iainctduncan

Do the masters. None of us know what the hell is going to happen with coding as a job right now, but a graduate degree carries weight well outside its narrow area. If coding goes to complete shit and you're in or done school, you'll be in a great position in two years to pivot into something else for a PhD. If you're just working, well you're just another layoff.

Many aspiring writers (perhaps most?) love the idea of having written, not so much the work of actually writing.

I think we are going to see a lot of programmers quitting the biz in the next couple of years. Everyone talks about the increased pressure, stress, and monotony of grinding with LLMs, and individual coders aren't seeing the benefit.

Burning out to grind out tons of code - for which you get paid no extra above your salary - is not a net win for coders. It's only a net win for the employers and it's turning coders into serfs. People are going to get wise and realize the electricians have a way better deal right now. This is no longer a nice way to earn money for a 20 to 40 year career.

Some of this is sensible. The copyright authority (can't recall right this moment what it is called in the US) has said only works by human beings are copyrightable. A good argument is that therefore there is no reason to pay royalties on AI generated work as it is the equivalent to public domain.

Take away the attraction to the grifters and you reduce the issue.

Of course this does not eliminate the problem of the streaming platforms tolertating AI generated work so that they do not need to pay as much out for your subscription fee.

Personally, if there were a decent Spotify alternative that had a zero tolerance to gen AI policy, I'd switch without a second thought.

After 30 years I've made thousands! Of course, the collection of instruments and their respective value goes up on the same line, sooo.... ;-)

The most annoying part is having to declare everything properly on the tax returns even when its peanuts. sigh.

I teach some music private lessons and play jazz gigs. An easy side hustle that should require not more than 10 years of work for a couple of hours a day to qualify if you apply yourself. You could be a hundredaire! :-)

"Jazz Musician": someone who puts a $10000 horn in a $1000 car to play a $100 gig

Of course it's ruining skills. Anyone who has a really well honed mental skill knows that we get rusty really damned fast (e.g. musician at a professional musician level, which happens to be my reference point). You keep shedding, you stay sharp. You take more than a week off, it's going downhill.

There's no way this isn't happening with other skills. No goddamned way. Anyone who tells you otherwise is grifting.

This is a weird title, because what is a perfect shuffle? The word shuffle does not necessary imply a rifle shuffle, and does perfect mean "it mixes the cards well" or is it meaning "cards go down left-right-left-right". It the later, then "perfect" shuffles don't randomize at all, as evidenced by the fact that 8 faros return the deck to order consistently.

I can do this when in shape, but like most mortal sleight-of-hand practitioners, only with in-hand faros. Actual table faros, what most people are thinking of with a rifle, are the domain of very very few, and even fewer can get that to a point of consistency. In hand faros are not impossible given fresh cards and enough practice.

nope, it's an old man yelling get off my lawn. And as a fellow old person with an open source lawn, I 100% sympathize.

My lawn == I'm not wasting any of my dwindling old man time on bullshit people vomit out. You want to do that, you fork and leave me out.

This is fantastic. There is a shortage of places that can press vinyl, making it very difficult to start an indy label. Vinyl (believe it or not) is going up in sales, many young people want to own a physical product of music, even if they don't have turntables. It's a way to support acts. Selling vinyl is thus one of the ways indy acts and labels can actually make money.

Is there a performative and marketing element? sure. But that's the music world, a great deal is performative. We have depended on patrons who want to support the arts and be seen supporting the arts for time immemorial.

Clippy, that cute little crack dealer from the 90's!

What strikes me about the post is that it goes to great lengths to talk about proper statistical methods, but then is written in the most clearly biased language ("what stupid AI haters get wrong etc). If you want people to take your study seriously, why wreck it by coming across with such a strong prior bias? I stopped reading...

You specifically brought up "scheduling tasks". There is a JS task scheduler, but it comes with a caveat - the scheduled timing is accurate but the time of executing is not accurate because it runs in the UI thread. Hence my comment.

If you want to schedule tasks in Max accurately with code, you can either use Max, C extensions, or my extension.

yes, you can do patcher scripting from S4M as well as you can easily send messages to named objects, which is all you need in order to be able to do that. That is how max patching works - whether you do it in the GUI, JS, or messages to the patcher, the whole thing is just objects sending messages to other objects, and the patch is just a connected graph of references of instantiated objects. If you send message to a thispatcher object, you achieve the same thing under the hood as manipulating the GUI or going through JS. You can read about it if interested in the Max SDK documentation and in the Cipriani & Giri books on thispatching.

Doing interrupt level scripting in it works just fine - lots of people have done it in C, C++, Scheme, and other extensions. I take it on stages and have produced music with it extensively. Scheme for Max is written using all the same C primitives from the Max SDK that the other Max sequencing options use and has been load and timing testing exhaustively.

I'm currently a PhD candidate in it, have previously used Csound, SuperCollider, Max, Pd, Common Music, and others, and have published/presented at conference on this topic. Of everything I've tried, I prefer working in Scheme in Max over other options. It is definitely practical and accurate. (Though in Scheme in Pd has soe nice features too!)

There's a big caveat there though that is widely misunderstood. Max has separate scheduler and UI threads. JS only runs in the UI thread, and thus cannot be used for reliable timing tasks - timing will seem to be ok until there is load and than the UI thread timing is out the window.

One of the main reasons I wrote Scheme for Max (S4M) was to enable tightly timed scripting. You can pick which thread an S4M instance runs in, and each instance is totally isolated, which is very different model from the Max js objects (including the new V8) one. Those are global and only in the UI thread. S4M works very well for this, I use it in Max for Live and can get it synchronized perfectly underload with other sequencers.

I started scripting max with JS and built Scheme for Max after banging into its limitations. My typical workflow is a mix of Max, Csound in Max, Gen and Scheme, with the fast majority of the work happening in Scheme.

For people into this sort of thing, another option is using my foss Max extension, Scheme for Max, to script Live through the live API using Scheme. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0sKBA-Pv2c&t=1s

The live object model is MUCH nicer to use in a lisp, as basically you do everything by making dynamic lists to represent what you want to access! There are examples in the Scheme for Max help file.

(Also, Scheme for Max can run in the scheduler thread, unlike JS in Max. Though of course calls to the Live API are deferred to the lower priority thread anyway)

Yeah, that was what got me into Live in the first place! Writing custom control surfaces in python from the reverse engineered stuff.

Nice to see they have put out options they will officially support though. I do admire that instead of saying "no you can't" they just said "we know those open python example scripts our there and we won't comment on them". :-)

I wonder how many of the responses here bifurcate by age. The post resonates with me, but I am now in my early fifties. When I was in my 20's and 30's, I would have happily chased rabbits down all those holes, but now that time seems so brutally finite, I feel that anything encouring me to spend time on stuff other than what really matters is a strong negative. (Where "what matters" includes work, family, friends, and recreation).

When friends start dying within 10 years of your age, it's a hell of a wake up.

"I wish I'd made more throw away apps I never use" ... said no one on their death bed, ever.

Lots of "but I don't have those friends" replies here....

..which is only going to get worse the more you rely on a statisical model for things instead of talking to people.

Spotify would love to have you listen to AI music... it means they can make it internally and pay no royalties on it all all.

Interesting, techno/trance producer BT was talking about this like 5 years ago. Very smart guy.

Nice to see that, after all these years, "car commercial techno" is still a thing.

Man, I miss the 90's. Best decade for electronic music ever.

Strange that the post makes no mention of the Little Schemer series, because teaching you to "think Scheme" is exactly what those books do. Some people are put off by the weird style (combination of children's book visuals and socratic logic problem presentation), but they work!

You don't. Customers who need it don't buy from solopreneurs. And if they did, they wouldn't expect it.

This is how all good comedians work. It really works! If you write 10 bad jokes a day, in a year you are almost certain to have three good minutes.

people who don't read articles make really silly comments about them

Serious question, is there any advantage to Zed if one does not use LLM assisted coding?

And of course anyone involved in fraud, whether legal or illegal - and by that token anyone selling services to help fight fraud. Infosec companies are loving this period.

Another generous gift to the ransomware and fraud "industries".

Grifters' gonna grift. The streaming indy pop world is toast.

On the other hand, this does seem to be rekindling, at least somewhat, an interest in people going to see small shows of real people making music. Which was historically what music was about for the vast majority of our human history. Mass market pop as a viable business was a particularly 20th century anomaly.

And oddly, in people buying real vinyl by real people.

I did similar stuff for many years (and sometimes still do). By far the most effective was going and meeting people in adjacent or similar fields and making sure they knew about me.

My favourite was helping scientists - not the highest paying gigs, but the most interesting work and sometimes it led to great ongoing relationships as their go to tech person.

I would absolutely not offer freebies. That telegraphs desperation. Instead, offer a free initial consultation for a 1 hour meeting, and after that, they go into paid discovery at a lower rate than your full rate, out of which they get a technical persons documentation of the problem to solve. This approach definitely worked the best for me in the long run.