Slow_Hand

Career musician here. My dirty secret is that Coltrane doesn’t resonate with me at all. Not one iota; despite me being a huge jazz fan.

For my taste, his harmonic language tips over the threshold where it goes from being viscerally enjoyable to a more heady, academic exercise. It all feels like a blur to me. Maximal in it’s vocabulary, and yet flat in it’s overall effect. It’s often so dense that it ends up feeling “same-y” and grey to me. Like Schoenberg’s serial music.

Maybe my impression here comes from the fact that by the time I began listening to him in the mid 2000’s an entire school of derivative jazz players had long since developed upon and retroactively made his innovations feel far more common (to no fault of his own). It’s that flavor of jazz where you get the impression that the players are enjoying this way more than the audience. It’s not for me.

Source?

No shame in that. I find modulars a bit too expansive for my taste. It sounds like you'd benefit from a more traditional hardware synth where the signal flow is mostly locked down.

Yeah. Having a model of the signal flow in your mind and being creative with the structure is half the fun of synthesizers for me. And even if you don't comprehend everything in the moment, happy accidents are a big part of the fun.

Some modular performers like Keith Fullerton Whitman have a very dynamic approach to patching. I've seen shows where he was aggressively re-patching throughout the performance and hot-swapping connections on the fly. I'm talking several patches in a minute. It wasn't subtle, either. It was a nice contrast to many performers who tend to design their system as a fixed structure and then play from there.

I prefer “confabulation”. It seems truer to what is happening:

The LLM isn’t seeing something that’s not there, but deliberately making up _something_ so that it can return a response.

Yes. And if something truly important should occur on the platform then it will be reported elsewhere.

What do we really think we're missing out on by not using X?

To your first point, fair enough.

To your second point, surely they’ve considered the hit to their relationship with their customers before selling for $1/car. Surely the trust between them and their buyers is worth far, far more than that.

Even assuming maximum greed, is every car manufacturer really so short-sighted as to break that trust for so small of a return?

That doesn’t smell right. Why develop the telemetry and go to all of the trouble for such a paltry return? That probably wouldn’t even cover the legal consulation to cover their ass, much less go through the trouble of implementing and selling the telemetry.

It would be cheaper to do nothing if that were true.

It's increasingly practiced in the open in the music industry these days.

There was a recent row over the revelation that Chaotic Good, a music marketing company, was astroturfing on behalf of the bands Geese and Sombr.

I had a meeting last week with a well-known record producer who tells me labels are increasingly leaning into astroturfing.

Just two days ago a colleague told me about his bandmate whose day job is managing five Instagram accounts to astroturf for Mk.Gee. According to her, "Mk.Gee is not allowed to know about it", with the implication that he would reject it if he did.

I'm not saying a real, recorded trumpet doesn't make an appreciable sonic difference, but if it were a sampled trumpet "Safe and Sound" would most likely still be a hit.

Attributing it's hit status to the perfect intervals is ignoring all of the other choices (and supporting infrastructure) that go into making a hit. It's like saying that the Dodge Charger was a successful car because the windshield wipers are of a certain make.

Side note: It may very well be a sampled trumpet.

Because music is pleasurable to play, to experience, and it's gratifying to be creative and to discover your creative potential.

If you have an alternative reason to learn music and to start learning through acoustic phenomena then let's hear it.

Most people don't get into molecular gastronomy if they don't intend to cook a meal. And I'm going to go out on a limb and say that 99% of aspiring cooks shouldn't learn cooking via that discipline without first starting with something more practical and immediate.

While these are helpful topics to understand, they are not beginner topics. Not if you want to make music. They are fundamental questions in that they reside at the base of why things are the way they are, but they are not fundamental in the sense that you should teach them to a beginner who wants to make music.

The point is to make music. And the most practical way to do so is to teach instrument technique, intervals, scales, chords, and melody. Not low-level acoustic phenomena.

To make an (imperfect) programming analogy, you are proposing to teach low-level computation when most students would benefit from some Python, if/else statements, and functions. Not memory allocation and assembly. They're useful someday, but less useful when your first goal is to simply write a program.

I’m not OP, but I can speak to my own experience.

I am approaching 40 and in two weeks I will begin clowning lessons with a Cirque du Soleil clown. I am thrilled.

So why clown as a discipline? Something deeply misunderstood and that probably lowers my social status with people who don’t understand it? Something with zero career utility? Because to me it represents extreme vulnerability.

I’m a pretty dignified person. A lot of poise. Goofy, but restrained. If I can debase myself in front of an audience in order to win a laugh then I believe I can do anything.

If I can (figuratively) hang my ass out for all to see then I can move with confidence. If I can blow past my natural inclination to save face, or have the answers. If I can discard the emotional hangups that make me feel embarrassed then I can be the person who I (and I suspect a great number of us) want to be deep down.

I want to (constructively) tear down everything inside of me that restrains me and discover who I can really be.

Speaking for myself: working out, reading, composing music, and journaling.

I'm not familiar with the tech; what is harmonic mixing for audio book readouts? Would you please elaborate?

And so… what?

Make a point or leave it be, rather than making vague innuendo about how we should disapprove of them.

I remind myself of this often, despite living a lower-middle class existence.

There’s always room for hedonic escalation and lifestyle creep, but if all of my needs are covered I’m largely satisfied.

As the saying goes: “He who is not satisfied with that which he has will not be satisfied with that which he hopes to have.”

Today’s ways of living - no matter how challenging or disillusioning or alienating they may be - are largely preferable to literally being hunted and having your livelihood threatened by predators, compared to the figurative hunters and predators you’re describing.

It ain’t perfect - and we’ll work to improve it - but it’s way better than the way it used to be for so many people. Civilization aint all bad.

I see so many people try to reinvent sequencing as a circular diagram, as opposed to (say) a piano roll that loops, and I see little to no advantage to it. It's a cool novelty, but not the type of thing you'd like to work on.

Horizontal (left-to-right) sequencer displays like a piano roll or step sequencer are far more compact to display and easier to read. For drums parts, it's one dimensional until you add a second layer, and then the parts stack vertically, nicely on top of each other.

It's all to say that I don't really see much advantage in this petri nets paradigm. Even the trigger conditions and probabilities have already been incorporated into a large number of DAWs and hardware sequencers. This feels a little like someone who has discovered fire independently from the rest of civilization, but in this day and age I don't think that counts for much when all they had to do was observe the design paradigms that already exist.

In the end, the proof is in the pudding: How good is the music made with the tool? Does the technique allow us to more easily do something that was previously difficult or tedious? In this case, I'm not yet seeing it.

They had to have had _some_ inkling, considering one of the lyrics is “a cop knelt and kissed the feet of a priest, and a queer threw up at the sight of that.”

No corners. Just a straightforward paving.

> The Bureau of Street Services (StreetsLA) has not repaved a street since last June, and the city’s latest budget practically zeros out repaving for next fiscal year. StreetsLA crews are still doing some road repairs, fixing potholes and patching problem areas. But the most basic form of urban maintenance—full street resurfacing—has all but disappeared in America’s second-largest city.

Anecdotally, a residential street (four blocks long) was freshly paved two days ago in my neighborhood here in Los Angeles. A full resurfacing. I'm not even sure it needed to be resurfaced, but they did it anyway. It's not even in a "nice" neighborhood where you might expect more attentiveness to the roads.

I wonder what to make of the contradiction here.

Not to mention that Amazon drivers are delivering to dozens of stops along their route to you, making them far more efficient compared to each consumer traveling to the store in their own vehicles.

I've been using Macrofactor for many years (after a HN recommendation) and now that you mention it, I've been super happy with the experience and don't detect a whiff of dark patterns, unwarranted tracking, or bad business practices that plague other apps.

The value of tracking my diet and health has been well worth it. I will happily pay their asking price and it's heartening to hear that the founders/owners are committed to good practices.

Side note: I recently switched over fully to the Proton Unlimited ecosystem. Another ethical service that I will happily pay for.

I'm beginning to think that we might be able to turn this shitty ad-industry-lead ship around, folks. Or at least we have strong alternatives these days for the people who care.

Now if I can just get my social groups to use Signal.

It's not. You're putting the cart before the horse (or attributing the horse to the cart?).

Contemporary music began using a click track because it makes techniques like sequencing, non-linear editing in a DAW, and tempo-synced effects far easier to incorporate. Click tracks and rock-solid tempo are also an aesthetic choice.

It's far more difficult to sync these techniques to a wavering tempo, so the trend has been for bands and records to conform to the click as the central authority for the pulse in order to unlock the benefits of the above-mentioned techniques.

The author's product allows users to slave the click track to the drummer's playing (which may now waver). This opens the door to real-time tempo-following by the click. The band can now push/pull the tempo AND use all of cool synchronized techniques in real time.

As a career musician with a heavy interest in electronic music and DSP, hearing the author work through designing the algorithm is interesting to me. They make several good points along the way of how a band relates to the implicit tempo of a performance when the drummer goes "off road" with a flashy fill or a hemiola. I'd never heard it articulated in this way, but it makes sense.

For that reason I like that the author is talking through their trial-and-error process in this way.

I understand the desire to have well-crafted writing, but this example shows sufficient care (for me) and doesn't throw up any red flags and it relates it's content well. It's not Nabokov, you know?

I also say this as someone who has never considered LLM-augmented writing, because I enjoy the process of articulating my thoughts and the creativity that comes with it.

Not once did this pop on my radar as AI-generated. And if it is that’s fine, because it reads extremely clear and coherent to me.

Larger point: I am so sick of HN comment sections filling up with obligatory comments speculating about whether a post is AI-written.

At this point I don’t care. People now write with AI. If the writing is deficient in some way, then comment on that. At least that way the “writer” can steer the writing towards greater coherence.

Very cool! Thanks for sharing.

Yeah. Whenever someone starts explaining to me that "they" - meaning some vague and undefined cartel - want you to (blank) I immediately flag their reasoning as suspect until proven otherwise. More often than not it's indicative of a lack of serious critical thought.

Examples include some version of "They want us to act like slaves" or "They want to control our minds".

More often than not the simplest explanation is short-sighted profit motive, or institutional dysfunction, or multiple parties with conflicting motivations with no central agenda. It's far less likely to be a grand coordinated conspiracy.

> Since 2025, the Chinese government has made “anti-involution” a priority in its economic agenda, introducing policies to strengthen labor protections and curb race-to-the-bottom price wars among e-commerce platforms, solar panel companies, and electric vehicle manufacturers.

I don’t know enough about the Chinese government to know whether I should feel cynical about such resolutions, but as an American it would be so refreshing to hear about this as a platform for improvement. Can’t say I’ve heard anyone on a national level ringing the bell for this kind of reform.