Modern Vespa

Hot take: The standard people are held to should be proportional to the amount of authority they hold. That is, people in positions of authority should be held to a higher standard -- legally, ethically, and morally -- than those who are not.

And yet, most of the time it's the exact opposite.

Twas always so unfortunately

I notice from watching TV that when Americans are drinking beer at home and often in a bar also, that they drink straight from the bottle.

Now if it's a plain old lager or pilsner then perhaps that understandable but I'm guessing a lot of those beers are craft beers or ales which surely would benefit from being poured into a class and have a nice foamy head?

Or am I missing something here?

Yes, you could be out riding your scooter instead of watching telly. That's what you're missing.

Maybe to a bar to drink a beer from a glass.

Very, very few are bottle conditioned, so drinking from the bottle is no different to drinking from a can. Pouring into a glass is OK - I do it - but the beer is filtered and chilled (0 to 4C), so you can't quaff it like a cask ale at 9-11C. They're almost a completely different drink.

One of my favourite movie lines..

From The Laurel-Hardy Murder Case

Twas ever thus

Back when I'd regularly frequent bars, the bartenders would prefer to simply open the bottle and put it in front of you, rather than also include a glass. If I asked for a glass, they'd provide one, but it's one more thing for them to clean, as opposed to simply tossing the empty bottle in the trash.

At home, I'll generally pour it into a glass, but at home I'm drinking higher quality beers that benefit from being in a glass. But like jimc said, if I'm drinking a mass-produced beer, it really doesn't matter what vessel I consume it from.

Funny, I always pour into a glass before I drink a beer, no matter what it is or whether it's from a bottle or a can. You get a lot more of the aroma in a glass.

Agreed! Plus you can't easy quench a Big Thirst trying to suck beer out of a 3/4" bottle neck.

OK for sipping tasteless muck (tm) but not much else.

Back when I was going to a bar on Friday and/or Saturday night, I'd drink out of a bottle. On Saturdays, they had Mystery Beer night. They'd load the beer tubs with all the older bottles that they wanted/needed to get rid of, plus a few good ones, and it was $ 2 per bottle. You got whatever beer the bartender grabbed, and they'd grab without looking. As a regular, the bartenders would ask me if it was ok before opening it. I'd always say yes. If it turned out that I didn't like it, I'd ask for a glass, because I could drink it faster from a glass than from a bottle.

To help put things in perspective, it was a TGI Fridays in the mid- to late-90s, so it's not like they had a lot of high-end microbrews. And the bartenders were all about getting the customers served quickly.

I can just imagine a tub full of Michelob Ultra, Bud Ice, Keystone Light and Zima ...

Blech!

They did put Zima in there at times.

My drink of choice back then was Hornsby's hard cider, so they'd put a sixer of that in one back corner and always pull mine from there.

One time they put Kaliber in, and gave it to one of the regulars. That guy was pissed when he found out it was a NA beer.

Hot take: Oat milk is a horrible milk substitute. It is full of sugar and starch, it has almost none of the fiber it started with, and the worst offenders are doctored with seed oils.

Yes, I get it -- some people can't tolerate dairy milk. But choose anything besides oat milk.

I have the Alpro no added sugars which then has zero sugars, I grant you the carbs content is higher than I'd like at 5.8g per 100ml but it hardly qualifies as an unhealthy alternative to dairy milk

We make our own soy milk. No added anything!

You can always go with Horchata. All added everything. Just damn good.

Chris from CLE

So, fair warning ... I'm probably going to be long winded on this one. It's been on my mind a lot lately.

AI Music. The tl;dr is I want to hate it on principle. But I don't. Here's why.

I've always considered myself a bit of a musician and an admirer of good music. Not really an aficionado, but maybe. Back in the day I read all the guitar magazines, I listened to entire albums in my bedroom through over the ear headphones, I had a band (We sucked. That wasn't the name of the band, but it could have been). But I still listen to a lot of music and like to keep my finger on the pulse of what's going on. And people are shaking their fists at the clouds over AI music, and rightly so. I guess.

I am very much a process guy, normally. I like pour over coffee. I brew beer. When I smoked I smoked a pipe. I like to be invested in the process that leads to the product. So it's completely against my nature to be ok with AI music. The thing is, music is just the latest thing to get caught up in the automation steamroller. Or is it?

This is a great interview with one of my favorite groups ever - Dream Academy - and just listen to what Nick says about the advent of synthesizers. He's spot on about the advantages regarding instrumentation, but we went from an era of hiring an orchestra to buying a Yamaha DX-7 or an Ensoniq Mirage and you have an orchestra in a box. The backlash against AI is concern for all of the artists it will put out of business, but in the '80s we no longer needed a raft of violinists ... we had MIDI. It's really much the same. The video won't let me hot-link, but it's a really good interview. Please follow the "Watch on YouTube" link.

I'm going to apply the advent of technology to another field that's gone by the wayside. When my band gave up, my bassist and collaborator went to college for photography. This was mid-late '90s. He had been a photographer for a long time, a good one, too. High school yearbook photographer, now with a degree in... and then digital cameras happened. That career was suddenly gone because everyone had digital cameras. Now we have fantastic cameras that are built into our phones. That's what made me think of this today.

I stopped off on my way to work this morning and snapped a picture - on my phone - of the lake with the sun just coming up. It's nice. Forty years ago that might have been a spectacular image because the photographer would have had to set up the shot, snap several takes, maybe bracketing some settings, develop the film and choose the best of the set. And people would have been all "Oooooh ... what a great shot" because, by comparison and considering the work that went into it, it was. Now, the internet is filled with spectacular images and it diminishes the "spectacularness" because of the sheer volume we're exposed to.

We all remember this picture. It's famous.



Here's the article :

The 1968 photo that changed the world

But to someone who didn't live through that era, the finished product doesn't mean as much because they just don't grok what it meant.

I just watched a really nice interview with Adam Duritz, one of my favorite songwriters, interviewed by Rick Beato.

Now, I love Counting Crows and have a ton of respect for Adam as a singer and a songwriter, and I enjoyed every minute of this interview. If you get a chance to watch the whole thing, it's really good. And I love to hear about the craft behind all of their music because they are musicians. It made me go back and revisit some of their stuff. But somewhere in there he makes the statement, kind of off hand, "That was before we had Pro-Tools" and it struck a chord with me, because musicians have been using technology for a long time to make things easier. And I get the whole creative process, and pouring out your soul and spending months or years writing a song, but when it all comes down to it, music is a lot of math and luck. Adam talks about the hundred or so takes he recorded for "Mr. Jones". So, what really is the difference between picking the one good one, or the best one, out of a hundred or just taking one "good" track and maybe fixing it? A little pitch correction, a little quantization and you wind up with the same result, it just didn't take you a month.

So, music has been going through this change for a very long time. And now we have AI that is able to learn from what's popular and using the 12 notes available on the tempered 440 scale, churn out music that is really not all that bad with lyrics that are usually better than Nickelback.

So, I should hate AI music, right? But I don't hate bands that use synthesizers. And I don't hate bands that use Pro-Tools. Here is a really cool snippet from Billie Eilish. This is how music is made today, folks, even by talented people. Follow the link ... it's short.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gI5HOHEnal8

So, now we have AI music that is just DOING what people were pretty much already doing. Just with a button.

I guess the thing that ticks me off about all of it is the complete reversal of what was predicted. Computers were going to take away all of the time we spent on work so we could spend more of our time on things we enjoyed. Like art and music. And ... well, here we are. I am at work writing about computer art and music.

Interesting take. I've only done a quick read of what you wrote, but for the most part, I agree.

When I was in 7th & 8th grade, pocket calculators were starting to become A Thing. Most math teachers hated them, and banned them from their classes. The math teacher I had at that time said it was ok for us to use them if we had one. His reasoning is that the calculator is only as smart as the person using it.

The same thing can be said for AI: AI creations are only as good as the prompt it is acting on. If I feed ChatGTP a garbage prompt, I'll get a garbage result. If I fine tune the prompt with specific aspects of what I want it to produce, it will produce a much better result.

Back to AI music: A local artist, Paul Slavens, set up an AI Music Night at a studio/event space in the area. It ended up being canceled by the event space within a few hours due to community backlash.

My opinion on AI art is this: The only artists who need to fear AI art are the mediocre ones. AI is a tool. When properly used, it can help create wonderful things.

My younger brother is a published author, with four novels to his name. He and I went out for dinner when I was back in Wisconsin in July, and he told me that he was struggling with creativity. He has an idea for a novel, but just couldn't get it started. He then went on to tell me that he's using AI to help him write it. He's working on it a chapter at a time. Once it generates the chapter, he reworks it himself. The end result only uses the AI generated work as a basic foundation. He also said he'd deny it if he's ever asked about it.

Hot take: Tuscan bread (made without salt) sucks. A lot.

Tuscany is home to many stunningly good culinary delights. Bread is not one of them. No, you're wrong. It sucks. Period. Bread should have salt. Omitting it is a crime. End of story.

Bread = flour, water, yeast, salt

Beer = barley, water, yeast, hops

Wine = grapes, yeast

Coffee = coffee

Tea = tea

Why complicate things?

Been scarce around here but this is fun one. OK I will play. Recent one after a barely avoided SMIDSY.

Hot Take: All US vehicle drivers should be required to renew their driver's license every 4 years, with a mandatory six-month period of exclusively riding a PTW during those 4 years.

Good luck with that, unfortunately us two wheeled riders are deemed as minorities with very little in the way of priortised protections.

Hot Take. Tea sucks. Hot tea Iced tea it doesn't matter. It makes my mouth dry. Every tea I have tried, except one, and that one is in Germany.




*Edited for emphasis

Hot take.

Not all entitled tosspots drive Audis or BMWs.

In fact some entitled tosspots don't even drive!

Hot take: if Europeans are so intent on preserving their privacy (which the EU keeps telling us, and which I in fact support) then why do they all use WhatsApp? Do they really not understand that their entire address book is being exfiltrated, along with (probably) all their photos?

The disconnect here is shocking.

seamus26

Matthew Inman, the artist behind The Oatmeal, posted a cartoon about AI art that I thought you might find interesting.

I have thoughts on it, but need to let them stew a bit more before I share them. I mainly wanted to share the comic so that I wouldn't forget about it.

I still hold the opinion that only mediocre artists should fear AI art, so that hasn't changed.

I think it's entirely possible that mediocre AI art will replace both mediocre artists and take out the skilled, talented artists as collateral damage.

Every skilled talented artist was once mediocre, and arguably some still are.

After seeing the quality of the work my fellow graphic design students are producing to earn their degrees, I completely agree.

Those hands and feet are the stuff of nightmares.

Hot take you banned the wrong member

The only person I've banned recently replied to my PM in such a way that a ban was virtually certain.

If you'd like to nominate someone else, my PMs are open.

Different skill set, but the same concept applies, I think.

Hot Take: Stir your own peanut butter, almond butter, etc.. is bullshit. What they should really call it is 'get oil all over your hands, the jar, the counters and end up with subpar butter that is equivalent to spreading tar on bread.'

This problem was solved and the stir your own should be banned from existence.

The problem of peanut butter separating was solved with some very nasty additives that put it solidly into the ultra-processed category.

I'll happily stir my own.

Are you really 'happy' about it though? Maybe you have surgical precision and steady hands.

I open the jar and even if I'm super careful it's the Exxon Valdez after a few rotations.

I keep Dawn dish detergent nearby just so I can clean the slick off all the wildlife that's nearby.

And sugar. And palm kernel oil.

Why?

I happily stir my own as well. As long as I am careful, there is problem.

Freudian slip?

I buy it early and store it upside down. makes stirring much easier.