This, I think, is what we call “talent” really is: if you are enthusiastic enough about something that practicing it becomes as regular as a heartbeat, then “practice” becomes invisible.
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Instead, I propose that we should think of “X-wave” names as, essentially meaning “operating as if X is true or hegemonic.” So “synthwave” is “operating as if synthwave is hegemonic”, or — to put it in less theory nerd terms — music from an imagined alternate history where Grunge and Rap never displaced New Wave. Ergo “Satanwave” is “operating as if the satanic panic were true.”
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LLMs are among other things predicated on an atomistic logic of language. Because they simply work by predicting the next symbol in a sequence based on a large repository of statistical data, they cannot actually create a functional top-level structure except incidentally.
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We have an island of tolerable weather here, so I’m going to give you all a slate of book reviews and rush off to complete other things.
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I first encountered the song “Lungs” by Townes Van Zandt about a decade ago. It’s the musical sting at the end of the seventh episode of the first season of HBO’s True Detective, a show we watch annually in the spring. It seems to have little to do with the content of the scene, but the vibe is immaculate.
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