It makes things much more challenging to sync up! You can't just speed up the slower song (or vice versa), because even if the averages match, it will still be all over the place from bar to bar. I now have much better workflows to deal with this, but for that first one, I spent a looong time manually adjusting things to get them to fit.

Working with tracks that were recorded to a click (or digitally gridified, as per the article), are much easier to work with. Match the tempos and everything automatically works. Definitely helps creating my mashups...

But I do agree with the post, in that it loses some indescribable human aspect. I love the push and pull of musicians trying to follow each other rather than concentrating on the click. Or even just pushing and pulling against oneself with things like rubato in classical music, sometimes accelerating, and sometimes slowing, at times almost to a dead stop, so as to build a sense of antecip.... pation.

[1] Link if anyone is interested in checking it out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP74tMiXBU8&list=PLsj2XVeWwU...

You feel like there is... But the minute you try to bring it into creation, you find out just how absurdly fuzzy it really is. A non-artist might believe that the failure of bringing your mind image to life is a failure of _skill_. That you are just physically incapable of accurately reproducing the thing you're picturing in your head.

While that might well be a factor, it's never the whole story.

That's most clear with writing. Anyone who's ever written anything of substance has had the experience of having what feels like a pretty solid story/thesis/whatever. But the minute you try actually writing, you realize just how fuzzy that idea really was. You have to work and labor at it to make it become something coherent. It's not a limitation in mechanical skill: typing absolute non-sense is exactly the same difficulty as typing the a NYT best seller. The difficulty is in the deciding what to type.

A huge portion of art is in that part of the process. Exploring ways to bring into existence not _the image you had in your mind_, because there's no such thing. But to bring into existence something that makes you _feel_ the same way the fuzzy idea in your head made you feel.

And that's the thing that AI does not, and fundamentally cannot, give you. All the innumerable micro choices your mind does as you try to gradient descend that raw log of wood into the carving of a bear.

Looking at an AI output and deciding whether it happens to match the fuzzy idea you had enough or not, simply isn't the same thing. I'm not even saying that it's not valuable or useful, it certainly can be. But it's fundamentally not _art_. That's the reason Rick Rubin, for all the praise he (deservedly!) gets for all his work, does not describe himself an _artist_. It's just not the thing he is doing. He doesn't create, he evaluates. And if you take that for what it is, that's absolutely fine, great even, when you're as good as he is.

But if you believe the evaluating is, as you put, "seeing what's in your mind's eye at the highest fidelity possible", that's simply untrue. And it _cannot_ be true, because there isn't actually a thing that's in your mind's eye in a way that would allow for that, regardless of whether you're using AI or creating it by hand. Using AI just gives you the illusion that there ever was such a thing.

I do understand that even if does get replaced eventually, it still was useful for a while, and probably served as the basis for whatever came after.

But still. For whatever reason, in my brain, it just diminished whatever psychological reward I got from adding information to OSM, which is a shame.

I got pretty into OSM for a while and that's definitely the thing that eventually put me off... So much stuff has multiple ways to be mapped, and it gets confusing/overwhelming. I understand that OSM has a very malleable data model, and that definitely has many benefits, especially for niche/edge cases. But I do wish the community had arrived at a settled convention for at least the most basic stuff, like the aforementioned sidewalks.

Also, lol @ the name of the river near that site. (For the gringos: "Rego Grande", "rego" officially means ditch/trench, but nowadays it's much more commonly used as slang for butt crack. So, it's the Large Butt Crack river. Which I guess tracks for Brazil :P)

Though that's an interesting point: some games were localized on the Brazilian CN website! Not all, but it's cool that at least some of them were.

And thanks for the game names as wel, although, I must admit that after posting that comment, I did go looking for them, and... Well, let's just say I've found my MixMaster skills to be quite rusty after all this time :p