You didn’t ask me to explain anything, you said I had the chance. You’re right, I could’ve kept trying, but you didn’t ask, and I don’t owe it to you.

I have spent far too much energy in the past trying to explain to people who aren’t listening to bother with people who are functionally no different to a brick wall. It’s exhausting and pointless.

And on a more simple, practical level, if you don’t tell me what you found confusing about what I said, then I don’t know what you need explained. As I said, the information is there if you want to investigate any of the terms you didn’t understand. If you want my help, you are going to need to express it.

Which is why, when I detect this behaviour, like you showed when you baldly repeated:

“Clickbate” is not a word.

I always stop and ask the person to express literally any curiosity to understand. In my experience people who aren’t listening won’t do this. Like I said, it would cost you nothing to ask if you actually do want to know.

You can express that you are curious to understand what I’m saying, or you can not. That is up to you, but it’s literally free to do, and it’s all I ask.

Do what you want.

What don’t you understand? I gave you the terms to look up to educate yourself if you actually cared, but instead of showing interest or the humility to ask, you literally just declared that you were right again without any reasoning and while saying you were ignorant.

So shall I take this as you not being interested in the information? It would cost you nothing to ask if you actually do want to know.

Ah yes, the first resort of the prescriptivist: baldly assert that you are correct with absolutely no reasoning behind it.

It’s pretty clear that you don’t understand linguistics or you wouldn’t have declared so confidently that something said on purpose and clearly understood by you to be “not a word”.

Like you literally said that you don’t understand my argument and then declared me wrong anyway. I could explain further but it doesn’t seem like you want to understand.

If you do want to actually learn something here, let me know and I am quite happy to help.

I would like you to show me any credible source saying that an eggcorn must achieve widespread adoption before it can be described as such.

The prescriptivist idea that something needs to be in a dictionary before it can be considered a feature of language is something that linguists - including the dictionary authors themselves - disavow.

Usually it’s spelled that way, but this is more like an eggcorn than a mistake.

I kind of like the idea that it’s clickbating, like the creator is jerking themselves off about how much they love clicks, or how clever they are with their manipulative title.

I forget who said it, but I remember a quote like, “When a bipartisan bill is being introduced that’s when you know the people are getting well and truly fucked.”

EDIT: Not a quote, but this is an article from the Harvard Political Review about US policy: https://harvardpolitics.com/deadly-bipartisanship/

Among some of the bipartisan bills are the 94 Crime Bill, The Patriot Act, yearly military budget increases, it’s really a highlight reel of the fucking worst, most infamous bills from US politics.

I’d be shocked if any liberal electoral system was significantly different to this.

Oof, yeah, those vibes are rancid. The website is covered in shady looking links and they want you to download an exe, which you don’t need for a simple registry edit which can be done with a text file.

This link shows you how to make the .reg file: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-take-ownership-files-using-right-click-context-menu-windows-10

For my money that’s way easier than doing it manually through the registry editor yourself, and you can inspect the code to see what it’s doing.

If you want to see the manual steps to take ownership without the registry entry, it looks like this: https://www.windowscentral.com/how-take-ownership-files-and-folders-windows-10

If that isn’t a dark pattern then I don’t know what is. They do not want you to have control over your machine, at all.

The way I do it is I have a script that adds an entry in file explorer called “Take Ownership”. I don’t have to use it often but when I do it’s a life saver, and it doesn’t blanket take ownership of the whole disk.

Obviously an elevated super user like linux has would be much more secure, but it’s windows, they’re not interested in security if it isn’t about their share price.

Sorry for the short novel but this topic is fascinating to me.

Okay, so it looks like “existence ex-nihilo” is a phrase I cooked up from “creation ex-nihilo”, and the accepted term is more like “first cause”, but it explains the problem I have with a purely material universe. Either our entire universe with all its complexity and scale spontaneously exists from nothing - “ex-nihilo”, or no first cause - or it has infinite regress, an infinite age, which doesn’t fit with what we know of thermodynamics. We would need an infinite source of useful energy to maintain a universe for infinite time.

The pure materialists have all sorts of rebuttals. I’ve heard of quantum spontaneity as a first cause, but like… for quantum spontaneity to exist, there has to be a substrate of physical laws that cause quantum effects to happen in the first place. That can’t be the baseline of existence.

And if they say that cause & effect breaks down at the boundaries of the universe, well, that’s just another way of saying that it gives way to a supernatural reality. Because ultimately science is about cause & effect, it is about the laws of nature, so anything that goes outside of that schema is, by definition, supernatural. That’s all supernatural means, beyond the natural. You can also talk abut physical laws vs the metaphysical, it’s just different words for the same thing.

And science is fundamentally only capable of interrogating the natural, the physical. The analogy I’ve used to explain this to materialistic atheists is of a simulation. Imagine we exist entirely within a simulation. Well, if we wanted to use the science that exists within this simulation to interrogate the world outside the the computer we’re in, we couldn’t. You could not design an experiment that would give repeatable results because whatever existed in the physical world beyond the simulation would be entirely unaffected by it. The creators could walk away or change the external environment at any moment, they could turn off the simulation, unplug it, move it to another continent, wait 20 years and plug it back in and we would have no way of even knowing it had happened. They would be outside of our space and time entirely. They could edit out our attempts to understand. The simulation idea is just spirituality with a veneer of sciencey-sounding language. It’s functionally no different.

So any evidence of anything beyond the physical is going to necessarily be anecdotal. You can do surveys and such things, but you can’t get a systematic data set. It could easily be that non-physical phenomena are shy of direct inspection, who knows.

My partner back when we were both gradually leaving the faith took an online philosophy course from some university, and I sort of took it in over their shoulder. The 101 course started with a discussion about the existence of god, which is the classical way of discussing spirituality. It probably helps that “god” is one syllable whereas “metaphysical reality” is seven. The basic takeaway was, we’ve been discussing this for thousands of years and nobody has yet come up with a slam-dunk answer either way. This is entry-level stuff in philosophy.

The reddit atheist bros are doing philosophy, but they don’t realise it, so they just keep tripping over their own balls. They want to use a “null hypothesis” and shift the “burden of proof” but there is nothing more or less natural or “null” about assuming no first cause as there is about assuming a cause that exists beyond the boundaries of cause and effect. They refuse to learn any philosophy, instead assuming that the tools of science can answer everything, but that in itself is a purely materialist assumption, so it’s downstream from philosophy. They are literally begging the question. They’re right that science cannot disprove spirituality, but it can’t prove it either, regardless of what is real. In my experience it’s very hard to get them to see this point.

Their arguments in my experience are always geared towards attacking evangelical christianity, which is actually an easy target. Evangelicals are fucking ridiculous when you strip away their respectability and institutional support. But then when they’re done with that target they turn the same weapons on the whole notion of spirituality and it just blows up in their faces. This is why these kinds of atheists are also called “christian atheists”. They just don’t want to admit that’s what they are; it’s purely reactionary. Their thought leaders seem to be mainly intellectually lazy grifters who have long since drifted back into an alliance with christianity and started attacking islam instead. Almost like they were always just attacking easy targets and the audience for anti-christian stuff turned out to be smaller than the one for anti-muslim stuff, at least after 9/11.

As for what I personally believe, I’m actually fine with the existence of an afterlife, and with its nonexistence. I found The Good Place ending amazing in this regard. They handled the notion of death so well, and they hit on something fascinating, which is that even if you’ve seen a thousand afterlives and been alive for billions of Jeremy Bearimy’s and seen and done all that you’re curious about in the universe you still have no idea what awaits beyond death. Oblivion is not a thing that you can grasp.

So yeah, I’ve realised that it doesn’t matter either way.

Not by itself no, but it was a vector to be indoctrinated into a strong belief in a christian afterlife at a very young age.

I no longer hold any of those beliefs. I now think that existence ex-nihilo and creation by something outside of the natural universe are two equally absurd possibilities, and science is fundamentally incapable of resolving that question.

I have certainly had odd, even otherworldly experiences, but I couldn’t say what any of them meant or if they mean anything at all. I am deeply suspicious of anyone that claims to have the answers.

Oh I do know about that, I’ve had a near death experience myself, your body/brain has an uncanny sense that says “you are dangling over the precipice right now.”

I just mean that until it actually happens, there is no true confirmation, and after, you can’t report back, that’s why it’s called a mystery.

In fact from the way that person is talking it sounds like they may have had such an experience, and maybe now they’re doubting that it’s real.

Every single person who ever lived could use this logic and they’d never see it disproven.

I’m just perusing my old comments and came across this, 7 months later. This is an amazing article, thank you.

Okay, that’s all very interesting and I love the idea about dynamic music, I’ve had similar thoughts myself but wouldn’t have thought to go this far to make it happen. I’d love to see what you come up with!

My only real thoughts are about the transpiling, so the editor uses relative time codes but the format itself uses absolute, if I understand you, and you’re converting between the two?

That to me hints of code smell, because I wonder why that’s necessary. For example, could you program the editor to display and work in absolute time codes, or is there something stopping that from happening?

Alternatively you could simply make the format capable of natively understanding both relative and absolute commands, so whichever is more appropriate to the context is what gets used.

Keeping them different seems like it will require you to program two formats, make them compatible with one another and deal with bugs in both of them. Essentially you’ve not only doubled the number of places where bugs can arise within the formats, you’ve added the extra step of transpiling which also doubles the number of interactions between the formats, adding even more complexity, even more places where inconsistencies can show up, even more code to sift through to find the problem.

It’s the sort of thing that shows up in legacy systems where the programmers don’t have the freedom to simply ditch one of the parts.

Personally if I had the freedom of programming the system from scratch I would rather commit completely to a single format and make it work across the entire stack, so then I only have one interpreter/encoder to consider. That one parser would then be the single point of reference for every interaction with the format. Any code that wants to get or place a note for any reason - for playing, editing, recording, whatever - would use the same set of functions, and then you automatically get consistency across all of it.

Edit: another thought about this: if you need some notes to be absolute and others to be relative, it might be worth having an absolute anchor command that other commands can be relative to, and have it indexed, so commands are relative to anchor 1, 2, etc. Maybe anchor 0 is just the start of the song. Also maybe you could set any command as an anchor by referring to its index. That way you can still move around those commands in a relative way while still having the overall format reducible to absolute times during playback. Also a note “duration” could just be an off command set relative to its corresponding on command.

I say that because as another principle I like to make sure that I “name things what they are”. If the user is programming things in the editor that are relative, but under the hood they’re translated into absolute terms, that will probably lead to unexpected behaviour.

It’s neoliberal politics. Basically after WWII it was obvious people didn’t like fascism and politicians couldn’t openly embrace it. But it was too useful for protecting capitalist interests, so a bunch of neoliberal experiments were run in south america to figure out the best way to use fascism to oppress workers without creating that world-war style blowback.

And one of the techniques they landed on was to keep scapegoating the vulnerable, but to use sanitised language. So it’s not “dirty n-----s, g-----s and k----s polluting our precious blood and soil”, it’s “immigrants taking our jobs”. It’s not “useless eaters withering the soul of our nation” it’s “welfare recipients mustn’t be allowed to freeload.”

It’s the same ideas dressed up to sound a bit more respectable and not trip the fascism alarm, but they work nearly as well to strip the social safety net, which lowers wages.

The argument could be made that because the image generator is essentially a regurgitator with no artistic interpretation, there is no transformative artistic value in it. It’s like applying a filter with extra steps.

Also the generators charge for access, so they are profiting off of the IP. That’s quite different to making something for personal use or releasing it for free.

Honestly a lot of this post is very inside-baseball with a lot of lingo, and the last paragraph is very dense, so it’s hard to know what you mean, especially by the term “transpiler”. What is it transpiling to & from, and where does this happen in the overall process of implementing the editor?

I’m sorry I don’t have a lot of insight other than: it sounds like you know better than anyone here, so just try it and see what works. Sometimes rewriting a system is unavoidable as you figure out the logic of it.

Also as someone with some interest in programming my own physical MIDI instruments, I’d be interested to hear what limitations of MIDI you’re talking about and what your system does differently. It sounds like you’ve got a pretty advanced use-case if MIDI isn’t up to the task.

Did anyone get consent from all the artists whose work was scraped to make the shitty AI that made their comic?

You can, but I find that if I have the tabs there, I use them or close them. I don’t use bookmarks after I make them, so they just acrue. You’re right I don’t need 7000 open tabs, just like I don’t need 7000 bookmarks. Part of the point of tab groups is you can more easily determine what tabs aren’t relevant and get rid of them, so you don’t wind up with thousands to start with.

If they’re open as tabs, even in groups, I’m incentivised to close them when they’re no longer relevant. For longer term notes I use a note-taking app that doesn’t rely on my browser or computer staying the same. I don’t like using a browser for that because it’s just not a good tool for it.

People should look into tab groups. Firefox has a tab grouping feature built-in now but this is a plugin that is a bit more feature-full.

So I have tab groups for different dev projects, games, podcasts, shows, music, etc. It reduces the size of each tab group which makes it easier to actually return to the important stuff and close the stuff that doesn’t matter.