Limo

Not shit, but the start is a bit too repetitive, then when the pad comes in at 0:24 the jump in how many notes the bass plays is too much, IMHO. A more gentle buildup would've less jarring. But the sounds are good and I like what I think you're trying to do here. It just sounds unfinished, is all.

For me on some of their albums the opening tracks kinda blew the rest away. This time around not so much. It’s an ... opening track, I guess? Ha! At least they kept the Rytm - its sounds pop up every now and then on this album ?

Oh come on ... what does that make Rest Proof Clockwork, then? 15/10? Bonkers.

First time through: * Quite a bit darker than previous Plaid albums, which tended to be more consistently light and airy (though this one, too, has its moments, such as the last third of "Drowned Sea" and, of course, "Dancers") * Much more synthetic than previous Plaid albums. * Tracks strike me as a bit repetitive. * Dancers is the obvious standout track here. It, too, is a bit repetitive, unfortunately. "Nurula" is pretty, too. * "Recall" makes much more sense in context. It still is a very un-Plaid-like track, though. * Second half of the album is better, or at least more immediately accessible, than the first. * The production quality is impeccable.

Dancers sounds like the Plaid we know and love ...

Casares and Krzhizhanovsky sound really interesting. Added to the list. Thanks. WATMM: come for the music, stay for the book recommendations.

Speaking of archeology: Currently plodding through “The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World” The subject itself is interesting enough: proto-indo-european and the people who spoke it. But the writing: my goodness. Why do archeologists (this was written by one) insist on bombarding readers with seemingly endless lists of burial sites, numbers of pots found, types of stone tools registered? I get that these are their raw data and your peers like to see them, but would it kill you to summarize your findings when you’re writing for a general audience? It’s something I’ve noticed before with books for laymen written by archeologists: the endless slurry of repetitive detail without a single overview in sight. Scientists from other disciplines are much better at this, somehow. Which is a shame, because I would find a birds eye overview of the archeology of a specific region quite interesting. As long as I don’t have to count all the bleeding pots and pans myself.

Instabought. The demo track is really, really good. Datach'i is a menace to music. Just because *he* can make a modular sound good doesn't mean you, too, should go out and get one. (and I say this as the owner of a small Eurorack system, so I know what I'm talking about)

That article is 8 years old: "Communications of the ACM, June 2010" I agree with you that once we get basic building blocks things should get easier. Problem is no one has built a single block yet, and that isn't for lack of trying. Of course, like you said, for years neural networks seemed like a dead end as well, until all of a sudden they weren't, but I somehow feel with formal verification it's different. For one, real world software development is done in a way (lots of shared states and side effects) that makes it impossible to do any form of formal verification while software that can be reasoned about has very little real world use. That, and the world, not least AI, is moving away from anything that can be verified at all: machine learning systems and neural networks are turning into black boxes that no one has any idea how they actually work (AlphaZero, for example). This is probably a fundamental issue - a system that can perform a truly complicated task may very well be too complex to be reasoned about.

It's a very small subset because it seems to be impossible - and has been for years - to do formal verification for any but the most trivial and contrived of software programs. I'd wager formal verification is a dead end. Like strong AI in the 1970s turned out to be a dead end.

Porno was great. As in “proper great tradition” type work. Much, much better than Trainspotting, imho, which was vapid and gimmicky, albeit with some great scenes. Haven’t gotten around to Skaboys. Probably never will.

Phase transitions: the math behind the music https://thedaily.case.edu/phase-transitions-the-math-behind-the-music/

In the end, probably, but as it stands self driving cars are still easily thrown off by simple things, such as stickers on roads - and computers for some reason find it impossible to distinguish birds from bicycles. So it’s still early days. Really interesting to watch where this is going, though.

Personally I’m a big fan of this: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRPiprOaC3HsCf5Tuum8bRfzYUiKLRqJmbOoC-32JorNdfyTiRRsR7Ea5eWtvsWzuxo8bjOxCG84dAg/pubhtml It’s an overview of AI and machine learning gone wrong, for example: Or Almost like reading a list of synopses for Stanislaw Lem stories

Thanks ?

Well, no, because questions lead to answers and answers lead to GAS and ... But are you saying it can’t be used like a regular drum box? That’s the feeling I get from your description, at least: unquantized, accidents, beasts ...

It's also on Spotify and on other non FB services. It's also very good. Really digging this. Like the other two tracks leaked so far it's a bit rough and gritty, so maybe that's what the entire album is going to sound like? Anyway: ?

I have no need (nor funds) for another 1500 euro drum synth ... but damn ... And making it full of bare metal parts so you can tweak it simply by touching is just amazeballs. Really really great.

Whoa ... that's some serious sub you've got going on. Intro might be a bit long. For me things only got interesting at around the halfway mark. The main bass line isn't strong enough to be repeated so often, I think. Sounds are really nice, though.

...

Started Babylon Berlin. First four episodes are pretty good. Looks stunning (but I always have a soft spot for 1920s styling anyway) and I love the way the main plot unfolds very slowly in what is nonetheless a cacophony of action.

You seem to have fixed it ... It looks like some Javascript thing is loading the toolbar buttons: when I posted before, they weren't there. When I posted to reply to your request for a screenshot, I could see them appearing one by one. Weird ... I'll keep an eye on it to see if it happens again.

No complaints so far. It might even be faster, not quite sure. That said: Has someone complained about the editor yet? In Safari (desktop) I get invisible buttons in the bar with edit buttons (meaning whatever images / text are on those buttons don't show up).

Simon Winder - Lotharingia. Like his other two books, Germania and Danubia, only heavier and more of a linear history lesson and less of a catalogue of very strange things in places you’d normally find very boring. Writing still very funny. Thoroughly enjoyable read. There’s a good sized excerpt here: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/medieval-innovations

Sorry, but no. Boring and self-indulgent.