Which is why we need to keep a close watch on how we structure our elections so we can understand why the good ones can't win a primary; and then fix the problem.
> I've always felt like the fact that no nukes have ever been dropped (in war) after 1945 was a pretty huge success story ... We invented this insanely powerful weapon
Because we (the US) vastly overestimated the Soviet Union's nuclear program. A lot of it was for show to scare us (the US.)
The nuclear "armegeddon" was a very expensive thing to build, and part of what held it back was the shear cost: You can't drop a nuclear bomb that you never built because you couldn't afford it.
> I don't know that I'd extend this analogy to the AI labs
It's because:
1: The "danger" is just an overreaction.
2: The practical cost of building and running lots of datacenters will prevent building it.
I think it was also that logic of 'if we scare senators and thus everyone with the idea of their imminent mortality, this will guarantee massive funding for our military ventures'
You should read up on what this quote from the article is referring to
> From the Air Force intelligence estimates I was newly privy to, and the dark view of the Soviets, which my colleagues shared with the whole national security community, I couldn't believe that the world would long escape nuclear holocaust.
The "dark view" that the Soviets had of a nuclear war was essentially that
1. A limited nuclear exchange was impossible due to not being able to ascertain or trust the enemy's intentions and so all parties would use all of their nuclear arsenal to avoid losing the ability to counter attack to any subsequent attacks.
2. Even though they didn't see a nuclear war as being able to cause human extinction they concluded that no nation involved in one or near enough to suffer the second order effects of one would survive.
3. A full nuclear exchange would likely destroy >80% of each nation's industrial capacity resulting in the total collapse of industrial society making any reconstruction efforts impossible and leading to the death of the majority of the population dependent on industrial production for survival. The survivors would be on their own attempting to start over with subsistence agriculture made all the more difficult by however many years of nuclear winter resulted from the burning of cities and industry and suffering high cancer rates from exposure to fallout and toxic soot.
It doesn't really matter how many nuclear weapons you have beyond a certain number. Just imagine if you only hit all of the oil refineries in the US or you only destroyed all the major ports, it would still result in mass starvation and cripple the nation while creating a gigantic ecological disaster from burning huge quantities of oil and material. Multiply that across several nations and it's the end of the world as you know it.
Educate yourself about the decision to drop the two nuclear bombs on Japanese. By that time US had more than 100,000 dead soldiers and another 200,000 wounded. Estimates for further casualties required to conquer the 4 main Japanese islands were for another 250,000 dead and close to a million wounded. The Japanese were gearing up for a fight on the islands. They were rationing their fuel (to the detriment of moving food stuffs within their country) and had thousands of Kamikaze planes and hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the Kyushu island (were coincidentally the Americans were poised to start their main invasion).
Dropping the bombs saved countless of American lives - young men who did not even start their lives yet. It was the right decision for the Americans. Not to mention the numerous appeals to Japanese government to surrender.
Hmm, using that logic I wonder how many countless young Russian lives Putin could save by using a nuclear weapon.
People like you will always make excuses for the U.S. crimes against humanity. Sure, your right, it was good think we dropped a nuclear bomb on civilians and hospitals, it was the right thing to do! It had to be done!
Your logic missed the part where Japan attacked the US and forced it into this war that costed many American lives. Your logic also missed the part where nobody attacked Russia.
That overestimation only lasted a few years. At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the USA was still nearly untouchable. The Soviets had a small number of rather bad ICBMs, plus a fleet of bombers that would mostly get shot down. That bit in Dr. Strangelove where the general advocates a strike because we'd only "get our hair mussed" with 10-20 million dead was spot on.
A few years later, they had hundreds of ICBMs, plus a good start on a submarine missile fleet. They were able to thoroughly destroy the US by then.
These forces were expensive, but not that expensive. The whole reason the US leaned into nuclear weapons is because it was a lot cheaper to deter the Soviets in Europe with nukes than with conventional forces. An ICBM costs a few million dollars. That's a real bargain for something that will destroy a whole enemy city.
I just find a lot of modern music... boring. It feels perfect but just isn't interesting.
In contrast, when I check out older music from less successful musicians, it's often very imperfect; both in that it's boring, but in that there's little talent there.
Or, to translate: Gridification is modern style that doesn't make up for lack of talent; and ironically masks the talent that used to be there.
Related: I suggest checking out some of the newer Lemon Twigs albums. They're decent songwriters and excellent musicians. They went 100% analog on their most recent album, which I initially thought was a gimmick, until I read this article.
Another recommendation is jazz music. Modern music, and especially modern pop music, is incredibly harmonically simple. You rarely hear anything beyond a 7th chord. But step into jazz and all of sudden you're hearing augmented, diminished, and other more complicated chords and sounds that in just a raw way sound more complex and interesting than a lot of modern music. (Classical is even more out there, but that's a harder sell in 2026 unfortunately)
I love jazz, but my problem with newer stuff is a lot of it feels like the composition is second to the players showing off their chops. Maybe I just listen to bad playlists, but often it will be a 7-8 minute track where everyone takes turns vaguely riffing on the melody. That's cool from a technical perspective, but doesn't interest me compositionally.
Compare that to some of the older stuff like Take 5, Giant Steps, or any of the big band stuff from the 50s. Sure, there was a lot of incredible skill on display, but the music itself didn't seem to take a back seat.
One of my favorite albums of the last couple of years was Against the Fall of Night by Sungazer. Whalefall, the first or second track is probably my favorite song on it - there's still a lot of technical skill, but the composition is also on display. So you get this conversation between the song and soloists, instead of a backing track with a few skilled players. Moon Hooch and Fox Capture Plan are also in this same vein IMO.
So... Any recommendations of newer groups like that? Would love to find more like it.
I hadn't heard much Sungazer, though I'm familiar with Adam Neely. Have you heard Knower? Not purely jazz, but superduper tight riffs and the vocals of Genevieve Artadi are ridiculous and catchy, and drummer Louis Cole is outstanding. Sometimes Snarky Puppy is just too damn tight and well-oiled for me to truly appreciate (same with Vulfpeck) but they have some wonderful songs and impressive group interplay.
TBH most of the best jazz/jazz-influenced/-adjacent music coming out in recent years has fully absorbed the "gridification" this thread bemoans, and plays with the tension in the continuum between lockstep and loosey-goosey. TBH what makes ?uestlove unique/influential as a drummer is not his chops or expressiveness, but his ability to sound exactly like a programmed/sampled Dilla beat, and then go on to more human-sounding grooves. Sorry I can't find the link but there are videos of master drummer Nate Smith, whose sense of time is so machine-y tight that he can make a metronome sound like it's off time. Yussef Dayes is another fantastic drummer whose groups have interesting sounds and genuine interplay. Anything involving drummer Chris "Daddy" Dave is worth a listen, too.
I'm impressed with the composition and chops of guitarists Julian Lage and Molly Miller, both of whom know all the fancy theory but prioritize communicating with their fellow musicians and the audience. Not newcomers but guitarists John Scofield, Bill Frisell, and Pat Metheny continually re-invent themselves every few years and have fantastic compositions that aren't just jam vehicles. Everything I've heard from Charlie Hunter since coming out in the '90s, same thing.
TBH I am less impressed by the majority of the latest generation of jazz horn players, can't really say why. Not strictly jazz, but Alabaster dePlume builds on the tradition of "spirit jazz" a la Alice Coltrane or Charlie Haden's Liberation Music Orchestra in terms of making sure that everyone in the room, onstage or off, has a real human experience together.
Didn't know Moon Hooch but made me think a bit of The Comet is Coming, possibly James Brandon Lewis? Fox capture plan are different to, but possibly parallels with Bill Laurance, Aaron Parks, Gogo penguin?
I'll take it all a step further: even better if you can find a place to take in some live jazz. Also, on your point about classical: live classical music is also incredibly moving.
While Kansas City isn't necessarily "special" in this regard, it's where I presently call home, and we have an amazing live jazz scene here, and the symphony at Kauffman Center has amazing classical music performances - both of which I cannot stress enough to check out to break apart from the "boring" of the gridified music this essay discussed. Find some live music in whichever locale you're based.
Granted, I'm biased... as I was already jamming out to some jazz when I hit your comment.
The thing to keep in mind with genres like "Jazz", "Classical", "Rock"... is that they're more useful for organizing a record store than really knowing if music is good, or something that I'll like.
IE, Ella Fitzgerald, Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis all have very different styles.
Personally, when I've listened to "genre" compilations (~20 years ago) or playlists (now,) they have a few songs from artists that I love, and then a lot of decent songs from different artists. But, when I listen to the other artists (who I don't know well) on the compilations, they tend to only have a few good songs or even end up being "one hit wonders."
Anyway, most of the music that I really like tends to borrow heavily from other genres. For example, when I was younger I really liked Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, who borrow heavily from jazz and rearrange classical music as rock. Yet, when I listen to Reach (Jacky Terrason,) some of it sounds like a demo for Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, just waiting to be rearranged for a rock trio with moog overdubs.
> Modern music, and especially modern pop music, is incredibly harmonically simple. You rarely hear anything beyond a 7th chord.
I suspect the same can be said about most "pop" music in the past. (Although I can't pick apart what the chords are just by ear.) When I go back and listen to older "pop" music, a lot of it isn't great. (IE, I poked around Badfinger for a few minutes because Paul McCartney wrote a song for them. They had one hit (Paul's song) and the rest didn't keep my interest. Or I poked around Redbone because Come and Get Your Love was the theme for F is for Family and they also had one hit and the rest didn't keep my interest.)
Or, a different way to put it: Abba, The Beach Boys, and The Beatles were the outliers and many of their contemporaries weren't much better than today's pop artists. I think the difference today is that the great musicians aren't "pop" anymore.
There is a level of melodious incoherence with Jazz that I can't get onboard with. I think that's the entire point of it but parts of it start to sound like a Sam Ash music store.
There is definitely some free-jazz that is too much for me as well. But, some of the incoherence is just chromaticism that purposely approaches or plays with our expectations for tension and release.
An incredible player is someone like Chris Potter on the sax ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Fvsz8KuD-g ), who has a truly virtuosic control on tension and release. In the video I linked, he (and everyone in the band too) plays with the ballad form over and over, never seeming to resolve perfectly, until they transform into a wild funk sound that is an ecstatic release that is also just wildly dance-able. The incoherence, even some of the screeching, that emerges is like the cows that are finally let out of the barn after a long winter and jumping for joy in the sun.
there is a huge amount of jazz now that is using videogame music as the source material.
like early jazz used popular but older songs and reinterpreted them, knowing the source tune really makes it much easier to get into the overall genre I think. no links handy to help you find it but pick a game you like and search for a jazz cover.
idk why this idea is so prevalent. sure theres weird avant-garde jazz, but the vast majority is usually relatively simple "standard" with improv over it.
I agree, but I prefer old jazz from before I was born. Modern jazz doesn't appeal to me, it sounds too clean and unoriginal to me (maybe gridification, I don't know, I'm not a musician), with some exceptions. But maybe I didn't find the good modern jazz.
Some good modern jazz I'd recommend (I'm into sax and guitar):
- Chris Potter, I already linked him in another comment but he is a virtuosic post-bop player with incredible improvisational skill. Many people consider him to be one of the best living sax players in that style.
- Shabaka Hutchings, another sax player (he also plays clarinet and flute) with incredible songwriting ability and ability to play over varying genres and styles. It's hard to keep up with all of his projects. A very powerful player and a very gentle player when he chooses. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpfpYTmohAk
There are multiple comments in here about contemporary jazz musicians, so I'm gonna pick this one to piggyback on and recommend some more for those who might also be interested. OP says they're into sax and guitar, I've got a general penchant for anyone who messes with "time", so swung/off-kilter rhythms (what's up, J Dilla), syncopation, odd time signatures and so on, but I'll also keep it fairly "normal" in that area for a lot of these...
Robert Glasper, Chris Dave, Derek Hodge & Yasiin Bey, Live @ North Sea Jazz Festival 2019, a really dope combination of contemporary and classic Jazz alongside Hip Hop (Glasper riffing on some Thelonious Monk while trading phrases with Chris Dave as Bey drops some unreleased Black Star is so damn fun)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5QVcYeT74I
I just saw Julian Lage a few nights ago here in Seattle - it was so great. I went alone and soaked it in. I'm not even really a jazz fan, but as a lifelong guitarist he is undeniable. He had John Medeski on organ and piano and it was absolutely sublime.
There’s also music outside North America. As an example, South Indian Carnatic has some similarities to jazz but some great divergences (tunings/microtonalty, complex percussion, devotional, etc).
I can't comment on classical (I almost only listen to live recordings) but there's a very obvious smoothness, perfection, and lack of surprise, to AI jazz (or as it's often on YT as "chill-jazz") that is immediately apparent to anyone with even a little experience with the genre. Jazz's valorization of improvisation also means there's way more importance put on live recordings and surprise/novelty than on polished recordings which are often considered somewhat suspect even without a whiff of AI.
I've never heard an AI bebop song come even close to a live example, but I'm always open to being impressed.
Hell, just throwing in some syncopation into a pop song would make it wildly more interesting.
"Triplet-flow" in rap took the genre by storm after Migos and Future popularized it a while ago, and the initial appeal was the rhythmic novelty of it. (It obviously got stale after the novelty wore off.) Pop music in many of the big genres is in general, however, quite reticent to move away from perfectly riding a 4|4. Even using a 6|8 would be interesting.
There is a decent amount of pop music in 6/8. I always joke that it's like a hack to making a song better because 6/8 is rare enough that it makes the song sound interesting but common enough to not alienate the listener. It ends up sounding mostly like a hard swung 4/4 but then fills and some melodic lines are just a little bit more rhythmically spicy.
I found that surprisingly many k-pop songs do microtonal shenanigans. Nowhere near most, but it's there. Even something as popular as Boombayah (check the 4th note, it's not an on-tune semitone).
There's also more niche stuff like Flying Microtonal Banana.
Listen to the first Peppa Pig album and then compare it to one of the more recent ones, maybe the Baby Evie one. The first one I find it hard to get sick of even after my kid's 10th listen. The latter I find insufferable and I only put on one song at a time. Why? The first one sounds organic, the kid singing is far from perfect, and the production is full and rich with some real dynamics in there. The later ones sound more or less AI generated, auto tuned and snapped perfectly to tempo.
In short: I "pick my battles carefully", and I'm not afraid to refactor after the fact. I'm also not afraid to make changes by hand when needed.
Picking battles: I lean heavily on AI for the mindless, boilerplate changes that used to take 2-4 hours; but instead AI can do it in 2-4 minutes. Then, I pay closer attention to performance critical areas, or areas that require deeper thinking. Finally, I lean on AI to review the changes. It gives me a better review than a human, and often thinks through things that require "superhuman" intelligence.
Refactoring after the fact: This is similar to working with a team of subordinates or lower-cost contractors. They (people or AI) write the first version, get it working, and then I pick the few areas that need cleanup. I work closely with AI to refactor it to be more readable; possibly to handle corner cases that weren't anticipated earlier in the design.
I'm also not afraid to make changes by hand when needed: The fact is that sometimes, changes are so minor or otherwise require a particular understanding that it's easier to do the change by hand instead of describing it to an AI. I hope where you work understands this and supports it.
Interesting: I had it one time in San Francisco and cannot remember what it tasted like, but I remember the dish was a dark red. I'd really like to try it again, but I've never seen it on a menu since.
(I ordered it because of my rule: If I see an animal on a menu that I haven't eaten before, I order it.)
More than 20 years ago, in a Goodwill, I came across a "weird" record. The theme was that a guy multitracked and electronically altered his voice to be a choir of ~20 voices.
I almost bought it for the entertainment value, but when I flipped it over, it was all very religious themed songs. Stuff about the devil. I thought to myself that I just couldn't sit through that and put it back.
I wish I bought the record, though. I'm sure it was good for a laugh.
When I read the first part of Origin of Species, Darwin made predictions where, I thought, "oh, that's just genetics and DNA." (Of course, he didn't know at the time.)
> A reliable source has indicated an announcement is scheduled...
> I have no evidence beyond "source: trust me, bro"...
In general, there's a big difference between passing a rumor among people you trust, versus posting it on a widely read public internet site.
I don't think it was a smart thing to do; but I've certainly had lapses in judgment myself.
The thing is, there was a scheduled announcement and it was coming up soon. It's not like you were a whistleblower.
Next time you find yourself with information like this, just pass it along privately.
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