Kohan Ikin

We got thru the night! I'm not sure how - except for the hard work by the @EuroclubPerth team, the Connections crew and @OGAE_Australia. We worked ourselves into the ground to make it happen. In case I'm never in the DJ booth again, here was my view at the end of Perth's night.

"It always seems IMPOSSIBLE until it's done" @ImpossibleHQ

@ARKeshet @emollick I thought it sounded remarkably like a Eurovision or Swedish Melodifestivalen track - especially the Taiko drums at 1:00. But many of the 1990s boy bands were written / produced by Sweden's Max Martin, so it could just be Swedish europop overfitted.

@emollick Overfitted to the american sound, unfortunately

I had access to the new Google Lyria 3 Pro music AI. Its quite good. I've been ruining(?) Rilke by giving the AI the First Elegy & asking it to make it "more 1990s boy band" ("oooo the beginning of terror, girl") Catchy! It is also nuts that you can ask an AI to do this & it can

@TheStalwart There's a game theory strategy "Pavlov" that seems to match. Two parts of the strategy: "“pushes boundaries” and keeps defecting when you cooperate, until you retaliate", and "“concedes when punished” and cooperates after a defect/defect result". lesswrong.com/posts/3rxMBRCY…

How unusual is this in game theory, where one of the participants benefits from having established a reputation as the one who chickens out?

@tgreen2241 @AnthropicAI Perth here, and I've got to agree... Melbourne is a better choice & cultural fit. Sydney probably has better airport infra though. Maybe we can solve this with another Anthropic office in Melbourne? And Perth? And every Australian city? And more servers in .au?!

Damn it, why Sydney!? Melbourne is SO much better... Sydney is like LA, whereas Melbourne is like San Francisco. Honestly though, our market for tech talent here is exceptional (I'm a HR Exec & own an AI Dev / Consultancy Company for context), plus lower cost of living and office rental costs, easier to build datacenters MUCH closer in due to the land availability, and much more. The only thing I can't vouch for is our State Government 😆.

Anthropic is expanding to Australia & New Zealand. We’ll soon open an office in Sydney—our fourth in Asia-Pacific after Tokyo, Bengaluru, and Seoul. Read more: anthropic.com/news/sydney-fo…

@BGroothedde lol, now to see how long it takes for it to be reflected on my instance... still showing as pending at my end! Argh!

@syneryder It worked! 😁

@BGroothedde BTW, having trouble following your instance from the SDF instance - SDF had a database failure in November and lost everyone's posts & follows (urgh). So if you see a pending request from me, that's real. Federation is great, except when it doesn't federate!

Heads-up for those still here: I'm increasingly hearing of people who can't get in & changing photos. Obviously support won't help, because its now automated. If anyone has ideas to help them, let me know. You can find ways to reach me, that can't be mentioned.

@BGroothedde Attempting again! I did the "withdraw follow request" that showed as pending & tried sending again. Won't be surprised if the instance I'm on is the issue. They're volunteer run & decided to stay open to newcomers during every wave...

@syneryder I see that I am following you, but indeed you're not following me. I have not seen a request, so might there be a conflict caused by a double follow? Indeed, in theory federation is great, but only when it works haha

@AethyrUlf Valhalla's been pretty adamant about never discounting (or, always keeping prices low): valhalladsp.com/faq/pricing/do… I'd suggest starting with ValhallaVintageVerb once you've got enough saved up (that's what I did). It's a great all-rounder. You can get the others over time.

@valhalladsp Hoping this might mean a Black Friday discount. I've really enjoyed using your free plugins and I'd like to get at least a couple of the paid ones, but $50 apiece is a pretty big chunk of change with my limited budget.

@tarnith @valhalladsp Valhalla has a blog too, I've been following it in my Feedly RSS reader! According to Feedly there's about 130 of us still following Valhalla via RSS!

@mttvll Awww, another +1 wanting an Android Mastodon app. I love Fenix, and I'd pay money for a decent Android app of Fenix quality, something like $15-20 US. (What code framework did you use for Fenix Android? If you're really not interested, maybe others will take on the challenge.)

The plan is to start on the iPhone, and then move onto iPad (and macOS?). Unfortunately I only have two hands, so no Android version for now.

Yeah, I think it's time.

If you're jumping ship to Mastodon, I'm @syneryder@mastodon.sdf.org for now. If you're into small-web, retrocomputing, Gopher, UNIX etc, you might like SDF.org too. Also, Mastodon has an instance specifically for Eurovision fans at douzepoints.social.

@a_selly_goose Heh, for what it's worth, Brazil is joining Eurovision this year, at least according to Variety: variety.com/2022/music/glo…

Isn’t it whack that Australia is in Eurovision? Is it not just bc they’re a western country due to colonisation from white Europeans? Like, if Brazil popped up with ‘yo can we join too?’ They’d be like ‘nah you’re not European’

@Pete_Brown My industrial goth side likes that Microsoft calls the color "Black Metal"! (Tops out at 16GB & 512GB SSD in 13.5in though? Would Komplete 14 even fit in 512GB?)

Surface Laptop 5 with Thunderbolt 4 should be great for making music in and outside the studio. 16/32gb option is killer there. Digging the sage color. microsoft.com/en-us/store/co…

@kurtfriday1 I was just thinking that today before I saw your reply, if those are the numbers, Covid must be a far higher cause of death than the road toll. Geez. (btw, small typo in your Twitter bio you might want to fix, should be "inherit". Tiny phone keyboards are a pain to type on!)

There have been 15,000 deaths since the start of the pandemic.

@eurovanya @itsmetaras Not sure if you heard, OGAE Estonia have withdrawn from the OGAE Song Contest today as well: twitter.com/OGAE_Australia…

@eurovanya @thedragtumour Unfortunately the deadline was today, UK & Germany were the only clubs to withdraw. But some clubs are giving individual members the option to register a Personal Objection instead of a song contest vote, and will forward the numbers of objection votes to OGAE.

@thedragtumour hopefully

@AndyLynch78 @steveshepard @FogBugzTeam @DevGraph_ @spolsky I just got that dodgy $31.25 charge email as well. I don't even use FogBugz, haven't touched it in a decade or so. What on earth?

Just got an email saying that the free version of FogBugz I've been using for the last 15 years is ending in ONE MONTH!!! Adding insult to injury, the pricing page redirects elsewhere so pricing info is unavailable. What's up @FogBugzTeam?

@VlSlONARYDREAM On the "pretending to be apolitical" thing, you might be interested in this post/translation on their site. Scroll down and find their paragraph that mentions "ammunition": www-escrus-org.translate.goog/2022/05/4.html… (and friendly sanity tip: don't feed the trolls, they sap energy like vampires)