vr46

Mainly because I installed it and ran it on a sample base infra - vpc and subnets - and I noted that it was still picking up Hashicorp providers, fine, but doesn’t this mean I have to run through a large codebase and start switching every provider out? Essentially I wasn’t sure what to do next. Should I stick with my standard terraform setup or figure out shifting to OpenTF and risk getting hit with something not available? Wasn’t something I could figure out in advance, if that makes sense? So was safest to stick with TF.

Just started a new tiny greenfield infra project for a friend but was too cowardly to use OpenTF after I tried it and found that I needed Hashicorp providers etc, couldn’t be bothered to dig in and untangle. Gotta say, didn’t find opentf docs useful at all. But hoping things go well and one day I’ll be able to just fire things up and it’ll be frictionless.

I have tried Boinc in the past, I didn't find anything that was visually interesting for me locally - one cool thing about SETI was the screensaver and graphics, if anyone has any suggestions for something cool and fun I could exchange my energy money for, that'd be appreciated.

Right now I wouldn’t even believe he was Craig Wright if he said so himself.

It's the trade-off with Prince, as Susan Rogers explains in another comment I made, where he needed to get his ideas out first and foremost. There were a lot of stunning-sounding albums around at the time!

She's mentioned elsewhere about messing up and them leaving it in too - like the Forever In My Life vocal was an error I think, but how good does that sound!

Sure, but the mix is not the recording, and it's the masters that are the bone of contention here.

And we have hundreds of contemporary albums that were all designed to be heard on all the same equipment, in 1987 alone we had Terence Trent D'Arby's debut, Pet Shop Boys' Actually, Fleetwood Mac's Tango in the Night, Whitney Houston's second album, Guns 'n Roses' Appetite for Destruction, U2's Joshua Tree, so I don't buy this argument that albums were mixed for these compromises all the time. All of those albums sound fantastic.

The fundamental recordings of those Prince albums seem to be sub-par, although that has not been helped by some of the mastering of original CDs or cassettes. I originally had it on tape, but then did buy the CD, years later bought a newer CD and then bought the Super Deluxe. No big differences!

Well, several people in the thread have pointed out how subjective my original point was, so fair enough, but on this particular point, the brilliance is in the songwriting, arrangements and performance. They're amazing, even in their imperfections.

I mean, nobody really cares that Prince's drumming is all over the shop in The Cross, it doesn't matter, the performance is incredible.

But I think the recording is pretty flat and dull, and I've heard it at a Classic Album Sundays event on a high-end stereo and there wasn't anything that stereo could dig out that I hadn't already heard. And I then bought the remaster in 2020, same same. But in a way, maybe it just proves that album has always been perfect in every way and I should stop giving a shit about the recording.

Susan Rogers on Prince:

"It’s really important. I think that’s a really important question. People have asked me, or they’ve prefaced questions by saying, “Prince was known to be a perfectionist.” I always have to correct them. He was not a perfectionist. He wouldn’t have had that output if he’s been a perfectionist. What he was was a virtuoso player and a genius with melody, a genius with rhythm, a genius at writing songs. It just poured out of him – he couldn’t wait on perfection. The important thing was to have the sound serve the ideas, not the other way around. Working quickly was fine with him and only a beginning engineer would have no bad habits to break. Only a beginner would be willing to go that fast."

It was definitely a highly-experimental time, pulling old tapes and recordings in too, and the result was flat and dull to me on a high-end Walkman even at the time, because I had cut-glass quality recordings from folks like Quincy Jones to compare with. But it was an amazing album and would be even if it was recorded on a Sony Walkman. As for New Jack Swing, Jam and Lewis were from The Time, right?

Yeah, fair point, it's subjective but here it's a case of different things being important to different people. The album - SOTT in this instance - sounds the way it does and I've been listening to it for 37 years and wouldn't want it any other way, but it still evokes a feeling of dissatisfaction compared to other recording unearthed from the same era amidst the evidence that Prince just didn't care enough because he was too desperate to get the music out, and that attitude never really changed much until he died. It just wasn't a priority, but then other engineers came along, I mean, just one album later, and just captured more of him and his work.

A lot of stuff he didn't really care about that much actually made a massive difference to his work - Laura LiPuma's artwork, graphics, visuals and designs were all hugely important to those albums - and when he went off on his own years later, those things fell off a cliff and the art was worse for it.

As brilliant as he was, there were a bunch of things he really wasn't great at and other people very much improved his output.

As for sonics, I feel that all those albums he made with Susan Rogers have a low ceiling for getting the most out of them - i.e. they don't sound any better on a £50K system than they do on a £100 system - and if that was an artistic goal, I'd give up arguing, but because he outsourced caring about that to others, it feels like we missed out a bit. But we will never know, and that's ok too.

Love Susan Rogers, and the Prince albums she engineered or worked from are standout-brilliant, from Purple Rain to Sign O The Times, but good gracious me are they sonically pretty terrible. I didn't expect much from the 2020 Sign O The Times remaster, and wasn't disappointed: there's not much there to begin with. I mean, fine, it shows just how strong the music was, and you can argue that Prince was too busy to care about sound quality. Indeed he figured that the songs themselves would override those issues, and was correct. Whatever Susan did to help those sessions aside from recording the stuff, it was probably amazing.

But when you compare that album against the live rehearsals, a few weeks after recording was completed, you are left somewhat wanting.

Live Rehearsals #1: https://www.mixcloud.com/moontroll/prince-sign-o-the-times-r...

Susan Rogers has always been an interesting person to listen to, hopefully I'll get a chance to read her book.

Covered already in this instance, thoroughly:

'The judge said in his ruling that he had examined “raw underlying intelligence material” before deciding there was not a “real and immediate risk” to NX121 or his family if his identity was made public.

Lucraft said the three-month delay in naming the officer would allow for “the imposition of any additional mitigating measures to be put in place.”'

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/oct/30/met-officer-...

Yes, and that specific tree was cloned by grafting, and you can see one of them in Cambridge.

This is totally correct and in line with all guidelines, naming once charged.

No, guidelines specifically say only once charged, people may be named, in line with the principles of open justice.

Sources: https://www.judiciary.uk/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Reportin...

https://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2023/news/huge-victory-fo...

https://www.college.police.uk/app/engagement-and-communicati...

Being a suspect and being charged are different things.

Yes, British politics has been on an absolute roll for entertainment the last few years for anyone not effected by it, but that said, you can never accuse the Brits of ever, ever, losing their own sense of humour about it (Economist & the Liz Truss lettuce comment stands as an absolute masterpiece). And I quite enjoy listening to German news here describing Uk politics in a far more truthful - and expletive-laden - way than the UK press can ("complete fucking shitshow" as one German newscaster labelled it).

Haven't been able to get into German politics in quite the same way, mainly due to my rage against the current hypocrisy, but as my German improves, maybe I'll understand it better.

As a fellow Brit with an American Studies degree, I follow US news and events to this day with a detached eye that really helps understand it, which I cannot possibly do with the UK, at least not politics, and having formally studied US history, culture, politics, foreign policy, means I know more about it than any of my American friends - so far - and I expect the converse to be true about Americans studying the UK.

This guy, however, is un-fucking-believable, because he's doing this for FUN and he possesses an amazing power that few people have - TO READ THE FINE MANUAL.

Simply awesome.

You are largely right, but they had advertised it visually very differently - on what people could expect to see - and for the price it really wasn’t better value than a special exhibition at the BM. I’m clearly still sore about it almost twenty years later!

It wasn't an exhibition, but a whole series of zones that you could freely wander around in, each one a show in itself. I recall going through the learning zone, and seeing the huge doors where you could hear the headmaster yelling behind them, to remind you what it felt like to be at school, and then as we were moving through to the end of that space, the lighting all changed, the music shifted and the walls fell away to reveal a forest full of trees to everyone's delight. Extraordinary.

The musical acts that surprised us as we were walking between zones, the huge scale of the artworks and sculptures that we actually had to walk through, it was an absolute delight from start to finish. I had been given two tickets as a gift from a friend, and I took a mate who I didn't know super well, we had zero expectations and that day definitely helped turn us into very close friends - I was his best man a few years later. I then bought tickets and took my girlfriend, who was left speechless by it all (she was a trained actor) who then bought her own tickets and took her entire family there.

The dome suffered from the worst PR ever, and it was a national joke but only for people who hadn't read the book, so to say, people queuing up to criticise something in copycat fashion, but the joke was on them, it was amazing.

The budget for the show was there for a year and I'm sure it underperformed but I'm also sure it provided a seed for the success of things like the 2012 Olympics, which was simply amazing. It was empty for a while, and Crisis used it as a homeless shelter in 2003 I think, I was volunteering as a chef and we were in an annex outside the main building, catering for people with dependency problems, while my then-girlfriend was cooking at the main kitchen inside the actual dome. I took my skates and skated around the whole empty-ish structure, was very cool.

This happened to be an egregiously-bad example of these cheap, padded-out, pop-up shows that are everywhere.

Anything that isn't run by a major museum or gallery is highly suspect in my book. I recall a Tutankhamun show that I think had National Geographic's name slapped on it, somewhere in London Docklands, that was fairly lame, but nothing compared to the lameness of a Tutankhamun show going on in Hamburg right now which is mostly words printed on posters, with the main event being a large empty room with projections on all the walls. Barely amusing and mainly a good chance for a sit-down.

Similarly, there's a fake-o Body Worlds show going on, a bullshit Terracotta Army show on, and there's clearly money to be made.

The one experience I can remember that blew everything out of the water was the Millennium Dome in London, circa 2000, simply amazing and mind-blowing. I went twice. Truly amazing experiences like these cost a fortune and take a age, and require top-tier talent to put on. Just like a West End theatre production.

Yes it was two posh ladies buying the Charlie and looking over at me in the distance nervously. I guess this was before delivery had really taken off. Strange.

Never found that end of Islington to be particularly bad, even if was a bit hectic.

Agreed and I was well-aware when commenting, hence the flippancy! I guess I’m from the Simon Blackburn school where relativism is a threat to ethics…

Ethics are more universal, if anything - don’t kill, don’t steal, don’t play anything by Creed or Kenny G over loudspeakers, that kind of thing. Things everyone can get behind.

Morality tends to be an implementation of ethics, like respecting the dead by leaving them to be eaten by vultures, or burying them instead.

One of my favourite theatres ever. I sometimes rode my motorbike and stuck it in a bay on Napier Terrace and even there I’d see drug dealing going on, which made me extremely nervous, having been bike jacked before. I was honestly surprised the dealing was going on so close to the squillionaires around the actual Almeida theatre.

The main stretch of Angel up to the Business Design Centre has always been pug-ugly, but things improve considerably the second you step off the main drag to pubs like The Camden Head or even The York, and then continuing towards the canal, where you get this delightful spot:

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.5333306,-0.1026485,3a,75y,...

The main thoroughfares of London, and likely everywhere, are likely tagged as "urban blight" for AI training models without a second thought, but twenty steps away from them and you get extraordinary surprises.

Education was once broader than just some kind of ladder that led to a cubicle, it was about creating people with a penchant for lifelong learning, a challenge that tested people and improved them, a means to share information and discoveries.

Bringing money into the contract - for higher education - very much changed that perception and the expectations that students had for it.

At the very bottom of things I expected to see this week, amazing. Worth playing with on sheer chutzpah, hats off to everyone involved.

I don’t know a thing about Pascal, though, why would anyone still be using it? Is it good?

Generally, I wouldn't get in the water anywhere after Teddington Lock, because it gets very tidal, very quickly. I grew up and lived in that part of London and sections of Twickenham are regularly flooded, plus cars are regularly swept into the Thames at Richmond despite warnings and it's very quick.

This link covers that whole stretch: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.444296,-0.3255391,15z?entr...

I have ended up in Thames somewhere past London Bridge, I think, forced into wading through the mud to try and dislodge our dinghy that my perennially headlong friend had gotten stuck, and IT WAS NOT FUN, not even Type 2 fun.

At the other end, by Teddington Lock Bridge, kids are always in the water. There is a weir not far, which I regard as a "drowning machine" because it is, but the area is quite agreeable.

Here's the Teddington Lock section: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.4306101,-0.3207403,435m/da...

Isleworth Ait, seen here, is frequently so empty of water that one can see the boats keels lying on the bottom:

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.4684678,-0.3166315,1733m/d...

Street view showing how empty it is in both directions: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.4672369,-0.3218927,3a,75y,...

This spot is especially not to be fucked with, as conditions can change quickly and the treated sewage from Mogden Works ends up here. I love the Thames and have never lived more than a short walk from it, but I have a nervous respect for it, plus I am a rubbish swimmer.

I'm less sure that voting for them would make any difference, given the way elected politicians behave, but the levels of corruption seem to belie the bureaucracy, designed to prevent corruption.

I feel that they're too keen on using Europe as some kind of club that encourages countries to soften in order to join - which I like - and less keen on fighting for the citizens, although this might be down to a disconnect and associated cluelessness about how things work.

This whole anti-encryption crusade has a Mr Bean-like naive bumbling line of attack, unlike the parallel UK approach which is decidedly supervillain-like.