In northern Greenland they make kiviaq: in the summer go out with a large net and catch about 500 auks (small sea birds). Stuff them whole into a single seal skin, sew it up and bury it under a pile of rocks. After 6 months eat the whole birds. Apparently delicious.
Yes. I took over the project management of a job where the previous project manager had spent a year planning it out, but development had not yet started. The client was furious, understandably.
I abandoned the plans from the previous PM and discussed the job with the developer who ballpark estimated that the work would take 2 months. After a quick analysis I adjusted this to 14 weeks.
But the account manager thought this sounded too long and insisted that we plug everything in to a Gantt chart, define the shit out of everything, map the dependencies, etc, which showed that the development would only take 6 weeks.
I find that ballpark estimates are often more accurate than estimates based on work breakdowns ... and this concurs with OP's observation that estimates tend to miss due to the unknowns.
If you're in the market for a new monitor, I recommend one with USB-C connectivity with power delivery - so convenient to just have one cable (and works with phones too).
I did not find success with the Claude Code plugin. If the AI thinks things work, it will say COMPLETE even if you wouldn't think it's complete. It does not seem to work any harder than it did without the ralph loop. The structure the plugin recommended was too simplistic and I did not understand the true purpose of Ralph Loops.
I think the key to it is having lots of smaller tasks with fresh context each loop. Ralph loop run starts, it picks the most important task, completes it, and ends its loop. Then the next ralph run starts with new context, grabs the most important task, and the loops continue. I have not tried this method yet.
I use them – well, mostly en dashes because that's the custom where I'm from – because I'm a bit of a typography nerd and have grown to dislike the barrenness of ASCII.
In this case Apple has cared about typography since its very beginning. Steve Jobs obsessed over it. The OS also replaces simple quotes with fancier ones.
I do the same on my websites. It's embedded into my static site generator.
Not long ago, a statistical study found that AI almost always has an 'e' in its output. It is a firm indicator of AI slop. If you catch a post with an 'e', pay it no mind: it's probably AI.
Uh-oh. Caught you. Bang to rights! That post is firmly AI. Bad. Nobody should mind your robot posts.
I'm incredibly impressed that you managed to make that whole message without a single usage of the most frequently used letter, except in your quotations.
Such omission is a hobby of many WWW folk. I can, in fact, think back to finding a community on R*ddit known as "AVoid5", which had this trial as its main point.
I did ask G'mini for synonyms. And to do a cursory count of e's in my post. Just as a 2nd opinion. It found only glyphs with quotation marks around it. It graciously put forward a proxy for that: "the fifth letter".
It's not oft that you run into such alluring confirmation of your point.
My first post took around 6 min & a dictionary. This post took 3. It's a quick skill.
No LLMs. Ctrl+f shows you all your 'e's without switching away from this tab. (And why count it? How many is not important, you can simply look if any occur and that's it)
At first I was just curious, and unimpressed with the horridly bland shite coming out of these AI music generators. But then I made a prompt that sparked some kind of magic, so now I want to finish off that track just to see if I can end up with something that I consider good.
I don't hold it much hope for this track because everything else I've heard on suno and udio are rubbish, but the 1 minute preview I have is enticing me to spend 8 bucks just so I can experiment a bit more.
I feel somewhat conflicted by my fascination because I have a great love for music and I wholeheartedly support efforts to restrict AI music crap.
But as the tools mature, the creative possibilities to make new sounds with finer control and granularity will make the process more ... creative - with greater human input.
I'm sure we'll end up with new styles and maybe even new genres that originate from prompts, and hits too. Is this a good thing to look forward to? I can see my future listening habits become strictly human only, but dang, the start of my new track sounds so dope!
I applaud Bandcamp's stance here and I will always look for ways to meaningfully support real musicians.
I’m not going to listen to people poo poohing what I’ve been doing with Suno, my seven year old and I rocked out to a song that took me less time to make than it took to listen to about my character’s D&D adventure last night. I’m just having fun.
The big secret right now is Suno will output good stuff but then it’s tortuous to get the lyrics to line up if you want to change anything, or add a word, it screws up the entire flow of the song all the way through. I spent 5 minutes making a 6 minute long power metal style song about a Druid fighting a dragon, then two hours unsuccessfully trying to get one with slightly more coherent lyrics and it output like 8 songs that sound terrible in a way I can’t quite put my finger on. The one song I tortured into existence took me 5 hours of work after getting a rough draft.
That said, being able to instantly make a song to tell my kids they need to clean the living room before we open presents and them singing the chorus happily for weeks after is just this great unique memory we have. Bespoke songs just for us is one of the coolest things ever and no amount of grumbling from anyone can dissuade me from it.
Completely agree! I have a child that teared up when (A)I created a song just for her, in the style she likes, with lyrics that have human(!) traits and character that inspires and lifts up the whole family.
Personally, I like making the kind of songs I enjoy listening to myself, across all kinds of genres. Next time, I want to mix a few completely different genres and see how that turns out. It's like a creative hobby were you just enjoy the process.
As for changing the lyrics, yeah, that’s taken me hours as well. You really need to get the lyrics right from the start. I’m not sure this kind of detailed editing can easily be done with such AI tools anytime soon.
No one is upset about being able to generate stuff for personal use. They are upset by the industrial scale of dumping AI slop on platforms like Spotify that make it increasingly difficult to discover anything good anymore.
There is lots of good music still being created these days, but you'll never find it by just hitting next on streaming sites because 99% of the content had about 5 minutes of effort put in before being uploaded.
No one is stopping you from sharing it. Bandcamp won't share it for you, and that's fair. Just like you're not willing to go shill for all my side-projects.
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