On Elektron’s policy on third party firmware [No Links/Promotion]

[pseudophysics]

while it’s true what you say, this is just the beginning…

my posts never got flagged on any other forum. and i get flagged quite often on here… felt a bit weird at first, lol

but it’s also the best electronic music forum we have imo (if you know better places, please suggest)

keeping things on topic is important and i’m happy that there are moderators on here, who are also real parts of the forum

i mean, even people like Fin25, who doesn’t even own any elektron devices anymore post here almost every day

and yeah, we all talk about getting off the screen, but having a community is important…

and i’m pretty sure this could all go down the drain, when there will be postings coming every freaking day of people who will post their first vibecode endeavours.

i’m also coding a video synth right now, and i’m definitely using ai to help me. i’m not against this at all but i also find this pretty easy:

just visit the special oct… discord and the special messagboard with almost the same name than this one, that you will find online easily and keep this forum for elektron based stuff and nice chats about music culture. it’s just a click away.

don’t be lazy…

and suggesting that there could be a category for it on this forum won’t work. cause it would rule the updated page at one point…

i just want this forum exist a tiny bit longer, until it wont matter anymore and i meet you all in the matriks

EDIT: good old sunday clean happened, just got flagged two times, lol

[JoyrexJ9]

Don’t try and present a rational view of this. You’re fighting a losing battle

For whatever reason many people are unable to distinguish between vibe coding and AI assisted development. They just lump it all together “derpaderp AI bad”

I actually think it’s willful ignorance in most cases

[dijksterhuis]

all that’s changed is elektron saying publicly what they told me privately a year and a half prior.

don’t read into my post any more than that.

that’s all that’s happened here. they’ve just gone public with it in response to a deluge of projects doing the very thing they weren’t okay with in the first place.

[benway]

@benway

Ableton have been extremely chill about it

I should correct myself here - there are limits to Ableton’s chill - discussions of unsupported third party mods are not allowed in their discord but when shutting this down they do signpost other discords where they can be discussed.

They’ve been ahead of the curve on this and I think it’s a good model. Mods are their own thing and I don’t see why it should be an issue for anyone that they go to their own spaces.

[Toxu]

Fair…But Native Instruments for example doesn’t ban anything about mods on their Maschine Community…but I guess it’s only because they have not enough employees for that task😜

[Function1]

@bibenu

@Function1

this kind of vibe/slop/LLM hacking

I hope nobody thinks that vibe, slop, LLM and hacking are all the same kind of thing.

Well certainly not me, the “/“ means “or” in this sense, but fair enough to question it.

[bibenu]

@re5et

so if there was a specific thread for this stuff

You’re on it, mods created it for exactly that purpose (and used my reply from elsewhere as a first post)

@Bitsnbobs

get ready for this thread to get closed down

Well the mods did start it so I hope, if it stays on topic, to be safe.

OTOH there does seem to be a gathering movement to take it off topic, so who knows.

[kaossbeats]

Commodore BBSes back in the day must have gone crazy out of excitement when this was released back in '98.

I wouldn’t call it “AI slop” rather “Human slop” these days, the term “AI slop” is so 2024. Only people who aren’t using it or not using correctly would call it that. If LLMs are feed the right assets and prompted the right way, people without programming background can achieve great results that eliminates most of the concerns this thread highlights. A lot of anti-AI thoughts expressed here as well underestimate that passion and curiosity can go a long way which probably led Elektron to this point…

[dijksterhuis]

more anecdata for folks.

i emailed elektron about one of the unofficial firmware projects to warn them about it being posted on this forum. they never emailed me back (which i was a bit annoyed about tbh).

months later that they posted their policy/statement on the forum.

it’s not like this is some knee jerk, panicked reaction. they’ve been aware of the issue for months at the very least. they probably spent a not insignificant amount of time figuring out what they want to do as a company.

that may not be the same as what you want. but that’s kinda your problem to figure out. elektron have made clearer what they find acceptable for discussion here. that’s their call to make.

[benway]

@kaossbeats

If LLMs are feed the right assets and prompted the right way, people without programming background can achieve great results that eliminates most of the concerns this thread highlights.

Personally I have seen no evidence anywhere that this is actually true, the limitations of the technology mean that there’s always going to be something not quite right - calculating the probabilities only takes you so far after all - that will need to be tweaked or fixed to get it to “great”. This can be in terms of having the expertise to review the code or the UX nous to make it work. Of course the companies making this stuff would have us believe otherwise, but let’s see how this pans out here, maybe I’ll be surprised.

But more to the point, I think the use of LLMs here does what LLMs do - focus on approximating the end product and skips over the exact things you mention in terms of passion and curiosity. Like, it’s a contradiction in terms to make out it’s a good thing that someone who hasn’t made the effort - i.e. displayed real passion and curiosity - to learn the intricacies of how to do this can still spit out more or less working approximations of what’s described and keep iterating until something sticks. This is another reason why I think there’s a major difference between this and earlier community firmware / modding / circuit bending scenes, shared learning and scenious vs an individual “talking to” the computer.

At base level what you’re describing amounts to paying Anthropic etc. to spit out code, no more and no less.

[Jalex]

It’s not even an opinion; it’s a simple lack of understanding of how it works.

[dijksterhuis]

@benway

At base level what you’re describing amounts to paying Anthropic etc. to spit out code, no more and no less.

don’t forget anthropic and co keep a copy of all the inputs and generated outputs, including all the proprietary firmware/OS code people are trying to reverse engineer.

[avantronica]

@bibenu

if it stays on topic, to be safe.

… and flag free, and shit-talk free … not naming names, but a few ‘contributors’ who specialize primarily in shit-talk (something to write but nothing to say) will ruin this topic (and its chance to be kept open) or their opportunity to continue doing the same … the admin for such garbage is unworkable on top of the flood of links/promotions etc (and this is just one topic)

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So, let’s respect that this is a discussion best left to the grown ups, there’s a time and a place for dropping some levity, but here due to the heightened emotions it snowballs too easily into a spiral that nearly saw it closed temporarily earlier (it generates an insane amount of flags)

So with respect to posters and flaggers - please do both of these activities with a degree of accommodation that this is a difficult and volatile topic and if it is to survive a degree of restraint will be required from both groups.

It’s incumbent on those who see further links or promotion of stuff we can all understand (whether we like or agree or not) would not be appropriate here to speedily flag it so the burden doesn’t fall on admins to monitor it

I’d urge you (and others invested in an adult discussion on this) to politely speak out inline or privately ask posters talking shit to desist if you want to see the topic remain open … with the current overhead it just couldn’t continue, this intervention has to be a line in the sand.

So with respect, can people read our guidelines right now, and pause before they reply in this one to check it adds value and isn’t going to be flaggable. Thanks in advance, y’all have no idea how much time this stuff takes to clean up

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Keep it strictly on topic (general AI chat is NOT on topic here) … please let’s not have any more flags, except for removing the unwelcome promotion or linking to the unsupported/inappropriate stuff people should realise by now can’t be given any credence by being found on here.

[m0ld]

Frankly I don’t give a damn what people do with AI. I just want them to stop spamming every single thread with their frequently (not always) half-assed “fixes” and “improvements.” Hack your shit, post it in discord or whatever, leave this place alone.

And yes, I know some people putting things out are thoughtful, with the proper background to test, debug, and implement the features. But anybody thinking those people are the majority is either being fooled by themselves or by others.

[Kegeratorz]

Right on! It’s exhausting!

[bwo]

Elektron wanting people to not post links to custom firmware is obviously fine on their own forums. Only reason there is really any issue is elektronauts has out grown being just a company forum and is one of the larger feeling communities online talking synth stuff… so now we sit in a weird middle ground of being on a company forum that is used for much more and well it feels kinda odd when some of the bigger stuff happening in the scene right now is being blocked. I know some companies have set there forums free, I don’t think elektron would do it but I kind of think it would be the right thing to do.

[Jeanne]

If Elektron hadn’t envisioned and then created these devices, there would be nothing to hack.

So I don’t know why all this hacking involves hating so much, e.g. if you look at comments on places where these firmwares are posted.

[Sandison]

So what?

edit:

OK, my “so what?” was really just me trying to understand what point you were making, because on its own, it seemed like a fairly obvious statement. I didn’t mean it to be provocative.

Whenever there’s some kind of conflict, I tend to look at where both sides are coming from without immediately judging either of them. On one side, I see people who are genuinely trying to defend the company’s decisions in good faith. On the other, I see customers who feel that some past practices were not very consumer-friendly, and that frustration ends up coming out in posts like these.

I think both extremes are equally unhelpful and ultimately lead nowhere.

On one hand, feeling entitled to anything from a company is a bit absurd. If you don’t like what they’re doing, vote with your wallet. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

At the same time, pretending that some practices aren’t worse for customers doesn’t really help either. Things like splitting the product line into too many versions can be frustrating, and pointing that out is fair. And some of these observations can actually be useful for both customers and companies, because they show pretty clearly what people are looking for in a product. If a company keeps ignoring that kind of feedback just because they’re in a strong enough position to get away with it at the time, that can easily become a problem later. Markets change, new tech comes along, competition gets stronger, and suddenly that position isn’t so safe anymore.

So even if we’re fond of a company, like many of us are of Elektron, I think a bit of clear-headed, detached feedback can be useful for them too. In the end, we all want the market to move in a better direction, whether we’re musicians or just hobbyists spending money on this stuff.

As usual, the truth is somewhere in the middle, in the nuances. The one thing I still struggle to understand is this need to identify so strongly with one side or the other, instead of looking at the issue in a pragmatic and detached way. That kind of tribalism is where most of these arguments start in the first place.