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Comment by soundworlds | Hacker News Reader

Which is interesting, because I've always been a musician first and software dev as a side interest, and I feel like LLMs have made the software iteration loop fast enough that it feels as exciting as making music for me.

I wonder if there's some blend of software and other interest that might rekindle that novelty for you?

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Robots in my garage doing woodwork would be nice. They'd be auto-orchestrated by all the spywares and spydevices already in place - and who knowns more about me and my ideas than me. And I don't have to learn anything.

But I love the smell of freshly carved wood, you would miss out on that.

You can buy cedar-scented air fresheners on Amazon. Isn't buying a wooden dresser and an air freshener enough to rekindle the love of your calling? Look, the sides of the dresser are CNC-milled to a level of perfection you could never achieve at home.

If you like sawing wood and gluing it together, just keep doing that.

If you want a wooden dresser, buy one.

Nobody does woodworking because it's necessary.

You could say the same about software; clearly it's missing the same 'ease and cheapness of creating the bespoke idea you have'.

> Nobody does woodworking because it's necessary.

I don’t understand this, can you explain or am I missing something?

Do it if it's your thing. I fletch arrows I might never shoot or will not fly right. Just an itch to scratch.

I probably didn't phrase that well. I meant that garage woodworking is not necessary, in an economic sense. It's an optional/leisure activity.

And people still do it anyway. Which is great. Because it's still useful, and valuable. Just not necessary.

> Which is interesting, because I've always been a musician first and software dev as a side interest, and I feel like LLMs have made the software iteration loop fast enough that it feels as exciting as making music for me.

I don't quite get what you mean by this. Music is a form of expression; it is supposed to be effortless once you are good at it, but software (if we go by a strict definition) is not about expression but about building reliable and efficient systems. Like what do you mean exactly

I am currently exploring music-software-combined-artifacts, and there is a lot of aesthetic and other design taste decisions that go into what I am choosing to make with AI assistance. It feels like self-expression at some level to me - e.g. https://johnoestmannmusic.com/0009-when-we-become-discoverer...

If I plugged it into something like an AI song generator and asked it to generate a bunch of sounds kind of like that, I think I could find something more appealing. All of this work to build this feels like a chore that could be prompted away.

Not the op, but it lets you shape ideas and test them a lot faster, and that does feel (to me) more like art or music.

For me, I've always been interested in music -- but now, I can have an AI generate limitless music, far better than anything I can do with less effort.

Imagine if you never had to pick up a guitar, blowing a trumpet, or even opening a tracker ever again.

You could just ask the AI to make music that made your best efforts look like a kindergartener's painting on the fridge. Isn't that a musician's utopia, surrounded by music without lifting a hand to make it?

> Isn't that a musician's utopia, surrounded by music without lifting a hand to make it?

I think my sarcasm detector is broken. I really hope there’s an implicit /s at the end of that.

There is. But it's not so different from what other people have posted without sarcasm.

I was almost replying to your previous reply by saying something akin that with the text-to-speech you can be illiterate, and that should be a reader's utopia.

Then I got this feeling that there was an odd chance of you being sarcastic.

It's difficult to tell on HN these days. Some replies I read should be sarcasm, but I those bad takes are stone faced.

> I was almost replying to your previous reply by saying something akin that with the text-to-speech you can be illiterate, and that should be a reader's utopia.

/me gestures towards literacy rates.

> There is.

Ok, phew.

> But it's not so different from what other people have posted without sarcasm.

I agree—and that’s why I had trouble being sure.

Yeah that’s called being lazy.

Probably not. They made "smart nerd" their whole personality and that is now being challenged, hurts the ego.

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