Author Archives: cleek

Listening To...

  • The Replacements - Tim (Let It Bleed Edition)
    There are 54 (!) songs in this release: two full versions of the album (a full remix and the 2023 remaster), 15 demos and alternative versions, and then 28 live tracks. Whew. So far, I have only listened to the first of the two new versions of the album: the Ed Stasium remixes. I heard two tracks of this on Spotify and knew I had to get the rest. It's amazing. The original, like a lot of mid-80s indie records (the other Replacements' records, Sonic Youth's "Sister", Dino Jr's early albums, etc.), always sounded a bit muffled to me. But this is the complete opposite of muffled. Everything is crisp and loud. More than just a remaster (which is like adjusting brightness or color balance of a picture after you've taken it), this is a full remix (which is more like rearranging the objects and lighting and taking the photo again); instrument levels and their stereo positioning are different, effects applied in the original version weren't applied here, and different editing choices were made. The drums and bass are way up front, the guitars are sharp but pushed back in the mix and the vocals are incredibly clear. Tons of things that the original recordings buried or outright muted were left in: little guitar frills everywhere, Paul Westerberg's vocal interjections, background vocals(!). The way various parts are raised or lowered vs the original gives many of the songs very different vibes. Which I find fascinating. I had to listen very closely at first to make sure they weren't entirely new versions that Westerberg had recorded (pulling a Taylor Swift move or something). A couple of songs are even longer: "Little Mascara" is almost a minute longer (the original faded out long before the band stopped) and "Here Comes A Regular" has a few extra seconds (including a line that was dropped) near the end. What a great thing. I wish more bands would do this. (Just found out that Robyn Hitchcock is doing this with "Globe Of Frogs", yay).

  • Horsegirl - Phonetics On And On. A couple of months ago I didn't know I wanted to hear anything that sounded like a mixture of Stereolab's vocals, early Pavement's guitars all in something like The Vaselines' or Beat Happening's general sunny but happily-primitive vibe. Now I realize I did. And I'm better for it. Great album. Very catchy.

  • The Sorcerers - Other Worlds And Habits. This modern British trio specializes in exploring the sounds of 1960's Ethiopian jazz. And they do it very well. The only thing that would cause one to mistake this for original 60's Ethiopian jazz is the fact that it doesn't sound like it was recorded on sketchy gear, 60 years ago. Fun.

  • Shellac - To All Trains. Losing Steve Albini last year was a huge blow to the indie music scene in general. He was a giant. And specifically, it means this was Shellac's last album. And it's a good one. Shellac had a very specific sound: very clean production of very loud instruments with a lot of empty space for contrast. They got a lot of mileage out of it, and yet it always sounded fresh. I would have kept buying these records forever. Alas. Fittingly, the last song is named "I Don't Fear Hell" ("If there's a heaven, I hope they're having fun / because if there's a hell I'm gonna know everyone!").

Spoon + Pixies

A lovely late summer night, downtown Raleigh. Fazerdaze opened, though we missed most of her set because we misremembered when it started. What we heard was good, though. I think the kids call it "dreampop" ?

Then, the mighty Spoon played a nice long set. A somewhat rowdier, harder-rocking selection of songs than I've heard them play before. They sounded great, although the venue sounds way way too fucking loud. The sound level app on Mrs' watch kept telling her it was dangerous.

So, I went on an epic quest for earplugs. I had some in my car, but they weren't going to let me back in if I went to get them. After much walking around and asking I found some at a strange booth called the "Upgrade hut", which looked like it was all about venue promotion. Whatever.

Earplugs in, the Pixies came on. They sounded like utter garbage. Frank Black's voice was inaudible and the guitars were mixed terribly. I was sadly disappointed. Another great band cashing in on their past.

Then I took the earplugs out to test the volume situation. And the sound was amazing! The guitars were perfect, Frank Black's voice was definitely aged, but also definitely capable of selling all the screaming and shouting you'd want. But, it was still too fucking loud. They played a long satisfying chunk (20+ songs) of old classics before getting into anything new (aka post-Kim Deal). While there will always only be one real Pixies bassist, current bassist Emma Richardson did a good job doing lead vocals on 'In Heaven' (from David Lynch's "Eraserhead") and Neil Young's "Winterlong". So, a good Pixies show. And a good Spoon show.

But I think I am officially old.

LLMs aren’t world models

A friend who plays better chess than me — and knows more math & CS than me - said that he played some moves against a newly released LLM, and it must be at least as good as him. I said, no way, I’m going to cRRRush it, in my best Russian accent. I make a few moves – but unlike him, I don't make good moves1, which would be opening book moves it has seen a million times; I make weak moves, which it hasn't 2. The thing makes decent moves in response, with cheerful commentary about how we're attacking this and developing that — until about move 10, when it tries to move a knight which isn't there, and loses in a few more moves. This was a year or two ago; I’ve just tried this again, and it lost track of the board state by move 9.

When I’m saying that LLMs have no world model, I don’t mean that they haven't seen enough photos of chess knights, or held a knight in their greasy fingers; I don’t mean the physical world, necessarily. And I obviously don’t mean that a machine can’t learn a model of chess, when all leading chess engines use machine learning. I only mean that, having read a trillion chess games, LLMs, specifically, have not learned that to make legal moves, you need to know where the pieces are on the board. Why would they? For predicting the moves or commentary in chess games, which is what they’re optimized for, this would help very marginally, if at all.

When people say things like "Why did ChatGPT lie about XYZ", I usually hold my tongue. But when I don't, it's to say: ChatGPT isn't lying; it truly, literally doesn't know anything. It can't lie because it has no intention and no concepts of truth or fiction, or of you, or of anything. It doesn't even have concepts. It's an amazingly-complex auto-complete - so complex that it creates a fairly convincing illusion of intelligence. But it doesn't actually know anything about the world. It only knows the structure of the things it has read.

But it sometimes looks like it understands the world, or aspects of the world. But these are Potemkin understandings.

And what about asking LLMs why they said what they said?:

The first problem is conceptual: You're not talking to a consistent personality, person, or entity when you interact with ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or Replit. These names suggest individual agents with self-knowledge, but that's an illusion created by the conversational interface. What you're actually doing is guiding a statistical text generator to produce outputs based on your prompts.

There is no consistent "ChatGPT" to interrogate about its mistakes, no singular "Grok" entity that can tell you why it failed, no fixed "Replit" persona that knows whether database rollbacks are possible. You're interacting with a system that generates plausible-sounding text based on patterns in its training data (usually trained months or years ago), not an entity with genuine self-awareness or system knowledge that has been reading everything about itself and somehow remembering it.

...

A lifetime of hearing humans explain their actions and thought processes has led us to believe that these kinds of written explanations must have some level of self-knowledge behind them. That's just not true with LLMs that are merely mimicking those kinds of text patterns to guess at their own capabilities and flaws.

The water spout

We're getting our house painted . Holy fuck is that expensive.

Yesterday, they took off all the downspouts on the roof gutters, so they could paint in back of them. Then they left for the day. And then it rained heavily for the next 24 hours.

The rain poured through the holes where the downspouts used to be and dug out 6"-deep holes in the ground before I got out there to try to stop it with all the plastic sheeting I could find.

FML.

RIP Ozzy

Heavy metal star Ozzy Osbourne has died, just weeks after reuniting with his Black Sabbath bandmates and performing a huge farewell concert for fans.

In a statement, his family said: "It is with more sadness than mere words can convey that we have to report that our beloved Ozzy Osbourne has passed away this morning. He was with his family and surrounded by love."

https://news.sky.com/story/ozzy-osbourne-dies-just-weeks-after-farewell-show-13400248