Notes to my younger and older self. I'm thinking through things like technology, music, and what it means to live a good life . You're welcome to read along. My name is Geffrey van der Bos.
Taste is trending in Silicon Valley. Usually, taste is part of aesthetics and is about art and beauty. But Silicon Valley uses a broader definition. They include cultural awareness and understanding of good product design. It’s an interesting development. So, I thought to explore it. California likes this concept because taste is an excellent differentiator, especially when artificial intelligence…
Isn’t it odd we mention our profession when describing ourselves? I get it, for much of history our identity and labor were inseparable. Telling someone you are ‘the blacksmith’ said who you were. Your skills were your survival and your social role. Nowadays, it has become a shorthand to signal status. “I’m the director of [..]” doesn’t tell me anything about you as a person. A shift toward…
AI-generated music is here to stay, whether we like it or not. So let’s keep an open mind and explore what lies ahead. I will not cover copyright or AI ethics or AI-assisted music production. Nor the criminal acts that are necessary to create the technology. It is an ethnocentric (and arguably capitalist) view that a recorded song is the only expression of music. There are many cultures that…
This manifesto is a declaration of my commitment to curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge. Or: "AI is making me dumber so fuck that." I won’t let tools do my thinking. Cognitive offloading sounds like efficiency. It isn’t. It’s borrowing against your own intelligence, and the interest compounds. I build understanding, not bookmarks. "I know where to find it" is not the same as knowing. Technology…
I read each sentence twice until the wordy task description clicked. Then I wondered: is music hurting my understanding of what I read? Being a curious boy, I decided to investigate. I pulled up my trusty research tools and went to theory town. "How does background music impact my brain?" I asked in science speech. Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of research on this. Mozart–Schmozart You might have…
I sat down on my comfy chair and put on Ne Obliviscaris's Urn album. "Something is off with my speakers", I thought a few minutes in. I tried adjusting the settings on my amp. Looked at the speaker position in the room. Nothing was off, yet it didn't sound right. The music stuck to the speakers. The double bass was overpowering the guitars. The vocals should stay the same volume, no matter the…
⚠️ This article includes interactive elements. View the full experience on the site . I’m growing more concerned about privacy and security. Every conglomerate trains their AI models on your information. Each tiny corner on the web is scraped. It's mental. Everything Ever since social media and the advertisement business model the internet turned dystopian. They've started tracking everything .…
It's been years since you bought Things 3. You used it a lot. Then a bit less. Now, it's decoration on your Home Screen. You watched YouTubers glorify Notion. Databases , slash commands , and workflows galore! You were hooked, yet still got nothing done. Then you read the essay . That was it! The truth! “Software companies are selling you access to your own data!”. Luckily, the essayist had the…
⚠️ This article includes interactive elements. View the full experience on the site . I thought music theory was complicated. I was wrong. I'm unsure whether it is snobbery or I've just never been taught 'the right way'. Regardless, here's how I made sense of it. Melody and harmony in music starts with the distance between notes (interval). I am going to outright skip meter and rhythm for this…
Humans have a tendency to adapt to positive or negative life changes. Always returning to their baseline happiness. This tendency—what Brickman and Campbell (1971) call hedonic adaptation —explains why the joy of a new purchase, promotion, or achievement often fades surprisingly quickly. As I write this, I have this nagging thought that “I should move closer to a city; that’ll make me happier.”…
Everyone intuitively knows what music is. But when you ask them to define it… well, it is really hard to pin down one definitive answer. Philosophers and scientists have been racking their brains on this for ages. Some have tried to boil it down to mere physics: organized sound. Other thinkers have been questioning the whole idea of a definition for music itself. So, where does that leave us? The…
When my Spotify account glitched and my library showed up empty, I became very aware of the fact my 'music collection' was vendor locked. To lose the 1200 (!) albums I've saved over the years, was frightening to say the least. Luckily, under some regulations, Spotify is forced to have your information exportable. Grab it under the Download your data heading in your Spotify privacy settings. After…