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That one that goes: boing BOING boi boi boing BOING boi boi boing boing-boing-BOING-boing

Posting a list of a billion things is cheating, you have to choose top 5 or top 3 or something Imagine This Is A High Dimensional Space Of All Possibilities - James Holden ^ founds lots of new stuff this year but this is the only one that was actually, like, new

It makes sense, same way you cant divide by zero See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetospheric_eternally_collapsing_object

Mid Max

Vince Clark! Of Depeche Mode, of Erasure, of Yazoo! Its interesting how he set himself some restrictions for this album - Each track is "based on a single note that is held throughout the composition" - and he only used the Eurorack synth. I've seen it popping up on a few 'best of 2023' lists. It varies a lot, some of the tracks are more ambient/droney his album from 10 years ago with Martin Gore as VCMG is also worth checking out, kindof hard techno but quality when you really spend time with it

Not going to argue with most of what you said and this is just a minor point but: Cars that are in demand or rare do sometimes have resale restrictions, e.g. here's an article about John Cena getting sued by Ford for selling on his Ford GT supercar before he was supposed to. The waiting list for cybertruck is supposedly long and production will be slow at first, so they probably wanted to stop people flipping them for a profit. Anyhow they have now removed that clause after all the scary headlines got written about it. Cybertruck has now launched, costs $60k to $100k, production will be slow. Here's an early Marques Brownlee review, here's a Cybertruck racing a Porche 911 while towing a Porche 911. Not really my cup of tea but innovation is a gamble. Cybertruck obv a bit of a niche/experimental product, Tesla are working on a smaller/cheaper version of the Model 3 sometime in the next few years.

I thought it fit quite well once the rocket thing took off. Looks to me this was made using lots of AI/procedurally generated 'sets'. Not much is animated as such, apart from that one shot of the guy pressing the button, and the sphere playing the guitar, so its all mostly stationary and the things that do move (like the rocket) dont animate as they move. The motion is all from the camera and transformations turning scenes inside out and so on. But they do some quite trippy stuff from that. So its like a series of frozen tableaus but with camera moving and tableaus being transformed. Interesting, and probably relatively cheap given the size/number/complexity of the sets.

He needs to take less drugs and spend less time on twitter. In my role as partial musk apologist (as in, I'll defend some things up to a point) last week literally the biggest object ever to take off, took off. With 33 of the most sophisticated rocket engines ever built. Tesla Model Y was the worlds best selling car in Q1 2023. Not just best selling EV, best sellng car. Global EV sales increasing - this isn't just Tesla, a lot of it is now coming from China, and other large manufacturers like VW are now having an impact. But arguably Tesla helped to bring this about (as is their mission statement). Tesla Energy are installing huge battery plants all over the world to help energy grids deal with demand spikes that would otherwise involve firing up dormant fossil fuel plants. Article: Tesla is killing off coal and gas plants with its giant battery projects 500,000 Powerwalls installed globally - domestic battery product which complements solar panels by providing battery storage Thousands of Starlink terminals provided to Ukraine for free Starlink offered to aid groups in Gaza (although I can't find any recent reports confirming that this actually happened)

OpenAI had morphed into a very strange structure of a non-profit board overseeing a wildly successful for-profit subsiduary. Essentially because they had realised they needed a fuckton of money to buy all the computing power they needed - this led to the deal with Microsoft. But that legal structure of OpenAI was like an unstable atom ready to fly apart at any moment, the legal duties of the various board members and officers just didn't make any sense. So it was unstable and it flew to pieces. Perhaps the exact steps that triggered the destruction will turn out to be quite mundane. Satya Nadella was already very involved and has the skills to reach out and grab the pieces as they fell apart and land it all in Microsofts favour. Over on hacker news everyone is impressed with how he's been able to profit from this chaos. But now the "for the benefit of all mankind" bit of OpenAI is dust. Some would argue that was only ever PR or a mirage. But now thats gone. Microsoft probably takes the lead in AI for the next five years or so.

I don't buy this stuff about some massive technical advance being the reasons for all the boardroom drama. It'll be disagreements about direction or safety or maybe just good old fashioned fighting for control of an $80B company.

In my day, Lego had kayfabe, and the kayfabe was that you ignore the studs. That is, this car has studs all over it because its made of Lego: But to the lego person driving that car, the studs are invisible. In his world, the bonnet of his car is completely smooth and normal. But modern lego tries to cover up the studs: This is wrong. The studs are supposed to be there. They are invisible to the inhabitants of legoland. You don't need to cover them up with smooth tiles.

Here's my problem with Star Wars. Take this scene, which is near the start of Episode 4/New Hope: Now this is brilliant and hilarious cinema, especially for a film made in 1977. The two robots look cool. The dialogue is hilarious because C3PO is the only one of the two we can actually understand, so you get the sortof hi jinx you get with a ventriloquist when the puppet whispers in their ear and you only hear one side of the conversation - "dont get technical with me!". Bonus points for comedy because C3PO is basically a comedy butler type character. BUT its is completely crap universe building. Why the fuck would you have a sentient robot that can't talk. We find out later the fucker can even fly. But for some reason they couldn't stretch to giving it the ability to output speech. Great cinema, crap sci-fi universe building.

Using this as an excuse to post this hilarious Ableton 10 shred (watch with sound on) So many of the the sound choices to fit the visuals are spot on, this is a masterpiece

I've got a question - you know there's plenty of "two blokes that make electronic music" duos - autechre, boc, orbital, plaid, mouse on mars, etc Are there any female duos that make electronic music? (and I guess that means not singing)

For some reason, since I first heard of them 20 years ago I thought pan sonic were a female duo. Must have mixed them up with someone else. (are there any female electronica duos? like, two females that make electronic music together a-la autechre or boc but neither of them do vocals?)

"Children of Time" by Adrian Tchaikovsky is an amazing piece of sci-fi. It was published back in 2015 when it won the Arthur C Clarke award and just last week the series (of three books) won a Hugo It deals with generation ships, geoengineering, uplift of other species. The FT review said "tackles big themes—gods, messiahs, artificial intelligence, alienness—with brio." which is also a good way of summing it up. I'd never read the guys stuff before so I didn't know what to expect but it was so tense and interesting and so well crafted. The book has perhaps the most satisfying use of a "Chekhov's gun" plot point that I've ever seen. I was always really into Iain M Banks and, to me, Adrian Tchaikovsky, while different, seems to be in the same vein. Same sort of confidence - takes on big dark crazy ideas and nails them. The other two books in the series are also really good, although all three books are deliberately quite different. So there you go, "Children of Time", starting to become one of the most acclaimed sci-fi novels of the last decade.

re: the hospital: both stories seem possible to me: (a) that IDF did it or (b) that hamas accidentally did it and then blamed it on the IDF. and the whole confusion over it is an example of modern information warfare. Will we ever get a clear narrative on what happened to the hospital or will both sides continue to build their story? We're going to have to get used to information warfare. (makes me think of climate change - even when we're all underwater or half the world is wrecked the arguments about it still wont end, denialists will still be saying its sunspots or some shit) So you might feel that the internet has made everything worse, but actually thinking back to 9-11 and the second Iraq war I think there is a wider spectrum of views being disseminated than there was 20 years ago and as a result things are playing out differently. Like there's two sides to the modern 'social media during a world crisis' coin: - cameras everywhere, quick reporting, lots of viewpoints getting wide exposure - fake footage, misleading messages, any possible confusion is capitalised upon for maximum leverage BUT both sides have to operate in that environment, e.g. I think the IDF is having to be more careful (or at least try and appear to be more careful) that they would have 20 years ago. so many cameras now. And hamas brutality from two weeks ago was exposed much more than perhaps they expected due to cameras everwhere. And for us, sitting safely thousands of miles away, a confusing barrage of conflicting information to deal with. But perhaps thats more realistic? Perhaps we've got too used to complicated world events being neatly packaged up and explained to us. We gotta do more homework these days.

My thoughts exactly

esaruoho, just gotta say my kids love "Strateface" and we all dance to that track at least once a week : )

Don't know who this guy is but he seems to understand the situation and have some nuance

re: amount of armed conflict now compared to previously: the 70s and 80s were way worse. but (as an environmentalist) the coming squeeze on resources (food, water, survivable land) in the next few decades might kick things off. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/deaths-in-state-based-conflicts-by-world-region

I've been vaguely wondering about this for years. In 1995 RDJ was interviewed by NME magazine and had this to say: See the interview here: https://lannerchronicle.wordpress.com/2020/09/26/aphex-twin-nme-18th-march-1995/ Now, with the utmost respect to RDJs talent, was he just talking out of his arse here? Because surely 20+ years later, if he had written secret pop songs that had got into the Top 40 we would know about it? (for americans: Top 40 was/is the UK singles chart) So I hereby ask watmm - can we identify what secret 1995-ish pop songs he might be talking about? Surely we could identify his sound signature if it was there? Or was it all a load of bollocks? Because lets face it, he has been known to talk bollocks in interviews, especially in that era

Hmm I suppose the article meant destabilise but its an article about thwarting the normalisation deal between Saidi Arabia and Isreal, so maybe denormalise is a reference to that. Or maybe its just a typo

This bit of analysis in the Guardian was interesting: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/08/hamas-attack-has-abruptly-altered-the-picture-for-middle-east-diplomacy Basically that Iran is making this all kick off to make it impossible for Saudi Arabia and Israel to get too friendly And if so thats just depressing - you've got a really fucked up situation being stoked and meddled from all different sides while the normal peope on the ground suffer terribly.