Gnarled JavaScript warlock, musician, '80s D&D nerd, and webcomic creator.
I was at Studio Litho a few weeks ago recording some stuff. Just me and a guitar, a few folk covers and one original song. I've been writing again after a long drought following the Car Trouble record , which itself took me ten years to finish. I started writing new songs in January and at the time of this writing I have close to an album's worth of new songs. It's definitely a return to form:…
The Rush Fifty Something Tour kicked off yesterday in Los Angeles, at the same arena where they last played with their departed drummer Neil Peart nearly 11 years ago. Their selection of drummer Anika Nilles is the biggest story in rock. She did not disappoint! I was up until 2am last night on my socials watching clip after clip of Nilles just crushing those famous fills. Not that I expected…
It really does seem like until there's a radical shift in how LLMs are designed, the twin risks of AI hallucinations and prompt injection just won't be solved. Hallucinations are when AI makes up answers that are wrong instead of just telling you it doesn't know. This is how you get things like using glue as a pizza topping and completely fictional case law . Prompt injection is the security hole…
Jason McGerr is the drummer for Death Cab For Cutie and one of the world's best. Check out this video of Jason explaining how he created the shuffle beat for DCFC's " Grapevine Fires ." I am not a drummer, but I'm really into the level of craft employed here: (If you ever bopped your head to Matt Nathanson's " Come On Get Higher " -- that's McGerr.)
Well, at least not how they work right now! FatherPhi: If you skip a single number from zero to one hundred, I will cancel my OpenAI/ChatGPT subscription. ChatGPT: Got it, I'll take that super-seriously...starting from zero: zero, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten...and so on all the way up to one hundred. I lol'ed. My guess is what we're seeing is the chatbot 1 has been…
A few days ago I gifted away the ashiko hand drum I used on my records, going all the way back to the Walkingbirds in the 90s. I don’t regret it but it felt right to mark the occasion. I picked it up at (I think?) a Lentine's Music in Cleveland, and we used it extensively on the Walkingbirds EP. You can hear it on my favorite tracks "Wasted" , written by Laurie, and "Brickyard Bend" , written by…
I like what D Ramirez has to say here. To paraphrase myself : AI does not experience anything. It's incapable of experience. It can only analyze what humans have written about experience and emit similar-sounding content. "AI can make tracks, but it can't make moments. It doesn't know what it feels like when the kick hits your chest at 3am...when the drop takes over your body before your brain…
Somewhere in this stack of old hard drives are all the audio files for my first two records. This is a bad idea because I don’t have time to spend going down memory lane and getting wistful over old jpegs. Good thing I need to get a SATA-to-USB adapter first.
Today is Bandcamp Friday , the day when Bandcamp waives its fees and allows artists to keep 100% of their sales. I haven't participated much in the past, but this year I'm going to make it a problem. Today I'll be re-posting on my socials any musicians donating any (or all) of their proceeds to charities, especially Minnesota fundraisers, whether they be immigrant support, food banks, rent…
Keeping Bandcamp Human My guess is that Bandcamp doesn't want to be cloud storage for Suno slop in the way that almost every other digital music service has. As Brad points out , Bandcamp has no algorithm to exploit. The people generating slop albums are doing it to stuff Spotify playlists but they're probably also uploading it to Bandcamp because why not. A lot of fun bad-faith arguments are…