I'm not sure if you already knew this, but this is actually a thing already - it's been called "Botanica" and there are a bunch of cool tracks floating around.

Sample track: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0QCBPnJz5w

Obligatory Ben Levin video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-mK82gLkWE

But yeah, jam bands have really embraced this more than any other category of artist - it's quite common even among low-mid tier jam bands that every single show ends up on Nugs. These bands are often pretty friendly to recordists too (a recent show I was at has two recordings on the IA as well as the Nugs version. Everyone's happy!)

https://lotuseater.epiccoleman.com/

It's a mostly vibe-coded fan site for jamtronica greats Lotus. I wrote/prompted a scraper to pull in setlist data from Nugs and have been having a lot of fun coming up with cool data analysis stuff to do with their sets.

I've seen them 7 times (chump change compared to some fans) and was starting to get certain intuitions about like, "if I hear song X that probably means they won't play song Y." For example, one of my favorite Lotus tunes, It's All Clear To Me Now, seems to fulfill a similar "function" as another song - Did Fatt.

It was pretty cool to see that intuition bear out in the data (they've only ever been played in the same show one time in over 900 total shows).

I've got a bunch of other "data" features sitting in a PR in my Gitlab, need to get around to reviewing and testing it so I can push out the next update. Also have a few other ideas for it, although I think there's probably a point coming fairly soon where there's not really anything left to do.

I posted it on the main Lotus fan group on Facebook. I have a grand total 8 users. I love those users.

The site is nothing crazy, it will never make money or anything - but it's just been a ton of fun to have something cool to hack around on.

I'm essentially the maintainer of a series of accounts for each kid, these days. Woe unto anyone without a password manager!

I guess this is basically how TV worked in the pre-streaming days - the new episode of whatever hot series aired during the prime time slot, and lesser slots were filled with reruns / resyndicated stuff.

This is by far the biggest annoyance with modern TV for me. If I've already decided on something I want to watch, it's obviously great to just be able to navigate to it and put it on on my schedule, to pause it, have no ads, etc.

But sometimes, for better or worse, I just want to plunk down on the couch and turn my brain off, and if I'm in that mode the last thing I want to do is try to find something worth watching on my own steam.

Like, Youtube is great! Yeah, there's a ton of crap, but there's so much on there that would entertain me and be a guilt-free, even edifying use of me time. But having to choose something new every 10-20 minutes? Actively managing a queue while watching stuff? That's - pardon my French - for the birds.

I typically share your mindset, but I can see the appeal. There was something nice about the TV that just, ya know, already had something going when you turned it on. I spent many happy evenings in hazy basement rooms enjoying whatever Adult Swim decided was going to be on the TV that night.

This is a hobby horse of mine to the point that coworkers probably wish I'd just stfu about Minecraft - but holy shit is it crazy how many different things you need to get right to get kids playing together.

I genuinely have no idea how parents without years of "navigating technical bullshit" experience ever manage to make it happen. Juggling Microsoft accounts, Nintendo accounts, menu-diving through one of 37 different account details pages , Xbox accounts, GamePass subscriptions - it's just fucking crazy!

I haven't made one for a few years, though - having a pie in my house is a recipe for me eating 5000 calories of pie and vanilla ice cream over the next few days.

When my grandma died a few years ago, I asked my aunts if I could have one of her pie pans. Apparently none of her other 17 grandkids thought to ask that - so I got all three (philistines!). Those basic metal pans are among my most cherished possessions.

JB: Yeah but guess who did write it, me!

KG: Yeah but did you write this?

JB: Dude, I did, I told you to do the bendy every once in a while!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLvOLjHt4S0

But LLM-aided development is helping me get my hands dirty.

Last weekend, I encountered a bug in my Minecraft server. I run a small modded server for my kids and I to play on, and a contraption I was designing was doing something odd.

I pulled down the mod's codebase, the fabric-api codebase (one of the big modding APIs), and within an hour or so, I had diagnosed the bug and fixed it. Claude was essential in making this possible. Could I have potentially found the bug myself and fixed it? Almost certainly. Would I have bothered? Of course not. I'd have stuck a hopper between the mod block and the chest and just hacked it, and kept playing.

But, in the process of making this fix, and submitting the PR to fabric, I learned things that might make the next diagnosis or tweak that much easier.

Of course it took human judgment to find the bug, characterize it, test it in-game. And look! My first commit (basically fully written by Claude) took the wrong approach! [1]

Through the review process I learned that calling `toStack` wasn't the right approach, and that we should just add a `getMaxStackSize` to `ItemVariantImpl`. I got to read more of the codebase, I took the feedback on board, made a better commit (again, with Claude), and got the PR approved. [2]

They just merged the commit yesterday. Code that I wrote (or asked to have written, if we want to be picky) will end up on thousands of machines. Users will not encounter this issue. The Fabric team got a free bugfix. I learned things.

Now, again - is this a strawman of your point? Probably a little. It's not "vibe coding going straight to production." Review and discernment intervened to polish the commit, expertise of the Fabric devs was needed. Sending the original commit straight to "production" would have been less than ideal. (arguably better than leaving the bug unfixed, though!)

But having an LLM help doesn't have to mean that less understanding and instinct is built up. For this case, and for many other small things I've done, it just removed friction and schlep work that would otherwise have kept me from doing something useful.

This is, in my opinion, a very good thing!

[1]: https://github.com/FabricMC/fabric-api/pull/5220/changes/3e3...

[2]: https://github.com/FabricMC/fabric-api/pull/5220/changes

When I want to dip into political news, I trust the Fifth Column guys to have fairly measured and reasonable takes with a vaguely libertarian bent. I have a handful of other political shows too from various perspectives of the aisle that I'll sometimes tune into when something big seems to be happening, but I generally don't consume much politics.

Also, I'd be remiss not to mention the excellent Knifepoint Horror, whose creator has been delivering exemplary horror short fiction of a very particular style for over a decade now. I always listen to those basically immediately after they come out.

https://archive.org/details/AllArtIsPropagandaCriticalEssays...

that one gave me an actual lol.