Hear, hear. Dragging cables around with a mouse was a hard sell in the first place, but now it’s pretty much inconceivable.
I’ve been using LLMs to help build out audio-related projects that I didn’t think I’d get a chance to pursue until I retired.
Under the hood, are they crap? Maybe. Probably, even. But they function well enough to make my own weird music with, and they’re available for use now - not twenty years from now when I retire.
The era of custom software on tap is here. As someone who is primarily interested in making unique stuff, it’s a great time to be alive.
I think you may have found a different Nate Smith than the one goosejuice was referencing. They were likely referring to the drummer named Nate Smith (he's collaborated with at least one of the groups mentioned).
The guy has a lot of interesting work, but I think the thing that blew me away the most is the composition 'Warble'. If memory serves, that's the piece where he explored 64th note and dotted 32nd note displacements in order to mimic J Dilla's 'wonky' swing. I've tried capturing the Dilla swing; it's nearly impossible to do on the drums without sounding like you don't know how to play the instrument. Nate Smith, on the other hand, makes it sound fantastic.
I’m in the exact same boat as solardev (non-traditional student, taking precalculus, relying on LLMs, getting good grades but not having any true understanding) and I came here to recommend this same book.
It’s a great supplement because it gives you a chance to understand the ‘why’ of things and not just the ‘how’. The writing style is neither too dry nor too watered-down. It feels like the piece that was missing from K-12 education.
On a side note, I’ve found the LLMs to be terrible at math, but insanely good at writing LaTeX. I’ve been using GitHub Copilot to speed up the rewriting of my class notes and I’m just gobsmacked at how accurately it can print out the steps to some calculation after feeding in the original problem.
To be fair, the parent never mentioned traveling in another country. The strategy works equally well while traveling within one’s own country.
If your digestive system tends to have you issues when given unexpected inputs, as is the case for a lot of people, then this is just what you do to stay comfortable while away from home.
If you're a fan of both Flying Lotus and Bitches Brew, you should check out Miles Davis' album On The Corner, which came out two years after Bitches Brew. It feels like a direct precursor to hip-hop and a lot of the sample-based music that gained popularity in the 1980s, partly due to the tape splicing and looping that was done in the studio and partly because of the extremely wide set of influences that got stirred together on that record.
I’m not a beginner per se - I started writing Objective-C and Python more than a decade ago and I’ve written a depressingly large amount of SQL in that same period. But when my current employer decided I was going to be a web developer, I needed to start from the ground up with Django.
Copilot has been a godsend for me. I still need books and Stack Overflow, but the conversations I’ve had with Copilot about architectural decisions, project structure, external library choices, syntax, etc., has saved me a ton of time that I would have otherwise spent reading ad-riddled Medium articles to learn.
As a not-beginner beginner, it’s been a huge productivity boost for me.
Agree with op though that it’s pretty bad with SQL. Other than reminders about basic syntax, conversions from T-SQL to Oracle SQL syntax, or mindless column aliasing, I don’t bother much with it.
I have had a long-standing interest in digital signal processing as it relates to music and audio. Any math or physics training that can help me get makes heads of something like ‘The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing’ would be great.
Honestly though, my math-related knowledge is so stunted that I’ll be happy just to gain a sense of what all is out there.
This is going to sound lame to most of the folks here, but I just finished a college algebra class. I’ve been doing database/software development/IT work for more than a decade but I have virtually no math background besides what I picked up my freshman year of high school.
I recently started working at a university so I’m taking advantage of the tuition reimbursement to build up my math knowledge. It’s a long-term project because I can only take one class a semester, but I’ll probably stay here until retirement (wife is tenure-track faculty at same university), so I’m in no rush.
I think Bargue did the world a great service in collecting his set of plates, and I think the sight-size method has a lot of merit. I really wish I could escape for a few years into one of the ateliers that employ it to train artists. It would be a pleasant break from doing IT work in the defense industry. :)
That said, Bargue's process was intended for communicating good taste to 'lesser' commercial and decorative artists as much as it was used for training fine artists. It's a method that essentially boils down to copying pictures of sculptures which are twice removed from nature.
Before and since Bargue, we've had great artists who gained their chops by being students of nature. Many of them never saw a Bargue plate. Many of them didn't use the sight-size method. And there were a lot of skilled Bargue disciples who never had any real impact on art history.
All that to say, I don't think the parent comment is at all out of line. Copying Bargue plates is a fine warm-up or substitute for life drawing, but it's neither necessary nor sufficient to becoming a great realist (we had those long before Bargue). Plus, the world has churned out countless nobodies skilled in the art of copying Bargue plates (which I say as someone who would like to be one of those countless nobodies). It's just not as important as people think.
This isn't my domain by any means, but one common argument for long hours that is that patient handoffs during shift changes can cause information loss, and thus cause medical errors which lead to worse patient outcomes. The shifts are intentionally kept long to reduce the number of times that this handoff has to occur.
Again, this isn't my wheelhouse at all. I'm just repeating something I hear often when this topic comes up.
No offense meant, but if you are surprised about the existence of Scrum Masters, then that interviewer is not at all wrong for wondering if you have enough Scrum experience.