AI? Sure that probably contributed

But Reddit has been pushing its users away for way longer than that though

I thought he had a new, more nutjob favourite in OANN or Newsmax or something

Well that’s not really true, music has a lot of utility beyond brain chemicals.

I mean there’s what I already mentioned in it just giving more options for stuff to do. If you find a new artist you like, there’s generally shows you can go to, at those shows you might meet some like minded people and maybe even gain some new friends. That whole life experience is impossible with AI music.

Following from that there’s the general broadening of horizons, music is very often a window into other lives & cultures. It might not be overt in any given piece, but brains love to notice patterns, so over time even tiny glimpses add up. You can make the anthropological case that cultures that share music historically end up growing closer. There’s no other culture you’re really getting exposed to via AI music.

Then broader than that, and admittedly the most dubious part of argument, there’s the vanilla-isation of music this causes. If this becomes a popular view, we’re just going to be flooded with beige. This stuff is zero effort to create, so there’s not really going to be anything to stop people from creating infinite copies of the same thing. For business and commercial folk, it’s cheaper to cut humans out, especially if hypothetically most people are happy enough with the pizza hut buffet. It’s not hard to see how this will drown out the actual artists and choke them out of the industry entirely. Pizza Hut every day whether you like it or not.

With AI music it’s like a pizza buffet: it’s not the best food there is but all of it is good.

Is a pizza buffet universally good? I’d say if you were having a pizza buffet every day, it’s going to leave you pretty malnourished before long

We happened upon a pretty nice allegory here

Well, we’ve got a truly unpopular one, kudos for that

The fun thing about this being tightly bound to the subjective is there’s not really any golden argument that can be made; some people are going to keep ordering pizza hut and saying they love it, even if literally any option is better from everyone else’s perspective.

In your choice of using it for background music, I personally would always choose an actual curated list, ideally mixed by an actual DJ. There’s a lifetime of that content on YouTube already, so I never have to have the same one on twice, and usually if you like the vibe at the start of the mix, the DJ carries it through. Also a great way to discover new music that you can then go and look into the artist and find more stuff, maybe even go and see a show.

With an AI playlist, that’s it, there’s nothing further that can happen, it’s literally just filling the space. Which is fine, but I guess I just see that as a wasted opportunity if anything

Aren’t the atom cores what they’re putting into a lot of their data centre CPUs currently?

Interesting development for them to do this

ivory coast

Landlocked

Is it not a white wine spritzer? There’s a bar right next to the jukebox

Oh is this another one of those shitty things we have been leading the world with in the UK?

I think we’ve had as many as 4 subscriptions to legally watch all the broadcasted* matches of a top flight football team some years

*You still miss half the matches played because of the Saturday 3pm blackout, which prohibits those matches being broadcast

Oh shit, that really sucks

I still have nightcall come up on my playlists every now and again

I guess it might help if you clarify your use case then

If this isn’t for home, Is this for in hotels or what? What are you trying to stream wirelessly and why not use a cable?

FWIW I tried out a few wireless HDMI products just after COVID lockdowns and every single one was crap. Low resolution if I got any kind of signal, and I don’t think I used any that didn’t start cutting out after a metre or two of distance, especially after running them for any length of time and letting them get hot.

It’s obviously been a few years, so perhaps the technology has improved a bit since then, but based on my experience, I can only recommend against them entirely as a class of product.

One thing to always have a look for in niche use cases like this, is to find a business/commercial solution for this problem and look at what that hardware does. That should give you an idea of what’s actually possible and what it costs to do it. If the product has been around for a few generations, you might even be able to get previous generations for cheaper and it’s still more likely to work over any of the crap you can buy for ~£100 that I tried.

Also AirPlay should work just fine without WiFi, there’s a mode where the devices connect directly to each other, skipping any network entirely.

The best for a MacBook is probably no dongle and just using AirPlay by several magnitudes

Wireless HDMI is kinda rubbish in general, and basically doesn’t work over any distance where it would make sense (i.e. a cable would be too long or inconvenient)

There are multiple ways to add airplay to a display, the most seamless would be an apple TV, but that obviously comes at a premium. I believe Amazon added it to their fire dongles, and I think you can set it up using Kodi on a Raspberry pi

Not strictly my rarest

But I remember taking a good while to actually achieve it (FTL)

Oh hey

There’s a whole school of political ideology about explicitly not centralising power in the hands of a few people

I guess it’s likely they’re doing some amount of that, yeah. However I believe the way directors typically approach IMAX is to still centre the shot the way you would without the extra vertical frame, so a centred crop would usually be the best option.

I’d find it hard to believe that they never take the opportunity to shift things a bit if it would make it better anyway

Home releases will almost certainly get the non-IMAX, 2.39:1 crop they’ve already cut for standard cinemas, and it’ll get the standard cinema letterboxing you see for other theatrical releases if you watch on a 16:9 TV.

Pan and scan has thankfully died off as a practice

FWIW, 16:9 is mostly used for wide-screen TV content (about 1.85:1), the effect is more pronounced because cinema screens are typically 2.39:1 with most content being that ratio

That’s why you still get letterboxes watching films on TV a lot of the time, despite us all having widescreens now

It’s partly because people would complain the other way if they only used half the cinema screen to display the full IMAX image. I’m not gonna do the maths, but I think Odyssey being 1.43:1 ratio would leave about half the screen blanked out on the sides.

But mostly because it’s the main selling point of IMAX films is there’s more image than a standard ratio. That more is supposed to be mostly in your peripheral vision rather than where you’re focused, directors aren’t really putting anything important in these extremities of the image.

So to pillarbox that image would just dramatically shrink the bit of the screen the viewer should be focusing on, on an already smaller screen.

I only ever front rowed the IMAX once

For Interstellar

Frankly, it added a je ne sais quoi