and was e.g. entirely immune to the charms of Twin Peaks,

I believe you're right.

But even then... once this devolved into what felt like a teeth-clenching march to the Final Battle, on the basis AFAI can tell that this is what the author understood Novels Must Do,

it wasn't even providing the pleasures you get from just floating along.

It was just a grind.

I can't take Adrian Tchaikovsky either...

It's got some provocative ideas, which Stephen foregrounds.

It's got a great hook, and like most writing incubated under circumstances like this, it leans hard into polished sharp introduction into a well-considered world with a very specific flavor.

It's also—no better way to put it—crappy as a novel.

It's not because the author can't string sentences together.

It's because that's not what makes a novel function as a novel.

Epic opening and premise establishment: 10/10

Nice "plot twist", predictable in its inevitability if not its specifics; conforms to genre: 7/10

Narrative arc: 2/10

Ability to sustain meaningful tension and interest while working through the de rigeur mechanics of filling hundreds of pages: 1/10

I get that there is a new readership with different expectations and styles of reading. (Looking at you tiktok; looking at you Dungeon Crawler Carl; looking at most successful YA fiction especially that which gets SPICEY and is released in 8-book series with a new volume every 11 months)

If you're silverback and relish long-form fiction as previously conceived: set expectations accordingly.

Srsly though.

Many tens of millions if you want to start with the emergence of primates, etc.

The partial answer being, some dialects retain differences and they are significant. My own accent is not terrible especially for an American raised when and where I was, but I internalized it early enough (just through middle school instruction, sadly) that I don't even know if I pronounce them all the same... I'd have to read some passages and inspect.

But I was hoping for a little more by way of explicit discussion of the why, which I infer is largely: diacriticals are mostly artifacts of etymology which at some point became ossified and absent a Dudens-like change in prescriptive heart, are here to stay, mostly unvoiced indicators of language evolution (like the silent k and gh in English knight).

Also, for Half Life.

Especially the lemmas:

- any statement about AI which uses the word "never" to preclude some feature from future realization is false.

- contemporary implementations have almost always already been improved upon, but are unevenly distributed.

Me, I'm not just chasing markets; I want to build things that create joy.

two that are drawn from my own experience are:

- meaningful software still takes meaningful time to develop

- not all software is packaged for everyone

I've seen a lot of examples shared of software becoming narrow-cast, and/or ephemeral.

That that doesn't show up in library production or even app store submissions is not interesting.

I'm working on a large project that I could never have undertaken prior to contemporary assistance. I anticipate it will be months before I have something "shippable." But that's because it's a large project, not a one shot.

I was musing that this weekend: when do we see the first crop of serious and novel projects shipping, which could not have been done before (at least, by individual devs)... but which still took serious time.

Could be a while yet.

https://mathstodon.xyz/@gwenbeads/115968206227675487

Gwen Fisher was at the Exploratorium After Dark event ten days ago running an activity where you could sit down and implement some of her CA rules on hex paper with markers.

It was fun, surprising, and beautiful.

however much atonality and other formalisms represented an intellectual inevitability, they also are ultimately useful mostly for having mapped a good bit of the coastline defining where the experience and enjoyment of musicality is grounded in ways which are obviously embedded in both physics and our particular embodiment, and to lesser degree, culture.

Jazz did a much more nuanced mapping of that ground IMO, but to the same end result: beyond the coast there is deep water, and there we do not swim.

Nor shall we, the collective. Not so long as we live in these bodies.

Individuals can swim; individuals can endeavor or through some rare combination of circumstance find musical value and enjoyment in the water, i.e. beyond conventional melody harmony and rhythm...

...but no amount of intellectual scaffolding or historical cultural momentum can bridge it.

Humans cluster inland.

I've spend decades in the experimental sound/music community and mapped some largely unvisited coves myself, having a particular interest in what in those intellectual traditions was called musique concrete;

and been to countless "noise" shows, and lived through many generations now of enthusiastic "kids" rediscovering various aesthetics.

The lines don't budge. The cultural framing of what it means to transgress them, and the communities that form around celebration of that "transgression," are all unique in their specific concerns, and—unhappy in the same way.

Minimalism was a welcome success for pretty obvious reasons: it was a reversion and embrace of exactly those things at the heart of our embodied experience of music.

Could be for fun. I remember fun.

Humans are not judged on the basis of what they _can_ do.

Reasoning about how to constrain tools on the basis of what they _could_ do, if e.g. used outside their established guardrails, needs to be very nuanced.

In other words: notionally, if not literally, by the time trailing numbers are collected they are out of date.

This is of course axiomatic, but, that staleness is a serious matter in this particular moment.

It's a cliché that six months can be a lifetime on the bleeding edge of tech.

This is the first time in my career that is more or less literally true.

Humans reason poorly with non-linear change.

This entire article is a demonstration of that.