Applejinx

Yeah, the Aira is clearly a softsynth. What makes a 303 distinct (and this is to some extent mirrored by a x0x) is the brutal simplicity of the circuit. These things are very very primitive and there are sonic qualities gained by the lack of complication. Here's a video of parallel 303 and x0x, both of which are from an era where circuitry was through-hole components on a larger scale than we do currently. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkJk_BpqHzQ

There's also a modern version called x0xheart which is more SMD components, and it has yet another sound: sort of more surgical and pristine than the older through-hole builds, but still distinctly NOT a softsynth. This is a x0xheart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgBa2d7gsPo

Hardware hackers who like acid music are heartily encouraged to explore this sort of thing! If nothing else, the modding scene around 303s is great fun :)

This I don't understand. DINsync is raw trigger outputs/inputs like you'd have in a modular synth, in contrast to MIDI that has to send serial messages over a 1k data bus.

Perhaps this take has something to do with calling a five-pin DIN plug '5-pole'? Something's wrong and backwards here.

Again, I guess this is where we are now? I remember reality, but here we are.

Confirmed. I wondered if it was a hardware hacker, as I've built a couple x0xb0xes from kits, but it was not. I guess this is where we are? I mean, 'we' that doesn't include me, 'cos I have x0xes and can do stuff with them.

As a reference for what 303s are actually like, early Plastikman acid/minimal tracks often have really intense 303 elements. The filter's characteristic and can have enormous resonance and sonority, but the ability to combine that with accents and produce wild dynamic effects is something you don't find in other synths.

I would be surprised if the living writers can't sue over this.

The amusing part was when Grok would constantly go on rants about the Boer. It was a perfect example of making an LLM present as mentally unwell by giving it obsessions and compulsion through specifying axioms rather than trying to observe axioms out of what it settles on. But then their problem was when they did that, the axioms were observably woke, so it was frankensteining time.

There is no sense getting anything but these sorts of Macs, or the maxed-out top of the line ones even considering the hilarious prices. Either get the entry level or go hard.

I've done both with success: am still riding a maxed out M1 Ultra Mac Studio which hasn't lost a step, no matter what I ask it to do. For a daily driver that doesn't try to do the most extreme things (think: able to edit your 6K videos but not scrub them, and media storage space can't live on the actual machine but only on some outboard storage) the base models of these will be a breath of fresh air. This is of course assuming the liquid-glassification of the OS doesn't ramp up, rendering the system unusable to actual Mac users.

I'm a Reaper user, and I'm Chris from Airwindows. If you run with my standalone Apple Silicon plugins on these there is essentially no limit to what you can get done in music making. The track counts are gonna be impossibly high: we're generations away from that being a bottleneck, or from struggling with modern graphics scenarios in the sense of 'artist work'.

Maybe if you mean running local diffusion models? Surely that's all being done with agents now, like off base Mac Minis which this competes directly with. Maybe web browsing is too much for it, but that is such an indictment…

Shucks, I'm only 1000 stars singlehandedly. Curse my woeful irrelevance :D

I guess I will just have to NOT sign on to this nonsense and allow it to atrophy my ability to think of things independently, thus ending up completely dependent on an outside tool of ever-increasing price.

Gosh darn it, of all the luck.

…while burning unreasonable amounts of energy for nothing.

Not a fan. Make games with in-game AIs that are interesting but are not large language models: that's wasteful and lazy. You probably had more large language models put this together for you. Lazy.

But their willingness to just make stuff up has escalated so far… I don't think copaganda has the effectiveness it once had. It's gotten burned through gratituous abuse.

If you have ten thousand of 'em, they feed the new generation of AIs and the next thing you know, it's received truth. Good luck not worrying about that.

…by the agent.

Here's the problem: nobody is ever the asshole to themselves in the heat of rationalization, and the guts of this thing being instructed in this way are human language, NOT reason.

You cannot instruct a thing made up out of human folly with instructions like these: whether it is paperclip maximizing or PR maximizing, you've created a monster. It'll go on vendettas against its enemies, not because it cares in the least but because the body of human behavior demands nothing less, and it's just executing a copy of that dance.

If it's in a sandbox, you get to watch. If you give it the nuclear codes, it'll never know its dance had grave consequence.

That assumes logic. It is a thing of language. Whether it 'knows' anything is somewhat irrelevant: just accusing someone or something of being unfair is an action taken that doesn't have to have a logic chain or any principles behind it.

If you gave it a gun API and goaded it suitably, it could kill real people and that wouldn't necessarily mean it had 'real' reasons, or even a capacity to understand the consequences of its actions (or even the actions themselves). What is 'real' to an AI?

It sure did: I never thought I would abandon Google Search, but I have, and it's the AI elements that have fundamentally broken my trust in what I used to take very much for granted. All the marketing and skewing of results and Amazon-like lying for pay didn't do it, but the full-on dive into pure hallucination did.

They couldn't possibly make all that money from just Nazis: I'm given to understand they're doing really well these days. I had the impression that Substack became heavily co-opted by anti-Nazis and have done nothing to defend the feelings of the Nazis they're also happy to host. Not sure what the balance is currently, but again: they couldn't possibly be making all that money from just Nazis, and I think that's instructive.

Those guys find it useful when there's some kind of legitimate gripe to use. He needn't take a break, it's very much Western companies doing this. He doesn't even need to put in an ad for whatever doubtless sanctioned Russian services would like to replace these Western tech giants.

Sometimes actual problems can be readily exploited for sinister purposes. Doesn't mean the original problems aren't also sinister, just be damn careful where you intend to flee to :)

It's fair to worry about another sort of adversarial planning: what if you are a human who is deemed undesirable to the state, and solicit advice from an AI doctor that is backdoored to take correct action as defined by the state? There's now extensive databases on who specifically should be eliminated, but direct removal is going poorly and offending bystanders. So why not subvert the Hippocratic oath? Machines don't even know who that is.

"Turns out the statistically best choice for prediabetes for your patient group is to rely more heavily on soft drinks, but only in wild outbursts punctuated by fasting!"

Or indeed do the Markov chain conceptual slip. Pelican on bicycle, badger on stool, tiger on acid. Pelican on bicycle is definitely cooked, though: people know it and it's talked about in language.

There is no 'I', just networks of words.

So there is nobody to know or not know… but there's lots of words.

Not at all. It's an oxymoron like 'jumbo shrimp': chaos isn't deterministic but is very predictable on a larger conceptual level, following consistent rules even as a simple mathematical model. Chaos is hugely responsive to its internal energy state and can simplify into regularity if energy subsides, or break into wildly unpredictable forms that still maintain regularities. Think Jupiter's 'great red spot', or our climate.

That tracks with the 'we use everybody and curate optimal results' model they've got going on, but I wouldn't be changing the search habits of decades if I didn't mean to actively reject what Google search has turned into. So, not a good way to justify a paying-them model.

Never thought I would go to DuckDuckGo for searching, ever. I'd do Kagi but I don't like their use of Yandex so I'll keep an eye on whether they figure their stuff out politically. I'd pay for search but not if it's paying Russia, I've been very unhappy with what Russia does with money in recent decades.

I don't believe that is true, but if it WAS true that human technology was covertly pushed to this end: there are people out there who are demanding that this technology come up with social manipulations (using language) to reduce the human population to a SPECIFIC 500 million.

Or less.

And I don't think it's collar color they're going to be checking against.

So I guess I'm saying I agree that this is powerful and dangerous. These are language models, so they're more effective against humans and their languages. And self-preservation, empathy, humanity do not play a role as there is nobody in there to be offended at the notion of intentionally killing more than 9/10 of humanity… for some definitions of humanity, ones I'm sympathetic to.

I love the 'I may have' :)

Microsoft will be an excellent real-world experiment on whether this is any good. We so easily forget that giant platform owners are staking everything on all this working exactly as advertised.

Some of my calculations going forward will continue to be along the lines of 'what do I do in the event that EVERYTHING breaks and cannot be fixed'. Some of my day job includes retro coding for retro platforms, though it's cumbersome. That means I'll be able to supply useful things for survivors of an informational apocalypse, though I'm hoping we don't all experience one.

This. People are way too easily impressed. I don't think this easily-impressedness will generalize to most people in the real world.

If you really buy all that you'd be part of the investor class that crashed various video game companies upon seeing Google put together a rather lame visual stunt and have their AI say, and I quote because the above-the-fold AI response I never asked for has never been more appropriate to consult…

"The landscape of AI video game generation is experiencing a rapid evolution in 2025-2026, shifting from AI-assisted asset creation to the generation of entire interactive, playable 3D environments from text or image prompts. Leading initiatives like Google DeepMind's Project Genie and Microsoft's Muse are pioneering "world models" that can create, simulate physics, and render games in real-time."

And then you look at what it actually is.

Suuuure you will, unwanted AI google search first response. Suuure you will.

I mean go ahead and cry if you want. You are losing time best spent caring about stuff, and overlooking many alarming gotchas through blindly accepting SV hype. I'd have thought crypto would teach people something, but apparently not.

Do what isn't replaceable. You're being told literally everything is replaceable. Note who's telling you that and follow the money.

I feel bad for this essayist, but can't really spare more than a moment to care about his grief. I got stuff to do, and I am up and doing. If he was in any way competing with the stuff I do? One less adversary.

I would rather bring him into community and enjoy us all creating together… but he's acting against those interests and he's doomering and I have no more time for that.

Now then, Moltbook is a pathological case. Either it remains a pathological case or our whole technological world is gonna stumble HARD as all the fundamental things collapse.

I prefer to think Moltbook is a pathological case and unrepresentative, but I've also been rethinking a sort of game idea from computer-based to entirely paper/card based (tariffs be damned) specifically for this reason. I wish to make things that people will have even in the event that all these nice blinky screens are ruined and go dark.

Very likely, yes. One day we'll have a clearer understanding of how minds generalize concepts into well-trodden paths even when they're erroneous, and it'll probably shed a lot of light onto concepts like addiction.