No. I barely talk to people I know and like. I think it’s great for those who do (as long as they take a moment to read the room and see if the person they’re approaching isn’t obviously signaling they do not want people approaching them, such as having on headphones). I do not like to chat face to face.

Subscription fees plus the double dip into selling bulk licensing of your thin client to companies who make computers.

I’m drunk. I live in Texas. So it was very difficult to choose my username.

My sex talk and cooking talk both came too late and were both variations of “you probably know as much as I do”.

I learned to cook the same way I learned to have sex. Trial and error, usually by myself, sometimes with a partner, and I read some publications about it that had plenty of pictures.

Partially correct. They’ll step in because they signed contracts and have moved AI under the umbrella of National Security. Brockman donated $25m back in September. Trump signed Project Genesis in November. So all these hardware companies feel pretty good because it’ll be backed by taxpayers.

I mean we’re (we as in local taxpayers, not me personally in this case) already paying for the infrastructure they use in increased bills. We’re paying for their tax holidays while they’re talking about all the new jobs they’ll bring (lots of short term construction, 25-50 long term employees once the tax holiday runs out, so very little money in the local economy). We (all of us) are paying the price for the mothballed coal plants that are coming back online to support them. We are paying for federal government contracts on them.

It’s corporate welfare all the way down.

I guess it does depend on what you call a circle. There are maybe a dozen of us in one. In the other there are probably three or four dozen. I don’t know everyone. I got invited because I like genre bending. We’ve got a private forum where we share things.

Even outside of that, there is a place that used to be less private but has now gone private (guess why) where we would do Sunday songwriters. We’d get a topic, record a little something before the next Sunday, then share. After sharing we’d critique, do mashups, genre hop, create genre crossovers, and generally just have fun with each other’s music.

I do not know how prevalent this is. I know of two private places, one of which is very small, and a third place that used to be public (with no expectation of anyone actually seeing it) but went private because of Suno.

There’s already mystery music out there. Small circles of folks putting things out that they don’t expect or want people outside the circle to hear. I’m a nobody and I’m part of two different groups who share music with each other, build on each other’s works, try genre mashups and new shit that may never get done again, many times because it’s a mess but sometimes just because it was a fun one time thing.

I think short term, yeah, I think so. Medium term and I think we’ll see a bunch of model collapse or people will get tired of the same story line repeatedly so it won’t be profitable (or won’t be regaining the money they thought they’d save on actual creative folks). Long term, I have no fucking clue if they’ll get around the fact that training AI on AI makes it even weirder.

It’s messed up. When I was young I thought that’s what it actually meant. Do the things that cost us the least while getting the largest return on investment. Because conservative means you want to reduce risk, right? Apparently fucking not. I was duped when I was young by the phrasing.

What if someone is actually fiscally conservative? Like I have seen the studies where it’s cheaper to house the homeless than leave them on the streets. We need to cut wasteful spending on corporate welfare and spreading out the costs of things like AI datacenters to the local community. We need to balance the budget by taxing spending instead of income tax, taxing the absolute dogshit out of billionaires, and adding exceptions for necessities (food, hygiene products, someone can come up with a better list than me). While we’re at it, bake the tax into things into the cost. So if my subtotal is $100 I’m paying $100 instead of $108.25 or whatever.

None of that requires the least bit of empathy or caring. It requires only looking coldly at the numbers and seeing that the country was in a much better spot financially when we had a strong middle class and taxed the dog shit out of the rich.

There’s more than this by a lot. Empathy demands even more than that. But anyone claiming to be fiscally conservative while not discussing forcing companies and the rich to pay their sharing is lying or duped. Anyone wanting our tax dollars paying for folks who live in the street rather than in houses is cruel or duped, not conservative, because it significantly reduces healthcare costs, justice system costs, and emergency services costs. It’s prudent to house folks because it will cost the country less overall. Progressive taxes instead of income taxes makes far more sense, reduces manpower, and reduces government spending.

The people calling themselves fiscally conservative are not. They’re shitbags or they’ve been tricked.

Reaper, Studio One (although we’ll see what Fender does to it, we all remember the Gibson Cakewalk fiasco), and Bitwig are all native. Kind of depends on what your workflow is and what plugins you’re using. Yabridge is workable for a ton of stuff and not difficult.

No, no. Didn’t you hear? The Internet is just the US.

Hell, I grew up in and currently live in Texas and even I know better than that.