rotw's comments

Giving this album 9.1 is the most old-Pitchfork thing they've done in years. It's the anti-PR move to do.

Cindy Lee isn't a retro revivalist IMO, their previous band Women already had that technique of using 1940s-60s songwriting form and warping it with a noisy, no-wave, DIY sensibility: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=673IaJZko9I

Part of that sound was Chad VanGaalen producing Women's two albums, and he went on to produce Alvvays' debut album in a similar DIY, tape-saturated style. Women's other successor act, Preoccupations, pretty clearly shows the post-punk/noise-rock side of Women, so it's kind of interesting to see how the descendants have grown their own roots a decade after the band ended.

Anyway my hot take is that Cindy Lee uses past conventions in an inside-out sort of way as a means to an end, rather than producing a retro-sounding surface as the end goal like Ariel Pink. It's not a style, it's an instrument.

The best and worst thing to happen to the album. It fully deserves the acclaim, but now loads of people are only going to listen to it through the prism of the hype rather than hear it for what it is

See, all of those sound "derivative" to me. Absolutely nothing against Japanese yacht rock/soft funk, but it's silly to blame musicians for using genre conventions when those are inherently part of the musical language IMO. Particularly given Cindy Lee works with 1940s-60s pop genre conventions of girl groups and also performs in drag, it's inherently a kind of music that repurposes familiar elements to say something new.

I've been a fan of Cindy Lee's work since before they started the project and were in the band Women, who're a sort of your favourites' favourite artist. Part of the hype around Diamond Jubilee is the context of that band, and the development of successor bands since.

But part of the hype is also that it comes from a very sincere place - it's a full-on auteurist work, the antithesis of "lo fi chill hip hop beats to study/relax to". It can aesthetically or artistically be your thing or not (it very much is mine), but it's a breath of fresh air to have such a fully-realized artistic statement that isn't a focus-grouped, try-hard Event get the acclaim it deserves.

That sounds like a great environment!

It seems like a tricky issue for people without the requisite know-how (and most of all, time), though. I worry that in the future, there might be a measurable decline in attention span and cognitive ability among children from poorer households, whose parents, through demands from long hours, lack of education, and lack of access to premium ad-free services, were unable to provide them with such an environment where they are protected from bombardment from technology. What kind of ready-made, low-information consumer level solutions would you consider important to expand here?

> It is because in practice these are politically motivated trojan horses meant to tear down things like a meritocracy, the very thing that created this great software.

1. Why is respecting gender identity a "trojan horse" - in what way is it deceptive?

2. How is a project a meritocracy if it scares away potentially better contributors with an antagonistic discussion climate?

> tried to do it to a guy who dared to express his conservative views on Twitter in a personal capacity etc..

I feel like you and the Medium post are missing out crucial information here. What were these views? How did they relate to the workplace? The Medium post mentions she is friends with James Damore - who was clearly fired because his manifesto by implication, but unmistakebly deemed women developers less competent than men, thereby creating a hostile work environment, which the author completely glosses over. This leads me to suspect that the "disagreeing with the narrative" is a euphemism for anti-women, anti-minority views and policies.

> so humanity will just have to deal with it and adapt over the next century. Shame about the planet and the natural ecosystem, though.

I don't think you understand that efforts to prevent climate change are efforts to preserve humanity - the planet will survive in any case, and just form new ecosystems. It's us who'll be the first victims.

> Erm, no.

Why do you bother commenting on this if you just flat-out refuse to accept scientific evidence in the original post?

> I prefer having bearable temperatures where I live, sleep and have visitors,

What gives you the right to all that at the direct expense of the people who can't afford it?

What about Signal?

Your comment is exactly the attitude the person you were replying to was mocking. What that person saying is that a lot of reasonably intelligent people who are nowhere near geniuses like to think of themselves as geniuses as a form of narcissistic self-flattery. For people good at math, sciences and computing and other occupations considered "nerdy", capability in these fields and stereotypes of intelligence associated with them become a point of pride and they begin to identify with people far smarter than they are, despite actually being unexceptionally intelligent. HN has talented people, sure, but I think it's definitely fair to say there's a large population of people who flatter themselves thinking they're geniuses who regularly post, upvote, and comment on this kind of article with "me too!" sentiments. Pointing this out has nothing to do with the kids in this article, who are genuinely exceptional and certainly worthy of sympathy and nurturing.

> If you are taking diversity into account, you are taking things other than merit into account and so it isn't a 'true' meritocracy.

Well, no. The point is that due to inherent unconscious biases (see my link for scientific papers documenting this), it's impossible to only take merit into account without social norms biased towards white men skewing the process. Diversity initiatives seek to eradicate this bias, in order to truly measure merit and compensate for the interfering factors.

> Not only that but it also suffers from the no true Scotsman fallacy.

I really don't see what that's got to do with anything here.

> To avoid unconscious bias, you would have to hire someone without knowing their age, sex, sexual orientation or anything else that you could consider discriminatory. That would mean hiring someone that you haven't and that's a little extreme.

Presumably you mean "you haven't met"? Well exactly. Hence, diversity initiatives that seek to compensate in practical ways.

Being considerate of other people is Stalinism, is that what you're saying?

> believe that discriminating against white men is okay because they enjoy "white privilege", whatever that is

> It is hard to distinguish the anti-white vitriol I see on this page from the antisemitism of yesteryear. It was often said that Jews were over-represented in various occupations not because their industriousness, intelligence or other virtues, but because of devious trickery (they plot together to deprive others of opportunities). I fail to see how the arguments regarding white men are any different.

It's because you don't even make an attempt to understand the terms of the debate. White privilege is a structural, societal-level advantage that white people have stemming from centuries of economic and cultural disenfranchisement of ethnic minorities, that while you personally can't change, can be worked towards overcoming it. Educate yourself before you throw Godwins around.

https://library.gv.com/unconscious-bias-at-work-22e698e9b2d#...

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case...

That's delusional conspiracy nonsense. Seriously, take a step back and look at what you're saying.

The entire point of diversity initiatives is that the meritocracy in theory doest not translate into a meritocracy in practice, due to unconscious bias: https://library.gv.com/unconscious-bias-at-work-22e698e9b2d#... as well as other factors.

You're totally right that skills and experiences should be the only way to choose, but right now, tech firms in this society are fundamentally incapable of actually implementing that without diversity initiatives. True meritocracy can only come through promoting diversity.

Your assertion that he "stole" Fez is really not supported by the purported evidence you linked. And you totally missed the point of Fez if you think it only has the 2.5D and artwork going for it.

You say you're not trying to make excuses, but you literally are making excuses for him. As is he for himself. No matter how curious, it's just not acceptable to run a service to snoop on people. It's a serious ethical transgression, particularly considering you know the people.

Now, if he'd implemented a mechanism to give users keys they could send him should they consent to him reading the log for moderation purposes, he would have been able to do the moderation job and not violate people's privacy. Or made structured data fields that users could consent to make public and also be used for data analysis purposes (like interests, societies, year, etc). But no. He just read their messages. He didn't even have a commercial incentive to analyse data, he just did it out of sheer voyeurism.

Don't link to the Daily Mail please. They're a rabid right-wing tabloid rag that deals in invasions of privacy and demagoguery, they're awful.

That's blatantly not true, people on the internet have become massive cheapskates due to the easy availability of everything. Since Napster, piracy has flourished and continues to do so, and most often the most-pirated products correspond strongly to what's most popular in the market.