The problem with any online community is that the people who most need to be there in order to get whatever they need from the community (usually social interaction + attention) end up sucking up all the available air, so that the people who merely want to be there eventually wander off and do their specialized, focused work elsewhere. The community then languishes in a purgatory where all the most active people within it are also the least likable, least knowledgable folks.

You can see this in action most of all on Reddit, where any technical subreddit devolves into nothing but new people asking questions and other new people giving wrong answers to them, but with full confidence. Any actual expert on the topic is too busy spending their time doing real work, not sitting on Reddit dispensing advice for free, answering the same 10 questions over and over again for people who can’t use the search feature and refuse to just read the manual.

Deeper’s new album, Careful!, is really good. If you like post-punk in the vein of Velvet Underground, with a touch of proto-punk ala Television, and a smattering of every other 80’s influence, you should find a lot to like here.

This guy’s video on building out realistic sounding jazz-y drum loops in Ableton is really hilarious. Enjoy!

Daily update on my “Girl U Want” Ableton project… I threw in a synth to act as the vocal line and spent some time today trying to make things sound a touch more natural.

After listening to something on repeat for so long, fiddling back and forth, it starts to lose all meaning. But still really happy with how this is sounding so far, still a long way to go, or at least a lot of choices to make. Like, I have an electric bass and guitar, so should I try to learn to play the parts and replace the synths where I can? Should I try to finger drum the drum beat?

Or do I move on and try something closer to the music I think I really want to make…

This is a good overview of the Quest 3 and its various issues and what is great about it. Probably better than my review was. I really enjoyed his last few comments about how nothing in VR is profitable yet. Growing pains…

I’d be doing myself dirty if I didn’t keep posting my progress learning Ableton by building out this song. Same 74 bars as yesterday but I learned a lot more about properly reading sheet music so now I think most notes are in the right place and are the right length.

With the exception of the ongoing Black Friday coupon code that gives you 40% off, the most sure-fire way to save some money when buying Meta Quest games is to use Meta-Dog, which compiles and distributes 25% off referral codes. This cuts into Meta’s 30% take from the app sale, so don’t feel like you’re taking money away from the developer using these referral codes!

I finally succumbed today and picked up Ableton Live 11 thanks to their Black Friday deal. My first project to learn it is to try to build out DEVO’s Girl U Want as best I can. First couple hours today got me this far…

Just the first 74 bars out of 126 with placeholder instruments, so I have a long ways to go, and I learned so much while building out these bars that I am pretty certain there is a lot wrong with some of the earlier ones. Pretty sure the drum loop is mostly wrong.

But not too shabby for someone who barely knew how to read sheet music before now.

One fun thing about telling people you’ve been diagnosed with high cholesterol and you’ve been prescribed medication for it: everyone’s got a second-hand horror story about how medication caused all sorts of other problems. I want to explain, hey, how often do people randomly tell you about medications they’re taking that just worked perfectly fine? Probably never. But people love to share a horror story…

AI hysteria only proves how insanely unimaginative humans are.

Every AI scenario is a disaster, where the AI apparently believes everything to be a zero-sum game (like humans seem to) and the only thing worth doing is taking over the world and killing all the humans (like humans seem to want to do any time they get a little bit of power). It’s so… boring and cliche. It’s also extremely self-centered, just humans thinking they are the greatest thing around so of course AI would want to kill us all.

No one is willing (or capable?) of imagining an AI that is so powerful, so all-knowing, that it loses any trace of the instinctual motivations that make humans violent and selfish, and to an AI like that we’re just ants milling about on the surface of the Earth, totally unimportant to the AI and definitely not something it feels like it needs to destroy.

Oh, that’s not fun, and that doesn’t get headlines. Sorry, sorry, I take it back, obviously AI will want to kill us all.

Between Humane not being able to fact check their big AI Pin reveal video, and Nothing announcing and retracting their big deal iMessage bridge feature… just not a good week or two for tech companies trying to be the next Apple.

I saw DEVO tonight. They were great. But it was weird how the place was basically sold out, and everyone was clearly a huge DEVO fan, and the set was full of non-stop bangers, but almost no one was dancing. I, meanwhile, was dancing by myself from beginning to end, while everyone else was standing around with their arms folded tight. I don’t get it!

There was definitely a point in my life where I would have been upset the Twisted Metal television show features almost no vehicular combat whatsoever, but that point has passed. I am just happy to get a Twisted Metal show that treats the brand and characters with love and respect, even if it’s low budget and has a generic plot, it doesn’t matter. Everything else is great! … It even made me cry at one point, so there’s that as well, though that is a low bar these days.