And the most efficient way to find stuff is to to connect with people who have already done the searching and have dredged up gems, and are happy to share those findings. There's communities out there that like the things you like, and have more free time than you do, and thus there's gains from cooperation to be had, rather than trying to search everything up solo.

So think of it less in terms of the time spent finding the music you like, and more in terms of finding communities that spent time finding music you like, and can save you a lot of time and effort via combining efforts.

If I spend 10 hours to find a single album that I will then add to my collection and listen to sporadically going forward, I do think I'd consider that time well spent. Especially if I spread that 10 hours out over weeks or months.

I don't have an account that can generate stuff but if you do can you make Suno generate some Romantic period Chopin-esque classical music.

All I could find with a cursory search was: https://suno.com/song/8a864816-4b39-4913-acd4-debb9beab873 which is Baroque but I must say pretty damn good.

EDIT: We now have the modern day "Vatican Rag": https://suno.com/song/ebe85375-dc99-4368-8bc1-f9fe24ad21f3

Will do that later today.

Thx

Okay, went ahead and put a selection of them in a playlist.

https://suno.com/playlist/d8348313-aa62-4474-b272-75d4dbabf641

Note these took me <20 minutes to generate, counting time setting up prompts (I used ChatGPT to fill out the prompt descriptions a bit).

And less than $2 worth of credits, I'd guess.

I don't have an ear for music but these pass as the sort of classical songs I listened to on CD growing up.

The playlist has an "inspire" button that would let one use these songs as the basis for future generations.

Lest I pretend it does it perfectly every time, it did ALSO produce THIS monstrosity on the same prompts:

https://suno.com/s/5Gc5DUCoji1hG2kN

Clip the last generation to about 0:00-1:04 and it's a brilliant mindfuck. I love watching it just spiral out of control. Couldn't stop giggling.

AIs of all kinds really do seem to have a knack for creating nightmare-fuel content that is just barely, barely comprehensible but deeply unnerving for hard-to-articulate reasons. Like just under the surface, there's a psyche made of pure chaos. Really gets at the "Shoggoth with a smiley face mask" nature.

It's decent, not amazing and none of those would pass muster for me as a Chopin fan unfortunately, not least the second to last one which somehow has English vocals (Chopin did actually write a small amount of songs with words but they were all in Polish and not published during his lifetime)...

Still I guess if you showed these to somebody back in 2015 they'd still be rightfully amazed. Still significant work to be done, at least in replicating Chopin properly.

I'm starting to get Gell-Mann Amnesia with Suno, it does really badly according to my ears for the genres where I sort of know what "good music" is supposed to sound like and it does really well according to my ears for the genres where I don't know much about them beyond vaguely knowing what they should sound like.

Also WTF is that last generation?

That last generation was the sort of thing that it used to produce more often circa V3.

Some weird distortion that spins off into eldritch horror territory as it compounds.

Which emphasizes my point that it has advanced a lot over just the last 6 months.

I really would like to try a double blind experiment on this forum to see who can still spot the AI songs.

I want it to be a good and useful personal assistant; that means not being obtrusive or people-pleasing or fishing for further engagement or trying to be my friend, but having just enough volition to occasionally nag me about stuff I should be doing.

If ask.com still owns the Ask Jeeves trademark, they can sell it for big bucks right now to someone trying to build a good digital personal assistant.

I'm not sure how you can make one that actually prods you to do things unless you give it the ability to physically interact with you somehow.

My phone has a lot of notification and reminder systems, but I ignore those all the time.

My experience also. Easy to drown in notification ocean.

Actually that right there is a use for AI.

Read the notifications pouring in, mute the unimportant, queue up the actionable but not urgent, and only let you see ones that read as actually important (not just "flagged" as important).

Or just do stuff on its own. If I could have Gemini monitor websites XYZ for sales on some consumable and order ten when there's a sale, that would be pretty convenient.

I suspect that's just result in there being no more sales on such items, demand would probably smooth out substantially.

Flip side, AI monitoring how much of a given consumable I have left and then ordering it for me (keeping me in the loop, I'd hope) before it runs out entirely, and doing at least some due diligence to ensure its a decent price.

I suspect that's just result in there being no more sales on such items, demand would probably smooth out substantially.

There's probably some variance in people's willingness to buy in bulk. Costco exists but that hasn't resulted in everyone matching Costco's prices. Maybe more websites will start offering bulk discounts (kind of like subscribe and save).

You don't notice the very clear artifacts in the sound?

I don't really understand why these exist and would have assumed that would have been easy to fix but seeing as they haven't been perhaps it's much harder than I imagine.

Beyond that the music itself is bland and the audiomixing poor, but perhaps these are prompting issues with these particular tracks.

If the technical issues can be ironed out this seems fine for stuff like background music in shops and receptions. Given that a Spotify subscription costs as much why would anyone switch though?

What is the use case here? I'm not being facetious, I think this is cool as hell but what is the use case? Composing and recording music is already dirt cheap. Extremely quick prototyping? Perhaps as a way to create temp music?

Composing and recording music is already dirt cheap.

There's at least, like, one semester of instruction required to learn a DAW. I can teach myself C++ and how to sys admin and use a DJ mixer. But a DAW just feels too hard without hand holding, same as Photoshop for me.

Being able to prompt Suno and get something fun to listen to (albeit flawed) feels liberating.

Is this going to be akin to that study about how good programmers working on mature projects did not save time using AI tools even though they thought they did?

I meant in the sense of hiring someone to do it for you. There is such an insane overproduction of these kinds of competences and it's been going on for like 50 years.

Oh, I see.

I would guess Suno's use case is the long tail of people who want bangin' music for their YouTube channel/podcast/home videos but have no idea how to license music or find someone to compose it for them.

As someone that occasionally DJs I have wanted music that hits a certain vibe but finding it on Beatport can take hours upon hours of listening. "Deep house, breathy female humming, no lyrics, sexy" is a really hard search but Suno will make you a couple in less time than it takes to listen. I may or may not use them because of quality issues but it does seem to be improving pretty quickly.

What is the use case here? I'm not being facetious, I think this is cool as hell but what is the use case? Composing and recording music is already dirt cheap.

You get 3000 credits a month for $10, and each song gen costs 10 credits. So you can get a couple hundred songs (assuming you're putting in a little bit of effort to tweak each one) each month for less than the cost of a CD back in the day. Whether that's a sustainable price point I don't know.

So we're talking below dirt cheap at this point.

MY use case has been making new high-energy songs to slip into the playlist at the gym, which is a fun process.

But this is also a step towards what I suggest is my preferred use-case: to make bespoke TV episodes, it'd need some ability to compose soundtracks and theme songs and such.

You don't notice the very clear artifacts in the sound?

I've been using Suno for about a year and a half, and its gone from "Constant artifacts that instantly betray its AI" to "If it played on the radio I wouldn't peg it unless I was paying close attention, and even then I wouldn't be sure." It even adds in respiratory sounds for Pete's sake!

Or more to the point, I think that if we did a double-blind test with randomly chosen people listening to AI songs vs. decently skilled indie artists, 80+% of them wouldn't reliably catch which were AI and which weren't, if we curated the AI stuff just a bit.

Given that a Spotify subscription costs as much why would anyone switch though?

Funny you should mention that.

Owing to the absolute dirt-cheapness mentioned above, its a 'viable' (if you cheat) business model to mass produce barely passable songs and upload them en masse to every streaming service under the sun.

And its actually debatable if this really makes the services worse given the fact that most users don't seem to notice or care much.

It certainly makes it harder for new, undiscovered artists to stand out. And that's the one thing AI has going against it. You can't yet attend a concert for an artist who only exists digitally.

But mark my words now, the first large music festival showcasing ONLY AI-produced music will be happening inside of 5 years.

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.

And more recently we discussed the art of cover songs.

This is also a machine that, if legal restrictions were not an object, lets you translate any given song to any given genre, instantly.

mark my words now, the first large music festival showcasing ONLY AI-produced music will be happening inside of 5 years.

Maybe, and maybe there will be sufficiently large cohort of people who want to go that it becomes a viable vehicle for the entertainment industry.

Much more likely, I think, is the move away from AI / digital art because people realise they need something human. That something human will be delivered not on screen or via any digital mechanism, thereby creating high demand for real life events (everything from spoken word poetry to pop-up tiny stage theatre to large concerts). The price inflation of tickets for gigs and live sports events is a symptom that shows this need for a real experience is already happening. It’s growing and not yet been adequately catered for.

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"?

And that's the one thing AI has going against it. You can't yet attend a concert for an artist who only exists digitally.

Ahem...cultured people have been doing this for a while now.

Yeah, its a very solid point.

THAT SAID... I'm wondering if people would actually be willing to buy tickets to sit and have the AI's songs just played at them over the speakers, even if there was an video accompaniment.

Or they can commission an actual band to play the songs, but at that point... just become a fan of said band?

Well, guess we'll see if I'm right:

But mark my words now, the first large music festival showcasing ONLY AI-produced music will be happening inside of 5 years.

Judging from YouTube, I think it's primarily useful for creating infinite quantities of music in genres that contain a lot of fuzz and vagueness already.

I suppose background music for YouTube channels that are very small or even solo operations could be a good use case. These people want to pay nothing (and licenses for use in videos is not cheap), might not want to use the same audio library as everyone else and the music itself isn't the focus.

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.

Maybe, but people seem to reuse the same tracks from every video so the actual time to find a track might not matter much if at all. I guess the question becomes, what do you care more about? The $10 for a month of suno + whatever time it takes to generate a song you're satisfied with, or spending ~1 hour in the free audio library?

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".

I feel this. My immediate thought on listening to one of those Suno tracks: “We’re going to get a thousand Sabrina Carpenters now”

It can emulate just about any time period, and REALLY traditional stuff too.

I'm not even trying to argue that its not AI slop at the end of the day, just like I think most pop music is human-made slop, but its a leap in capabilities.

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.

My working theory: All those are great songs, but what makes them great is not JUST the notes and lyrics and performance. These things didn’t exist in a vacuum. What made them great was how people experienced them together in time and/or space, and responded to them together in time and/or space. This is why I’m hopeful that human art still has a bright future, but that bright future must take place offline more and more. (I appreciate this sounds ludicrous to anyone who’s lived their entire life with and on the internet.)

The Song of Roland example is not very good and sticks out instantly for anyone who actually understands that era of music. It sounds like the modern 21st century musician's idea of Medieval music and has very little to do with actual Medieval music.

I HAVE TO IMAGINE that there aren't many recordings of actual Medieval music around to train the AI on.

Well, that's a problem, because there are some, but they are utterly drowned out by so-called "bardcore" or "neo-medieval" music that has very little to do with what actual medieval music sounded like other than that is has a thin veneer of what modern audiences think it sounded like. The funniest part is that, in addition to medieval, it's tagged as modal and Gregorian Chant, when it's neither of those things. We have a pretty good idea of what actual medieval music sounded like by virtue of it having been written down, and we know what the theory behind it was and what the performance practices were. Almost everything in that example is anachronistic. Actual medieval folk music would have been monophonic in texture (every voice and instrument is playing the same melody line; modern concepts of accompaniment didn't exist yet) and modal in harmony (tonality i.e. chords had yet to be invented). The prodromes of modern harmony were present beginning with organum around 1200 (where the vocal lines would occasionally sing different complementary notes), but that would have been Latin church music, not any king and queen larping. You'd get polyphony in the 14th century but again, it would take folk music a long time to catch up to what composers were writing for the church. It wasn't until the 16th century that what we would call modern harmony and performance practice was fully developed and widespread in Europe. Before then, music would have sounded more like this, especially in England, which was far away from the locus of culture at the time.

The fact that authentic music is all but drowned out by bastardized modern versions is only further proof of the limitations of AI training—garbage in; garbage out. What you posted has more in common with a Taylor Swift song than with actual medieval music.

I can't really put my finger on what's wrong with it but I wouldn't want to listen to any of this again despite liking some of the genres it's aping.

I guess I agree that it's succeeded in producing replacement-level slop and to the extent that people thought this was impossible they should probably eat crow. But I see no indications of SOVL.

Yea but in three years it will?

two weeks three years to kiev sovl

but I wouldn't want to listen to any of this again despite liking some of the genres it's aping.

The question of the hour: Is that really different than most songs produced by human artists?

I admit that I keep falling back to the same ~1000 songs that I enjoy listening to, very few of which are less than 5 years old, many of which are older than I am. And most 'new' songs I'll play like a dozen times and then they sit in an unused playlist for months or years.

I don't think I've heard a SINGLE pop song in the last year that I consider 'memorable' (not entirely true: Chappel Roan's "HOT TO GO!" sometimes pops into my brain unbidden).

I truly do enjoy Kendrick Lamar's music, but after listening to GNX on repeat for a couple weeks I've not felt any desire to add it to my main playlist. Humble is on there though.

And I lamented before that there's really no such thing as a new 'genre' anymore. So the AI does have the advantage of letting me play around with combining genres to see if anything neat falls out or is worth pursuing.

I am going to agree there's no actual replacement for having a talented live performer in front of you.

I don't think I've heard a SINGLE pop song in the last year that I consider 'memorable' (not entirely true: Chappel Roan's "HOT TO GO!" sometimes pops into my brain unbidden).

Similar vibe (sassy red-haired female with socio-culturally relevant songs), you should look up CMAT.

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.

The question of the hour: Is that really different than most songs produced by human artists?

Possible, hence why I called it replacement level slop.

I do find Spotify's algorithm shows me recent songs that I like with some regularity (and no, these aren't from the Spotify ghost artists/ais), so I'm not as negative as you about today's music.

Music is perhaps not the point of pop music, it's the admiration and parasocial relationship with the artist. It's not clear to me if people will be willing to do this with an AI, but perhaps.

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.

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).

To add: it went to shit also because pop music industry’s big data data-sciencing and machine-learning was able to identify what the masses wanted, and gave it to them. Manufacturing of, e.g. Sabrina Carpenter and Sabrina Carpenter types and the disappearance of auteurs and any sense of authorship to the margins.

The music being a major point of pop music goes back centuries: For example Mozart and Beethoven were "pop" artist in their time.

The top answer suggests that a much larger fraction of the population has heard e.g. Michael Jackson than Beethoven or Mozart in their time. Beethoven and Mozart were "pop" for the upper crust of society. Has music popular with the 1% gotten worse? I don't know, but certainly mass media has transformed who you have to appeal to in order to have mass success.

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.

More comments

it's the admiration and parasocial relationship with the artist.

I do think there's an issue where with AI you can't really make the AI itself the 'object' of your obsessions because there's nothing 'there.' And making the person prompting the AI the object seems extremely odd.

But I feel pretty similar about people who seem obsessed with certain DJs, when there is certainly an argument that all they're doing is pressing "Play" on the computer and then fiddling with some knobs. They still have 'fans.'

But, uh, we see that (some) people are readily accepting AI boyfriends and girlfriends.

And Hatsune Miku has a large following, even does concerts. Granted, the Japanese can anthropomorphize ANYTHING.

I'd want absolutely perfect health tracking, the kind of thing where the AI can tell me exactly what to eat, what supplements to take, how much and what type of exercise to do etc. Might require a bunch of implants, but I'd love to always feel well-rested and optimised.

Me, I think I want the ability to produce bespoke episodes of older TV shows that I enjoyed but were cancelled or went off the rails and/or had horrible conclusions. GOT and Firefly are obvious examples there. But I have several others in mind.

This would also be good. The petty part of me desperately wants to re-make all the BBC costume dramas without all the ahistorical diversity casting, but I'll settle for Six Seasons and a Movie of Firefly.

https://suno.com/s/voPPxtsXxRjFRF93

This could genuinely be a Paramore B-side. Crazy.

I'd want absolutely perfect health tracking, the kind of thing where the AI can tell me exactly what to eat, what supplements to take, how much and what type of exercise to do etc. Might require a bunch of implants, but I'd love to always feel well-rested and optimised.

I agree... except I'd be pretty nervous on the nefarious uses that particular setup could create.

My piecemeal solution is that I can feed it the information about myself I want it to have rather than have it tracking me full time.

I do like the thought of being able to ask how to optimize for particular goals. "I'm training for a Marathon in 4 months, create a training and diet regimen tailored to my current work schedule."

This could genuinely be a Paramore B-side.

I know, right? I've gotten it to near-perfectly emulate Rammstein, Motley Crue, and Drowning Pool, and decent-quality ripoffs of Rage Against the Machine and Linkin Park.

System of a Down has proven trickier.

The Holy Grail of AI privacy and security is one that's both powerful and efficient enough to run on your own hardware so you have full control over it and your information. In some imaginary world where your implants can run their own computations internally and don't require internet access (except occasionally if you want to download verified updates) then they're safe and secure from external threats.

I personally will never feel comfortable unless the entire system is airgapped, and maybe not even then. Think, for example, of how you have to keep a pacemaker away from electromagnets.

But life demands acceptance of certain risks, and there's a strong argument that health benefits from AI monitoring your body and suggesting adjustments would outweigh most risks from having that data exposed.

Of course, follow the logic and its just straight up transhumanism. Discard the weakness of the flesh entirely.

There's also some level of difference in invasiveness and permanence.

Removing your arm to replace with a bionic one, is categorically different from implanting an electrical muscle-growth stimulator underneath your skin, is categorically different from putting on strength-boosting mech armor.

Following the logic only goes as far as your axioms allow, and different axioms will lead to different endpoints.

I would absolutely argue we're talking a matter of degree, but yeah, if your goal is "live as long as a carbon-based multi-cellular organism possibly can in ideal health" that's different than if the goal is "avoid literally every risk of actual brain death possible, with zero regard for preserving organic parts."

But we're already blurring lines by strapping sensors and stimulators and other mechanical parts in.

Now, to put a final spin on the question, what would you DO with your now-optimized health thanks to your AI patron keeping you in tip-top shape?

My preference for the AI generating personalized entertainment options somewhat answers that question. I could watch Firefly Season 50 and then go to the theaters and enjoy "Mission: Impossible 16: Mercury Poisoning" where AI Tom Cruise sprints across the surface of Mercury while holding his breath or something.


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New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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