bit-rot

Not the startup-themed website featuring logins and calls to action…

Why not read some music blogs or go to a record store, or talk to your friends about the music they like?

The majority of people, I think, don't want to listen to AI music or view AI art. Systems like this will produce muzak for ubers, cafes, phone queues, advertisements. Some artists will make hyperreal work by sampling it. But to listen to these "songs" willingly is not something I expect most people will choose to do.

Why do you want to like it?

I'm also saddened by the impact of tech on creative industries. But art always was something you do for yourself and to share with others, for some fundamentally human experience. Could an AI pray for you or ride your bike? I don't know anyone in my personal life who wants to listen to AI music, view AI art, or read AI books. I wish art careers were easier, but I don't think a career alone is the right reason to make art.

> a musician could compose melody, harmony, and lyrics and generate many performances of the same song until they get one they like

Can't relate to this. Art doesn't come out as a left-brained problem solving exercise or identifying the right product for a market. It's about expression. You do it when you're feeling things.

What is the currently accepted way of nailing down a specific python version if not using something like pipenv?

Any intentional relation to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slint ?

This feels like a bit of a bikeshed. There are problems with many configuration languages. I don't see anything related to yaml on their issue tracker.

Look, without getting into a debate on cancel culture, I’m wondering if it’s specifically virtue signaling that you object to. Because RMS is specifically known for a massive amount of virtue signaling. It’s all over his website and was written all over his office at MIT. And he would join discussions and change the subject to whatever he felt like talking about in order to, we’ll, spread the good word. And of course the free software movement more broadly is about taking a moral stance and aggressively spreading it through copyleft and other forms of activism.

So I wonder if it’s not “virtue signaling” here that’s the problem, but the virtue being signaled itself that you don’t like.

Because, generally speaking and on balance, a least in American society, women have things worse off than men. The pay gap, gender roles, access to reproductive healthcare, representation in government, no paid parental leave, violence against women.

> For example, you could believe that gender gaps in engineering are 60% personality-driven and 40% discrimination/sexism-driven. There is nothing toxic about this opinion...

What's potentially toxic about this "opinion" is that, until it cites evidence, it entirely confuses what is social science and what is armchair philosophy.

One can either state: "Study X suggests that the gender gap is roughly due to Y% of A and Z% of B", or they can say "Anecdotally speaking, I have experienced the following, which suggests to me that $REASON may be at play here".

When one carelessly mixes the two together, they drape an assertion in the unearned aesthetics of quantitative reasoning. Which, in my experience, is sadly where a lot of these rationalist arguments end up.

I don't take offense, but thanks for your genuine concern.

Consider re-reading what I wrote. "master" has many meanings, and the whole point I'm making is that context is key. I am not sure what you're referring to with "righteous rage".

What's funny to me about your comment is that you actually chose a perfect example of the importance of critical thinking in how we discuss terminology.

The message behind the English idiom you chose is clearly one of self empowerment; /you/ are the master of /your own/ destiny implies independence, freedom, and agency.

In the context of git, and distributed systems more broadly, `master` is specifically chosen for its association with a power differential between one special entity giving the orders, and some collection of other entities taking the orders. In some DB systems, for example, the language is as literal as `master/s`. Even without "s" in use with `git`, there's a clear association with `master` being the branch that broadly holds sway above the other branches.

We chose symbols and metaphors to aid in our mental modeling of complex systems. I'm further amused by your own choice of "policing" to describe a push for cultural healing coming from a minority population. I recommend reading up on the history of policing to see why this metaphor is ill-advised.

> Like, we're just going to scratch a whole bunch of words from the dictionary because someone somewhere is offended?

This is a strawman; nobody is calling for this.

> The other day, people at my workplace were saying that expressions like "blind spot" and "falling on deaf ears" needed to be purged.

Based on your use of "policing" and "[scratching] from the dictionary" I'm wondering whether these folks literally said "purged" in their own language. But otherwise, cool, it sounds like they are exhibiting the positive human trait of compassion. If a disabled person tells me they'd prefer I don't use this idiom, I'd happily find another way of saying the same thing. What's the big deal?

> AFAIK, "blind spot" is not actually about blind people, it's a term related to driving and the angles seeing people can't see in without looking.

This isn't really how language works though, is it? When people are forging associations with words or phrases, they're not opening a webster's dictionary, but rather drawing on a complex web of cultural associations. A more extreme version of your argument here is that it's unreasonable to be rattled by the use of a swatstika in western culture, since the /original/ meaning behind that symbol was one of peace. Nobody would buy that. However, in certain east asian cultures, the symbol is still in use for more positive associations.

The specific choice of `master` as a symbol in distributed systems holds meaning due to its evocation of a power differential. Whether this is intentionally "bad" holds no meaning whatsoever. What does it say about us if we can't honestly hold some degree of empathy for someone who, affected by a violent history of subjugation and dominance, might not love the idea of using symbols chosen for their hierarchical power association?