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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2025

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  • I’ve seen demos of software that uses AI to split a song into multiple tracks, one for each instrument. THAT is pretty cool. It’s not lossless, you’re going to lose some of the human performance because the AI has to reconstruct the sound for each instrument and it’s not going to be 100% perfect, but it’s a really neat (and useful) tool.

    Notably, it’s not the kind of thing you generally see when tech bros are touting AI.


  • If you have something that you can’t afford to part with, you don’t let it leave your person. It goes in your pockets, or in your carry-on.

    If you have something that needs to get somewhere safely, and you can’t afford to lose it, and you can’t carry it with you onto an airplane, you don’t put it in your checked luggage - you ship it. With insurance.

    Everyone either knows someone, or has had the experience themselves, of losing luggage due to an airline’s neglect. It’s a known risk.




  • Amazon is a service. That service is becoming materially worse (I have a harder time finding what I’m looking for because of the flood of substandard products and Amazon’s preferential search treatment practices, and even when I do find what I’m looking for, there’s a sizable risk that it’s a fake). This is very much enshittification; they captured the market share, and now they’re squeezing it. Anything that makes them more money but is worse for the consumer, they do. Anything that is better for the consumer but costs them money, they don’t do.


  • There are two factors necessary for a truly free market that prevent any capitalist system from actually being a free market. They are:

    1. Consumers need to have perfect information about the products and the companies that make and/or sell them - in other words, companies must not be able to hide their sins.

    2. There needs to be zero friction for new entrants into the marketplace, whether that is from costs to start up a business, or anti-competitive behavior from other companies with money to throw around.

    It is impossible to achieve either of these in the real world.





  • Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence.

    Mostly I just wondered why the movie was made in the first place. Sure, examining the tragedy of creating an intelligent being that cannot mature and cannot let go of emotional attachments by design is interesting… but the meandering, pointless story had like three places it could have ended and just … didn’t, finally topping it off with a ‘bittersweet’ ending that seemingly had no purpose besides to give some catharsis to the audience despite being so out of left field that it had no relation to the rest of the story. It could have been an art book showing off the scenery instead of bothering to throw an aimlessly wandering robot child into it.


  • Kpop Demon Hunters initially looks like a girlie movie that was shoehorned into being an action flick.

    It’s a drama, interspersed with enough comedy and action to make you forget that it’s a drama. The story isn’t anything special, but it has well-done emotional beats backed by a soundtrack that elevates it. It is absolutely worth watching. (And the animation is fantastic.)

    Don’t go into it expecting a cinematic masterpiece; it’s made for kids. It is also, however, a kid’s movie that is intended to entertain the adults who take their kids to see it.




  • For the longest time, Sanderson was utterly terrible at writing romance, and it was very obvious. A lot of it was probably due to a lack of personal experience. He’s gotten better, but a lot of the ‘lack’ you’re feeling in his writing probably stems from the same place. Despite writing about dark topics - apocalyptic events, oppressed populations, the failures of heroes, etc. - he is missing the edge that you get from other authors who write similar stories. Personally I don’t mind, and I really enjoy his books - but I can understand why others would find them bland.





  • The word that always comes to mind is ‘literally’ which has come to mean ‘figuratively, but with emphasis’ and it drives me nuts - because it removes the word we have to say ‘this is a thing that you might assume is figurative, but it’s not, it actually happened’.