Month: June 2024

June 2024 Web Links

Excellent This American Life episode (ThisAmericanLife.org)

If anyone could make AI spew sound good, it’s got to be Werner Herzog.

More info comes to light about the ill fated Titanic implosion sub (ArsTechnica.com)

It’s a Wired article, but Ars ran it too. Clears up a lot of the rumors and confusion around the event, such as “how was Boeing involved?”

Samples used in the C&C Series (Reddit)

The real win here though is the link to Methods Of Mayhem. Some really awesome samples and a ton I recognize from Red Alert and Red Alert 2, including many of the voice clips (including the infamous Brain From Outer Space clips used in the Yuri’s Revenge soundtrack.)

I will ****ing piledrive you if you mention AI again (ludic.mataroa.blog)

The title really says it all, this article made the rounds this month. Though it does slide in some AI X-risk stuff, so a good antidote is:

AI Doomers have warned of the tech apocalypse while doing their best to accelerate it (salon.com)

Someone put these pieces together. Admittedly, though, it’s basically doing the homework for that tweet where Altman said Yudkowsky needed a Nobel.

Penryn Space Agency

This was a great electronic music mix show. There are over fifty episodes to listen to. I don’t know the inside story but it sounds like they had difficulty getting to the studio during the pandemic. Their archives are a treasure trove of electronic music recommendations. Get them while they’re hot (and still hosted.) They do a great job of linking to the music they play so you can find new artists.

The Living Computers Museum Finally Isn’t (Old Vintage Computing Research)

This is unfortunate news for the retro-computing community. I’d always hoped to visit this place if I could ever make it out there.

Finding Deceit in the Chambers of Xenobia

A mystery reminiscent of Sour Grapes. Thanks to https://digipres.club/@ryanfb for posting this one on Mastodon.

I’m making a go of it on BlueSky (bsky.social)

I dunno, is this thing on?

May 2024 Web Links

News Related Wikipedia Drama (Wikipedia)

Wikipedia talk pages are always an interesting place, but this one is a pretty interesting discussion, because it gets at the heart of Wikipedia’s role in our evolving Truth landscape.

AI Is Breaking Google (Better Offline Podcast)

A conversation about the ludicrous ‘AI summary’ feature that google debuted recently. The juiciest bit of gossip is that the SEO community has been playing with the feature for a year prior to release and thought for sure that Google wouldn’t release it in that form because it was so busted… and they just up and did it!

Intro contains a cogent explanation of why Google’s latest move is so bad for the web and web users. If anyone has an alternate search engine they’re planning on launching, best to strike while the iron is hot!

The Batsh*t [sic] Software Aphex Twin Used (YouTube / The Flashbulb)

The Flashbulb (yes, that The Flashbulb, the guy who gave us Please Don’t Remember and The Bridgeport Run) talks about software Aphex Twin used. You probably already knew about Supercollider, Trackers, and Metasynth, but I’d only heard passing reference to CDP, for example. I wish he’d gone into a bit more depth about Supercollider and shown off exactly what sort of things you can do with it.

One thing that I found really interesting was the insight into one of my favorites; RDJ album. Tracker outputting MIDI triggering a hardware sampler, because trackers of the day couldn’t handle samples as nice as you hear on RDJ album. I suppose that suggests that HAB was using samples inside the tracker for drums and outboard synth for the melodies? At the very least it’s always sounded like someone manually playing with the cutoff in the first part of Arched Maid Via RDJ, it sounds great and it’s an effect I’ve often tried to emulate.

I’m surprised The Flashbulb considers Bucephalus Bouncing Ball the all time best. I mean it’s a great track and I love how the sweet melody sneaks in after the harsh metallic noises of the intro, then are just as quickly washed out by more crazy noodling. But the best Aphex Twin track at any given time tends to either be from his latest album or second to latest album. I’d put Rushup | Bank 12, Xmas, or Collapse up against anything from what he called RDJ’s ‘peak era’ (Windowlicker, RDJ, etc.) If anything, what the SoundCloud release shows is that the reason the Analord era sounds so different is that RDJ now feels happy (or financially motivated) to actually release (or at least DJ) more of what he makes rather than holding a ton of it back as he did during earlier eras.

A pretty good thread on The Orange Site about GraphQL

Sums up my feelings about how our attempt to implement GraphQL went back when we tried it out at SmarterTravel.

I thought we had passed the era of Peak Zoom Calls (YouTube / Detroit Free Press)

But here we are.