I think music is a good example of sometimes you need to not have fun to have fun. Practice isn't really fun, but if you can put up with it you can have a lot of fun. So you can say that the not fun parts are part of the fun parts because it's what gives you the payoff. But when people then go and send you a Suno generated song, and say it's better than yours, it is them devaluing the "not fun" parts you had to put up with. I've had people do similar things to code projects I've done. It's a real buzz kill.

I also really value when musicians critique my songs, even when I feel defensive about it. Because then it's not about them devaluing my time, it's about them helping me grow, and they know how it feels to go through that process.

A lot of our culture is disappearing before our eyes and people are defending it.

I've moved to running Bitwig in an Ubuntu distrobox container. Hope you're enjoying 6, it seems they fixed a lot with the piano roll.

I had to set mouse warping off in my tiling manager for yabridge/wine plugins.

Been thinking of going a bit lighter recently, and also getting a classical.

It's mostly targeted at me, or others that make music, but are not piano players.

There isn't much to show currently, but I have a rhythm generator, and have been working on a chord builder. The main thing that has taken time has been trying to decide which things to add to a user interface to make it worth actually building.

Not everybody is in Star Fleet, so I assume people want the ability to travel the stars and they'd be happy enough scrubbing torpedo tubes.

At least parts of it are "scientific" and "directed," see the Lydian Chromatic concept for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lydian_Chromatic_Concept_of_To...

The first thing many new vegans ask is "what do I eat now?" The replacement food comes first, and beyond hits the mark a lot more than seitan does because we don't culturally eat seitan.

And even more so, I think beyond has made it so an entire generation realized they could go vegan. A black bean burger just never hit the same way.

That the "enlightenment" of Lisp is that you can use functions everywhere. Write macros that look like functions and modify behavior, and build your code as a language.

Things like monads are more on the evolution of functional languages, and I also fall off the bike. It's as difficult as you want it to be, and I find scheme and lisp to be easier high level languages than javascript or python and makes more sense.

The forward and preface to SICP is good reading.

https://mitp-content-server.mit.edu/books/content/sectbyfn/b...

The Dan Friedman books are pretty good in general: "The Little Schemer," and the sequel "The Seasoned Schemer" which are both more "recursion" books. He also has another book "Scheme and the Art of Programming." Which I think is a great comp sci book that's not too difficult and doesn't seem too well known.

How to Design Programs is supposed to be a pretty good comp sci intro:

https://htdp.org/2024-11-6/Book/index.html

Looking more into plugin libraries, a lot of it is based specifically on X, I don't think that's going to be rewritten anytime soon.

I've felt for a while stuck between X and Wayland. Same with Pipewire and Jack/Pulse.

You can practice playing over the changes, or you can go to the bar, watch netflix, or do anything else.

But in 10 years are you going to be able to play over the changes?

If you remove llms from the article everything is still the same.

Now I have no fear of loading random presets.

A layoff killed that goal for the foreseeable future.

Theory has helped me practice like I think you're supposed to. More structured, more analysis. It also tickles the same part of the brain the certain comp sci topics do.

I think it came from wanting to learn how to improv, and then wanting to make my own songs. So I make a few tracks a week, of different genres, depending on what I'm interested in at the time. I've seen improvement, and I take notes about what I learned/what works.

In the process of adding stuff like euclydian sequences, and trying to figure out how to generate melodies. Been considering using something like a simple markov probability from a bunch of jazz standards, but also starting to read more music theory behind it.

It's a programming project but it's directly related to me trying to figure out music. So not a random sequence of notes in scale or not. The idea is more to generate backing tracks or song starters.

There's a big corollary to FOSS and gpl, but a lot of people seem to miss it. This future isn't for our culture, it's for business. And since our culture requires making money to make things adjacent to art, less culture will be made.

A lot of generated music is good enough to wind up in playlists. Lots of live bands already fake it, and lots of music venues have already replaced live music. That doesn't mean music will die, it just means it's harder to discover new music and go see a show.

I think there's some European countries that have some kind of basic income/stipend for artists. If this is the direction of the future we need to ensure something like this exists.

Lots of people don't realize that "natural" can mean pretty much anything that's not produced in a lab.

There is a trend though where some companies include in the nutrition facts the sources of their ingredients. That's how it should be.

In the US you can write "modified food starch" and that can mean a million different things. In Europe they have specific numbers for different types of "modified food starch."