The Guardian article on the Velvet Sundown “hoax” frames AI-assisted music as a threat to authenticity, but the moral panic it describes is a smokescreen. The industry insiders calling for regulation aren't scared that AI made music. They're scared that people listened, liked it, and that it happened without their involvement and outside their revenue models. This has them quaking in their boots.

The fundamental issue isn't that AI generated a fictitious group and generated catchy songs for it. It's that the music industry is terrified of any creation it cannot gatekeep.

Let's be clear about the roles, here. Spotify and Deezer, and all the other streaming platforms, are not the music industry; they are just the latest winners in its relentless cycle of disruption. They are algorithmic landlords who rose from the chaos that MP3s and the internet inflicted on the record labels. Now that they are the gatekeepers, their calls for transparency are a predictable attempt to protect their turf. It's not about integrity; it's about protecting their toll-booth from people who are simply walking around it—a situation straight out of Monty Python's Black Knight sketch. This panic is about protecting platform metrics, managing licensing liabilities, and ensuring their role as indispensable revenue collectors isn't disrupted by the emergence of AI.

There are real ethical problems here, but the call for labeling isn't addressing them. The single greatest issue is the scraping of human-made music to train generative models without consent or compensation. If your work was ingested by a large language model that now generates profit for a tech giant, you are owed a cut. This requires a robust legal framework for licensing training data, not killing the tool.

Instead of focusing on this legitimate issue, the industry is demanding a purity test via their Spotify and Deezer conduits: labeling AI-generated music as if it's counterfeit. This isn't about disclosure; it's about delegitimizing a new creative tool and the independent artists who might use it.

The hypocrisy is stunning. We don’t demand labels for chart-toppers ghostwritten by committee or for tracks algorithmically engineered to bait playlists. The reaction to The Velvet Sundown proves the point. An AI-assisted project gets a million streams while its origin is unknown, and only when it's AI origin is surfaced is it declared a moral crisis. Success isn't a symptom of the problem; success is *the* problem.

Bob Dylan wrote "All Along the Watchtower," but Jimi Hendrix made it eternal. By the logic of the "labeling" camp, Hendrix's version would need a disclaimer: "Warning: Generated using another artist’s source material." It’s absurd. Artistic transformation has always been about building on what came before. When I first heard Velvet Sundown, my reaction was, “Nice—somebody loaded a lot of CSN&Y into the training set.” I like CSN&Y. And I liked hearing echoes of Southern Cross and Suite: Judy Blue Eyes in something new.

AI isn't replacing human creativity. It's extending it. Like the synthesizer, the sampler, Auto-Tune, and DAW tools like Ableton Live and Logic Pro, generative AI is simply the next tool in the toolkit. For anyone who remembers the outrage when Dylan went electric, this panic is depressingly predictable. The delicious irony is watching streaming platforms, which blew up the old industry model, now defend the very system they disrupted.

If you want to support human artists, don't demand we slap a scarlet letter on songs made with new instruments. Instead, fight for policies that give creators legal ownership and control over their work as training data. Demand fairer compensation from the platforms and AI models that regenerate their creativity for profit.

If we get that right, AI isn't a threat. It's just an instrument we are still learning to play.

Cue the fossil fuel shills. "Let's do the math" is the new "I'm just asking questions." It’s not analysis—it’s misdirection. The point of the MeyGen project isn't to power all of Scotland with four turbines. It’s to prove the tech works well enough to scale. And after six years in a brutal marine environment? It does.

Correct. That’s the project’s current per-turbine capacity, based on real-world, in-water operation. Not a lab estimate. So far, so good.

Also correct—but also meaningless. This is like dismissing rooftop solar because you’d need millions of panels to power an entire country. No one energy source ever powers everything. Scotland uses a diversified energy mix, including wind, solar, hydro, and yes, fossil fuels—which is precisely the problem tidal energy is trying to address. The less we need fossil fuels, the better. What you are doing, and what every other fossil fuel shill does, is assuming a strawman goal ("tidal energy must power 100% of Scotland or it’s useless") and then calling it a failure for not meeting that imaginary benchmark.

Let’s look at what the article actually said:
-6.5 years of uninterrupted underwater operation = massive win for durability, cost reduction, and investor confidence.
-130 turbines in one site is a planned expansion, not a final limit.

This is a technology demonstration, not a national energy plan.

We can conclude you're either a fossil fuel shill or deeply unfamiliar with how infrastructure scales. Also: if we're applying your “do the math” standard, let’s apply it to offshore oil rigs. One deepwater rig off Aberdeen doesn't power the world, either.

Yes, that Enron—resurrected by a “Birds Aren’t Real” founder—is trying to sell retail electricity in Texas. And weirdly, it’s not a total joke. Their plan? Slap the Enron logo on a wholesale-to-retail resell operation inside ERCOT (Texas’s isolated power grid), promise “tech-enabled efficiency,” and hope no one notices they’re just another middleman with a nostalgia filter.

They don’t generate electricity. They can’t make it cheaper. They’ll just buy it like everyone else and maybe offer slightly better billing software or a meme-worthy plan name. Think: Smartest Guys in the Room 2.0, now with battery storage and ironic mustaches.

It’s legally real, potentially functional, and cosmically on-brand for 21st-century apex capitalism: revive a disgraced corporate corpse, wrap it in absurdist theater, and hope the regulators are too confused to say no.

Welcome to Texas, y'all, where even satire is comically oversized.

Fair enough — “naive” was too pointed, and I’ll own that. Frustration got the better of me, and I should’ve stuck to the argument, not the adjective.

That said, it’s a bit rich to accuse me of belittling opinions in an open forum while calling me a self-centered fool in the same breath. If you want to talk about freedom of speech, maybe start by respecting the idea that disagreement isn’t the same as arrogance.

More to the point: you still haven’t engaged with my actual argument. I'm not claiming the U.S. has the moral right to “allow” or “deny” anything in a vacuum. I’m saying that when geopolitics hits the firewall, the idea of the internet as some untouchable neutral zone collapses fast. We’ve seen this in Belarus, Ukraine, and a dozen quieter cases. That’s not ideology. That’s precedent. Your idealistic take on the internet is...misplaced, and that is how I should have phrased it, instead of calling you naive. If you're going to call me out, do it on the merits — not just the tone.

Thank you for pushing back on the murder/suicide angle—there’s a massive difference between a fatal mistake and malice. The FDR timeline is damning because it shows something more banal and tragic: a mistake that the crew realized too late and tried to undo.

Engine 1 switch to cutoff at 08:08:42. Engine 2, one second later. Then a brief gap—possibly the moment the PF (pilot flying) asks, “Did you just?” or realizes it himself. Switches flipped back to RUN around 10 seconds later. Then comes the Mayday -- "Thrust not achieved...mayday".

That doesn’t look like sabotage. It looks like someone reached for the wrong control—then realized what they did and tried to fix it. The passive phrasing of the mayday supports this -- "thrust not achieved" vs "Engine failure" or "dual flame out." this is typical behavior from pilots who know they fucked up and are trying to cover it up. It absolutely has precedent in the history of aircraft incidents, where the mayday phrasing was calculated to shift and misdirect blame from the pilots. This isn’t a murder/suicide plot for a Bollywood thriller. It’s a tragedy. And tragedies often begin with small, irreversible human errors.

Murder/suicide? Really?

Everything you cited actually supports an alternative theory—especially the Mayday call.

If this was suicide, why try to cover it up? You say he lied. Yes, he did. But why lie—why try to obscure the cause—if he intended to kill everyone? You caught the phrasing in the Mayday call, right? “Thrust not achieved” is suspiciously passive for someone facing total engine loss. It sounds like someone describing the outcome without admitting the cause—not someone justifying a deliberate act of murder.

Here’s the more likely scenario: the pilot realized they’d shut off the fuel flow, flipped the switches back to RUN, and called Mayday, phrasing it to cover the mistake. That’s human error followed by panic—not malice.

Yes. That’s how solar works. It’s literally powered by the sun. The relevant question isn’t whether solar dips in winter (it does), but whether we are building the grid architecture—including storage, transmission, demand-shifting, and complementary sources—to use it effectively across the year. You’re stating the obvious as if it’s a disqualifier.

This is technically true in winter months, but misleading without context. The trend is not about solar replacing all other sources in winter—it’s about displacing fossil fuels as much as possible when conditions allow, and investing in grid-wide flexibility to balance the rest. Also: coal generation doesn’t increase because it’s good. It increases because we haven’t fully scaled better alternatives yet. You’re mistaking a transitional gap for a structural failure. Your comments are starting to sound more like an nuke-industry slide deck at a pitch meeting in parliament than a reasoned take on a milestone in sustainable energy infrastructure.

No, it’s not. Hydro, geothermal, and some biomass are also consistent (though capacity-limited). Gas peakers are dispatchable. Grid interconnects provide transnational stability. You’re presenting nuclear as a silver bullet—it’s not. It’s a valuable tool, but not the only form of baseload or consistency. You’re oversimplifying to serve a narrative, which puts you firmly in shill territory.

“Destruction” is doing a lot of rhetorical lifting here. Rooftop solar, agrivoltaics, and floating solar don’t “destroy” land. Even ground-mounted utility-scale solar is often sited on degraded land, brownfields, or dual-use setups. Meanwhile, uranium mining, waste storage, and security perimeters also impact land. You’re weaponizing land use in the same ham-fisted way US energy sector shills do.

That’s a fair opinion. But it ignores cost, build time, and political risk. New nuclear in the EU (Flamanville, Hinkley C) takes 10–15 years and costs billions. If you’re serious about “supplying future projects,” you should advocate for nuclear *and* rapid-deployment renewables. You’re pretending urgency can wait. If I had any doubts about you being a shill, they just evaporated.

Reasonable people can disagree. But those decisions were based on specific political, safety, and cost tradeoffs, not just ideology. Germany didn’t abandon nuclear because it was anti-science—it did so after Fukushima, under a democratic mandate. Whether that was wise is a good debate. Pretending it was universally “ill advised” is hindsight bravado. You’re rewriting history to score points -- which means not only are you a shill, you are a troll, too. Shame -- this could have been a good debate...but I don't waste time debating trolls. *plonk*.

Go away, shill. Your responses are recycled FUD from the fossil fuel sector: cherry-picking, poisoning the well, goalpost-shifting, and other tiresome rhetorical sleight-of-hand tactics, including a classic strawman that reveals your real intent—none of which actually address the GP’s fair question about real-world pricing.

Yes, heatwaves can reduce reactor output due to cooling water limitations. But on an annual basis, France is still overwhelmingly nuclear-powered. One anomalous month doesn’t invalidate decades of baseload contribution or stable pricing. You're cherry-picking.

This is rhetoric, not analysis. You’re just trying to poison the well. EDF’s financial crisis was largely due to poor management, cost overruns in next-gen reactors, and long-term rate freezes, not because nuclear is inherently more expensive than solar. Also—newsflash—solar and wind are subsidized too, especially during early deployment. So are gas and coal, for that matter.

That's a big asterisk: "during the summer." This isn't false, but it's highly context-dependent. The GP wasn’t asking whether solar is cost-competitive on a sunny July afternoon. They were asking about system-wide cost trends as solar scales, and you are just moving the goal posts.

True, to a point—but disingenuous. You’re just dodging the question. If the public keeps hearing “solar is the cheapest ever!” and then sees retail prices at €0.35/kWh, they’re going to ask questions. Brushing them off with “that’s not how bills work” is elitist and tone-deaf. Bridging the gap between LCOE and retail price is the whole point of the transition.

Now you are trying to strawman your way out of answering the GP's real question. End-users don’t live in spreadsheets. They live in nations with differing policies, and many of those policies have geo-political constraints wrapped around them. More importantly, end users have bills to pay besides the electric company. If cheap solar doesn’t bring cheaper electricity, something is broken in the policy or infrastructure, and the GP wants to know where the fracture is. You are pretending that the question was only about raw generation cost when it was clearly much broader than that.

I’m just as exasperated. You’re asking the right question, and it does deserve a real answer.

The renewable energy community often cites Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) to show that solar and wind are now the cheapest new sources of generation—and that’s true. Utility-scale solar is routinely under $0.03–$0.05/kWh in auction data across Europe. But your point was about end-user price, and that’s where things get more complicated.

Retail electricity prices reflect more than generation cost—they also include:
-Grid maintenance and upgrades (especially important with renewables),
-Transmission and distribution costs,
-Taxes and policy charges (e.g., carbon pricing, renewables subsidies),
-Market volatility (e.g., fossil backup capacity, energy crises).

So yes, solar is cheap at the panel, but the system that delivers that power to your wall socket still costs money to run—especially in a transitional energy economy. Still, the goal is that cheap LCOE translates to better long-term price stability. And when people wave away legitimate pricing concerns with “that’s not how markets work,” they’re often dodging the real policy challenge: structuring the grid to pass those savings on to consumers.

Yay. This is a win for the EU power grid. For the first time ever, solar power was the largest single source of electricity across the EU last month, according to Ember’s latest analysis. Thirteen countries set new solar records, and coal generation fell to an all-time low of just 6.1%—a milestone worth noting -- especially if you own stock in RWE or PGE.

This is not good news for the fossil fuel sector, and they know it. Before the predictable drive-by comments about “lol it’s summer” or "but baseload!") roll in: yes, solar output peaks in summer. That’s the whole point. It’s a seasonal technology. The relevant metric isn’t a single month—it’s the direction of the trend across years. And that trend is accelerating. Solar generation in June 2025 was up 22% from June 2024. Wind also posted record Mays and Junes, despite a weak start to the year. These gains reflect years of sustained investment, not just a cloudless Tuesday in Valencia or a gusty weekend on Sylt.

Trying explaining that to the industry's shills though, who are diligently trying to FUD both solar and nuclear, buying time for some more profit taking at scale before their pay masters are relegated to niche markets. The fossil fuel industry wants us to see this as a zero-sum game: you either burn fossil fuels, or freeze in the dark. It's near-sighted and greedy, and it is headed for collapse as a business model.

I'm seeing the energy war as a kind of combined arms operation against fossil volatility and climate instability. That means using solar, wind, nuclear, hydro, storage, and grid interconnects like complementary systems—not rivals. RWE and PGE are the last great fossil battleships still patrolling EU waters, defending their profits as much as they are defending the EU's energy future—heavily armed, politically shielded, and designed for a different era. But the energy war is shifting to drones, satellites, and decentralized networks. Solar, wind, and storage don’t need to sink the battleship—they just need to make it irrelevant.

Speaking of RWE and PGE, fossil fuels (including coal and gas) provided just 23.6% of EU electricity in June, and coal hit historic lows in countries like Germany, Poland, Spain, and Denmark. Even with a rebound in gas use earlier in the year (thanks to drought-reduced hydro), the overall trajectory is unmistakable: Europe is building the infrastructure that will eventually flatten fossil volatility and extend renewables into non-peak hours—especially once grid storage and flexible demand catch up.

TL;DR: This isn’t about one sunny month. It’s about the structural reshaping of the EU power grid. Okay, shills, you have the floor...

Hmmm...I am going to assume you are really talking about software engineering, and not computer science. They are related, but the article is about changes in the software engineering curricula at UW, and not so much the CS side of the house. Here's a direct quote from the article:

“We have never graduated coders. We have always graduated software engineers.”

With that said, I actually have a CS degree from the University of Arizona, but I spent thirty-odd years as a sysadmin, riding herd on software engineers whose default position was to reject anything that moved them out of their comfort zone. You're right that accreditation will matter more than ever, but accreditation bodies don't exist to preserve the past; they exist to ensure that graduates are prepared for the professional demands of the present and future, and UW's direction is clear. Here's another quote from the artcile:

"Coding, or the translation of a precise design into software instructions, is dead. AI can do that."

So let's be very clear about this -- academia doesn't create coders. It creates software engineers -- people who can use code to solve complex problems. LLMs shoulder some of the burden. Not all of it, but enough that the future holds exactly two paths for software engineers -- the path where people leverage LLMs, and the one where they don't. Guess which path defines a successful career in software engineering.

UW's goal is not to teach students how to prompt GPT to spit out a finished program. The goal is to focus on the actual work of software engineering: the "creative and conceptually challenging work" of figuring out precisely what the computer needs to do.

Think of the evolution of software engineering tools.

In the 1960s and 1970s a "real" programmer might have said that anyone using a compiler like FORTRAN or COBOL instead of writing assembly code wasn't doing "real" programming. In the 1990s, a "real" programmer might have said that anyone using an IDE with syntax highlighting and code completion instead of vi and make was taking a shortcut. Today, you're suggesting that using an AI assistant to handle boilerplate code, debug a tricky API call, or translate a Python algorithm into Rust is somehow not worthy.

In every era, the tool—whether compiler, text editor, or IDE—abstracted away tedium and repetition to free the engineer to engage at a higher level of complexity. GPT and other LLMs aren’t cheat codes; they’re the next rung on that ladder. They are the compiler's compiler. LLMs aren't replacing thought; they’re upgrading the thinker. Was Michelangelo less of an artist because he used a scaffold to reach the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—instead of a brush with a really long handle?

So, let's talk about accreditation. In a few years, which program do you think ABET will accredit?
        1. The one that ignores industry-standard tools and produces graduates who are experts in solving problems that no longer exist?
        2. The one that teaches students how to leverage AI assistants to build more complex, robust, and innovative systems faster than before, while ensuring they have the deep fundamental knowledge to know when the AI is wrong?

Institutions that don't teach their students how to collaborate with AI will be the ones that lose their credibility. They'll be the new ITT Tech or University of Phoenix -- diploma mills churning out graduates unprepared for the modern workplace. The accredited, top-tier universities will be the ones, like UW, that see LLMs and AI in general for what it is -- a new tool -- and prepare their students to embrace it.

UW announced a major revamp of its computer science curriculum to embrace large language models (LLMs) as collaborative tools. Not just for ethics discussions or one-off assignments—LLMs are being structurally integrated into how students learn to code, reason, and debug. In short: the assumption going forward is you won’t be competing with LLMs—you’ll be building with them.

Fwiw, UW was in my top three when I was looking for a college after I left the USAF in 1989. For anyone who did their undergrad work during the early 90s, this feels like a homecoming. UW was a beacon in the pre-web academic world. Their FTP servers were pilgrimage sites, along with WUSTL and CWRU. If there was something you needed, it was to be found in that academic FTP triangle. And yes, this is the same UW that gave us ELM and PINE, and later IMAP.

Back then, tools like PINE weren’t flashy. They were designed to assist, not replace—to be partners in how you worked and thought. It’s fitting that UW, which once helped define what computer-assisted work could feel like in the age of VT100 terminals, is now helping redefine what it looks like in the era of transformer models and semantic autocompletion.

When it comes to LLMs, I've been pushing the “collaborators, not competitors” message from day one. I'm glad to see that UW groks it this way, too. And if the next generation learns to treat LLMs the way we once treated PINE—customizable, helpful, (and occasionally insightful, if your sysadmin implemented the .sig and MOTD hooks with random quotes from the Jargon File) —then we might actually end up OK.

I hear you—and I don’t think we’re actually in disagreement, though I might frame it differently. You're right to flag the tension—I probably should have said apparent paradox, or better yet, frustrating duality. That’s on me, and thanks for calling it out.

When I said we have the "capital, brainpower, and legislative frameworks," I wasn’t suggesting we have a turnkey solution to the nanoplastics problem sitting in a lab somewhere. I meant that we’re no longer operating in the dark. We have the diagnostics, the modeling capacity, the regulatory and economic levers—but we haven’t mobilized them at scale, for any number of reasons.

And yes, scaling solutions has real costs. I absolutely agree: ripping plastics out of every supply chain overnight would trigger cascading harm, especially for the most vulnerable. But that’s not the only option. The “incapacity” I’m talking about isn’t just technical—it’s political, cultural, ethical. It’s our inability to even start meaningful transitions without waiting for a catastrophe to force our hand.

So not a contradiction—just a frustration at how narrow our action window seems to remain, even as our knowledge expands.

That’s hard to argue with. The gap between capacity and will is one of the defining tensions of our time. What’s particularly maddening is that this isn't some moonshot—the technologies, models, and even regulatory templates exist. What’s missing is the structural alignment to prioritize them.

This one I hesitate on. It’s true that voting trends matter, but reducing the failure to act to just voter apathy or preference risks overlooking the asymmetry in how influence operates. Gerrymandering, dark money, lobbying, and procedural gridlock all distort the link between public will and legislative outcome. “We just don’t want to” feels too blunt for a system this engineered.

I get your point: when something aligns with MAGA's political narrative, money appears. But again, the mechanism isn’t just public opinion—it’s narrative salience weaponized by media ecosystems and electoral incentives. Environmental policy rarely gets that kind of narrative heat, even though the stakes are existential.

Exactly. That number—11—isn’t a failure of political will; it’s more of a structural issue. It points to a deeper truth: the mechanisms that should translate public concern into action are systematically misaligned. Political representation in this country is skewed heavily toward a GOP that does not represent a national majority. Not by a long shot. The Senate, for example, gives Wyoming (580,000 people) the same power as California (39 million) to legislate. That is a simple fact of the US system. The Electoral College inflates the influence of rural states, allowing candidates to win the presidency while losing the popular vote—as happened in 2000 and 2016, and again in 2024. And as a result of this structural situation, five of the nine Supreme Court justices represent the preferences of presidents who lost the popular vote.

So...when legislation stalls, it’s not for lack of evidence or even popular support. It’s because the architecture of governance in the U.S. is built to resist change—any kind of change, and one party, the GOP (especially in its current MAGA incarnation) ruthlessly exploits that. So yes—even with cultural momentum, an issue that is not MAGA-aligned is going to go nowhere, legislatively. That’s not apathy. That's playing by the rules while the other team works the refs.

You’re not wrong—it is a weird time to be human. Speaking as an American, weird seems to be our new normal. We’ve reached a point where our tools have outpaced our maturity, and we’re now seeing the damage in high resolution—scientifically, ecologically, even psychologically. But I try not to let the sheer scale of it turn into fatalism. We may not be emotionally equipped yet, but culture does evolve. Sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once. The fact that we can even name the trap—and have threads like this unpacking it—feels like the start of something, not just the end.