zabriel_goss

Tremendous loss. A thespian's thespian, through and through.

Has most of your career been in Austin? Genuinely curious. Lived there during the big boom around 2020, and it's astonishing to me how much it's fizzled out and contracted since then.

Nice idea! I wonder how the installed IBM Granite 4.2 8B LLM does on machines with "modest" RAM

Say more! Fine arts? Music? Theater? Non-profit? Commercial?

Great group, great new direction for their music

Perhaps Freud was right about the libido!

Masayoshi Takanaka is a virtuosic City Pop guitarist who saw a recent renewed popularity while riding the resurgence of the genre's popularity. When asked in an interview if there would be a new album, he stated no, saying that humans lose their creative drive as their sexual energy declines, and this is why he could not produce a new album.

The original EPCOT as imagined by Walt Disney was a master-planned city, with all the pleasant amenities and cleverest design you could imagine in the 1960's: Walkable areas, clean public transit, no traffic congestion, homes furnished with the latest in technology and appliances. It was his greatest ambition at the end of his life to make it a reality.

But it didn't happen. Namely, because of how much central control would be given to one man and/or his company to pull it off. The plan in its early iterations essentially meant that if you lived in EPCOT, you forfeited certain freedoms, such as what goes in your home, where you worked, and so on.

This game gave me a good chuckle as a Sim City fan. I'm guilty of complaining about politicians of all levels. But I don't envy their position of having to cut through the vines of competing motives and regulations. And at the same time, as a citizen, I'm not sure I would opt for the Utopian alternative.

I can see where this can be abused. (The PR review example is pretty rough!) I can also see where it's a strategy for triaging which tasks are a priority.

I've had projects presented to me over email that sounded great and seemed like they would have good traction, but then fizzled out once I asked if we could discuss it further in person. Blocking off face-to-face time is a signal that the work is important enough to get done.

The example came to me because I did indeed go from playing music collaboratively & publicly to largely playing by and for myself. Don't get me wrong, I still find fulfillment this way. I understand both sides here, and I think it's still fair to say that there are dimensions that are lost.

Strongly agree. Thinking of music — you reap enjoyment from practicing by yourself, then collaborating with other musicians as craftspeople, then performing for an audience. All three feed into each other.

So when the audience has moved on to synthetic music (stretching the analogy now!), and musicians have as well, it's still possible to continue on your own, for the pure enjoyment of it. But much has been lost with the global transition.

What domain is the work in?

I have an electronic keyboard and an acoustic guitar near my desk. Great to slow down with either

Layer on top that some offices are owned by private equity!

At my last visit, the new doc who took care of me for my third cleaning said: "Oh, by the way, we have these cavities we've been watching that need filling." It was never mentioned to me that they were keeping an eye on anything. I just had to wonder if every patient's third visit calls for a filling!