Matthew Dessem

Why is that my problem? Why is that anyone’s problem?

I generally assume public performances of childlike ignorance are kayfabe but that is mostly because I don’t want to believe, e.g., that a grown man wouldn’t recognize a totenkopf. I don’t think Platner is being sincere but I’m willing to provisionally accept that Ryan Grim means what he says.

My wife’s childhood was also haunted by this book. Probably worse than Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark because people encounter it at a younger age.

Cover of book

Girl burning

Scissor man cutting thumb

Here's a nightmare children's book my German grandmother used to read to me called Struwwelpeter.

Cautionary tales that included illustrations of the tailor who cuts off the thumbs of kids who suck their thumbs and the girl who burns to death playing with matches.

That seems like a less useful tool, but I do see how that and WaveNet are relying on the same idea.

I don’t think this is quite how music generators work, at least not the ones in Logic Pro. They generate MIDI that gets fed into a sample-based instrument synthesizer, but the predicting the next note part, as far as I can tell, is unrelated to the audio it produces.

I think there is a vastly underserved market for “How’d they do that?” articles about film craft. In my experience it was hard enough to get editors to go for articles that talk about image or sound more than plot; I hope that is changing.

Not to be dense, but if the LLM is predicting the next phoneme, what does it use the text input for?

It seems like the audio essentially runs on a sample-based synthesizer using phonemes? What is the machine-learning component of the final product?

Well, I’ll check back mid-summer!

My God, they built the Prisencolinensinainciusol Nexus, from the hit song “Don’t Create the Prisencolinensinainciusol Nexus.”

If you haven’t already, you might enjoy investigating the novel’s mysterious author, B. Traven. No visual effects angle but it’s memorably weird.

I really appreciate getting glimpses of the technical details of AI here, but have you two considered spending a few weeks discussing analog video signals and matrixed audio?

Anything “may or may not have gained consciousness,” not just Claude. Zero is a percent, isn’t it?

It’s the real deal. Crazy how much of the pilot is obviously modeled after Mad Men, while the rest of the show is not. There’s the show you sell and the show you make and they aren’t necessarily the same thing.

Honestly, I think this works best when the creative team has *no* option but to say, “We are contractually obligated to produce 22 episodes; we have no choice but to get weird.”

People use “dancing about architecture” as a metaphor for using the wrong medium for the message like they’ve never seen a mime trapped in an invisible box.

More songs should start like Monkey Gone to Heaven. "There was a guy." Ok I'm listening, what's this guy up to

Memorable to you, maybe, but from inside the bag it was just another Tuesday.

You're absolutely right—that was not a command post, that was an elementary school. Those were not military leaders—they were schoolchildren. I said the opposite, and that's on me.

A text excerpt. It reads: Once in the shop he let the whole contraption crash to the counter, on which he then leant for a while with his head in his arms. When he looked up again a young man was standing over him and readying a foolscap document. Richard croaked his way through MAKE, MODEL, REGISTRATION NUMBER. At length they came to TYPE OF MALFUNCTION, and the young man said,

A text excerpt. It reads: 'What's wrong with it?' 'How would I know? It cuts out all the time and it makes this screeching sound and the bag leaks all the crap out of the back.' The young man considered Richard, and this information. His stare and his biro returned to the relevant rectangle. The biro hovered there unhappily. He looked up for a moment—time enough for onerous eye-contact. He looked down. The biro itself now struck you as gnawed, cracked and capless, and paranoid, conscious of its disadvantage. Eventually, under TYPE OF MALFUNCTION, the young man wrote: NOT WORKING. 'Yeah,' said Richard. ‘That ought to cover it.'

The secret key to understanding AI discourse is found in this passage from The Information, in which the protagonist takes a vacuum cleaner to the shop for repair.

Also by this standard they still haven’t come close to “a good—or even tolerable—prose style.” If I weren’t choosing my words so carefully I might even be inclined to say they “don’t work!”

“Our Stories Live Forever” is a terrible tagline for “Hamnet.” We aren’t all related to William Shakespeare!

You would think that “Is Paris Burning?” and “Paris Is Burning” would make a good double feature but you would be wrong.

American Epic | The Official Movie Website The official site for the award-winning documentary series directed by Bernard MacMahon.

If you are contrasting overproduced modern pop with the authentic clockwork recording devices resurrected for American Epic, you are on much firmer ground.

Whenever you contrast some imagined era of authenticity in recorded music with the overproduced pop of today, keep in mind that the Sun Studio sound was created with tape delay. Elvis’s voice didn’t sound that way!

Okay but liver is delicious.

Not too surprisingly, the first streaming app to adopt Dolby Vision 2 will be Peacock, which currently doesn’t even stream video in its native colorspace or framerate.

Stone Cold Jane Austen