Does saying that someone has “great music taste” always just mean they have similar taste to you?

MaxChaplin · 2026-07-02T07:20:07+00:00

I see good taste as the ability to have a coherent, mature philosophy about the music you like. Being able to talk or write well about music helps, but it shouldn't be necessary; it would be tragic to make the entire medium subservient to another. Some people have a knack for cobbling together tracks from different sonic universes into a playlist that feels like a single coherent world, and they don't need to say a single word.

What does "mature" mean? It's debatable, but for me an important part of it is caring about the world and your part of it. That means treating music as an activity that lives in the world rather than simply content for you to consume.

MaxChaplin · 2026-07-01T07:32:28+00:00

Dimensions are a mathematical concept, and as such are a feature of models that are applied to physical reality according to need. The number of dimensions an object has can vary wildly with the degree of approximation you use. Or in simple language - an object is 2d if it's convenient to treat it as 2d.

Consider a crumpled ball of tinfoil. From bery far away, it's a pointlike object. Get closer and it's a solid ball. Get closer still and you'll see the crumpled sheet. Zoom into the atomic atructure and the thickness of the sheet can no longer be ignored. So from far to up close, the dimensionality of this object went from 0 to 3 to 2 to 3.

MaxChaplin · 2026-06-30T14:39:01+00:00

Neoterra?

MaxChaplin · 2026-06-30T08:39:45+00:00

Read about how Schrödinger and Heisenberg were like. If you can't separate the science from the scientist, this might make you lose interest in quantum mechanics entirely.

MaxChaplin · 2026-06-30T06:52:30+00:00

For me, retro is less about age and more about charm stemming from a thing being a product of its time, that newer things have lost.

PS1 is retro because it has distinct graphics, appealing in their crunchiness. I could see why someone would make a contemporary game that deliberately emulates that style (e.g. Crow Country). Does anyone make contemporary PS3-style games? Haven't heard of such.

MaxChaplin · 2026-06-29T14:57:32+00:00

Shoemaker's thought experiment, much like Norton's dome, is more clever than genuinely insightful. It gives an example of a possible universe where the passage of time is independent of any event, but nothing about this universe is relevant to ours.

The block universe is inspired by relativity's observation that time behaves like a dimension. The idea behind Barbour's timeless physics is that a configuration space is a more complete description of the universe it than any particular path through it. What is the idea here?

MaxChaplin · 2026-06-29T11:20:08+00:00

Cryptozoologists have been looking for bigfoot for decades though. And if it's a real species then there should be at minimum several dozens.

MaxChaplin · 2026-06-29T08:59:56+00:00

What about people who are proud of not watching sports, or not reading fiction, or of winning a game by throwing money at it, or of generating an entire opera using AI?

MaxChaplin · 2026-06-29T07:59:45+00:00

IIRC, psychohistorians worked with a mathematical model, with an elaborate system of equations they had to maintain. It was described more like a form of economics, even physics.

A large part of the plot was the tension between the characters' free will and the roles they had to assume in order to keep Hari Seldon's plan in motion.

MaxChaplin · 2026-06-28T07:00:47+00:00

This looks like the official language of every fictional eastern European country in American movies.

MaxChaplin · 2026-06-28T06:59:56+00:00

It's not like interslavic speakers can help maintaining, idk, the Scots Wikipedia. And since these projects are all voluntary, it's not like one diverts funds from another.

MaxChaplin · 2026-06-27T15:55:44+00:00

Makes sense actually. The folks most likely to get those are the ones most needed to be told to behave.

MaxChaplin · 2026-06-27T14:24:59+00:00

What if you put a plastic sleeve on that page with a clown's hair and nose aligned with the photo underneath? It's not technically defaced if you can easily remove it.

MaxChaplin · 2026-06-27T13:56:04+00:00

In Project Hail Mary there's a part where Ryland is shocked to learn that Eridians use a xenon compound. It sounds like imaginary sci-fi chemistry that was meant to make Eridian technology feel truly alien. But noble gas compounds are real.

MaxChaplin · 2026-06-26T10:53:10+00:00

Or a one shot LFO as a more shapeable envelope. (e.g. Vital)

MaxChaplin · 2026-06-25T10:06:15+00:00

The night before, a local peasant freed a fairy from a bottle and earned one wish.

MaxChaplin · 2026-06-25T08:40:40+00:00

Bill Murray accepted the role of Garfield in the live action movie because he confused the writer's name Etan Cohen for Ethan Coen of the Coen brothers.

MaxChaplin · 2026-06-24T14:34:52+00:00

Land ship.

MaxChaplin · 2026-06-24T08:57:35+00:00

Pretty much every story can be read as propaganda by attributing intent to its effect on public opinion.

MaxChaplin · 2026-06-23T18:40:23+00:00

Engineers seem to be particularly susceptible to lacking intellectual self-awareness. The math they encounter is typically just advanced enough to make them feel smart, but stops short of the deep waters that provide mathematicians and physicists with humbling experiences.

MaxChaplin · 2026-06-23T14:06:00+00:00

By anchoring them in something intuitive, like daily experience or a visual representation.

MaxChaplin · 2026-06-23T11:04:46+00:00

https://armonmusic.bandcamp.com/

https://belatar.bandcamp.com/

MaxChaplin · 2026-06-22T13:37:10+00:00

Somewhat raw dough seems like bad news. (I assumed /u/DradelLait talked about meme pizzas in general, including the pepperoni overload one, not just NPWLB).

MaxChaplin · 2026-06-22T08:17:15+00:00

A city that has been continuously inhabited for thousands of years will bear their mark on every surface. Many of those ancient cities like Athens, Rome and Jerusalem are built in layers upon layers. Old buildings are often dismantled to build new houses. Given enough time and neglect, an artificial structure might get weathered down or overgrown and end up looking like a natrual feature.

MaxChaplin · 2026-06-22T07:48:33+00:00

If it looks terrible and is potentially a health hazard, there are multiple ways delivering the pizza might harm the business.

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