Carl-Richard

The eternal problem with generalized LLMs. A possible counter to that other than the "only use academic literature" prompt would be to feed it a list of common inaccurate internet tropes that it should avoid. Here is what I will update the original prompt with (could be developed further): "Avoid anecdotal claims" was supposed to counter this. Who knows if it actually works though lol

By accepting things you cannot solve now and moving on to things you can solve. That's a part of the growth mindset, of not expecting things to be served to you on a silver platter. It might be solved later with better knowledge. Also, when you engage with life intensely enough, unsolveable questions simply become absurd. You're constantly in a state of flow of solving things. If things aren't solved, you simply move on and keep the dopamine flowing. If you don't deal with enough solveable problems, your mind will focus on unsolveable problems. If you adopt enough responsibilities in life and engage with things that have a clear direction, you won't have time for endlessly looping about unsolveable questions.

Upgrade your worldview from a certainty vs unknown based worldview to a statistical worldview. What is likely given certain estimates? What is reasonable given certain arguments? Looking for certainty means you are looking for comfort. Growing up means going beyond mere comfort-seeking. Upgrade your worldview from a static worldview to a growth worldview. Wherever you put your focus and time in, it will grow. And even if you can't see a path right now, the path might be uncovered by simply walking a path. Your ignorance depends on your growth. It's not static. Your knowledge grows with data points, with statistics. Things do not reveal themselves without discovery, and discovery happens by taking the journey.

Degenius.

I'm lost in the sauce. What's the argument and how does it negate that certain structures have a certain naturalness to them? Does an amoeba have to discipline itself to chase a bacterium?

Ey fok yoo man.

Or maybe it's about de-disciplining yourself of certain things and re-aligning with what is often more intuitive and natural. That's the conundrum of modern society and the materialist mind virus. You're essentially taught to feed yourself poison and you have to unlearn that, which requires, well, learning something. If you were never taught it, if the environment was already more healthy, you would not need to discipline yourself as much to have it. If you were a caveman living in caves 30 000 years ago, would you need to discipline yourself to be social or be in a community, "go out" and meet women, get laid, be physically active, sleep well, engage in sacred practices and rituals, lay down the phone, stop scrolling TikTok and get to work?

@Nilsi You're talking about fluctuations and the power of obsession and attention to magnify something to where you prioritize something over something else. That's definitely a part of the human repetoire of meaning. Frank Zappa comes to mind as someone who sometimes worked for days on end without sleep and only ate and slept when he felt absolutely forced to. He also died of cancer at the age of 53. Some live on that chaotic and obsessive edge. But it doesn't change the fact that even the content of that meaning, boils down to biology and movement, in the sense that it's about movement through some environment, be it musical, abstract philosophy, or a literal walk in the park. And this movement is not purely incidental; it has cycles, structure, logos. A meaningful piece of art or music does not single-heartedly stand on an amorphous ground. It may hinge on divergent and chaotic elements, but its base is firm. I know you hate me saying it, but I'm not painting an either/or picture. Meaning is structured and chaotic, dynamic and static, energy and form. I get it, you have a thing for chaos, you like chaotic philosophers, you like challenging the ortodoxy, you like giving the antithesis. But even that has a structure that can be described.

While I generally agree somewhat, one time I forced GPT to make me a script a certain way because I didn't like its initial suggestion, and then after a while, instead of giving me an answer, it said "look, you've now spent hours on this approach and it's going nowhere, maybe instead try the first thing I said". That's the first time I felt a sense of agency reaching out from behind the screen and touching me. But in hindsight, it could be something that is programmed in.

I gave it two pictures and it typed me as ENFP in the happy picture and INFP in the neutral picture. This one dude insisted I was ENFP and I think I'm INFP/INTP

The first time I've heard "progressive deathcore", i.e. Knocked Loose sound merged with prog noodling and even saxophone: Even when simply mixing genres, I think you sometimes find interesting divergent gems popping up that you wouldn't have found otherwise.

Unsettling and very calming. My kind of music.

But how fleeting? Are there not certain regularities, certain cycles, like the heartbeat, the rising and setting of the sun, the rising and fall of cortisol and melatonin, the cycles of anabolism and catabolism in relation to feeding cycles and physical activity? And are there not ways to better align with these cycles, in a way that is not simply random or fleeting, in a way which creates harmony rather than dissonance?

Meaning boils down to biology and movement, but also more fundamentally the interplay between energy and form, dynamism and structure, Logos. Do you cohere and connect with reality? Does reality make sense to you? Do things matter?

That could work. I'm imagining it 🥸 Damn, gimme more of these wacky artists 😂

@Nilsi Here is an example of Meshuggah taking rhythmic dissonance so far that it essentially becomes "noise" (beyond mere heaviness), as the syncopating rhythmic pattern is so long that you don't have the attention span to decode it (maybe ever, certainly not on the first listen). Not coincidentally, the song feels mostly like noise to me: On the other hand, this riff is my favorite Meshuggah riff, and it uses rhythmic dissonance in such a beautiful way (which makes it really heavy): 3:45 (and also the one at 4:16 which is the main riff of the song).

I'm gonna do a Nilsi and quote myself: this is a better example of the "within genre" divergent creativity than the very last one (maybe not specific to heaviness, but divergent creativity nonetheless), also from Steven Wilson: https://guitar.com/news/music-news/steven-wilson-explains-why-guitarists-should-regularly-change-their-tone/ Steven Wilson is a very "within genre" kind of guy, but on his newest album, you can really see this come into play. There are some interesting guitar sounds there I've not really heard before.

That's an interesting song. I can see your point on a certain divergent creativity informing heaviness. But this happens "within" genres as well. It's really just a matter of scale. Structure is always there, hierarchy is always there, genre is always there. It's just how far can you jump. And it's also about where you choose to focus. These jumps happen all the time when making songs. If they don't happen to any noticeable degree, you get ideas like "bland", "stale", "unoriginal", "uncreative". For heaviness in particular, the jump can be as minor as introducing a different technique for how you attack the strings (e.g. "thumping", as popularized by Tosin Abasi, or the insane pick scratches by Gojira) or rhythmical elaborativeness (e.g. Meshuggah). Rhythm in itself is a Pandora's box of heaviness, and of course dissonance of rhythm especially. Or it can be inviting an entirely different sound than what is normal for that genre (e.g. strummed acoustic guitar layered on top of the distorted guitars; both Opeth and Nile has done this) or really music altogether (e.g. the nightmare-ish, silent but also loud amorphous wall of dissonance which is impossible to describe in the interlude of Steven Wilson's and Mikael Akerfeldt's "Storm Corrosion"; maybe a bad example of staying within a genre to be honest). However, you did make me have some interesting thoughts pop in my mind about ways of producing music that are so divergently creative that it scares you socks off. It's hard to describe, but I got a "vision" (rather a "listen") about somewhere in a song leading up to a type of breakdown, you do a severe surround sound effect where you quickly flip the entire soundscape to the back of your head and then pan it violently upwards and forward (it would be so much easier to show you with hand movements, but whatever). I would have to create it to show what I really mean. It's a bit like the vision I had with the meditation movie idea. You would know more what I mean when you see it. There are actually many such visions/listens I have about music that if I were to pursue and create in a song, it would either sound amazing or I would never be able to recreate it.

I'm not gonna lie, the first few times I got high, it was like a new world opened up for me. The level of interconnectedness of mind and stream of insights I got and which I would spill in raving rants like Terrence McKenna on speed was something else. The euphoria and sense of profundity was unmatched. One the other hand, LSD opened it up even further and also crushed the previous world I lived in. And seeds were planted there for meditation to take over and bring in a new world again which recaptured the older one.

Some of the most unexpectedly heavy things I've heard is that one Poppy scream in that Knocked Loose Jimmy Kimmel performance (I hadn't heard the song before watching that). It didn't sound like a "metal" scream, but like a "scream scream", like from a horror movie. And also that moan inflection at the end. That was something that broke the standard metal mould but which also made it more heavier.

I swear if you look up any vegetable, berries or spice, somewhere it will say "it is known for its aphrodisiac properties". Try it 😂

I bought some of Dr. Collins Biomin Restore without fluoride as recommended by Bryan Johnson. I was hesistant in buying it, considering hydroxyapatite nanoparticles sounds spooky. But I figured it's probably better than fluoride (for your brain, maybe not for your teeth). Then I realized one ingredient, titanium dioxide, is now banned in the EU since 2022 from foods and supplements, including toothpastes. It ironically also comes in the form of nanoparticles, and that's what is thought to be some of the reason why it is cytotoxic in vitro and labelled as a carcinogen. Funnily, my brother read the tube once and he blurted out "titanium dioxide?!" with a chuckle, probably because he works with titanium, but the implication was also "that surely can't be good for you...". And that was my feeling too. So I looked it up, and here we are. So does anybody have any alternative fluoride-free hydroxyapatite toothpastes they use without titanium dioxide? 😊 Or do you guys in the US not care about EU regulations? 😆

Amelodic in the Western classical music sense where if you play outside or jump too much between Western music scales, you're deemed a heretic. Like if you watch Doug Helvering's earlier music reaction videos, he will be like "ooh, that is a weird place to go to an E". Basically all music theory jargon is just Western imperialism 😆 The most amelodic music I can think of that uses tones and is not just random sounds is some of Frank Zappa's earlier records:

They seem to use a lot of Phrygian in their intros when doing their nods to Egyptology and just generally, but I think that particular chord progression is more amelodic than anything (missing a true tonal center), which is a typical thing in death metal, but this was just pulled off so beautifully. "Death" is a band that uses very much Phrygian, certainly in Chuck Schuldiner's solos (it's virtually in all of his solos). I think for a chord progression to sound heavy, it must have moments of incredible dissonance that is unpredictable in a way, but which is also used strategically and in a larger melodic context that is not as dissonant. Or else it just becomes "ugly" or "just noise". Phrygian as a scale seems to make a good general template for this, but going into amelodic territories is where you find the really heavy stuff. Another example of a really heavy chord progression is Opeth's Blackwater Park intro riff (0:07-1:10). The final chord in the progression is so dissonant, both in comparison to the previous chord but also especially as its own chord. But honestly, the riff just after that (1:15) is honestly just as dissonant and generally the most genius riff ever written: One thing is for certain though, Nile's style being centered around Egyptology gives it a mystical and sinister vibe, because Ancient Egypt has always given me that vibe. Images of being deep inside a pyramid and running from mummies and ghosts of thousand year old kings casting magic spells.

@UnbornTao Health is unironically the best aphrodisiac. It's a holistic aphrodisiac. The term is often used in reductionistic way to describe things that work like a drug that you can boil down to a very specific mechanism of action (which is generally what they do with all kinds of food). But if you take an aphrodisiac drug and you're unhealthy, it might not even work that well. You can't get a boner if you can't get blood to your dick despite taking 2CB or whatever.