I expected to feel conspicuous, at this Indian music conference, for the shallowness of my knowledge of Indian music, but actually it's much more that I am not buying or selling anything.
glenn mcdonald
@glennmcdonald.bsky.social
Music, furia.com, everynoise.com, books, soccer, food, civilization, pickleball, technology, music. Bridges.
Remedial humanity tip: the exciting thing about a cancer treatment is not how much money it could make.
I'm pretty sure we will come to believe that most of the ways we're currently trying to use AI were dumb, but it's also truly amazing that I can write instructions in English and they can be implemented in Turkish.
I growl at em-dashes in AI writing as much as any human, but also it *would* be useful if English had a punctuation mark that was a colon with negative polarity.
Putting an invisible watermark in Claude-written text to mark it as written by Claude is like putting a flavorless trace-chemical in a bowl of clam chowder to mark it as made out of clams.
like a knife that, no matter how you cut with it, always makes things into little tugboat shapes that smell of mango
What's a good word for the combination of assiduous, gratuitous and condescending? I'm trying to name the valley that comes after the Uncanny one.
If you use everynoise.com, @everynoise.bsky.social has some updates.
Every Noise at Once
everynoise.com
Every Noise at Once@everynoise.bsky.social · 4w agoAll everynoise.com functions that use the live Spotify API are currently broken due to Spotify disabling everynoise's API access without warning. I have filed a request to get it turned back on, but am not expecting to hear back one way or the other for a few days.
Kickstarter needs an option where you take away money from bad ideas.
If only there was some way for me to do the same things I already do, but in a way that consumes exponentially more resources and money, and shifts my own focus from my goals to the processes.
If you're near Mumbai and want to hear me talk about music and algorithms and humanity, I'll be speaking at the All About Music conference on August 26th! www.allaboutmusic.in/glenn-mcdona...
Glenn McDonald - ALL ABOUT MUSIC
Glenn McDonald Algorithm Designer Glenn McDonald is a music evangelist, algorithm designer, software engineer and technology strategist. He created the...
allaboutmusic.in
Right now, somebody is inventing something that could have been the next guitar, except they will ship it with a list of pre-played songs and an automatic next-chord recommender so anybody can learn it, and then nobody will.
I'm very actively undecided about how I think AI should be used to write code, or really at all, but if you're having AI write apps for you, and want to try having it write them so that their data and algorithms are open to inspection, here's an AI-written Skill for that. dactal.org/dactal.html?...
I'm not convinced or claiming that it's possible to talk to engineers effectively about love as their goal, but I failed to stop myself from trying. furia.com/log/524
A future in which the makers of your software tell it to do something dumb, and you can say "that's dumb" to it and it will say "you're right" and stop doing that.
Soon, robots will be able to play pickleball for you.
I feel uncertain, this week, about what seems like everything until I notice that it definitely isn't.
It's not just that deferring to magic makes you less resourceful, it's also that tolerating the automatic application of magic makes you even more lost when for some reason it doesn't happen.
If you follow 2024 election fretting, you might know that there were some NY precincts with weird party skew between the President and Senate votes. I happened to be poking at election data in my work on data tools, so here's the relevant view for all precincts by state.
AI coding is a godsend for everybody who loves solving logic puzzles and hates arguing across obdurately unexplained cultural barriers with unintelligibly motivated customer service reps. I hope I'm using "godsend" right. Existential torment.
With actual humans you rarely get one so simultaneously desperate to prove that they are brilliant and that you are brilliant and that every question is conclusively resolved by your combined brilliances. It's refreshing. No, not "refreshing". what's the word I'm looking for? Excruciating.
DACTAL, the query language and data knife I've been working on at @imbue-ai.bsky.social, has been capable of complex things for a while, but is starting to also be capable of some simple things.
DACTAL.org@dactal.org · 3mo agoExtensions are accumulating. Here's a geo adapter feeding into a weather adapter feeding into a map renderer. Europe .search countries .weather forecast |temp=(.history@1.temperature_2m_max) ...map=(...colorField=temp,width=700,height=700) |data-of
You won't become a better cook JUST by not using a microwave, but every opportunity to use a microwave is also an opportunity to make better food and learn more about heat and food if you don't. This is not a post about cooking or microwaves.
Club teammates, but World Cup group opponents? Yes, several. dactal.org?dbname=wc202...
DACTAL
dactal.org
I admit to being viscerally impressed that Claude not only can play Connections given just an unexplained screenshot, but can and knows to explain the day's trap. Of course this is exactly a language-completion task, so I know I should be less surprised. But this is why this AI is hard to evaluate.
