April 9, 2023

Weekender #108: Sakamoto’s Playlist

  • Birb watch: no signs of any mynah babies. However, Handsome and Matey have been squawking at the front door a bit more often to ask for food.

  • NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants), one of the largest of its kind, is returning to the Anaheim Convention Center on April 13—15, but some of its highest-profile guitar companies such as Gibson, Fender, Paul Reed Smith, and Boss won’t be in attendance.

    • Guitar World interviewed Fender CEO Andy Mooney , who explained that the pandemic made them come up with alternate approaches to reach dealers and network with them, and they found that they could do this without attending NAMM and that it was also much more cost-effective. With more larger companies shunning these types of events, I wonder if they will still be able to draw the attendance that they did pre-pandemic.

  • It was great to see the photography community’s response following Amazon’s decision to shut down DPReview. According to Vice, some fans have already taken steps to archive a lot of the photography information while others are creating successor forums like DPRrvived.

This week’s Link List

Machine Learning

  • I wasn’t surprised to see that AI is now able to crack passwords with incredible speed.

    • According to the study linked, “51% of all common passwords were cracked in less than one minute, 65% in less than an hour, 71% in less than a day, and 81% in less than a month.”

    How to protect against AI password cracking

    • Stick with at least 12 characters or more with upper- and lower-case letters plus numbers and/or symbols.
    • Passwords with 18 characters that include both letters and numbers were found to be safe from AI cracking… for now.

  • TechCrunch showcased a bullet point list of takeaways from Stanford’s 386-page report on the state of AI.

  • Segment Anything is a research project by Meta AI showing how they can use AI to “cut out” any object in any image with a single click. The demo was impressive, but it didn’t work in Safari on macOS but worked fine in Firefox. I can see the potential uses for comickers who do a lot of flatting. This could eventually make that process as easy as point and click!

Design

Mastodon

  • The Verge had a great interview with Paul Haddad of Tapbots. The article explores the death of Tweetbot and the rise of Ivory, their Mastodon client.

  • Micro.blog founder Manton Reece shared his post-Twitter plans via his blog. He’s going to wind-down Twitter cross-posting from Micro.blog over the next couple of months. When that happens, I may just stop posting to Twitter entirely as well.

Software and hardware

Media consumption

  • I was reminded of the story of how Ryuichi Sakamoto was so annoyed by the playlist at his favorite restaurant that he decided to make his own. The story goes:

    The issue was not so much that the music was loud, but that it was thoughtless. Mr. Sakamoto suggested that he could take over the job of choosing it, without pay, if only so he could feel more comfortable eating there. The chef agreed, and so Mr. Sakamoto started making playlists for the restaurant, none of which include any of his own music. Few people knew about this, because Mr. Sakamoto has no particular desire to publicize it. […]

    He went home and composed an email to Mr. Odo. “I love your food, I respect you and I love this restaurant, but I hate the music,” he remembered writing. “Who chose this? Whose decision of mixing this terrible roundup? Let me do it. Because your food is as good as the beauty of Katsura Rikyu.” (He meant the thousand-year-old palatial villa in Kyoto, built to some degree on the aesthetic principles of imperfections and natural circumstances known as wabi-sabi.) “But the music in your restaurant is like Trump Tower.”

    via @dnanian

  • Comic creator John Allison (Scary Go Round, Bad Machinery) is going to release the X-Men comic he would have made as a child! “KIT + THE WOLF” is not a joke but a love letter to the X-Men comics he fell in love with at 13 years of age.

  • Audra and I finished watching the final episode of the Apple TV+ series Shrinking. I really loved this series and its great story, scenes and dialog. Jason Segel did a great job, but it was Harrison Ford’s performance as Dr. Paul Rhodes that really stood out for me. He was perfect for that role, and I can’t wait to see the next season!

  • Actor Jeremy Renner was hospitalized after a horrible snow plow accident back at the start of the year. Diane Sawyer interviewed Renner and showcased his amazing road to recovery for ABC News. Renner looks amazingly good during the segment, considering the horrific accident he went through only three months ago. I can’t imagine the pain he must still be living through.

  • My favorite Japanese group, ATARASHII GAKKO!, has finally been gaining popularity in their home country. This week, they were featured on The First Take YouTube channel doing their current hit, Ontonablue. Another sign that they’ve made it big time!

  • I happened upon Shigeru Suzuki’s Sunset Hills Hotel, that came out in 1987, and have been playing it all week. It’s a cross between city pop and jazz fusion, with some amazing guitar work sprinkled in between. Listen on Apple Music.

by Scott Yoshinaga

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