Love watching his videos, they go way beyond your average music production youtuber content. I generally think generative AI is an awesome tool in itself, but that it’s too ripe for the perversion of capitalistic greed. Like Jordan said in the video, it’s pretty disgusting to ingest years worth of hard work and dedication from many artists and then use the resulting model to compete with those same artists. I optimistically predict that the current approach to AI will never do much better than the grey slop it currently shits out, though.

A house back in 2017. I really had no business buying a house, financially speaking, but I was getting fed up with renting land under a trailer I owned. They kept raising the price significantly every single year. Turned out to be a great decision since I was able to get a good interest rate and a good price. Of course there are downsides, like when the water heater flooded my bottom floor. Still worth it though.

Radiohead, especially In Rainbows. They have amazing melancholy music that also has a groove to it.

Yeah but like, what new features do apps have which weren’t available in those times? Embedded videos maybe? Doesn’t justify the bloat.

It sucks that you have to do that, but I know people who manage projects just want progress to come in on a steady drip feed. Hopefully some day you’ll get a decent manager who can understand your work style and roll with it though, or maybe get to the point of setting your own destiny!

One hobby turned into a career (software engineering), which hopefully means I’m decent at it. I also play the bass guitar, which I okay at, but eagerly trying to reach a high level. I have a million other hobbies that I do fine at. But grading yourself is only useful as a way to keep from stagnating and to create healthy goals. The internet is really dangerous in this regard, because you’ll always find someone who’s way better than you. At the end of the day I just want to keep my brain stimulated and have fun with the time I have.

I used to think C# was like Java but with fresh ideas. I still do, but Kotlin gives it a run for its money. The type system is pretty great. For example, you can use the Elvis operator to return early if something is null, allowing you to use a non-null type afterwards. In C#, nullable annotations feel more “grafted on”, and there are some weird quirks and footguns that Kotlin avoids by being a little smarter about it.

How do you type letters like ‘a’ and ‘L’?

I dunno, I made an ipod clone app in Android for myself recently and it has both acceleration and a db progress indicator. These were not tough features to implement…

Are you saying the anus has ways of shutting it all down?

You might enjoy learning vanilla js and making a site with as few deps as you can get away with. Or a lightweight framework like svelte or preact. The browser stack is definitely some weird shit but it’s still somewhat approachable if you dig under the abstractions that most web devs never venture beyond. It definitely helped me cut through all the manufactured noise.

What software have you made? Sometimes people make me feel crazy when I tell them it’s bad to have deeply nested dependencies. Often I’ll dismiss a library if it depends on other things. I think the software world is rife with the idea that “if it works now, then my job is done”.

Good riddance, I say. Web dev is infested with layers upon layers of tools that attempt to abstract what is already fairly simple and straightforward to work with. We’re beyond the days of needing to build buttons out of small image fragments, and JS is (slowly) becoming more livable in its raw form. I welcome anything that keeps the toolchain as simple as possible.

Spineless tech tips

A few weeks ago I watched Ladyhawk on a 13" TV with a built in VHS player. I realized that my brain didn’t care about the quality as soon as I started paying attention to the content. I still like my 1080p but there’s definitely massively diminishing returns after that.

On Linux Mint I can resize windows by hitting super+z, close windows with super+c, and move them around with super+left drag. There are others too, but I use these constantly. I was worried when I switched from Windows that I’d lose my shortcuts, but it turned out that there even more options on Mint.

I’m afraid of getting locked into anything so I do all my notes in raw markdown and organize it with vscode. I tried all sorts of things before I settled on this way but I’ve never looked back. Simplicity is king.

I was using my school’s website the other day and had a similar thought. I remember waiting a similar amount of time for many pages to load back in the dialup days. Why is it so slow to load a page that just shows some text and buttons??

What if that just drives you insane due to the problem described by Gödel’s incompleteness theorem? Maybe you’d become susceptible to someone telling you “this statement is false”.

I’ve been working on a raspberry pi based music notes box for shows on and off for about 5 years. I can count through and change songs with my foot, so I have an easier time keeping track of where I am in the song for live shows (I’m the bassist). I did all the programming and hardware stuff.