rgbivvv.net

Stream of consciousness on the web. A place for writing and other oddments. Subscribe to RSS here. Happy reading!

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Still can't decide if I'll regret using AI to code or not...

• There's a big chance that at some point I stop understanding my codebase
• I likely will not learn as much because I'm not doing everything by hand
• It feels like I'm robbing myself to some extent
• Just a general "AI bad" feeling??

But then there's positives to consider as well...

• The model will likely take a more efficient approach than I will (especially if I'm building something I never have before)
• Lots of saved time in general (debugging, raw code writing)
• I can obviously have the model guide me through the whole building process instead of literally only prompting it

Just dunno yet. It's worth noting that I have not used AI to write slogger at all.

Fixed a bug with post permalinks in slogger a couple days ago.

Just found out about Japanese instrumental rock band toe, really really awesome stuff. Another great case to convince me that I should stop stressing about writing lyrics all the time :)

(They also make me really glad that I made the choice to purchase a telecaster :D)

Road trip coming up in about a week. Excited for this one, lots of time to chill and listen to music. I do this trip every year for the holidays, it's always fun to see the sunrise and sunset at the same time every time I do it. Kind of like watching a movie where the whole thing is a driving montage. Very grounding stuff. I love road trips.

I'm really wanting to make a self-hosted Pinterest/Are.na clone and an accompanying browser extension. It would focus on saving:

• Images
• Videos
• Webpages (in an archive.org fashion
• Textual notes (with Markdown support because Markdown rules)

I have some ideas for architecture and whatnot. It would be nice to be able to spin up the service in a Docker container. Also, SQLite would be nice to implement as a backend database since it's supposed to be supported until the year 2050. Despite this, items that are saved should be easily accessible and transferrable.

As for features, here are some ideas:

• LOTS of keyboard shortcuts
• Easy, intuitive customization using CSS
• The initial design should be boring in a benficial way.
• Have a very simple but very satisfying and fast mobile interface for easy gathering and recording
• The application would be for one user only
• All in all, I want this application to be a tool. It should be a means to an end, which is to inspire creation and encourage real-world experiences

I really hope I can get some version of this working. Would be really fun and cool for personal web curation and inspiration.

Turns out the sticky note on laptop todo method rules

Playing around with BLE stuff with an ESP32. These things are really nifty. I've heard you can do all sorts of recon with them, as well as RF fuzzing.

The more I am able to notice, the more grateful I can be.

Great idea on "attribution" from nnnnnnnn.co. Can help to identify productive patterns for creativity and thinking.

The blue hour was truly blue today. All the yellow lights of buildings appeared very stark and golden.

Hello!! New week coming up. Thankful.

This is perhaps one of the most stark reminders that much of the craziness and hate and vitriol that we experience online is manufactured to exploit regluar people.

Morningtime. Loving this beautiful, electric shade of blue.

Excited to fly tomorrow :)

I think that one of the best missions one can have in life is to increase the amount of people and things that one can love.

Can't tell if there's a lot of stuff going on or if I am ill-equipped to handle a normal amount of stuff going on.

It is good to feel, even if you feel a lot sometimes. That is the biggest sign that you are alive.

Listened to half of this album on a run yesterday. It was a fantastic little compilation. If the music of the Vince Guaraldi trio is the soundtrack of the lives of the children in the Peanuts universe, perhaps this is the soundtrack of the lives of the adults.

Yesterday, I noticed the varying tones of brown in the leaves on the ground. They are quite beautiful. Copper, peanut butter, bronze, chocolate, gold, banana, and more.

I have been loving this album today. Lots of bleepy and bloopy sounds. Very easy and entertaining listening. Listen here.

Most of the tracks are under 2 minutes. It reminds me a lot of the naran ratan record, "trees, etc.".

Just found out about ulauncher, this thing rules :D

Something that I've often seen in the music production community is the taping over of logos on effects pedals. The first time I saw this, I assumed that it was done to hide the effects that the artist was using, or to hide their "secret sauce". The more time that has gone on, however, I have realized that artists often do this because they find certain gear designs to be distracting.

For instance, if one has a piece of audio gear that is decorated with eye-catching text and/or images, an artist may choose to cover that design up with masking tape to keep themselves focused on the ultimate goal of their artistry: to make interesting sounds. (These choices are, of course, up to the discretion of the user of the tool.)

A true tool does not detract or distract from its true utility or purpose. It is our job to recognize when a tool is drawing attention to itself, rather than the task the tool was designed for. Would a hammer be more or less useful if it had a dragon burned into its handle? Would a screwdriver be more or less useful if it projected movies out of its tip?

The more that I have adopted this mindset, the more that I have noticed distracting design patterns not just in my own audio gear, but in the design and configuration of my digital devices.

Digital devices and applications, especially in the smartphones category, are often marketed as tools to help us to "save time" or "supercharge our productivity". However, it is increasingly apparent that large corporations have a growing incentive to increase user engagement with their products in the name of profit.

The prime exmaple of this is social media, which has devolved into a nearly vampiric system in which users are subliminally coerced into spending obscene amounts of time consuming content.

It is our job as consumers to effectively "tape over the logos" of our digital tools. What bloat can we cut from our digital lives? Do we really need a widget on our homescreen that shows us tweets? Do we really need notifications for this application? Do we really need email updates weekly?

The more we implement essentialism into the way we use modern technology, the more that technology will serve us. Not the other way around.

Northern lights from last night. A very surreal sight. It almost looked like a localized sunset.

Also, saw some deer. These ones were especially bold, closest I've ever been to a deer. Beautiful animals. There must have been 20 of them wandering around.

Time is the original unrenewable resource.

Left behind in the morning.

Running time again! A bit chilly out.

Having loads of fun with VCV rack. The workflow is super convenient because I can pop it open any time and work through my AirPods or my AT headphones. It's really easy to explore and there are so many fantastic and free modules to choose from.

Many of these models are digital emulations of real synthesizer modules. For example, the Audible Instruments Modal Synthesizer is a direct emulation of the Mutable Instruments Elements. Some of these emulated modules are no longer in physical prouduction, so that's pretty cool too.

Here is a sample patch that I put together tonight, I'm actually listening to it right now :). There are three main sound sources:

1. An Audible Instruments Macro Oscillator 2 whose morph (brightness) and timbre (chord inversion) and frequency modulation (vibrato) are all being modulated by three LFOs from the AS TriLFO. The oscillator is then patched into a stereo delay module which gives the synth lots of width and additional pitch modulation.

2. Another Macro Oscillator which is being modulated in the same way as the first, but just an octave higher and with all of its LFOs inverted.

3. A BogAudio FM-OP which is being triggered semi-randomly at semi-random pitches by a clock generator. The oscillator is patched into the (wonderful) Valley Plateau Stereo Reverb with some pitch modulation. I am still figuring out how to use clocks, sequencers, atenuverters, and scale quantizers so it's likely I'm doing something really weird with the way I'm triggering notes in the oscillators lol. I also modulated the BPM of the clock generator with one of the slow LFOs for extra melody variation.

All three sound sources are patched into a mixer for easy balancing and panning. Here is a picture of the patch and a sample that I recorded:

I'm really excited to learn new techniques and methods, especially ones incorporating external audio sources and/or MIDI inputs. There's so many possiblities here.

Running timeeeeeee

Gave up on pure data for now and gave VCV rack a go (I'm glad I did). It's much more my speed and has a much friendlier learning curve. I was also very pleased to find out that the software was supported on Linux.

There are so many great free modules to choose from!! Hoping to get some sample work out soon.

Wonderful take on artificial intelligence from filmmaker Justine Bateman. Taken from this article from the Guardian (emphasis added):

Generative AI, says film-maker and writer Justine Bateman, "is one of the worst ideas society has ever come up with". She says she despises how it incapacitates us. "They're trying to convince people they can't do the things they've been doing easily for years -- to write emails, to write a presentation. Your daughter wants you to make up a bedtime story about puppies -- to write that for you." We will get to the point, she says with a grim laugh, "that you will essentially become just a skin bag of organs and bones, nothing else. You won't know anything and you will be told repeatedly that you can't do it, which is the opposite of what life has to offer. Capitulating all kinds of decisions like where to go on vacation, what to wear today, who to date, what to eat. People are already doing this. You won't have to process grief, because you'll have uploaded photos and voice messages from your mother who just died, and then she can talk to you via AI video call every day. One of the ways it's going to destroy humans, long before there's a nuclear disaster, is going to be the emotional hollowing-out of people."

Artificial intelligence is marketed as this means to "save time." I don't deny the usefulness of A.I. to help us to learn and gain knowledge. But at the end of the day, what are we "saving" all this time for? The processes of struggling and making and experiencing are the quintessence of life. What are you saving yourself from? Living?

Bio professor just said "Bed Bath & Beyond" with the same cadence as "to infinity and beyond!!" I think I'm going to adopt that

More experimenting and planning for the guitar pedal patch bay. We played around with our current patch bay and figured that the ideal setup would be paired with a mixer to adjust levels/tone. This would allow for maximum flexibility for multiple sound sources and outputs.

Here is a picture of our experimentation setup:

First, we used a splitter 1/4th" cable to self oscillate a ProCo RAT distortion pedal. We could adjust the pitch of the feedback tone using the volume control. This was later routed into a DigiTech Polara on shimmer setting (top left).

Our other sound sources came from electric guitar samples captured on an EHX Super Ego and a Montreal Assembly Count to Five.

We then grabbed a 3 channel mixer pedal to adjust levels for our 3 sound sources, and plugged the outpit of the mixer into our amplifier.

Got some really cool sounds from that alone. I'm excited to move forward with the construction of the patch bay. It's going to have a total of 20 1/4th" jacks (10 on each side) each with a corresponding 1/8th" jack for easy routing/patching. We've nicknamed it "the subway sandwich". :)

Heres a small sample from the setup pictured above:

More updates to follow soon!

Recently came into posession of a little photo scanner. Having lots of fun with it. Here is a scan of several sheets of colored people stacked on one another.

It's been getting dark real early here. Hopefully this piece can bring you a little bit of sunshine.

2.5 hours of sleep already catching up w me... :O

Paul Ehrlich:

The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts.

For quiet moments. "Os Justi" composed by Anton Bruckner.

In a biology class, proffessor asks the class to answer this question:

Why are there so many different types of things?

I'm just so glad that there are so many different types of things. So many universes to explore while we are in this life. :)

I know the feeling...
Losing breath, time, and patience.
Dawn is coming soon!

(Written for a friend going through a tough time.)

What a lovely shade of green. I've only seen this elevator with its doors open one or two times. Kind of feels like seeing a whale when it opens up on you like that.

Chatting with a friend about building a guitar pedal patch bay. Like imagine two Fairfield Circuitry PB&J's smashed together.

Would be really cool for my ambient board :)

Time to go running at night :D

"Le Premier Chagrin" by Daniel Ridgway Knight (1892, oil on canvas).

I have always loved this painting ever since I saw it a few years ago. There's something so relatable in the face of the girl with the basket -- the feeling of being young and witnessing true pain in a close friend. You want to help or do something, and you wonder if what you are doing is enough.

The painting touches me each time I view it.

Smiling, in pictures
Laughing at dinner
Hugging and crying
The stillness in the silence
Breathing in the cold

semicolons speak
crown the pale twisting angles
of the things I try

Dotted Line

Following the interstate
Or highway 89
6 or 7 headlights on
Still makes a dotted line
They think they are alone
Both in front and behind
So I look at them and laugh
And I cry at the same time

Writing down a few sites that I want to check out later:

• https://antisoftware.club/
• https://musicforprogramming.net/latest/
• https://wwwwwwwww.jodi.org/
• https://entertrained.app/

trees and moon. thank you world.

Went up and finally drove the canyone for the first time in a while. It was very vey refreshing, as usual. I'm always super surprised how grounded I feel out there amongst the trees and the deer and the water and the horses.

One thing that I think that we have lost as modern humans is the practice of feeling small and powerless. We are given the illusion by our numerous modern conveniences that we have some significance and strength on this earth. It's when we take the time to visit our true origins in nature that we can witness our weakness and reset our perspective.

Also, there are whole universes hidden in everything around us! You will find what you look for. Don't get trapped in your own head.

added a RSS feed feature to slogger. It's probably a little janky but it will do for now. Not sure whether I want to add any other new features yet. Might just restructure the code so that features are easier to add later if I need them.

Even light has to travelt to go somewhere. What makes you expect that you are exempt from journeys?

Just bought a foldable bluetooth keyboard for writing. Gonna keep it in my satchel for easy writing :)

happy halloween!!

Fall and winter bloom in their own way.

Decomposition: Fox on a Highway by Saapato. Good album, listen here

Also I love that album art :) so pretty

tall, the willow watched
words un-uttered in the loam
one million voices

i'm here, met again
in shadows of underbrush
in the dead evening

been really into nighttime, it's definitely one of my favorite times

husband and wife

seven thirty nine
floating down the interstate
the headlights are eyes

so enthralled in it all
that sometimes i'm losing track,
forgetting to breathe

thoughts fly day by day
the minutes like a river
weeks like fires burning

I'm at s restaurant and this guy is on a (first?) date and he's explaining what Clash of Clans is to his date...

Want some food? Are your regular meals getting you down? Look no further! Try NIST's "Typical Diet." It has all the goodies you could ever need in "two packets" of "freeze dried homogenate of mixed foods"! By the product here while supplies last for our famous price of $901.00. That's right, just 900 and 1 dollar more and this scrumptious feast could be yours. Order now!

Poor little downed beautiful bee. Take care little guy.

I wonder when the first big snow is going to hit. I need to get up into the mountains again before everything gets snowed over.

Created a repo for slogger! Yippee!

Very cold morning this morning, around 29 degrees. The apartment was really chilly so I started up the heater. It was fun to smell the stuff getting burned in there for the first time this year.