Tuml Ate My First Blog So Time To Start Again

Lesson #4 buoyancy

For those interested specifically it is:

• Freshwater: ~ 1.00 g/cm3

• Seawater (Saltwater): ~ 1.025 g/cm3

• Average Human Body: ~ 0.985 g/cm3

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Messing with Suno for the first time, I noticed that, even in the free tier, Suno was generating songs in less time than it takes to listen to one. We've already had discussion of music generation that can massively flood the industry. Indeed, we were already past the point of "more music worth listening to is written than a human could ever hear, even if they did nothing else" while music was still only written by humans. It is a matter of taste as to what if any AI music counts as "worth listening to" and in what sense, but most music is not heard with a high level of critical artistic analysis to begin with, like what you listen to while driving just because it's on the radio and good enough, or low energy synthwave while studying.

At least, AI music has reached the level where you can at least believe a human wrote it with workmanlike skill and thought it was good enough to publish if you're not actively searching for tells. (Well, there is a certain sense in the lyrics that I feel like I can hear sometimes that I can't describe, that tells me, "these are AI". But who knows how long that will last, or if humans writers become more like that from AI influences in their media environment.)

But the prior volume, AI or human, still assumes you're listening to the same music as others: one song is played many times. But we're now at the level where a sufficiently funded Suno account could produce an endless stream of songs that are generated and then played once.

But how much funding is "sufficiently funded"? Imagine a 24/7 station that generates songs that are played once and then deleted. Songs cost 5 credits (well, 10, because Suno always generates 2 songs on each attempt, but we'll imagine you can negotiate this even as we're assuming full retail price otherwise)…

(4,000 credits / 30 USD) * (1 song / 5 credits) = 80 songs / 3 USD

Max song length is 8 minutes but 3.5 looks closer to average (tho symphonic metal is somewhat longer on average) by eyeballing it, let's call it 3 minutes.

(80 songs / 3 USD) * (3 min / song) = 80 min / USD

(1 USD / 80 min) * (525,949.2 min / 1 Gregorian year) ≈ 6,574 USD/year

These are full retail and considering only extra credits, the subscription credits would reduce it somewhat. Anyone that this volume might be able to negotiate lower, but credit costs are also probably more closely linked to raw compute costs since you can't subsidize or loss lead when a commercial customer picks their volume. On the other hand, constant fixed usage on multi-year contracts is ideal for capacity planning and amortization of TPU capital.

uaaa i was very inspired by the notes.. you articulated my feelings in drawing such a creature with many bows quite well

yes there are morphic resonance theory enjoyers and Jacob-did-nothing-wrong creationists, but those people are wizards

Like, I literally was in a workplace training at a company that the computer touchers here have all probably heard of in 2020 where we were all told that Black people are actually indigenous to the Americas. I have seen some other positions that seem obviously insane presented as fact by people who had authority, from church pulpits (“the Haitian revolution succeeded because Tousant Louvitur sold the people of Haiti to the devil for a hundred years”) and college lecterns (“Nobody ever starved to death under communism”). My sense of how obviously fucking bonkers cuckoo bananas vs literally the enforced party line within an institution an idea is has been calibrated by being hit with large rocks by powerful crazy people from every corner of the political compass.

I have met some evolution-denying young-earth-creationists at church, engaged them in conversation to try to find out where exactly we disagree, and found they were on board with what-I-call-heredity to a great extent. Excuse my wordiness because I want to avoid smuggled connotations, but here's approximately the sort of thing I remember them agreeing to when I tried to talk closer to the processes rather than the labels:

Children resemble their parents for biological reasons that we colloquially call "in the blood" but it's more right to say "in the sperm and eggs" where there's an instruction set for building a human that copies traits from both parents. Sometimes we highlight features like "She has her mother's eyes" that are particularly like one parent, but all bodily traits work that way to some extent. Traits vary between different people, they are passed down across generations, sometimes traits are mixed or combined or diluted, sometimes traits are preserved by chance in the process of a child taking more after mother or father, you can see it when a boy looks just like Great-Grandpa looked at that age in the family photo album. Rarely, a new trait pops up from random mutation, and then it can be inherited too. Physically, this applies to animals the same way as humans, which is how farmers breed for traits and bigger cows have bigger calves the same way tall humans have tall kids. The distinction between animals and humans here is moral: it would be wrong to breed humans that way, but it's in principle possible to do it to slaves.

But humans? We put them on the cover of magazines as if they're something to be idolized.

Elon Musk has not piled up a natural resource in his house. Musk did not go to the Rocket Forest where Rocket Fruits grow on Rocket Trees and hoard all the Rocket Seeds so no one else could have any. Musk got his fortune by the opposite of hoarding: making rockets that did not previously exist, and providing them to people who wanted access to rockets (and satellites, and cars, and so on) and would pay for the service.

For as long as humans have had social organization larger than a single tribe, there have been power struggles between the central government and the fringes of a state, swinging back and forth, decided sometimes by violence and sometimes by moral or intellectual legitimacy.

A century ago, Max Weber came up with the idea of the state monopoly on the use of force. This is one of the single worst ideas in the history of politics, contrary to the right of self-defense and natural law. But it spread and became a popular idea supporting the central government side of the power struggle.

This is ABSOLUTELY a perfectly fine footpath.

In fact, with how much space I’m seeing here, it is entirely plausible, that the European hordes will just create a temporary little Wanderweg right next to the highway. With that much space they might not even have to interfere with traffic.

It is the middle of a Sunday afternoon. You have nothing on, and aren't expecting visitors, deliveries or post.

Unexpectedly, there is a knock at the door.

Meanwhile, all the minor conditions and requirements for the other event (the existence of fairies, the conditions for the development of fairies as real beings, their lack of discovery, all of the same conditions for a fairy to appear in front of your doorstep and knock when this is seemingly not routine for them either) are handwaved in good faith.

And in the reverse, I still remember the time I asked one for evidence, and he said "well, I believe these other, similar conspiracy theories".

And I said "that's not evidence. In fact, now you need MORE evidence than just proving the original claim."

If Faeries exist, the world AS WE KNOW IT is a lie. All bets are out and the question of 'how did they hide so long' and 'how did they develop' and 'why are they here?' have one, simple, easy answer that itself goes fuck you to every step of your normal life, MAGIC. Which is such a fuck you to the rational order as to just not hold value. It's a SHOCKING revelation, but once past the shock all the rest falls into place instantly.

But with Walruses being real things? The chance of one knocking at your door, or window, is a given and finite percentage based on the location of your door/window relative to the dwelling spaces of Walruses. It's baffling because it already obeys pre-existing natural laws, and as such a scenario where it DISOBEYS those laws in a notable and visible 'knocking at your door' sense? Is so outside the natural rules that 'and a moment later a faerie shows up, giggling' would be a RATIONAL EXPLANTION for the scenario.

Somehow they completely forgot that Australia just had a mass shooting not that long ago. Despite guns being banned. The year before that, they had a mass stabbing attack that killed almost as many people as the shooting. Despite knives being banned. That one was eventually stopped by a police officer, with her gun. She shot at the attacker as he charged at her, iirc. And these were just two incidents I knew off the top of my head.

Now I don't think the above actually counts as knowing the rules. D&D is a relatively crunchy game that actually rewards system mastery and actually learning how to play D&D well, as in to make mechanically informed tactical decisions and utilizing the mechanics to your advantage, is actually a skill that needs to be learned and cultivated. None of that is to say that you need to be a perfectly tuned CharOp machine to know how to play D&D. But to actually start to make the sorts of decisions D&D as a game rewards you kind of need to know the rules.

And like, a lot of people don't seem to know the rules. They know how to play D&D in the most abstract sense of knowing that they need to say things and sometimes the person scowling at them from behind the screen will ask them to roll a die. But that's hardly engaging with the mechanics of the game, like the actual game part.

When you have people that have actually done some reading on the rules vs. people that just coast and foist the majority of the game onto the GM, it makes it appear like the more knowledgeable players are sweaty power-gamers or rules-laywers.

My point is not to say that people who don't want to learn the rules shouldn't play, only that people who don't actually know the rules aren't necessarily engaging with the game to its fullest, especially in the case of a relatively rules-heavy game like D&D, and that as the previous poster mentioned it can actually result in a bad rules dynamic where the DM needs to do more work due to player unwillingness to learn the rules as well as casting players who actually know the rules and can engage with them in unfavorable light. All of these are negative elements of the culture of play surrounding.

Like, there isn't anything meaningfully gatekeepy about saying "players who don't know the rules of the game aren't as good at playing the game as the people who know the rules of the game." Because playing games is a skill that can be cultivated and knowledge of the rules is an important part of that skill.

I actually want to dial in on the phrasing here, which seems - insidious isn't quite the right word - but really weasely to me. There's this reflexive attempt to position the writer as the victim, from the way things are phrased to the actual sentiment. "I feel gatekept" (note that its not "I have been gatekept") is a pretty transparent attempt to claim victimhood, and gain the reader's sympathies. Likewise "I just wanna" and such. But then you have the sentiment of "I just want to play a silly game" and this carries this, like, baggage that game design is *not worth* taking seriously. Same with 'play it how u want', it's working to undermine the idea that you could *care* about this stuff, and it positions taking the artform seriously as an act of aggression against the poor victim who just wants to *not think about things.* Which is to say its classic anti-intillectualism. "It's just a [song/tv show/book/game] don't take it seriously" is like classic anti-intellectualism, and generally comes from a fairly regressive infantalised place.

They can set up the scenarios and build the maps and run the world. They already know the rest of the rules, so why not? They also know the stats for all the NPCs too, so might as well let them play everyone else

It's kinda their world and their game, too. So they can handle scheduling. My schedule is crazy, but they can figure it out.

The gits of it is - no one EVER knew how to play this fucking game, people had arguments before the official first edition, the white booklets era. Most people played based on their own interpretation, then arguet about it in zines. All the crunch in the AD&D onward was Gary Gygax's attempt to make the rule for everything because he grew greedy and wished to kill the competition that built careers on explaining his crappy rules better than he did (also, he made AD&D to screw Dave Arneson of his due money).

The first complete game - the Greyhawk supplement - is entirely straightforward and easy to pick up, and significantly simpler than modern D&D.

None of the early editions of D&D are hard to learn or obscure like you seem to think, so I assume you either have pudding for brains or are going entirely on hearsay rather than direct experience.

I'd wager nobody in the entire world has ever read the full comprehensive rules of MtG as they exist today.

And nobody expects you to! If you go to a Friday Night Magic with a random deck you bought in a toy store, no idea what the rules are like, I'm sure you'll find people willing to teach you, even explain how to properly play your deck in particular.

If, however, you keep coming to FNM for weeks, if not months, and you keep asking basic questions, like what "Flying" means, or what a "+1/+1 counter" does, or how any of the cards in the deck you've been playing for months does, if you call someone who tells you you can't block with that creature because it's already tapped that they're a "rules lawyer" who's "gatekeeping your fun", if it becomes apparent that you're not making any effort to actually learn the rules of the game... nobody will want to play with you anymore. You'll be labeled annoying at best, an asshole at worst.

And that's the case in any dedicated gaming space. As an avid board gamer, there's nothing more infuriating to me than having to re-explain basic rules because someone doesn't listen, or explaining what certain cards/characters/units/items/whatever do because someone is too lazy to simply read.

And yet, somehow, in D&D, behavior like this is apparently not just accepted, but expected, nay, encouraged(!) by the player base!

You may not like cooking dinner—I certainly don't—but I do know how to make cooking dinner easier for my partner. I can chop onions or grate cheese, I can grab things for them while their hands are busy, I can make a simple side salad, I can put away ingredients as they're used, I can set the table and pour the water, I can clean up the dishes after the meal is over. I'm aware enough of what's involved in making dinner happen that I know how to help even if I don't do the most difficult central activity.

Plus, if asked what I want for dinner, I don't respond 'ooh, let's have filet mignon! I want filet mignon!' when there's no steak in the house, because I maintain at least basic working knowledge of the ingredients we typically have on hand and I know filets are not among them.

I don't expect my partner to handle 100% of everything to do with dinner just because I don't like cooking. Why? Because having somebody make me hot dinners is better than the alternative, and I'm not an asshole who's going to take advantage of the fact that my partner would probably cook for us even if I didn't help. I can help, so even though I would rather have an extra 30-40 minutes of fanfic time, I get up and help.