WTF-Beta

@Mik Ooh I googled, that's a very pretty color!

I also like a good cherry red car too. A friend of mine has a 1966 red Corvair, it's so awesome!

On the topic of red, Elton John's red Yamaha is pretty cool too!

Burger

P.S. join me in this thread for an extension of this discussion to piano music: https://wtf.coffee-room.com/topic/3960/two-different-versions-of-clair-de-lune

I'm pretty sure I already posted this video of Victor Borge playing Clair de Lune, but in the thread about using AI to detect AI, the topic of music and digital pianos came up...

So listen to these two different versions of Clair de Lune. The first by Victor Borge

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1595935812544429

The second by Rousseau, the YouTube pianist (who actually started the trend of this kind of video)

The Rousseau version is so clean... It's nice enough (and I certainly couldn't play it this well!) and actually I think this recording and this video would be an excellent learning tool (which I will probably make use of when I start working on this piece).

But it also strikes me as very sterile. It's too precise, too clean, too sterile. And I don't really care if I ever listen to it again.

Victor Borge's Clair de Lune, on the other hand, I am obsessed with. I can't listen to it enough.

@CHAS said:

Digitals are too precise.

I never liked playing a digital because it sounded too clean, lacked character and voice... I actually like how my acoustic piano sounds subtly different depending on the time of day or the weather (now, having said that, I wouldn't like it if my piano was truly challenged in terms of tuning stability...)

So to @axtremus 's comment about adding imprecision to machine generated music, I don't think that would be enough for me. The music might still be good, but it would be missing some essential quality...

back to the original topic, and watermarking for example, as far as I understand it, there really is no way to reliably leave a "marker" that shows some content is AI generated.

Here’s a great article in the Atlantic about the proliferation of gray, beige, and greige in houses, interior and cars.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/colorless-gray-products-houses/688174/

Or here https://archive.is/M47pS

And an antidote, San Francisco houses painted by Dr. Color:
https://drcolor.com/gallery/

We don’t live in an HOA neighborhood and this neighborhood was built before the gray-invasion. So the housing exteriors around here are not super uniform. Nothing shocking, but enough variation that it makes the neighborhood nice IMO. Also our house (1990) has the original (and very nice/pretty) wood trim around the windows and very nice wood doors etc., and the walls are a nice warm, off-white color. Then we get our bursts of color through furniture and artwork (especially in my piano room). But we don’t have any “accent walls” or dramatic interiors.

BTW when I lived in Japan and bought a car new for the first time, here’s the Subaru I thought I would buy:

And here’s the Subaru I actually bought:

The car we have now is that boring gun metal gray color

Dogs

@dolmansaxlil said:

a study of folks who play board games as a serious hobby and see if that has impact.

Oh, I bet it does! Strategy games, having the think ahead, consider various possible outcomes several steps/turns out.... Also, depending on the games, like D&D etc. where there's kind of world-making in addition to strategy...

I'm sure the complexity of individual games and the diversity of playing different games result in all kinds of benefits.

@wtg thanks for posting that article. I had actually heard about the “London cabbies have bigger hippocampi” finding (that research study is apparently from 2000), but it’s interesting to read about it now, when practically everyone relies on GPS to get around and esp. to go new places.

I’m surprised the author didn’t mention that, but I have read people talking about the skills we lose when we don’t learn the lay of the land, so to speak…

(ETA I had to look up the plural of hippocampus, I wanted it to be hippocampuses…

Happy birthday @mik !!

kerfuffle

@wtg thanks for this. My most recent hotel stay was actually on a university campus, so I used the campus wi fi service (which is called eduroam and should be very secure). But I have a lot of conference travel coming up this fall and next spring, and most of those are massive hotel/convention center places.

Subs

BTW from the Guardian article:

The news industry in the US used to hold corporations more accountable for the quality of their products and service. But consumer-facing business news was decimated when local newspapers disappeared and national news outlets shifted their corporate coverage to focus on investors.

Yep, it's all connected.

Brilliance

This is why I'm terrified that something in our house will break. Not because we can't afford to replace it, but because the options we'll have to replace it with will most surely be lower quality and not last as long.

@Bernard said:

When a brand changes hands this many times, the name becomes the product and the pan becomes a cost to be managed beneath it: thinner steel here, an offshored handle there

And this is why Mr SK can't find the kinds of pans he wants.

Order

Always

Wow indeed! Congratulations!!!

Squeaker