I’m not sure quite what I was expecting from this album, but whatever those expectations were, they were utterly defied once I clicked play.

I will admit that my initial reaction about halfway through the first track was “This sucks, change it.” It mostly reminded me of Sleep Token, which I cannot stand (that’s just me, and there’s no accounting for taste—YMMV).

The more I let this album, though, the more it grew on me. While I ran across it on a list of new metal releases, it is nowhere near the realm of metal. There are maybe a bit of black metal vocals here and there, but they are absolutely buried in the mix. It is tough to pin down genre-wise, with clean vocals, some hip-hop, and drum-and-bass beats scattered throughout.

As is my Sunday-morning habit, I am sitting here in my kitchen planning out the week and—as usual—I am listening to our local public radio station’s classical channel. Something about Sunday mornings just always says classical music to me.

While listening, I finally found myself motivated to go set up a monthly recurring donation. It is something I probably should have done a while ago, but kept not doing. No good reason not to… it was just one more thing on the list to go to, and that list is feeling pretty long these days.

I forget where I heard about this album—someone’s Mastodon post, I’m sure—but it has been on my list to listen to all week. I finely got around to it today.

Holy cannoli! It is great!

I tend not to go in much for stoner/sludge metal, as I find it all sort of blends together for me. This album has a lot of variety to it, and some pretty great (and heavy) grooves. And the tone on the guitars is just about perfect. If I had to pick a stand-out track, it would probably be “Cryptids”, but the whole album is just really good.

🔗 An Entire Company Was Staffed With AI Agents and You’ll Never Guess What Happened:

As Business Insider first reported, the results were dismal. The best-performing model was Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which struggled to finish just 24 percent of the jobs assigned to it. The study’s authors note that even this meager performance is prohibitively expensive, averaging nearly 30 steps and a cost of over $6 per task.

Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash, meanwhile, averaged a time-consuming 40 steps per finished task, but only had an 11.4 percent rate of success — the second highest of all the models. The worst AI employee was Amazon’s Nova Pro v1, which finished just 1.7 percent of its assignments at an average of almost 20 steps.

🔗 The group chats that changed America | Semafor:

Many of the roughly 20 participants I spoke to also felt a genuine sentimental attachment to the spaces, and believed in their value. One participant in the groups described them as a “Republic of Letters,” a reference to the long-distance intellectual correspondence of the 17th century. Others often invoked European salon culture.

It never fails to amaze me the degree to which these clowns and continuously upward-failing Richie Riches want to imagine themselves to be these world-historical players like the ones they hear about on all the bullshit history podcasts they listen to.