Chip McDonald

I'll still pull my ("extremely early 400/prototype") out, sitar and overtly idiomatic sounds it's still great imo. I'm surprised Line 6 hasn't jumped on a.i.. A Varia-i pickup system with each string trained on particular guitars would be uncanny and useful. For that matter that they have let IK Multimedia jump ahead - I would have bet they'd have a $119 amp out by now that had a plethora of built in ai tricks. I predicted that here a long time ago, but I was wrong. Strange how Boss isn't doing it, either.

Jared Polin / Fro knows Photo / RAWtalk Chelsea and Tony Northrup Kai Wong Camera Conspiracies

Split the stems out with ai, trigger new sounds off the separated drums, put it back together.

I think very young kids are growing up with the view of things we think of as "on" the Internet, as a plurality of ala carte services. "The Internet" is now really "the cable" or "the telephone line". Gmail is a solitary thing, YouTube another, PlayStation Network another. There is a relatively precocious 12 year old I teach, who is totally reliant on Alexa. He asks Alexa to play his music, fast forward/rewind, stop. One lesson Alexa didn't hear him for some reason, and he looked at me (over FaceTime) and said "the internet must be down", "no Sam, FaceTime wouldn't be working if that was the case" and you could see at that moment - it just clicked for him Alexa and FaceTime *both* require the same access. He's the IPad generation growing up that used to slide their finger on books, wanting the page to turn. Their perception of reality is very different. When a.i. completely Balkanizes media, the difference to them they probably won't perceive as being important. They have no relational context, as we are the transitional population.

Is it what Illya saw? Or what he saw? Johnny Apples' expression, eyes, don't match his statements. He's always been a VC first. What goes wrong is having the most cutting edge tool being bought by whatever entity. Also, it implies he's bent to get to AGI first - just like Elon. I think they both seek power.

Well... Our shop/outbuilding was impacted, but our house wasn't. It could be worse. (...long. I've got nothing better to do in this circumstance, save to document ...) Worse: my wife and I decided to get "a non-specific covid like respiratory illness" the middle of last week, so we've been really, really sick. I've been sitting in the dark, 83 degrees+ humidity. Water finally showed up at a Publix yesterday. We've got running water but it's of sketchy quality. The Georgia side of town has no running water. We put a generator on credit, so tonight our portable A/C has the room down to a luxurious 74 degrees! Effectively every house has a tree on it. We were lucky in that none were close enough to hit the house, but our property is back in the woods and we were stuck back here, trees blocking us in for a few days until we got someone to cut us out. Lots of blocks locked in by trees across the roads. Power lines down everywhere. My father's subdivision in Martinez over the river looks like a pine tree logging camp. Literally. Bottled water showing up yesterday was big, and there is finally gas. We couldn't get out of our driveway until Saturday, but ... it's like Mad Max Walking Dead Lite. Zombie shell-shocked people converging on gas stations, carrying gas cans. Cars out of gas on the road all over, people walking in the middle of stalled traffic with "need water" signs. Lots of agitation. Backed up traffic everywhere, saw a guy get out of his car sitting in traffic and started pointing at cars and screaming. Where there had been gas, the lines stretch for over a mile: saw a fist fight from afar at a gas station. Lots of yelling. Lines to get in grocery stores: while waiting to get in Publix had a lady in front of me take a swing at an employee that was taking her cart inside. Frenzy at the pallett of water, but they had power yesterday and AIR CONDITIONING.... The sirens have been 24/7 until yesterday. I realized this after getting home from the Hunt For Water, and thinking I was hearing sirens (hmmm... It's weird, it's kind of like even now I think I hear them in the distance?) and I realized I wasn't, I was imagining it. It's exactly like if you've been in the ocean for awhile, then you go inside and it feels like you're still being bobbled around... It was constant sirens, more than even 2020, ... Weird, it's not like tinnitus, it's like I'm half asleep and thinking I'm hearing the TV in the adjacent room, but it's off. I thought that had gone away, strange... They turned the power on the street a block over. And also the drop that goes to our out, *whose line is laying on the ground under a tree, across our fence and backyard*. So while I'm glad I can use my phone longer now by charging it in there, and my CPAP battery - 5 hours of sleep last night - *I've got to be hyper vigilant about walking my dog outside*, he's accustomed to opening the door when he wants and going out there. I've told Dominion power and they're like "we're busy". They still have it listed as out, like our house, but... I noticed a light was on. The lines are down everywhere, across streets, blocking streets. People drive over them, walk next to them. How many are energized like the one in my yard? I'd already canceled lessons last week because I was sick (still sick), now another week, probably another after this week... I'm broke. A perfect storm. I'm not sure how they got the forecast so wrong. I have students in Atlanta, "the lights didn't even flicker". The eastern side of the wall has the most power; whoever decided it was a "tropical storm", just because hurricanes didn't used to keep going over land, is maybe to blame. It was a hurricane with tornados for 5+ hours non-stop. Giant trees and their root balls scooped up and blown across yards, cars moved around, houses disappeared, trees lopped off the top with the bark shaved off... With the treeline gone everything looks different. Thankfully it's only been in the mid-80s to 90, no power for weeks in 100 degrees would be unbearable with sickness. Not that it's not miserable now. I'm not sure why we had gas stations closed immediately. Lowes managed to get pallets of gas cans and generators in, but Publix, Kroger and Walmart couldn't get water here? Some companies contracted gas tankers to come in for their employees. In prior emergencies I've seen the Guard out directing traffic (another thing: no traffic lights until some places today. A LIGHT OUT IS A 4 WAY STOP. Not "all ways green")... Oh yeah, we've been getting useful EBS messages like "the 911 service is not operable. Please seek alternative ways to contact 911" What....? No infrastructure. Almost a week without water, gas shortage? We're going to have these storms more and more often, and more powerful. Pro tip: Just buy a 5,000+ watt generator now. You need one. You do. Buy at least 2 battery packs with charge controllers and solar panels to easily charge 2 phones. Just do it now. Have a separate solar/battery set up for a fan, and one lamp. Have a cistern and a propane grill to boil water. Don't count on having water. Solar powered radio. The phones aren't working well, not at all on the west side of town, and data doesn't work during the day really. You'll want alternative means of getting information. *Everyone will eventually have all of those things*. Absolutely. 100 Year Storms coming every year, every where. *Ice cap/glacial water can go in the air, not just the oceans*. Look at the news, floods everywhere, constantly. If the U.S. doesn't implement some sort of New Deal/CCC plan to refurbish infrastructure, make roads and buildings capable of handling climate change, the U.S. will degenerate into a pseudo third world situation, 10 years tops. We've made this bed, to sleep in it will be tough.

Sound is easier to quantify, and to present as an objective thing. Full range, flat. Emotional impact is chaotic and beyond the bounds of conscious summation. It requires a *judgement* call, integrating many moments of impressions without presenting a case. The fear of making the "wrong judgment" is great and indefensible. Having a preference has been turned into a bad thing. You might be wrong from a clinical point of view, and people prefer to coarsely reference other people's *opinion* as a way of showing that another *opinion* is wrong.

Blackmagic ATEM Mini video switcher came out just in time for when I switched my lesson business to online in 2020. Accepts any HDMI combinations with no fuss. Good hardware chromakey functionality. Quick source switching. Well thought out layout, HDMI preview output, USB streaming camera source implementation. 4 years of daily operation, almost flawless. Pretty optimal for the cost, only just now finding competition. Yamaha THR 10 as a runner up for size vs. utility, combination use as a USB interface, straightforward interface implementation, sound. ASIO drivers being cross compatible with the Steinberg interfaces is convenient, and they're very reliable and hassle free, low latency and resource-light.

I hope covid never impacts you personally Craig, and you can continue to maintain a "politically distanced" attitude towards talking about playing gigs during a pandemic. I can't, and will not. I'll return when covid is over.

Which has no bearing on their procedures. Auckland has an outbreak, they do something about it for that area. Is Auckland an island? Is Auckland somehow different than Dekalb Georgia, Austin Texas? No. Which means what? Everybody is perfectly spaced apart from each other, and it has no cities? Citing population densities as a comparison is non-sequiter unless both distributions are perfectly diffuse. There are places in North Dakota that are thinner in population than places in NZ, and cities in NZ that are denser than cities in the U.S.. That has no bearing on the PROCEDURES implemented that has controlled it. It's absolutely ridiculous, as you say, to insist that there is some unknown reason a city with a million people in New Zealand has some capability that a city of a million, or 3 million, in the States doesn't have. Whether their political system is better or more effective is beside the point as to whether their procedures have worked. I could go into my own "lesson" about what powers can be enacted, and have been during war time and can say all of their procedures could be implemented in the U.S. if the government had the will to do so. "Please stop insisting what New Zealand has done is impossible in the U.S.". We were close to implementing similar restraint in the U.S. in March 2020. Sheriffs were prepared to stop people from crossing State lines. Curfews have been implemented all over the U.S. plenty of times. 9/11 there were no planes flying. That doesn't require anything beyond the will to do it, that there is a political divide based on idiocy IS my whole point: New Zealanders as a whole were willing to take necessary steps where the U.S. faltered. There are zero technical reasons the U.S. couldn't do what New Zealand has done, except governments allow idiots to have political sway. Enough people get tired of the way it's going here, and it can happen here. As evidence of that, the social pressure now having switched to anti-anti-vax sentiment relative to wrecking our hospital system - Kimmel feeling safe in saying the remarks he's made, and doctors/nurses agreeing publicly. Biden's weak, but better than nothing vaccine mandate for businesses. Events requiring vaccination proof. School systems rebelling against idiot governors anti-mask bs. If we get a surge at the end of the year like last year, it will ramp that up another notch; and if lambda, or a more vaccine resistant or communicable variant takes hold, it will go another notch towards active measures. Active measures is the difference. I say 8 years ago *we wouldn't be having this conversation*, because we would have already implemented similar active measures to contain the pandemic. FEMA has had plans for it for decades, there should be nothing functionally different in this disaster than any other. All that aside, I will continue to proselytize the value of the procedures New Zealand has implemented (and partially other nations as well) until the sentiment in the U.S. changes.

I hope something magical happens before then.

No it's not. If I have a friend from high school, that makes 20 posts every day but the only one Fb puts in front of me is a political opinion, *that was Facebook's doing*, not me. Actually no, if Fb has a redeeming feature it's that I *don't* have to interact with all of these people. It's a comfortable distance, actually. I've had my browser set up so that I haven't seen ads in... maybe forever, but *you can't control what it puts in front of you*, you can only try to edit it out. I'm not going to the trouble, because again, Fb wins; what's left over is *still not going to be reality*. Without FB, I can almost assuredly say that I would not have a book publishing deal or be writing for Photofocus or several other things that I cannot think of. And that's really the LEAST of it. The main benefit for me is that I've made friends and learned a lot. It's worked *for you*, and I can see a photography centric person could get something from it if you have the time. I've conversed with my literally my favorite photographer, gotten photo press passes for political events and other events, gotten some freelance photo work via little effort on Twitter - and I'm just a hack peasant photography nerd. I'm pretty sure none of that would have happened on Fb.

I don't care about tracking at this point, it's impossible to get away from unless one doesn't own a phone. What I *do* care about is being manipulated. Facebook uses a.i. to keep you engaged, and it works differently for different people/accounts, depending. For some people it's putting posts in front of them that are related to flowers. Or talking about college football. For me, it's - surprise - politics. Being "left wing" in a MAGA centric town, 99% of my 1,000+ "friends" don't have anything in common with me politically or philosophically. While I'd like to know what's going on with people I know, as Facebook once did longggg ago, what it does with me is put posts the algorithm *knows* will get under my skin in front of me. People don't realize that *what you see on Facebook is customized for YOU*. It's not a level playing field. You're not going to automatically see the latest post from the friend from high school, that just wrote something innocuous about cars a minute ago. Instead, you're going to see what a person you may have only met once, years ago, wrote YESTERDAY about a political debate that the algorithm KNOWS you have a very strong opinion on. It's doing that over, and over, and over. It knows how to get certain neuro chemical responses to happen. You are being manipulated on Facebook. I have some friends that are in my Venn diagram. If I go on Facebook, I have to literally hunt them down to see anything from them. And vice-versa, they never see my posts; I've watched with them on their accounts, and I'm shadow banned. Sometimes my posts *can't be found*. I'm always in a bad mood after going on Facebook because of that. For people that live on Facebook, literally, the algorithm has learned a happy medium for them that keeps them hooked. I can't go on without having 20 things in a row that make me tense. So I absolutely hate it, but I have to because for some people "the internet" is *literally* "Facebook": they want to talk to me about guitar lessons there, they want to send messages there instead of in email, on and on... ahgh.

I'm mad because covid derailed a live project I had in the works 2 years ago, and now it seems like it's never going to happen. I'm further mad because, *we could so easily have a normal gigging life*, a NORMAL way of life*. It's very simple, obviously works, and costs a whole lot less than what is happening now. It's pathetic, ridiculously pathetic, that "patriotic" "Americans" insist the U.S. can't do what little New Zealand has managed - or England or Canada, that "freedumbs" are more important. I'm still maintaining ultimately people will get tired of this, tired of people around them dying, tired of finding out they can't go to the hospital because it's filled with unvaccinated people, tired of finding out that they now have a kidney problem, heart problem, brain problem, because they got a "mild" case of covid, tired of getting that "mild case" that puts them in bed for a week or more every year... at some point it will dawn on the herd that "wait... why don't we JUST LOCKDOWN AND GET RID OF IT?" Look up video of daily life in New Zealand. It almost looks fake, or from years ago. Zero reason the same procedures can't be applied in any country.

I wouldn't touch that site with a ten foot vaccination needle. The Israeli *studies* are being taken out of context so much. Israel's community is not representational of the world; The results are not linear across age groups - for a reason; Without the context of deaths relative to other nations, it's not valid; Hospitalization rate in Israel.... is NOT the same thing as hospitalizations in, say, rural South Carolina. Cherry pick fallacies are a scourge in social media. The parameters are known: you stand a better chance with the vaccines, presuming you survive you're risking long term health if you get infected, immunity from vaccines and infection is not permanent (unfortunately). Masks help, distancing helps, lock downs work. With hospitals at capacity you're killing many more people that do not show up statistically, because people are missing operations/procedures/care for other maladies. And with tens of thousands out of work for days routinely, the economy is negatively affected. That's it. People that are busy posting some distorted headline are ultimately wanting what is in the above paragraph to not be true, somehow. Delusional wishful thinking. Without a breakthrough - Oxford Principle study has positive results, a cheap/free/accurate instant test is invented, magically universal-epitope vaccine is concocted - there is ONLY ONE WAY OUT. New Zealand is showing the way, THERE IS NO OTHER OPTION.