This looks like a great way to launder money.

Write some generic AI music, have have your small accounts using stolen giftcards bought with dirty money pump the track and watch it climb the charts as other jump on the band wagon.

Et voilà instant layering with no connections.

I'm pretty sure this is exactly how all the music I don't like gets into the charts. :P

How are Swedish gangs using music platform Spotify to launder money?: https://www.euronews.com/business/2023/10/03/how-are-swedish...

You are not wrong.

You saying it like there are no other easy ways to launder money. Every time I walk by a cleaning service or hairdresser in a less dense populated area I wonder if they are involved in money launderinng.

Undoubtedly! I haven't trusted hairdressers for 20 years. I have no idea why people would need to spend money in such establishments. :P

Now those old-timey photo places in every mall in the U.S.? Definitely a money-laundering front.

i've seen a a where three barbershops were a stone's throw away from each other, with a few houses between them on a street in an (only moderately dense) residential area with no carparks anywhere nearby, and wondered how that could possibly have arisen (since they'd detract each other's customers, and laundering operations wouldn't make it so blatantly obvious).

and the same occurs with phone(-repair)-and-vape shops in shopping areas (which I guess are somewhat more understandable, since they only require one employee present each and do get footfall, and the cost to rent a shop has imploded since the coronavirus hit the final nail in the town centre's coffin)

You saying it like those areas don't need cleaning or hairdressers.

For some reason that also reminds me of the TV shows in Robocop.

e.g. Climbing for Dollars and It’s Not My Problem!

When I first saw Robocop these looked so crass it was obvious satire.

Now...? Well, I'd buy that for a dollar.

Climbing for Dollars is from The Running Man[0], the Arnie version from 1987 - same year as Robocop.

Then in 2001 was "Series 7"[1] (which I got flashbacks of from the 2013 White Bear[2] episode of Black Mirror).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Running_Man_(1987_film)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Series_7:_The_Contenders

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Bear_(Black_Mirror)

Trivia for music nerds like me: Mick Fleetwood and Dweezil Zappa are in The Running Man.

Very good point. My brain is just one big 80s mashup at this point.

Verhoeven makes some extremely heavy handed satire.

A decent litmus test is whether someone understands that the Starship Troopers movie is satire or not.

And I’m reminded of The Dark Knight Returns (1986) graphic novel. There are grotesque parodies of talking head news anchors and even a caricature of then-president Ronald Regan. Situation all fracked up.

Based.

This looks like a really great project.

I naively thought that with 300ish synths covered they'd have everything I own but I can see that's not the case.

I've got Alesis, Casio and Yamaha equipment that's missing. Time to dig out the manuals and get a PR ready.

It's easy to forget how successful the MIDI standard is. It might be the most stable and still relevant digital standard of all time.

My oldest bit of kit is a Casio CZ-5000 from, I think, 1985. That I can plug it into the latest equipment without drivers and it still works is amazing. 5 pin DIN for the win!

Hey thanks. I love the MIDI standard for exactly this reason too. Blows my mind that you can hook a forty year old synth up to a computer or iPad without drivers.

Synth nerds got it right: open specs, and a general industry-wide desire to make things play well together. After all, its music, this is why music works in the first place..

Totally, and I think the need for MIDI Guide - the fact that MIDI CC/NRPN is pretty much a free-for-all - is also why the spec has such staying power. It's so unopinionated that it imposes essentially zero constraints beyond message size. I love it.

> Wait, isn't this what MIDI is for?

It is but I don’t think this Pocket Operator has MIDI without adding third party hardware.

> The alleged conduct at issue does not reflect how OkCupid operates today.

I mean, come on. This bullshit is what you said before.

You haven’t changed, you’re just pissed off you caught but a bit smug you got away with it scott free.

This seems to be somewhat similar to web browsers.

I could see the model becoming part of the OS.

Of course Google and Microsoft will still want you to use their models so that they can continue to spy on you.

Apple, AMD and Nvidia would sell hardware to run their own largest models.

Fixing the 16K RAM pack makes an apperance in the Micro Men film:

https://youtu.be/XXBxV6-zamM?t=1694

RAM was so tight on those 8-bit machines that many games used tricks like hiding things inside the viewable area of the screen to eck out just a little bit more.

Not sure why the down votes, this is true. If you only had 16, 32, or 48K then 64K seemed like a lot.

Hell, the RAM size was so important that they named machines after it.

An enterprise licence won't save you, Google, Microsoft, et al have happily been breaking copyright laws for years.

If the publishing industry can't win a case against the AI firms then you don't stand a chance when you finally find out they've been training on your private data the whole time.

They can tell you one thing and do the opposite and there's effectively nothing you can do about it. You'd be a fool to trust them.

If you think the Seal isn't affordable then don't buy one.

You can buy a brand new Dacia Spring for only £12,240. Personally I don't think it's a great car but it's certainly doesn't cost 40K.

If it were my money I'd spend a bit more on either a used Jag ePace or a Renault 5 but some people prefer new cars I guess.

Thanks for the nerd snipe! I just found the Citroen e-C3, for a couple thousand more than the Spring. Both look fine. They should just be station wagons, but this is our timeline.