The cognitive overload of AI trying to Make You More Productive™️ whilst you’re actually trying to be productive is so shockingly absurd. And yet, we are being made to feel like we are stagnating, being left behind, not good enough, that we are luddites should we not adopt this imposing technology. We are being told we’re missing out, even though we’re probably doing just fine. The technology is gaslighting us.
Belfast TradFest have republished this blog post of mine and I must say, I really like the photo they’ve used—doesn’t my mandolin look lovely!
The transcript of a very thoughtful talk by Frank.
I love this conversation.
I’m giving an afternoon talk during Belfast Tradfest—come along if you’re around!
Join Jeremy Keith for an insightful talk about his pioneering work with TheSession.org—the world’s leading online hub for traditional Irish music. Discover how Jeremy helped build this vibrant digital community that connects musicians, shares tunes, and preserves Ireland’s rich musical heritage. Learn about the challenges and triumphs of creating an online space where thousands of players worldwide can collaborate, learn, and celebrate traditional music together.
An enjoyable guided tour of album artwork starting at the beginning of the twentieth century.
This is a great new musical project from Brad:
Brad Frost plays drums to the albums he knows intimately, but has never drummed to before. Cover to cover. No warm-up. No prep. Totally cold. What could possibly go wrong?
I really enjoyed watching all of The Crane Wife and In Rainbows.
I enjoyed reading through these essays about the web of twenty years ago: music, photos, email, games, television, iPods, phones…
Much as I love the art direction, you’d never know that we actually had some very nice-looking websites back in 2004!
The show itself was an unbelievable outpouring of energy and love. I couldn’t help but imagine if anyone in the audience had decided to go on a lark, not knowing anything about it. I would think they would have been pretty damn impressed. This wasn’t just a couple of nerds poking around at instruments (except me), these were some serious musicians giving it their all.
These are great!!!
Aw, man, this gets me in the feels!
Just over here sobbing while reading Jeremy’s recount of Frostapalooza.
I love how into it everyone is here, both on stage and in the audience—just look at Jina rocking out!
Wow! The photos that Will took at Frostapalooza (and in the run-up) are absolutely fantastic!
He also shares the technical details for all you camera nerds.
I can’t say I would have ever expected to see Jeremy Keith performing the Yeah Yeah Yeahs song “Maps”, but then again, I don’t know what I expected to happen at Frostapalooza.
Laying out sheet music with CSS grid—sounds extreme until you see it abstracted into a web component.
We need fluid and responsive music rendering for the web!
There’s no AI substitute for a human-produced drawing of someone on the subway, even if a similar-or-even-better result could be produced in seconds by AI. The artifact is often less important than the process — the human process — that made it. That’s why I suspect videos of creative processes are so attractive; we are captivated by seeing humans doing human things.
I like how Paul has recreated his own version of This Is My Jam and I really like how he’s done it with an HTML web component.
Fancy joining me in Pittsburgh in August next year to celebrate Brad’s birthday?
How cool is this‽ Dan made a font for Wilco!
I also think the number of situations in which an SPA architecture can be recommended is dwindling, chiefly due to how good the web platform has become (and how much better it’s getting every day). And because so much of the rest of the ‘struggle stack’ (transpilers, unique dialects, etc.) was built to get around gaps in the web platform that no longer exist, the use cases for these tools is dwindling in tandem.
This is good news: not only can we avoid piling up transient knowledge about a seemingly endless stream of dependencies, we can also eject from the routine stress of those dependencies changing or breaking under our feet and throwing wrenches into our workflows — all while delivering more robust and performant websites to end users.