I enjoy trying to get the maximal number of pieces from the log. My record is 16. The game is slightly annoying about forcing a rotate when i'm trying to shave thinner sections out of the log, so it's somewhat constrained.
Do you have much experience reading musical notation?
I've found that engineer types tend to immediately bristle at the weird parts of how notes are named because the system seems really kludgy until you realize that there's actually a utility in the weirdness - namely, that scale patterns look roughly similar in any given key and so sight reading is counterintuitively easier with the current system than it would be in a system which assigned a different position on the staff (or a different name) to each note.
Furthermore - we have seven note names because there are seven notes in the major scale, so changing this count would definitely not make sense.
To be clear there are definitely warts in the current system, lots of confusing stuff around enharmonics. But there's definitely babies in the bathwater and any alternate system would not want to toss them out.
> Dynamically typed languages like Ruby create a huge surface area for type slop for LLMs, and why I would not recommend using a dynamically typed language for vibe coding.
I totally understand this, and have seen the problems firsthand. But Elixir / Phoenix / LiveView, along with Tidewave, have become my favorite "vibe slop stack." Just so quick and easy, and the LLM seems to get things right quite often.
All kinds of random stuff really, but to filter it down to only the noteworthy ones:
Tuber[0] - this is my favorite, use it multiple times a week. It's just a little CLI wrapper around yt-dlp for my most common use cases - downloading the video, or the audio, or the subs. And then, if you've got the Claude CLI installed, it can also shoot the subs through Claude for a summary. I use it all the time, it's a great little thing!
Scrapio[1] - this is really specific but I was so pleased with how it turned out. You give it a list of "hacks" ("mods" for Super Mario World) and it goes out to SMWCentral, grabs each of the patch files, and patches a clean ROM. I think I only used it twice but it was just a nice way to chew through a list of hacks and get a few ROMs ready, made quick work of something that would have otherwise taken a bunch of annoying schlep work.
Lotus Eater[2] - calling this a tool is a bit undersell, but I'm still really pleased with it. It's a fan site for jamtronica greats Lotus that scrapes Nugs.net for setlist data and lets you do some mildly interesting analysis on things like song frequency and co-occurrence. Also has a per-user "shows I've attended" thing, Setlist Bingo. It's been fun to hack on.
Lastly, less a tool, more just a toy: last week Google released their Magenta model for doing live music generation. I thought it was really neat, and it's open source, so I opened it up with Claude, and after a few passes and some extremely annoying toolchain issues, I was able to add a spectrograph which does key / chord analysis to the "Collider" app, so you get a live readout of "what the band is playing" and you can pull out your guitar or whatever and join the jam with some info at your disposal. It's the kind of thing that would have taken way too much effort to be worthwhile in the past, but with AI, it's a really neat result of a fun night of weekend hacking. See the README I added in my fork for a screenshot:[3]
Bandlab is decent enough for this, yeah. It's not "version control" in the way that programmers are used to, not by any means. More like "Google Docs" but for a DAW session. Certainly good enough for "my brother who plays keys lives in a different city but we want to collaborate on something".
I haven't set up my own stack for music, so I'm just guessing tbh, but administering Jellyfin has been completely painless. Let Claude write a docker compose file, toss it on the server, haven't had to think about it again. I bet there's something equally good out there for music management.
> Just as a completely random example, you could go out, record noises your environment (even if it's just with the smartphone), grab interesting parts, chop them up, process them and turn them into unique new instruments.
I'm not sure if you already knew this, but this is actually a thing already - it's been called "Botanica" and there are a bunch of cool tracks floating around.
It's not just a subscription thing, you can purchase individual shows ala bandcamp too.
But yeah, jam bands have really embraced this more than any other category of artist - it's quite common even among low-mid tier jam bands that every single show ends up on Nugs. These bands are often pretty friendly to recordists too (a recent show I was at has two recordings on the IA as well as the Nugs version. Everyone's happy!)
It's a mostly vibe-coded fan site for jamtronica greats Lotus. I wrote/prompted a scraper to pull in setlist data from Nugs and have been having a lot of fun coming up with cool data analysis stuff to do with their sets.
I've seen them 7 times (chump change compared to some fans) and was starting to get certain intuitions about like, "if I hear song X that probably means they won't play song Y." For example, one of my favorite Lotus tunes, It's All Clear To Me Now, seems to fulfill a similar "function" as another song - Did Fatt.
It was pretty cool to see that intuition bear out in the data (they've only ever been played in the same show one time in over 900 total shows).
I've got a bunch of other "data" features sitting in a PR in my Gitlab, need to get around to reviewing and testing it so I can push out the next update. Also have a few other ideas for it, although I think there's probably a point coming fairly soon where there's not really anything left to do.
I posted it on the main Lotus fan group on Facebook. I have a grand total 8 users. I love those users.
The site is nothing crazy, it will never make money or anything - but it's just been a ton of fun to have something cool to hack around on.
I like that idea, almost like a prioritized queue of content - show me the stuff I'm sure to want to see first, and then just gimme whatever. In the context of NPR, the "stuff I'm sure to want to see" is probably just "the news." But maybe other platforms / distribution channels would have a more specific notion of what deserves my attention first.
I guess this is basically how TV worked in the pre-streaming days - the new episode of whatever hot series aired during the prime time slot, and lesser slots were filled with reruns / resyndicated stuff.
> I chalk it up to overwhelming choices. Sometimes I just want to watch something but don't want to go through dozens of options and having decision anxiety.
This is by far the biggest annoyance with modern TV for me. If I've already decided on something I want to watch, it's obviously great to just be able to navigate to it and put it on on my schedule, to pause it, have no ads, etc.
But sometimes, for better or worse, I just want to plunk down on the couch and turn my brain off, and if I'm in that mode the last thing I want to do is try to find something worth watching on my own steam.
Like, Youtube is great! Yeah, there's a ton of crap, but there's so much on there that would entertain me and be a guilt-free, even edifying use of me time. But having to choose something new every 10-20 minutes? Actively managing a queue while watching stuff? That's - pardon my French - for the birds.
This is super cool, I love the aesthetic. The biggest thing I want out of something like this is curation (and it seems like there's at least some degree of that happening here among the various categories).
Sometimes, it's nice to just sit down and watch something without needing to make repeated decisions about what's on.
I typically share your mindset, but I can see the appeal. There was something nice about the TV that just, ya know, already had something going when you turned it on. I spent many happy evenings in hazy basement rooms enjoying whatever Adult Swim decided was going to be on the TV that night.
> Granting kids access to our own minercraft servers: My god, I felt dirty about what the other parents had to go through to enable that.
This is a hobby horse of mine to the point that coworkers probably wish I'd just stfu about Minecraft - but holy shit is it crazy how many different things you need to get right to get kids playing together.
I genuinely have no idea how parents without years of "navigating technical bullshit" experience ever manage to make it happen. Juggling Microsoft accounts, Nintendo accounts, menu-diving through one of 37 different account details pages , Xbox accounts, GamePass subscriptions - it's just fucking crazy!
My grandma made Platonically Ideal Pies, and I took up the art years ago. Mine, if I say so myself, are quite good, given that with Grandma's example I know what I'm shooting for.
I haven't made one for a few years, though - having a pie in my house is a recipe for me eating 5000 calories of pie and vanilla ice cream over the next few days.
When my grandma died a few years ago, I asked my aunts if I could have one of her pie pans. Apparently none of her other 17 grandkids thought to ask that - so I got all three (philistines!). Those basic metal pans are among my most cherished possessions.
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