detfalskested

Talk nicely

Amanda Bachman pretends to be the AI friendly tech CEO we all know too well, in A Company Reminder for Everyone to Talk Nicely About the Giant Plagiarism Machine:

I guess I understand. I, too, was once a little skeptical of the Giant Plagiarism Machine™. But that was before I attended The Conference for Big Boy Business Owners™. Here, I learned that my fellow titans of industry have been re-orging to “leverage plagiarism” and “minimize thought-waste.”

(...)

The way I see it, we’re family. It really does disappoint me that so many brilliant colleagues—whose genuine breakthroughs I’ve profited from for years—would be so quick to condemn this newer, stupider way that I and others like me can make money off your life’s work, through stealing.

Iris Meredith on LLMs

Iris Meredith, in Keeping up appearances:

LLMs provide a great deal of opportunities to increase your status and decrease other peoples': a core status marker in the corporate world these days is being "innovative" or "tech forward", which means that loudly and ostentatiously using LLM technology can be an excellent way of building your status in corporate spaces. The converse of this is that you can label LLM sceptics as being "irrational" or "frothing" and tell them that "if they don't use the technology they'll be left behind", which is an excellent way of lowering their status in the eyes of the corporate world that they function in. We've seen exactly the same pattern play out with blockchain and half a hundred other overhyped technologies.

Max Cooper

Last month, on a Sunday afternoon, on the train, on my way back home from the other end of the country, I accidentally discovered that Max Cooper would play a concert the same night in my hometown.

I almost didn't go. But, fortunately, I remembered the promise to myself to go to as many concerts as possible. So I bought a ticket and walked directly from Copenhagen Central Station to the venue. And then I was in for a treat I did not expect: A beautiful, 3 hour marathon of a show.

The Max Cooper live shows are marketed as audio visual experiences, which could easily just be a cliche. I already knew about the audio part – the music. But the visuals blew me away. It was some of the best I've seen in a long time, in the ranks of Moderat and Massive Attack. The setup was rather simple: A projection behind him, another one on a transparent screen in front of him and then a couple more on the walls adjacent to the stage. The effects of the layered projections was stunning.

Max Cooper released his new album, On Being, a week ago. Give it a listen. And if you happen to live near one of the cities remaining on his tour, I strongly suggest you go.

Self hosting the Fediverse

It's amazing times for self hosting the Fediverse.

While I'm not necessarily a big fan of Docker, if you're familiar with docker compose (which in itself of course raises the bar to a certain extend), you can easily spin up things in a matter of hours.

A few weeks ago I was trying out Owncast after dinner, and managed to get things running and start a stream from my webcam the same night.

Earlier this week, I set up GoToSocial along with Pinafore, Semaphore and later Phanpy as frontends for it, before I settled on Elk.

I highly recommend trying this out for yourself if you have the required computer skills. Or even if you dont, but are curious – ask your hacker friends for help. Remember, you can have this running to tinker with, while keeping your main accounts somewhere else that you consider more safe, if that's your worry.

Next up for me is to try out something that offers those sweet, sweet custom emoji reactions.

I'm making a PipeWire matrix mixer

Once in a while, you get an idea for something to build that completely takes over your brain and you can't stop thinking about it.

This one scratches an actual itch I have with my music gear. I believe I have all the pieces of the puzzle, I just need to put it together in the correct way. It's a perfect mix of doing things I'm comfortable with and pushing me into unusual territories.

The Erica Synths Matrix Mixer and Conductive Labs MRCC have been on my wish list for a long time. I'd really like to have these, or something similar, that allows for flexible routing of audio and MIDI.

I have a Bitwig template that takes me a very long way there. But I keep falling into the trap of endless possibilities in DAWs when I open Bitwig. So I'd like to be able to route things around without it.

I have a Soundcraft Signature 12 MTK which gives me a lot of flexibility with regards to sending audio back and forth from/to the computer, but it's huge and doesn't fit into a portable setup that can be thrown into a backpack and taken anywhere. I've also been thinking about getting a 1010music Bluebox because of the portability.

No matter what mixing/routing hardware I have been looking at, I have been seeing limitations. Maybe apart from the Erica Synths Matrix Mixer and the MRCC. But even those have a finite amount of inputs and outputs and are the MRCC is definitely not very portable.

A lot of my gear has USB audio/MIDI. And with PipeWire it's technically super easy to route things around in any way I'd like. I'm generally really impressed with how easy USB audio is on Linux with PipeWire, compared to the horror stories I read of hoops to jump through to get the same results on Windows and Mac. I just didn't find any software on top of PipeWire that solved this issue in a way suiting me.

A few days ago, I had a look at the CLI tools provided by PipeWire and then I realised that making an interface on top of these could give me the matrix mixer I have been dreaming of. The only downside is that it requires a computer to be part of the solution. But it can be a laptop or (probably) even a single-board computer. I can live with that. The huge upside is that if I'm running out of inputs or outputs, I can just add more.

I have a bunch of ideas that will really improve the daily quality of life. From the top of my head:

And further down the line, maybe allow attenuation of links and even hooking audio plugins in somehow.