Tin Pan Alley is the historical industry from before recording: composers sold sheet music and piano rolls to publishers, who sold them to working musicians. The ASCAP/BMI mafia would shake down venues and make sure they were paying licensing fees.

Recorded music and radio obviously reduced the demand for performers, which reduced demand for sheets.

We've had Yamaha Vocaloid for over two decades now, and Synthesizer V is probably coming up on a decade too now. They're like any other synth: MIDI (plus phonemes) in, sound out. It's a tool of musical expression, like any other instrument.

Hatsune Miku (Fujita Saki) is arguably the most prolific singer in the world, if you consider every Vocaloid user and the millions of songs that have come out of it.

So I don't think there's any uncharted territory...we still have singers, and sampled VST instruments didn't stop instrumentalists from existing; if anything, most of these newcomer generative AI tools are far less flexible or creatively useful than the vast array of synthesis tools musicians already use.

Miku is neat but not a replacement for a human by any stretch of the imagination. In practice most amateur usage of that lands somewhere in a cringey uncanny valley.

No one was going to replace voice actors for TV and movie dubs with Miku whereas the cutting edge TTS tools seem to be nearing that point. Presumably human vocal performances will follow that in short order.

"You're so right, that nice catch lines up perfectly!"

It's not just a coincidence, it's the emergence of spurious statistical correlations when observations happen across sessions rather than within sessions.

You can add an M-dash, and we completed the bs-bingo. :)

Staring at a bright light makes floaters visible, so dark is a must for me. Plus, code should never be dark-on-light, that's disgusting.

Astigmatism can cause eye strain headaches. I don't know if LASIK corrects that or not, or if you have it, but getting glasses with cylindrical correction helped reduce some of my headaches. Apparently most people don't see a big starburst around lights at night, or have a faint/fuzzy halo around text at any distance.

Japan has that too: あの (ano) and えっと (etto) are used as fillers to indicate that you're about to say something.

Moshimoshi is fully a contextual greeting. (You'd use the good morning, good day, good evening equivalents in person.)

Elmo Musk was pumping and dumping dogecoin for years before pivoting to starting an LLM Ponzi.

We're just seeing that the copyright emperor has no clothes: companies want to infringe upon others' rights through a copyright laundering machine, but of course will insist that the laundered code they use is their property, protected by the holy copyright cudgel.

Propulsion is not the issue. Quality cars' engines last just fine for decades, if maintained.

Cars in the north have major rust problems, even if you're exceptionally careful, from exposure to snow and road salt.

Plenty of 30+ year old cars in Candida show rust isn’t that much of an issue. It’s increasing maintenance costs per year that take most vehicles off the road.

For CarPlay, yes. I don't need a virtual assistant to do things I can do but worse; I need reliable voice controls to send messages, start phone calls, change the map destination and such with as little friction as possible.

Siri needs faster and more flexible handling of Spotify, Google Maps and third-party messaging apps, not a slop generator.

Any satellite signal is going to be relatively weak compared to what you can produce on the ground. Inverse square law, and power limitations of a mobile transmitter.

It's fairly trivial to set up a transmitter that saturates a slice of spectrum at an amount of power that is ridiculous compared to a satellite signal. There are still AM radio stations operating that go as high as 50kW. The satellite transmitters aren't going to exceed maybe a hundred Watts, at a great distance, and that falls off at 1/(distance)^2.