I’m buying a trumpet.
Up your oil chutes, robots.
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In our world of music and noise, the moment someone first wired up voltage to the coil of a speaker cone, we effectively removed all limits on sound. For the first time we were no longer limited to the noise made by physical things. Literally all sound was possible.
Did this lead to some sort of singularity where all sound was all sound, no one cared to distinguish one from another, and music was never the same? No. Did it even spell the doom of physical instruments that, on every level, were now superfluous? Not even. I’m reminded of a quote by Stephen Wright: “You can’t have everything. Where would you put it?!” You can’t have all sound or an everything sound machine. How would you make sense of it?
The fact is, Mario in Elden Ring is a funny meme for 5 seconds but is a really shitty game no one would want to play. People seem to look at a widening of possibilities and think “everything is possible!” Bullshit. Were you able to do all the possible things before? What makes you think you’ll be able to do them now that there are exponentially more available?
As always, our experiences are ultimately limited to the time we have on the planet. We get to decide how we spend that time. And generally, the more time we spend doing things we find worth-while the better. Playing Pokemon as if it’s Minecraft would not qualify for most of us. The thing that makes Pokemon or Minecraft (or Mario or Elden Ring or…) worth while is the hard work spent crafting the specific design, constraints, and tradeoffs built into those experiences. It’s someone’s effort we enjoy, not a random madlib of nouns, verbs, and adjectives.
Remember, synthesis itself started as a purely modular endeavor. But it never took off until those infinite possibilities were hard-wired down to just a limited few in the form of the minimoog. Even today, when modular is popular on levels never seen in its past, it’s still a tiny fraction of the synth scene, which is a fraction of the electronic music scene, which is a fraction of the music industry, which is a fraction of the things we do with sound, which — as has been said — has had all its limits removed for a touch over a century now.
“Everything is possible” doesn’t mean “everything is worth the time”. Our lives have always been limited to “That small slice of the possible we have time for.” That “the possible” has grown doesn’t really change much. The basic rules still apply: try to survive, then have the best time doing it.
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yikes. have you used Schwung? it has a save state buffer like elektrons. it has an incredible ecosystem of one click install plug-ins. it has many cool things that i haven’t used because using it just like a move with extra instruments and effects is satisfying and easy. It works very well.
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You couldn’t be more wrong. Even if you turn off your computer, phone etc. many aspects of your life are affected or governed by software somewhere on someone else’s computer. Whether it’s banking systems or the software controlling traffic lights. These are things that will affect people anywhere.
As the guy in the video said, decompiling and recompiling code used to be such a time consuming task that it was considered a form of security just by those merits alone. This is no longer the case.
Also, try saying that to people living in neighbourhoods where huge data centers were built, who are suffering from all the noise and are experiencing health effects from the infra-sound being emitted from these.
“Turn off your PC and nothing has changed” is a nice thought, but it’s one that you can only think if you live in dreamland.
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I agree with @homealone.
This summer, I tried to turn the screens off and keep away from internet.
Grabbing a book when I would see my hand trying to grab the phone…
It’s impressive how 3 months like this did much good to my mental health.
Of course, system and whatever.
But the more you orientate your life towards less screen, the more you feel good, believe me.
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Where I think there are limits here, is that learning the actual process and the reasons why it works helps with making a complete outcome. One of the risks here is that people think “if it boots, I succeeded”, and lower their expectations of what quality means. We may see more and more of the “knowing the theory will kill my mojo” mindset that makes some musicians think music theory will worsen their music or something.
So, I don’t think AI replaces experience and an actual curriculum.
As you said, it is only marginally better than rude answers on forums. The likes of which are usually used by people who want to rush to a result rather than understand the fundamentals and build up from there. It’s fun for beginners, and may help people spark their passion for a topic in a more accessible way. However, it is not a great way to build skill over time.
I’m afraid a lot of people will not understand the need to transition from this “it’s alive!” feeling and actually do the work to navigate their craft more thoughtfully. It can make some (not all) people feel like “the less they work, the better they are” at something, building hostility towards people who want to put more effort into what they do.
In the (paraphrased) words of Isaac Asimov: “they want to believe their ignorance is worth as much as my expertise”. Nobody has to become an expert, but tools like AI make the ego of entitled people feel like they should be treated as such without building actual expertise.
I think the biggest risk here is conversations like this forum becoming worse, filled with an outpour of people who want to be celebrated for putting out a lot of material, while showing no interest in growth, acting hostile when the conversation steers towards it. I think it mostly makes communities more frustrating, as we are more and more divided in what we value in our hobby, and we understand each other less and less.
I hope I’m wrong!
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I feel like we’re talking past each other here.
I 100% vouch for digital detox, meditation, touching grass etc.
But the way society works regarding building products is likely very different from here on.
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Oh yeah sorry, I had read you initial post but my mind twisted for some reason.
To come back to your subject: as a developer, I use AI and am amazed at how impressive and addictive this assistance is.
But I am not amazed at what we come up with: it suddenly feels like every line of code I/we have written so far is both unimpressive and useless.
Like you, very hard to get excited about this AI frenzy, more like the opposite actually.
Where I come back to what I was talking about, is that reading books written before 2022 feels more important to me now, compared to “consuming products” made afterwards.
And like @homealone said, there are many things like gardening, wandering in the forest, swimming in the sea, drinking or playing music with friends or family, over which the AI has not cast its shadow yet… Those are the precious, and real things.
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I had more tools dropping out of my ass than music coming out of my soul prior to Ai. I’m neither impressed with myself, nor the size of my toolbox. I’m more impressed by peeps who have very few tools, yet continue to make music without complaints. That’s the future I foresee for myself.
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i think it can be a better way. for my soldering example, i did utilize a forum and couldn’t have gotten to where i am skill-wise without it, but ai helped bridge a lot of gaps. answering questions that had not yet been asked or where im waiting for an answer for, it can weigh multiple varying answers based on my preference/tools/circumstance/goals/skillset
so its a tool, it works along with the other resources. but i think the opposite of your statement is true, i think it helps push, motivate, facilitate the type of learning and skill development that is typically crippled by discouragement, a lack of information or help, and knowledge that isnt catered to your specific scenario. i knew how to code before i ever used ai, i knew how to solder long before i ever touched ai. but ai has made me better at both. and the soldering analogy is even more salient here because thats not something ai can just do for you. it helped me bridge so many gaps, figure out where i was going wrong, that i was using the wrong tools, that i was confusing conflicting advice i had previously read on forums
i agree that you need some fundamentals to learn fully and to determine if something actually turned out to be high quality and useful. but i dont know how to write C+++ and claude still made a perfectly working, flawless (in execution/practice) working version of the exact tool i needed and made it better than i could have ever imagined.
thats the thing, as it grows at this exponential rate every new iteration, ai is no longer as painful as it was even like 5-6 months ago. it will run scripts in sandboxes/emulators before feeding you a working output. it will detect and remediate failures & bugs before it even provides you it’s output. this works better with Claude Opus 5.5 or higher, with a max account. but it isnt the case anymore that we have to really parse through half-broken poor output
if the problem is that you dont think the vibe coder deserves the recognition/ego boost hat someone who spent time to learn the craft does, thats fine. but that isn’t what this is about. i dont think im a master programmer. i just know that i have the ability to have this tool either help or almost entirely create what i need when i need it. and i can influence and still come up with the ideas and curate that output
we dont have to celebrate the individual, but i think that’s a separate ego thing on both sides. i think we can still differentiate between skilled programmers and vibe coders. i dont think we should be asking for money or praise when we have ai create us something. i understand the frustration. people using Suno do make me angry/conflicted. so i can imagine being a great programmer and having to compete or exist amongst vibe coders. but i dont see it that way. i see it as a separate tier or category of creation
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I must state, though, that I am still impressed by people that manage to add functionalities to old machines ^^
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Hey guess what… I don’t care! Bye!
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Genuine question, if you want to ask Claude, say, to build a new firmware/OS for Digitakt - do you need to upload a rip of the pre-installed firmware to Claude for it to analyse and then add to? I can’t see it just knowing the contents of the box otherwise, or the specs, or programming language, etc. So if you do need to “feed” Claude the pre-installed firmware, aren’t you just disclosing Elektrons IP to Anthropic for free, meaning they now have something they wouldn’t have unless they bought their own box and ripped the firmware?
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I can’t even tell if I’m optimistic or pessimistic! But yeah, right now AI companies are wooing users with promises of “unlimited potential” so that they can woo investors with promises of “unlimited growth.” There’s enough venture capital floating around, enough fear of China pulling ahead, and enough media coverage to let them keep “disrupting.”
Once the gold rush slows down, I find it very hard to imagine anyone tolerating the severe intellectual property infringement we’re seeing. And because LLMs are extremely good at recognizing patterns in massive data sets, I actually think there’s a pretty easy solution: copyright holders will upload their IP into the LLMs, and the LLMs will block and/or report anything that infringes on it. For game source code, they can designate which parts of the code are open for tinkering and which are locked down — and I would be willing to bet that they’ll find ways to monetize it (e.g. Microsoft only allowing Minecraft mods with a paid Copilot subscription, and working out a deal with the other big players so that no one else can create Minecraft mods. Collusion? You betcha!).
There are lots of questions like who pays who, what happens after the inevitable data breaches, what’s to stop bad actors circumventing the protections, etc. But I can’t imagine a world where anyone can reverse engineer anything they want and big business is just okay with it.
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The 90ties were easier to understand.
That’s all I have to say about this whole new world.
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I think the recognition issue is not going to be everyone’s problem. I guess my take is rather the conflict between people who care about the process and people who only care about the result. It used to be that you could not have one without the other.
I think it’s great that any topic becomes more accessible, and the crowd building things around said topic becomes more diverse. I just think that there is something about working closer to the process and doing more by yourself that informs the result, and gets lost on many people who use AI as their preferred way to learn things.
Maybe that is not your case, I don’t know you personally after all. But I think it makes the landscape of any creative field focus less on the “why”, the “how” and any other activity. Purpose is not mandatory if there is no commitment. I think it encourages communities to respect each other’s effort a lot less, and become a less positive space after all.
Finally, since AI loves to spit out an average of the data it scraped, the diversity of AI creators will only funnel into a singular approach that - I think - is less creatively interesting.
Ultimately, I think we are having slightly different conversations as you seem to talk about AI as a way to shorten a technical manual. Personally, I think most people see it as a shortcut, thinking most of the knowledge was useless fluff anyway. I only hope this doesn’t hurt creative communities too much, with an increase in conversations about how “the process is a waste of time” and every forum becomes LinkedIn; a place to flex one’s output at the expense of vision.
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I used to shoot indie short films and as digital video and dslr:s made shooting films accessible to basically everyone, the expectation was that it would revolutionise Hollywood and so many new ideas would pour in.
Now a little over 20 years later film production is more centralised than ever and most major productions are sequels and remakes of recycled material. The digital revolution wasn’t what I expected at least.
When things become more accessible, the market still always has a funny way of making sure only a select few get to profit from them.
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Right, usually the most talented or right idea at the right time! It’s the same with everything in life.
Music, restaurants, software and so on!
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lol hmmmm. usually the ones with enough capital to operate at a loss or buy out the competition.
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It’s so difficult to post in these threads.
There’s a ton examples of people that were struggling that made it to the top. Yes, companies with money also can. Can we get over this idea that only people with money can be successful? It’s not even part of the topic. I was just agreeing with the post above mine in a broader context.
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