The Trichordist.com | In a dramatic turn of events, Congress is quietly advancing a 10-year federal safe harbor for Big Tech that would block any state and local regulation of artificial intelligence (AI). That safe harbor would give Big Tech another free ride on the backs of artists, authors, consumers, all of us and our children. It would stop cold the enforcement of state laws to protect consumers like the $1.370 billion dollar settlement Google reached with the State of Texas last week for grotesque violations of use privacy. The bill would go up on Big Tech’s trophy wall right next to the DMCA, Section 230 and Title I of the Music Modernization Act.
Introduced through the House Energy and Commerce Committee as part of a broader legislative package branded with President Trump’s economic agenda, this safe harbor would prevent states from enforcing or enacting any laws that address the development, deployment, or oversight of AI systems. While couched as a measure to ensure national uniformity and spur innovation, this proposal carries serious consequences for consumer protection, data privacy, and state sovereignty. It threatens to erase hard-fought state-level protections that shield Americans from exploitative child snooping, data scraping, biometric surveillance, and the unauthorized use of personal and all creative works. This post unpacks how we got here, why it matters, and what can still be done to stop it.
The Origins of the New Safe Harbor
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Go here to read more of this AI development:
https://thetrichordist.com/2025/05/15/26567/
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From Messiaen to Radiohead: How Great Music Uses Prime Numbers
By Mini Philosophy
Olivier Messiaen’s music, especially his Quartet for the End of Time, uses prime number patterns to create a sense of timelessness and structural disorientation.
The use of unsynchronized rhythms and harmonies—built on primes like 17 or 29—prevents any true repetition, mirroring the theme of time ending.
This mathematical underpinning has inspired animations, contemporary artists like Radiohead, and reveals the deep connections between music, structure, and human perception.
I fell in love with Messiaen’s music in my late teenage years, after my youth orchestra spent a weekend playing through his explosive Turangalîla-Symphony. I think that weekend was the peak of my trumpet playing. It had to be. The trumpet part was crazily difficult. The whole piece was fiendish. Strange time signatures defied the usual three or four beats we were used to. But I remember being just blown away by the sheer ecstasy that Messiaen captured in the music.
A weekend spent inside Messiaen’s sound world reshaped my musical landscape. It wasn’t too long before I started exploring beyond that monumental piece, and Messiaen quickly became my favorite composer for many years. It was during that period that I listened for the first time to the Quartet for the End of Time on a CD I borrowed from our local library. The delicate chamber work was of a different order of magnitude than the symphony we’d played, but I was equally transfixed.
For years, I wasn’t able to articulate the strange structure that I heard at work in the opening movement. How was Messiaen able to achieve this curious effect in the piano part, where rhythm and harmony each individually repeated themselves in a regular pattern, and yet, when they were put together, the pattern vanished? What was Messiaen’s secret? It was only when I finally got a score that I was able to understand the blueprint Messiaen was exploiting. The answer turned out to be connected to one of my other teenage passions: prime numbers.
The rhythm of numbers
In the first movement of his piece, Messiaen wanted to create the strange sense of time ending. He achieved this in the most stunning manner. Time depends on things repeating, so he needed to produce a structure where you never truly hear the moment of repetition. While the clarinet imitates a blackbird and the violin a nightingale, the piano part plays a 17-note syncopated rhythm that just repeats itself over and over. But the chord sequence that the pianist plays, set to this rhythm sequence, consists of 29 chords, which are again repeated over and over. Such repeating patterns might lead to boredom and predictability, but not in this case. Because Messiaen’s choice of numbers—17 and 29—means that something rather magical… or mathematical, occurs. The numbers he chose are prime numbers, and their mutual indivisibility means that the rhythm and harmony that Messiaen has set up never get back in sync once the piece is in motion.
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Go here to read more of this fascinating concept:
https://bigthink.com/mini-philosophy/from-messiaen-to-radiohead-how-great-music-uses-prime-numbers/