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A nice clear explanation of how to do this.
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A magical, brilliant teaching tool. Ableton's education/explanation team have always been top-notch, but this is great, and I am envious of it and them. I love how it starts with sound, and abstract explorations, before breaking those apart into components – amplitude, pitch, timbre – and only later mapping those to synthesizer components – all of which will work with a keyboard plugged in, thanks to webmidi. Grand stuff, and so great to see them investing in this sort of thing.
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"…"there is no parallel here. Richter was a genius. He worked tirelessly for many years to perfect his piano playing. The lobster was some aberration. But what if it was not? What if the lobster was *essential*? What if every pianist needs a lobster? What if everyone needs a lobster for something?"
So much in this huge essay by Errol Morris – on anxiety, on performance, on the piano, on consciousness, and how we offload our consciousness to small advisors – what a programmer knows as rubberducking. There is so much in here to love, and I probably need to reread it at least once.
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"In this way, Dynamic Yield is part of a generation of companies whose core technology, while extremely useful, is powered by artificial intelligence that is roughly as good as a 24-year-old analyst at Goldman Sachs with a big dataset and a few lines of Adderall."
This is good – and largely well written, bar an unnecessary cheap shot at one point. It overlaps with lots of what I have to teach students about AI: namely, those letter have become this huge suitcase concept for anything from gnarly machine learning problems and recurrent neural networks down to applied statistics and a splash of arithmetic. And meanwhile, everyone just keeps adding to this cyclone of nonsense as they try to out-claim one another. It's exhausting, and it pollutes the public sphere, such that inexperts – politicians, policymakers – get themselves tangled up about all the wrong things. Sigh.
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"The things we love create us if we get to them early enough, but when we get to them a little bit later, they show us who we’ve already become, what we’ve accumulated, what we’ve chosen to discard and what we’ve clutched so close to ourselves for so long that its material has leaked into our own." More wonderful writing about The National from Helena Fitzgerald. Wonderfully written, and so on the nose about what loving bands, or people, or things, feels like.
“…meditating over an extended period of time on a subject you consider to be important”
17 June 2019
Don’t leave writing to writers. Don’t delegate your area of interest and knowledge to people with stronger rhetorical resources. You’ll find your voice as you make your way. There is, however, one thing to learn from writers that non-writers don’t always understand. Most writers don’t write to express what they think. They write to figure out what they think. Writing is a process of discovery. Blogging is an essential tool toward meditating over an extended period of time on a subject you consider to be important.
Marc Weidenbaum on the value of straight-up blogging, in a place you own yourself. All of this. I’ve been quiet here – less quiet at my work site – but not absent, and knowing that this is mine, and that slowly, what I’m thinking about was always present – even in the Pinboard links – has value.
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"Culture is what you celebrate. Rituals are the tools you use to shape culture." This is good, especially the balance not just of 'what you celebrate' but _how_. And thus the stress on using such a ritual to celebrate process, not just success or delivery.
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"Animals as they are." Just lovely.
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Lovely writing from Ruby Tandoh.
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"Black and white and RSS is an RSS feed of black and white photographs, updating throughout June 2019. There is no associated website. You can only see the photos if you use an RSS feed reader and subscribe to the feed." Subscribed.