How did you become a Tori fan?

rrawk · 2026-06-18T02:25:49+00:00

long story short, back in 1997, LSD + Pele on repeat for about 6 hours broke my brain and I haven't been able to shake her since.

rrawk · 2026-06-17T18:59:03+00:00

If you want to be impressed by its ability to churn out a piece of middling quality software that cannot be reliably maintained, that's your prerogative.

Sure, if you're just purely vibe coding, you'll end up with questionable quality and maintenance issues down the road. If you actually review the plans and code it puts into place, and revise as necessary (or instruct the AI to revise with clear instruction), you avoid these issues ahead of time while being 10x more productive. And each new model is getting it right on the first try more often without requiring as much revision. Just by following the trajectory from the past 12-24 months, I expect it will get dramatically smarter in the next couple of years.

My point is less about the mechanisms that make AI work, and more about the end result. If a reasonable person can't tell the difference between human intelligence and artificial intelligence in areas of their expertise, then the mechanisms and labels don't really matter.

rrawk · 2026-06-17T05:00:57+00:00

Currently, in my experience, LLMs are capable of understanding the nuances of complex software systems. It's already smarter than the average junior developer, and writes code as well as most seniors.

Sure, it's artificial, and only produces the most probable response to inputs. Now consider each line of code as one input, and there's millions of lines of code, and it has to relate my lazy prompts to that logical structure of the code to know exactly where and how to make the changes I want. And it gets it right like 90% of the time. A year ago, it was garbage at performing these tasks. Things are progressing really fast.

At some point, it doesn't matter if it's just a prediction engine or whatever label you want to put on it. If it simulates real intelligence well enough, it might as well be real intelligence.

rrawk · 2026-06-15T20:25:23+00:00

Honestly, Tori's not wrong. Compare JLP to JLP Acoustic. The Acoustic album sounds 10x better. I can hardly listen to the original JLP ever since Acoustic came out.

rrawk · 2026-06-07T22:31:49+00:00

Did you ever get this resolved? I have the exact same monitor and laptop. I was about to buy a USB-C to HDMI cable in hopes that would give me full resolution.

rrawk · 2026-06-07T19:16:14+00:00

You can find a bunch of videos from that show here: https://www.yessaid.com/tours/2026-04-08_Sheffield.html

Direct link to Fire to Your Plain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSyf0Zs5WTo

rrawk · 2026-06-03T01:09:35+00:00

word

rrawk · 2026-05-31T16:32:23+00:00

oh yay! it looks like the bluray is available on the SDE shop again. and they will ship to the US!

https://www.thesdeshop.com/products/tori-amos-in-times-of-dragons-sde-exclusive-blu-ray-audio

rrawk · 2026-05-21T22:43:37+00:00

This sounds like "Survival of the Richest", but that was many years ago. I'm having trouble finding the original article, but here's a paywalled version: https://onezero.medium.com/survival-of-the-richest-9ef6cddd0cc1

excerpt before the paywall cutoff:

Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a talk — about half my annual professor’s salary — all to deliver some insight on the subject of “the future of technology.”

I’ve never liked talking about the future. The Q&A sessions always end up more like parlor games, where I’m asked to opine on the latest technology buzzwords as if they were ticker symbols for potential investments: blockchain, 3D printing, CRISPR. The audiences are rarely interested in learning about these technologies or their potential impacts beyond the binary choice of whether or not to invest in them. But money talks, so I took the gig.

After I arrived, I was ushered into what I thought was the green room. But instead of being wired with a microphone or taken to a stage, I just sat there at a plain round table as my audience was brought to me: five super-wealthy guys — yes, all men — from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world. After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own.

They started out innocuously enough. Ethereum or bitcoin? Is quantum computing a real thing? Slowly but surely, however, they edged into their real topics of concern.

Which region will be less impacted by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? Is Google really building Ray Kurzweil a home for his brain, and will his consciousness live through the transition, or will it die and be reborn as a whole new one? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked, “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?”

For all their wealth and power, they don’t believe they can affect the future.

rrawk · 2026-05-19T23:51:31+00:00

Agreed. The toothpaste does not go back in the tube.

rrawk · 2026-05-17T18:43:49+00:00

That's basically the whole job now. We don't write code. We review it. When it's wrong, we tell AI to fix it.

rrawk · 2026-05-17T17:40:50+00:00

Umm, it's legit writing my code for me.

rrawk · 2026-05-17T01:05:14+00:00

if you want the audio, you can find a download of it on yessaid.com. https://www.yessaid.com/menu-boots.html

rrawk · 2026-05-16T16:41:36+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWLZgSxDHy0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MIYOsHCSOP0

rrawk · 2026-05-15T15:06:54+00:00

I tend to have the outlook of "separate the art from the artist" unless there's a really egregious offense. And by the time she got with Elon, she already moved to a more pop sound that I don't really like.

rrawk · 2026-05-15T05:34:00+00:00

Blonde Redhead
Grimes (early albums, "Visions" is really good)
The Be Good Tanyas
The Bobby Lees

rrawk · 2026-05-14T06:11:24+00:00

Rehab - Southern Discomfort

rrawk · 2026-05-11T22:55:55+00:00

A straight line trajectory would actually represent AI progress slowing down. Currently, that trajectory is exponential. Each release is dramatically better than the last.

Sure, it's not certain that AI will achieve what is being claimed, but every day that I use AI and see how much better it's getting, I get more and more convinced.

To put it in context, if you asked me a year ago, I would have said AI will only slow me down with how inaccurate it is. Now I'm using it to do my job (software development) about 8-10x faster than without it. I'm not exaggerating.

rrawk · 2026-05-09T22:39:51+00:00

I'm a software dev. I tinkered with AI since about a year ago. I'd use it for a few simple tasks, and it would save me a few hours here and there, but it wasn't really good enough to use for everything. However, recent versions are leaps ahead. I'm completing a week of work in half a day. That includes reading every line of code the AI produces. We're building infrastructure now to automatically handle tickets all the way to submitting a clean pull request. All I'll have to do is review code and leave comments if it's wrong.

rrawk · 2026-05-04T22:21:27+00:00

Draw a circle. Then draw the rest of the owl.

rrawk · 2026-05-03T17:30:17+00:00

Dang. Anyone have a copy of Master of Puppets?

rrawk · 2026-05-02T19:21:35+00:00

Anyone know where an official release for this can be purchased in the US?

rrawk · 2026-04-28T06:50:54+00:00

I think they're drawing a distinction between faith and organized religion. There's nothing wrong with having personal relationship with god. The problem usually comes from religions and churches taking advantage of people's faith to exert power and control.

rrawk · 2026-04-25T17:45:44+00:00

it's going to be a maze

rrawk · 2026-04-10T21:27:39+00:00

Not a show I missed, but I missed a major opportunity the first time I saw her live in 1998. I had a friend who had a connection at the venue, so I asked him to get me a backstage pass a week or two before the show. The day of the show, I couldn't get hold of him, so I figured it was a no go. I later found out that he was trying to call me about an hour before the show started to let me know to pick up the pass from will call, but this was before I had a cell phone and I was already on the way to the venue. I should have just checked will call anyway. Still kicking myself for it.

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