I see your point, but as you say, there would still be the tradeoff of missing more recent stuff. That might only involve missing a couple of years’ worth of stuff now, but AI isn’t going away any time soon, so it would mean that there’d be an increasing amount of human made music not being archived; One of the things I like about Anna’s archive is that they seem to look at this problem as a long term, informational infrastructure kind of way, so I imagine they wouldn’t be keen on stopping the archive at 2023.

It seems they’ve opted for a different tradeoff instead: lower popularity songs are archived at a lower bitrate, and even the higher popularity stuff has some compression. Some archives go for quality, and thus prioritise high quality FLACs, so Anna’s archive are aiming to fulfill a different niche. I can respect that.

That’s super interesting, because with mine, it definitely made a huge difference. It honestly tasted pretty bad before it had aged at all, and it didn’t taste much better after 3 months. It was drinkable after a year, but still not great. After 2 years though, it was one of the nicest alcoholic beverages I’ve ever tasted.

I wonder what caused such significant differences between our experiences. Do you have a particular recipe you use? Not because I want to compare methods — I wouldn’t be able to find whatever guide I followed. Rather, it sounds like whatever strategy you used gets drinkable mead far quicker than whatever I did

You’re right — I think it’s more the frequent moving home that’s holding me back. I just want stability

I don’t remember where I heard it, but a phrase I quite like is “AI is the death drive of capitalism”

This always irks me, like if you’re going to harvest my data, could you at least use some of your immense repository of data insights to improve your product? No? You’re just going to enclose the data commons in your ridiculous quest to make the line go up, without giving any value back to the people who facilitated your growth? Yeah, I thought that’d be the case. Disappointed, but not surprised that this is the case.

The context in which this most often annoys me is that nearly every Tuesday, I go to a philosophy discussion group at a nearby pub. I usually get the route up on Google maps through Android Auto because the optimal route depends a lot on traffic, and each time, I have to manually type in the name of the pub.

It especially annoys me when sometimes, on a day that isn’t Tuesday, the pub will be listed near the top of the suggested destinations when I first launch Google maps. I literally never go to that pub for any reason other than the philosophy group.

It’s such a trivial thing to be annoyed by, but equally, it appears to me that actually giving useful suggestions in straightforward cases such as this is equally trivial. It reveals that they truly don’t give a fuck about improving products (and indeed, when it comes to Google’s offerings, so much of it has gotten worse. Google assistant and its voice recognition used to be way more reliable and powerful in the past. I first started using Android 10 years ago and I had so much fun tinkering with automation on my Nexus 6; there are things that I could do before that I no longer can, and it annoys me to no end)

I’d appreciate it if you could let us know if you find anything

Witchy vibes have really helped me to think more positively about ageing.

As a teenager, I was Wiccan for a while, and whilst that’s no longer the case, there’s a bunch of conceptual motifs that I took from it that still play a part in how I think. In this case, the notion of the triple Goddess: the maiden, the mother and the crone.

I am certainly past my maiden stage — not just in literal age, but headspace. I don’t feel the need to accept every invitation I receive in a quest to explore what I want and to figure out how to best situate myself in the world. I know what I value, and now the challenge is in cultivating it.

Something interesting about this framing is that I’ve spent a while lately pondering “what does the mother era mean for someone who never plans to be a parent?”, because certainly fertility and motherhood are big components of the mother aspect. When I found myself thinking about my maiden era having come to an end, I kept slipping into wanting to skip forward to my crone era, because I didn’t have a sense of what the mother era would mean. Don’t get me wrong, I (and many other women) have long aspired to be forest hags, but I don’t want to poison my current era with excess wistfulness for the future.

In time, I realised that I can channel mother energy in a bunch of ways. For example, I like to host parties in my home rather than going out, because I am able to control the space and ensure that everyone is safe and comfortable. In my early 20s, I experimented with a heckton of drugs because I’ve always been deeply curious about mind altering substances, and occasionally, I was a bit unsafe in how I did this. As a result of that, all of my friends know that if they ever want to try a particular substance, they can come to me to talk about relative risks, how to test drugs for adulterants, and for a safe space in which to try them (because a trip sitter is pretty important for safe, first time psychedelics use)

Mildly NSFW:

!Another aspect of “mother” energy that’s just come to mind that isn’t necessarily something that I’d initially have thought of as fitting into this domain is that recently, I went to a sex party type thing, but I turned up too late and many people had gone home. I didn’t want to end the night without getting laid, so that led to me lowering my standards somewhat when it comes to the general vibe of a person. I went into one of the playrooms with a dude, and before long, it became clear that this was a scenario of “no sex is better than bad sex”, due to how he was so keen to slip straight to the “main event” without any foreplay (and of course, trying to do that is a great way to make the main event painful for some women who need to warm up). At the first instance of pain, we stopped for a moment so I could recover, and I decided “nah, I’m too old for this shit.” — having had plenty of bad sex in my maiden era, I could see where this was going. I told him that I wanted to stop, that I was not in the correct headspace, and apologised for the abruptness. It was pretty empowering actually, because a younger version of me would have implicitly felt like giving my consent was an irrevocable act, and I would have prioritised social niceties over my own comfort and pleasure.!<

Edit: added spoiler tags for mildly NSFW part

Yeah, I’ve been seeing an increasing number of artists who are pro piracy, who basically say “steal our music, save your money, and if you want to support us, come to a gig and buy some merch”.

I’ve also seen more and more artists staying off Spotify entirely. One such artist is the wonderful folk artist Lucy & Hazel . This was the first time I actually bought music in years, and a big part of that was because I wanted to support their active choice to stay off Spotify.

An unexpected side effect of this is that because I’m aware these guys are situated less optimally for algorithmic discoverability, I find myself actively recommending them to people. It feels nice compared to the more passive mode of algorithmic music discovery

I’m not sure how they would go about doing that at scale without also getting some false positives and removing human music too

I made mead ages ago and it was incredible. It didn’t last very long though. The demijohns the mead was ageing in came with me across 4 house moves in 2 years.

I’d love to do it again if I ever have the space, but also, I only made that first batch of mead because I tutored a beekeepers son

Did they know it was you? Or did you sheepingly pretend to also be annoyed at the smell

I often wonder whether Starmer has even one sincerely held political beliefs or value. I’d love to put him in a zone of Truth (D&D spell) and just ask him what he actually believes.

It’s weird, because it means that I sort of respect the Tories more. They believed many abhorrent things, such as that a cripple like me is at best, an inconvenient drain on the country’s resources, and at worst, someone who is making it all up to escape having to work — but at least they sincerely believe that.

(((gnu)imp)tk)lib)object)

If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck…