I dunno.. even here in new zealand, very much not a musical hub, i still know plenty of jazz musicians who make a living off of music, and there is generally at least 1 jazz gig every week.
I also think the industry is pretty tolerant of more experimental/non-pop music, just that this isn't really true for the rock scene amymore. Hardcore punk, hardstyle, dubstep, hyperpop, shoegaze are all huge genres now, large enough to live off of and perform at festivals as big as coachella.
You may be right about Damon Albarn but that would just be a result of which genres have listeners who are willing to listen to smaller, non-mainstream artists. I think the biggest example of this is that mainstream rock music a la guns and roses has pretty much completely died out, while genres with smaller, more dedicated fanbases like post-rock and noise rock are still going strong as ever. I'm sure if you check your local shows (and you live in a place with reasonably large population) you will be able to find plenty of bands who completely live off their music.
this is not clones. the old Sites are html/php.Different stack, different UX focus — Next.js app vs the older PHP tools. Not trying to replace, just built a simpler, free, ad-free version for people who aren't security researchers.
i tried to open and Funny enough — that site is throwing an SSL error right now (ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR). Whatever slop is, broken SSL on launch day isn't a great look either way.
More likely a misconfigured custom domain than Vercel itself.
Their default *.vercel.app deployments handle SSL automatically. But fair, plenty of half-finished launches out there either way.
I also suspect Terry Pratchett would have had a lot to say about this sentence: "Pratchett’s [pocket editions] were small, fat, slightly battered, and printed on a kind of paper that already looked guilty." And this one: "It had Heroes, capital H, walking grimly towards their Destiny across a landscape that smelled of dwarves."
Some odd turns of phrase there that are grammatically correct, but... you know...
I thought those sentences were examples of excellent writing.
They don't sound AI to me - is that the implication, that it is? And the bit about 'Heroes' reminds me of his descriptions making fun of heroes in the stories about Cohen the Barbarian.
That's what I think the comment meant.. I was trying to put my finger on the word (other than slop) for the sort of low-effort, gimmicky pastiche that LLM's enable..but it might not exist yet.
Giving objects interiority is a very Pratchett move.
I'm really surprised to see everyone praising the article. It's... it's slop, isn't it?
> And then there are the memories [...] that arrive uninvited, settle in, and start terrorising the other occupants by kicking over the chairs.
> Sir Terry Pratchett, who knew more about furniture than most, put it this way:
> "Rincewind tried to force the memory out of his mind, but it was rather enjoying itself there, terrorizing the other occupants and kicking over the furniture."
He "put it this way", in the exact same words you just used? Also, he knew more about furniture than most? What? Why?
> "Mathieu and I had read every Pratchett the school library would admit to owning, plus several it would not."
This has the cadence of a witty sentence unless you're paying attention and realize it makes no sense.
> “In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.”
> Nine words. A complete cosmology. Most physics departments would settle for that.
It's eight words, and the thing about physics departments makes no sense.
> The Author, refusing to let the Narrator off the hook.
Again, cute sentence, unless you're paying attention and you realize it doesn't mean anything.
I just sort of subconsciously glossed over these, thinking they were very clever jokes I was too dense to get. Upon re- reading — yeah, it’s quite bizarre. It’s nailed the cadence, but completely butchered the content.
The bit that sounds the most AI out of all of this is “A complete cosmology. Most physics departments would settle for that.” It sounds absolutely like something Claude would output. “Most physics departments”? Why would any physics department be so taken by these eight (or nine) words that they’d choose to stop doing physics? If some were, though, why not all of them? Are there contrarian physics departments that wouldn’t want to adopt the very trendy eight-to-nine word Grand Unified Theory of Everything that’s all the rage nowadays? Argh.
The funny thing is, Pratchett would have a field day with this. I can imagine it now, one of his golems starts writing these bizarre things and becomes a literary sensation in Ankh-Morpork, and there's like one actual writer, William de Worde or someone, who's just like, but it doesn't mean anything! But nobody is listening to him.
... then they find out that the golem is actually just outsourcing all the "work" to a small army of pissed off, underpaid, chain-smoking imps. The punchline being that GolemAI is "actually imps."
Interestingly each of those sentences also tripped me up but I let it go as it read good enough.
This comment is pushing me to think critically about those weird sentences rather than just accepting it. Thanks for this comment.
This is like that short story with the various llm troubleshooting jobs in some solarpunky future. I loved it but the fact it was AI gives me a form of sadness. This is likely the same now.
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