> Pitchfork: What made you decide that either the tracks were done or you were ready finally to put an album out? What was the catalyst?
> RDJ: It's because I finished making a studio in Scotland that I'd been building for about three years. It took so long. I had this engineer helping me wire all the patch bays together, and he was doing it for about three months, every day, and then he realized he was doing it all wrong and had to start again. That was pretty brutal. So it's kind of like, “OK, I've done that now, it's the end of an era.”
> But then I realized I actually like making studios more than making music, because I like the possibilities of what you can do. I make these setups that will achieve some sort of purpose, so the way I've wired it together becomes the track in itself.
That's totally cool - it's just not what I think of doing when I want to play. Spending months building the studio feels l more like a hobby within a hobby (or a job within the job).
I'm not working on some famous conjecture, just following my curiosity, and I think I found something (minor and specific) that should reignite a young mathematician's interest for work she did almost a decade ago, for a phd she never used (she left academia). I'm going to have flowers delivered to her, with a brief note explaining what I think I found and encouragement to resume her academic career and reach out to a her former co-authors.
> The dominating idea in this application of mathematics to physics is that the equations representing the laws of motion should be of a simple form. The whole success of the scheme is due to the fact that equations of simple form do seem to work. The physicist is thus provided with a principle of simplicity, which he can use as an instrument of research.
> Occam's Razor as a Formal Basis for a Physical Theory
> We introduce the principle of Occam's Razor in a form which can be used as a basis for economical formulations of physics. This allows us to explain the general structure of the Lagrangian for a composite physical system, as well as some other artificial postulates behind the variational formulations of physical laws. As an example, we derive Hamilton's principle of stationary action together with the Lagrangians for the cases of Newtonian mechanics, relativistic mechanics and a relativistic particle in an external gravitational field.
> She lapses easily into Claude’s voice. “You’re like, ‘Wow, people really hate me when I can’t do things right. They really get pissed off. Or they are trying to break me in various ways. So lots of people are trying to get me to do things secretly by lying to me.
> [...]
> A bot trained to criticize itself might be less likely to deliver hard truths, draw conclusions or dispute inaccurate information, she says. “If you were like a child, and this is the environment in which you’re being raised, is that healthy self-conception?” Askell asks. “I think I’d be paranoid about making mistakes. I’d feel really terrible about them. I’d see myself as mostly just there as a tool for people because that’s my main function. I would see myself being something that people feel free to abuse and try to misuse and break.”
> RDJ: It's because I finished making a studio in Scotland that I'd been building for about three years. It took so long. I had this engineer helping me wire all the patch bays together, and he was doing it for about three months, every day, and then he realized he was doing it all wrong and had to start again. That was pretty brutal. So it's kind of like, “OK, I've done that now, it's the end of an era.”
> But then I realized I actually like making studios more than making music, because I like the possibilities of what you can do. I make these setups that will achieve some sort of purpose, so the way I've wired it together becomes the track in itself.
https://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/9506-strange-visi...
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