zazen

TLDR: Humanity seems to have stumbled upon an almost-impossible superconductor material that is like a power-up that will potentially unlock fusion reactors, super efficient electric motors, quantum processors and (unfortunately) super powerful hand-held rail guns*. Efforts to replicate the results of the original korean team and make and test the material are happening right now, livesteamed on the internet in a truly collaborative nerdy way. In the lead and spitting fire and materials science wisdom and generally not giving a fuck is a russian marxist junior researcher no-ones ever heard of who's cooking this stuff up (apparently in her own apartment) and giving advice to the other teams. * all of these things might take several decades

updated summary table of replication efforts by someone on forums.spacebattles.com What are the implications for IDM?

Wait wait - at the Grammys in 2015, that isn't actually what happened. This is an interesting story of WATMM memes replacing reality. Here's the thread from 2015 where we all discussed the Grammys. Start at about page 9. The actual real audio was quite weird, they just played a bit of random lift music: Goiter Sanchez then posted a meme version with the AB 3.1 track dubbed over. Goiter Sanchez also posted this 54 Cymru Beats version: There were quite a few other meme versions that I can no longer find. Warp Records then put out a news item about the win (its no longer on their site) and jokingly included the AB 3.1 meme version. And then that became the one everyone remembered and now everyone thinks thats what happened. Paging @Goiter Sanchez - congratulations sir, you have changed history.

Been listening to this a lot. Its dubby, a bit like what early Orb was trying to do, but without all the "nudge, nudge, wink, wink, drugs" vocal samples. Its great for working - I play it through my laptop speakers and then an hour later I've written tons of code Listening to it in the car landed completely differently somehow, like you're not supposed to focus on it too much.

I burn the track to a CDR then put it in a jewel case and travel back in time to HMV in Uxbridge in 1993, and put the jewel case on one of the racks of new chart CDs. Then five minutes later I go back into HMV in different clothes, and 'buy' the CD, then take the bus back to my student accomodation, in the lounge there's a stack of mismatched hi-fi separates with amp and speakers, next to a large old crt TV. There is a SNES plugged into the TV and my flatmates are all stretched out on the sofas, baked, and playing Street Fighter II. I put the CD into the CD player and press play and then turn up the amp. My flatmates all think its shit, and tell me to turn it off, and they go back to listening to a C90 cassette of recorded pirate radio happy hardcore. I go upstairs to my room and listen to the CD on my aiwa all-in-one 3-cd changer hifi.

I was thinking more along the lines of could I skip worship this week

This interview from Muzik Magazine in 1996 when Mike & Rich came out has a lot of interesting stuff in it, primarily because they just got Mike and Rich very drunk on vodka and recorded them bickering. I had the magazine when it came out and then for a very long time I don't think this interview was on the internet anywhere until the lannerchronicle re-published it: https://lannerchronicle.wordpress.com/2020/08/02/the-odd-couple-mike-rich-interview-1996/ They essentially slag each other off quite a lot, in a laddish way but also in a way that you can see some of what they really think creeping in. And you get a sense of their personalities at the time. Lets just say that if you had to choose which one of them to be stuck in a lift with for six hours you'd definitely choose Mike. >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Rich: “What’s up with you, Mike? You didn’t used to talk this much. I suppose the fame must have affected your personality.” Mike: “No, I was just always quiet with you because you try to play games with people’s heads. You’re like a bully. And what you do with bullies is ignore them so they go away.” ... Rich: “I don’t want to work with any electronic musicians for a while. But I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on you. Did you know that Mike’s girlfriend has an Aphex Twin tattoo on her ankle?” Mike: “It’s only little.” Rich: “I was thinking about it the other day, wondering how you are going to explain it when you kid asks, ‘What’s that on mummy’s leg?’.” ... Mike: “You don’t do any promotion for the label. It’s crap.” Rich: “What do you expect? We are just a couple of boys from Cornwall. We don’t know how to run a label.” Mike: “Is that why people don’t know ‘Bluff Limbo’ has been re-released? And why you’ve sat on my best stuff?” Rich: “We are waiting for Virgin to put money into promoting your next µ-ziq album before we release the older stuff.” Mike: “Crap.” Also has a picture of the famous tank.

Like that its a subtle track that doesnt have a crazy bit in the middle like T69 Collapse. Really like the cover art

I dont really make music any more but I'm thinking of sticking my old tracks onto Spotify just for fun (not really expecting anyone to play them) What service should I use? Random googling turned up this one which has a free tier: https://www.vampr.me/distribution/ Any other ideas?

Listening to some of the tracks, how have I never heard of this guy before?

lol

Always loved Container, will check this out Things I love about Finland: There are 3 million Saunas in Finland (enough that the whole population could conceivably all be in the sauna at the same time). You've got to respect the commitment to setting aside a whole room in your house for basically sitting around naked and doing nothing In the UK whenever it is hot you get official advice not to go and jump in a cold lake because the shock might give you a heart attack but in Finland coming out of a sauna and jumping into a lake is a fucking national sport Snow Midnight sun Finnish government baby box (given to all newborns) Generally nice high-tax, high social security vibes old nokia phones

I hope Cylob is experimenting with some LLM stuff, he could really make something interesting from that

from @Auxien in another thread Page 10 - General Banter - We Are The Music Makers Forums (watmm.com)

the bit about how he's trying to model indigenous instruments by breaking them down by fourier transform and then re-building using colundi frequencies is pretty interesting

Its amazing how much he produces and how much of it is great to listen to. It said on the bandcamp page 'supported by KONE foundation' so I looked it up. Its a Finnish firm that makes lifts and gives grants to artists etc. Here's the page about Aleksi's grant: https://koneensaatio.fi/en/grants-and-residencies/elektronisen-musiikin-saveltaminen-ja-tuottaminen-pohjautuen-colundi-taajuuksiin-2/ Translated:

ERR

My position is: you're both right. It is a markov chain in the academic sense, because it is just a 'guess the next word machine' BUT (and its a big but) it guesses the next word by looking at (up to...) the previous 2000 words, and using its vast neural net weights from its vast training material. Something that can guess the next word by looking at the previous 2000 words has to go pretty deep. It is a LANGUAGE MODEL. A MODEL of our LANGUAGE. And it is LARGE. So its knows that a "Cat" might "Sit" on a "Mat". It doesn't have any external reference for what a Cat, Mat, or Sitting are, but it does have all the rest of its training data to cross reference, so its knows that a "Cat" can "Purr", eats "Fish", has "Four" "Legs" etc. On and on, deeper and deeper, billions of carefully weighed connections between hundreds of thousands of words in different contexts. So it knows (at a deep level) all the interconnections between all the words, without having an external reference for what any of them actually are. That what the Model bit of LLM means. Is it an 'expert system'? - sortof - it can tell you a lot of stuff. But sometimes it gets it wrong and its very hard to distinguish. But in a sense it kicks the arse of any expert system we've previously been able to build (IBMs Watson and all that crap). So even though its not meant to be an expert system it comes closer to being one than anything else we've ever built. I guess if it can pass the bar exam you have to admit it knows some shit. That OthelloGPT paper and the stuff about it building internal model is fascinating. Is it conscious? I dont think so (but the interesting thing is that we can't say for sure because we dont know how consciousness works, who knows what happens in those milliseconds where billions of silicon components work in parallel to produce an output) but the shock to us humans is that just by scaling shit up we've been able to make huge leaps. Us humans are used to being the only competent users of language on the planet (granted dolphins and monkeys etc but they're not using language to the extent we are). then suddenly, BANG, there's another entity in the game that can competently use language, and we barely understand how it works. It hints at emergent properties. And it suggests that timelines until AGI are much shorter than we thought (and that also means us humans are a lot less special than we thought - perhaps our fabled consciousness is not such an amazing thing after all...) I find it all endlessly fascinating because its my interest in technology and my interest in consciousness and philosophy crashing into each other

Hey Zlemflolia this will be up your street: ChatGPT Is a Bullshit Generator Waging Class War (vice.com) I found it to be an interesting point of view, quite underrepresented in the current frenzy

Well, in his defense he has sort of done that. In 2000 Eliezer Yudkowsky founded the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence - now called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, and has - I'm given to understand - done quite a lot of work to make the concepts of 'AI Safety' and 'AI Alignment' into research fields that people have heard of. He also founded the lesswrong forum - which is focussed on AI safety. He's quite well known in the AI field. Here's Sam Altman (OpenAI boss) talking about him. They disagree, but my point is that people like Sam Altman are well aware of him.

Its more like trying to contain weapons of mass destruction Not sure how much I agree with the article but its a suprising thing to see in a mainstream magazine.

The Only Way to Deal With the Threat From AI? Shut It Down | Time I heard of Elizier Yudkowsky a few years ago, in the context of the Ex Machina movie - someone telling me that movie is not actually about a turing test, its about a Yudkowsky "AI Box" experiment - the idea that a sufficiently smart AI would be very hard to contain. He's been popping up a lot on twitter recently. And it turns out he's one of the founders of LessWrong which I hadn't really heard of before but is kindof a community of like-minded rationalists who have been talking about all this stuff for a while. Anyway so Yudkowsky is someone who's been thinking and writing about this stuff for a while, and while there's plenty of people who disagree with him, he's not a crank, he is generally careful about what he says and tries to back everything up with reasonable arguments. He wrote this article for Time and he pulls no punches: