fragilerock

To play devil's advocate here, there are plenty of examples where computers (or other kinds of non-human systems) create music in a way which human listeners don't expect. Anyone who's ever played with a drum machine knows you can click a random pattern in and accidentally make something that sounds really good.

I've always found stuff about how technological/sociological advances beget changes in music really interesting. David Byrne's book 'How Music Works' covers this exact point about quantisation and much more.

I would argue that there's probably a lot more nuance here when you look at how economics of music have changed in the last 50 years - it's now so much cheaper and easier to produce and listen to music. There are millions of bedroom producers experimenting with production techniques, and the market for music is completely saturated with more good music than anyone could possible listen to. Record labels just can't compete when it comes to making interesting, creative music, however they can still win at marketing. I think the modern charts now are less determined by what resonated well with audiences, but rather what has been calculated to be the most 'marketable' kind of music, and I suppose a metronomic tempo is an easier sell in this regard.

Also worth noting: a perfect tempo makes a song a lot easier to remix, which can often gain the song a lot more exposure than the original edit.

Nothing I said implied that. I just pointed out that the original claim was false, it's utterly moronic and devoid of nuance for you to think that by doing so I'm implying that the opposite of the claim is true.

No one is encouraging you to argue with data that doesn't exist and no one is claiming that no arrests are being made over political speech online. I don't disagree with your third paragraph but it seems clear to me that my original statement stands and it's quite suspicious that you responded it to with these strawmen.

> they already arrest over 30 people a day for speech that offends the prevailing political orthodoxy.

This is completely false and comes from a commonly misrepresented statistic; '30 arrests a day' is plainly the arrests made under section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 and section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988 which includes things like online stalking and harassment. I hope you're just mistaken and not willfully implying that those issues are merely offensive to the prevailing political orthodoxy.

Ok but that doesn't contradict the original point that the area ended up soulless and expensive, so your "people like you are what holds this country back" is still unjustified (and rude)

It's useful for quitting. A lot of smokers/vapers struggle with "oral fixation", ie needing something to do with their mouth. Gradually lowering your nicotine to 0% is a way to get off nicotine without having to face this problem at the same time.

It's not hard to imagine that not every derelict wreck has to turn into the new battersea power station. In fact, it's hard to think of a less inclusive redevelopment project in the UK than battersea power station.

I'm a local to the area, I agree with everything you're saying here (despite the weird backlash) and I know exactly which shop you mean. That shop is one of the most bizarre shops I've ever seen. It's branded as a "general store" but there's absolutely no household brands, everything is about 5x the normal price and all of the shoppers look like rich influencers? I have a theory that the store is used to trial new products before they go to the wider market

By most accounts he's the most cited academic of all time. I'm sure he's less relevant in pure philosophy than other humanities but he is definitely taken very seriously by many.

You read "Users are younger, increasingly female, global, and adoption is growing fastest in lower-income countries" and gathered that "Young moms with no money in poor countries use this product the most". Do I really need to spell out the fact that you completely failed to understand basic English here?

My layperson interpretation of this particular error was that the AI model probably came up with the initial recipe response in full, but when the audio of that response was cut off because the user interrupted it, the model wasn't given any context of where it was interrupted so it didn't understand that the user hadn't heard the first part of the recipe.

I assume the responses from that point onwards didn't take the video input into account, and the model just assumes the user has completed the first step based on the conversation history. I don't know how these 'live' ai sessions things work but based on the existing openai/gemini live ai chat products it seems to me most of the time the model will immediately comment on the video when the 'live' chat starts but for the rest of the conversation it works using TTS+STT unless the user asks the AI to consider the visual input.

I guess if you have enough experience with these live AI sessions you can probably see why it's going wrong and steer it back in the right direction with more explicit instructions but that wouldn't look very slick in a developer keynote. I think in reality this feature could still be pretty useful as long as you aren't expecting it to be as smooth as talking to a real person

If someone said "The earth is round and anybody who says it isn't doesn't know what they are talking about" would you still challenge their intellectual honesty in this way?

I said was talking about face-to-face (or 'in person' as you put it) communication. You're absolutely right that over long-distance people prefer to communicate by text, but in person people prefer to communicate by speech so that's exactly my point: there are at least some contexts in which people prefer speech.

I guess I could also follow suit and return your weird toxic/patronising insult here too since you clearly didn't understand my original comment, but perhaps it would be nicer if we didn't do that?

Then how come in face-to-face interactions people generally communicate using speech rather than text?

Clearly there's a disadvantage to using text in that situation, and I think it's that it almost always takes longer to express thoughts/intents using text. ISTM a sufficiently advanced computer voice interface would have the same advantage.