Limo

Beatfuckery from Japan (I believe). Should be right up WATMM's alley.

Hehehe ... if you do this in The Netherlands, it just ends up looking like a regular bike (like this one does). I spent years without a stand on my single speed commuter bike because it didn't come with one. Always a hassle to park your bike, always need something to lean it against. This being The Netherlands, with millions of bikes around, all the good spots are always taken so I'd always have to spend time hunting for a place to park my bike. Mounting a €15 Decathlon bike stand was *so* liberating.

Adopted a new touring bike: a Cube Hyde Race the original owner decked out with useful things like mudguards, a luggage carrier, a bike stand (sooo useful) and, of course, a lock. Shimano 8 speed Alfine hub and a belt so everything between here and the foothills of the Alps is perfectly doable and there’s no need for maintenance. Previous owner didn’t get along with it so sold it back to the store almost immediately meaning it’s good as new.

The bar for Star Trek has now been set so low that this is actually enjoyable.

Buy it, of course. BTW, fenders and mudguards don’t weigh *that* much and they seriously improve your quality of life, bike wise, especially if you do your daily shopping with it. Same goes for some sort of luggage carrier. I know it seems silly to add them to bikes like these but it really improves them. And in the end you still have a nimble racing monster, just one that’s a bit more useful. And since you’re not going to win the TDF anyway, who cares if it weighs a bit more?

They sell that shit all over the Netherlands. It's foul: sweet and sour lemonade with a hint of artificial bitter to simulate beer. -1 would not recommend.

Nifty Eurojazz from les Pays-Bas:

Definite yay.

Right, but they said the major / minor thing was tested on MIDI files, which are really small. So whatever the reason is, it's not this. You might be on to something here. For image recognition (which ML is very good at) the metadata is clear and descriptive. For language models the training data itself is the metadata. But how would you describe a piece of music accurately? If this was easy to do, music critics would be out of a job.

Picked up Hades in the Steam sale. Not bad. Fairly intense, fun story. Not very deep, though. Managed to smash my way up to and halfway in level 3 of 4 in total after about an hour or 4 (I'm *very bad* at games). For the €12 (IIRC) it costs now: highly recommended.

Interesting. Would have thought that this was easy (they’re talking about MIDI so the amount of data should be more than manageable). Then again, major / minor is only a thing in Western classical music, so maybe it’s difficult for human brains too.

How to introduce Miley Cyrus to someone who likes only classical music?

Yes. Although most of my students will go on to spend their lives building needlessly complicated CRUD applications for use by marketing companies, I tell myself that at least some of them will do something useful with the skills I teach them. I’m not sure this has already happened but one can always hope.

We’re everywhere. Teachers, that is. I teach HBO ICT myself. We share a building with HBO Rechten, btw. Also hi!

Except there were trenches in Korea, Iran / Iraq and probably others: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trench_warfare . So not *that* bizarre. Except that no one expected anything else than a walkover, of course.

Yeah, this is all a big WTF. But then this entire war has been WTF from he beginning (in 2014). None of it has made sense. Ukraine was not a military threat to Russia until they invaded Crimea and the west started arming and training the Ukrainian military. The Ukrainian government was so weak it didn’t need any active destabilizing whatsoever for the country to remain too big of a mess for the rest of the world, let alone the EU or NATO, to touch it. Vast segments of the Ukrainian population were basically Russian and thought of themselves as such until the invasion of 2022. On of the largest armies in the world, and the only significant army that had major experience with being in action during the past two decades has made mistakes even a rookie computer strategy game player wouldn’t make (a single file of slow moving trucks and tanks, really?). Luckily there’s our resident WATMM Russia expert @Hugh Mughnusto explain things for us otherwise I’d be even more confused than I already am about his. And I’m not being flippant here. Your take is probably the most sensible one.

It works like this in the Netherlands as well, but I work as a teacher so, you know, not really possible.

Almost on vacation (fully paid because education) but not quite. Am now sick (a bit). Which normally happens *during* my vacation, so this is a first world success for me.

FU ?

If the answer is "no", don't ghost, but start educating her. Women like that.

Started "For All Mankind" hoping it would be hard sci-fi. It's not. It's drama drenched in cliched writing (pretty sure ChatGPT was involved). Still curious as to where they take this. But ... can anyone recommend some truly hard as nails sci fi (as opposed to "game of thrones with spaceships", like Foundation was)? I'd be much, much obliged.

Hey, this is something I have some experience with! FWIW (YMMV, OFC, ETC): The sequencer is indeed horrible. The canonical workflow of SP machines is that you resample, that is to say record "sequences" in real time as new samples. If you're good at finger drumming, more power to you. If you're not, there is now, as you have noticed, a sequencer, but it's not very good. It gets better with practice, but it's still a frustrating POS. The step sequencer that was added in recent firmware I haven't used yet, but it doesn't look great. Sampling and resampling is quite fast, as is trimming samples. Even chopping is fairly quick. Basic operations such as panning, normalizing and tuning are also super easy. The effects are very, very good. Not bread and butter (equalizing a sample is a bit frustrating and the two reverbs are ... characterful) but they can quickly turn pedestrian samples into pure gold. Also, every studio should have the SP303 vinyl sim as an end stage before the final recording. So yes, it's basically a resampling fx box, as SP machines always have been. The mk2 tacks on a lousy sequencer but that does not change this basic fact. Whether this means you should keep it is up to you. I had one myself for about six months, decided I didn't really need it because I already had an MPC One, which is in all respects a much, much better device, but ended up buying it again recently because the effects are just that good. My couch workflow is now to sample into the SP 404 mk 2, usually with effects to rough things up, maybe process a bit further (tuning, trimming, more effects) and then sample the result into an MPC 500 for sequencing. Sometimes I also sample a sequence from the MPC back into the SP 404 for further processing - and then back into the MPC again. Finally, if I decide something is worthy of becoming a track, I sample the sequences from the MPC into the SP404, apply a vinyl sim to the result and record a final track into Ableton. Whether this works for you, you'll have to figure out for yourself. Me, I like messy, hazy lofi stuff (Basic Channel, for instance, or the LA Beat scene) so for me this works. If you're into cleaner, more precise music, the SP 404 likely isn't for you. Good luck!