rectang

The Coltrane Changes pattern of descending through major keys via major thirds is actually used at moderate tempo in the bridge of the Rogers/Hart tune Have You Met Miss Jones? [1] ... which is a standard from a musical haha.

But I acknowledge that in that context, it's an "out there" harmonic adventure which builds tension, to be released when the final section harps on the tonic.

I still think that it's mostly the tempo that makes Giant Steps feel alien. Modulating through major keys by major thirds isn't that exotic, but doing it so quickly that ear just doesn't get a chance to orient itself is.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHGFo7fRIqc

Sure. It's also true that if you speed anything up enough it becomes impossible for anybody to play. But neither of those reductio ad absurdum observations tells us much.

The point is that this Vox presentation and many other articles on the Coltrane changes present them as so revolutionary that improvisers struggle, but on its own that's not true.

There are records which predate Giant Steps which are equally harmonically interesting and challenging and which similarly modulate through many key centers, like Con Alma [1] by Dizzy Gillespie from 1954 or Lush Life [2] by Billy Strayhorn from 1948.

What Coltrane did with Giant Steps was akin to calling for Lush Life at 300 beats per minute.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLUyVyM626A

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqTDm34vyj0

The Coltrane changes are lovely, but if you slow them down they aren't substantially more difficult than other Jazz changes from that era. What makes Giant Steps so challenging is mainly the tempo.

Tommy Flanagan, the pianist who struggled a bit on the original Coltrane recording, put out a recording of Giant Steps with his own trio in the 1980s. Having had enough time by then to woodshed the changes, his improvs are exquisite. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3PWynH-CEc

Who knows what the future holds? Right now he can get away with anything: paying for partisan ads with taxpayer money, shaking down industry for bribes to pay for various monuments... There is no amount of corruption or incompetence that this Republican congress would not enable.

The majority of the Republican electorate demands an authoritarian leader unconstrained by the rule of law. Trump won't be the last.

There have been Republican elected representatives who have confronted Trump. With very few exceptions, they have gone down to defeat in subsequent Republican primary elections.

The Republican electorate will not stand for Trump being constrained or criticized by Republicans. That's why there are almost no remaining Republican elected officials who are willing to confront the Trump administration aside from a handful of lame ducks like Tillis and Massie.

Functionally, the Republican congress is unable to hold the Trump administration to account, because Republican voters have ensured that it cannot. The only way Trump will ever be constrained is via Democrats.

"Hold onto 16 as long as you can" — John Mellencamp, "Jack and Diane"

I will die on the hill that "SOME PIG" from Charlotte's Web was merely an existential determiner.

Instead of asking AI to write something substansive for you, ask it to critique your writing. Then use your own judgement as to which bits of advice to follow and which to ignore.

The LLM will always give you a full rewrite — don't use it. It always does too much, and persuading it to tone it down is a constant battle.

It's childish of me I know, but if this actually goes through I will feel a twinge of delight at the refutation of all the HN commenters who have argued that such enforcement is unrealistic.

> Let's start with crimes that actually cost lives.

https://spectrumlocalnews.com/tx/south-texas-el-paso/news/20...

"According to the Identity Theft Resource Center’s 2023 Consumer Impact Report, 16% of identity theft victims are experiencing suicidal thoughts."

Then such businesses should not exist. What right do they have to gamble with the wealth of 150 million people unrelated to their enterprise?

The socialized losses vastly exceed 300% of earnings - they're analogous to a company mishandling toxic waste and ruining everyone around them. The way they are running their business is catastrophically irresponsible, and if they can't afford the consequences, they shouldn't have gone into this business.

It's perfectly reasonable, and if something perfectly reasonable is "unrealistic", then the system is corrupt.

Fines exceeding 100% of lifetime compensation might actually do something. As it stands, clawbacks are ineffective — for example, Carrie Tolstedt of the Wells Fargo scandal wound up money ahead to the tune of tens of millions of dollars:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_Tolstedt

> In response to the report, Wells Fargo retroactively fired Tolstedt for cause and revoked $47.3 million that they had previously paid her. This brought the total amount of money she had given up to $67 million, or about 54% of her $125 million pay package she initially received when she retired.

Fines on the scale that it might be reasonable to reserve escrow funds for are just "cost of doing business" fines.

Ohhh, has anybody used AI to generate delicious statistics about how many ads served by various ad networks will get you hacked / violate the ad networks own policies?

Fully agree. Humans are social animals who behave differently in different contexts, and the corporate context statistically ensures that the humans inside of it behave in all sorts of lamentable ways.

The potential damage is all to users bound by terms and conditions, who are unlikely to collect damages successfully from a vendor. Structurally, vendors don’t have to care. Therefore, vulnerabilities have little direct financial value to a vendor.

It’s natural to feel cognitive dissonance because the value to the vendor is so disproportionate to the potential harm to users, but the incentive structure is what it is.

A vulnerability which lets an attacker harm the vendor has much higher direct financial value.

The concept of memories blending together resonates after watching a recent Kurzgezadt video entitled "How Are Memories Stored Inside Your Brain?". It makes the point that the very act of recalling a memory changes it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PqtggjVAi8M

> But memories are not static like photos. Like dioramas made from wax, each time they’re under the spotlight of your attention they can melt and change a tiny bit.

> Let's hope the LLM model continues to be paying for credits

LLM vendors make this hard because you can't trust them with your session data. Yesterday you were opted out of training, then suddenly today you're opted in.

It's an extension of the idea that they don't need to care about anybody's copyright. They don't care about preserving the security or privacy of customer data, because there is negligible incentive to do so.

For now, there's no substitute but as LLMs get commoditized trusting LLM SAAS vendors becomes an unacceptable business risk.

I pay for a subscription to Duck.ai mainly because I don't want to be constantly fighting my vendor to protect my privacy.

Microsoft already did a rug pull on me and opted me in to training months after I signed up with Github Copilot. It exhausting and ultimately futile to monitor these companies.

It's not guaranteed that Duck.ai will continue to uphold its promise of not training on your sessions — if the company gets bought by Microsoft, it's only a matter of time before the switch to "you can opt out at any time". But since privacy is Duck.ai's brand, it will be somewhat harder for them to hide what they're doing should they betray their customers.

I also don't actually trust that Duck.ai sub-vendors OpenAI and Anthropic will uphold whatever contract they have with Duck.ai — the whole AI business model is built on lawless consumption of others work.

We'll ultimately have to run our own models locally, because it's impractical to defend against untrustworthy AI vendors.

Money from confused seniors getting scammed is a critical revenue stream. Without scams, ads are far less viable.

Forming every paragraph of dialog into perfect rectangles is way more extreme than just avoiding "widows". The usual term for this is "full justification" and typographically when it's done it's typically through word spacing and letter spacing. Full justification in monospace through word choice (which is what the Ares Luna article is about) is bonkers, but I can't see that happening for TV dialog.

I've sometimes heard "orphan" used to represent a single word left alone on its own line at the end of a paragraph, but the terms are often confused and Carter could have used "widow" in that sense.

I'm curious to see what the hard-copy scripts actually looked like. The soft copies I've seen aren't particularly idiosyncratic but maybe they've been normied: https://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/the-x-files_production.h...

"No widows" on its own isn't enough to create a distinctive dialog cadence.

"Widows" (alone at the top) and "orphans" (alone at the bottom) are single lines cut off from the rest of a paragraph by a column/page break. The solution is generally just to fiddle with column/page breaks, which is purely typographical.

I'm sure that there's a distinct identity to X-Files dialog; it's just not due to this quirk.

I can totally see a fellow typography geek bragging about this to someone and them being horrified haha.

ETA: I speculate that Carter was avoiding "widows" to be considerate to the actors by not splitting lines across page turns.

Why not start with a brownout? Make the data temporarily inaccessible, but don’t actually delete it immediately.

Completely wiping all computing devices in advance every time you pass through a border checkpoint seems like the only defense against the government getting all of your personal data.

As we can see from the Tunic case, providing a "duress password" to cause data to be wiped on site when entered leaves you vulnerable to destruction of evidence charges, even if Tunic ultimately prevails.

What computing device vendors specialize in bulletproof, convenient wiping and restoration?

It’s been a while, but I recall finding The Plague more compelling than The Stranger.

While I agree with Camus’s philosophical points about the absurdity of existence and the indifference of the universe, within the scope of our tiny little lives there is morality and meaning. Taking action to address the suffering caused by an epidemic is meaningful. So are the deaths of an Arab or one’s mother, and the premise that a human would be so alienated that they would feel nothing at them is unconvincing, even if the universe doesn’t care.

There was an essay in The Guardian a couple days ago on a related topic, positing that the essence of the self is the biological body including the brain, rather than the isolated mind. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jul/30/alive-...

I’m as uninterested in debating someone who denies the existence of fossil fuel subsidies as I am in debating climate denialists. I recommend that interested parties perform a trivial web search.

Geoengineering proposals are often unserious because the point is to give the appearance of doing something while the root cause goes unaddressed. "No need to reconsider those fossil fuel subsidies because [fanciful geoengineering proposal] will save the day!"

Geoengineering proposals spring from the same impulse as climate denial — anything to avoid consequences for those contributing to the crisis.