Latest Posts I’ve Wrote
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Jane Jacobs on Toronto’s Split Personality
This isn’t a dead city. There doesn’t seem to be much creativity at the top. It seems to me that Toronto has a split personality, a civic schizophrenia. On the one level there’s the spirit of individuals and small groups who do things, what you might call the vernacular spirit. This is all very informal and genius, quite romantic and full of fun, a great deal of fun but it seems to me the official spirit of Toronto is, ‘Stamp out fun.’ Pompus, impressed with mediocrity if it’s very, very big and expensive.
Jane Jacobs, 1969 CBC Interview
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April 2025
Housing
In March we replaced the lighting in the basement with some nice LED fixtures and removed all the old T12 fixtures. My next project is to drop off the large collection of burnt out T12 bulbs at the dump, and then organize the workbench in the basement so I can start using it as a workspace for electronics.
Synth Building
After prototyping all the various subcomponents of my new melodic orchestration module, I finished the PCB design and sent it off for fabrication. Once I get the circuit boards around the middle of the month, I’ll assemble the module and hopefully start coding. The first project will be write a program that emulates the arpeggios and chords of a Roland J-6.
Synth Music
Now that the weather has warmed up again, I’d like to start shooting synth videos outside again. Hopefully we get some nice weather in April so I can get restarted with this.
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Cory Doctorow on AI Generated Art
Today I read Cory Doctorows latest post, Why I Don’t Like AI Art, and really appreciated his approach to defining art and how the use of AI tools diluted the meaning within works of art.
…the prompt given to an AI to produce creative writing or an image is the sum total of the communicative intent infused into the work. The prompter has a big, numinous, irreducible feeling and they want to infuse it into a work in order to materialize versions of that feeling in your mind and mine. When they deliver a single line’s worth of description into the prompt box, then – by definition – that’s the only part that carries any communicative freight. The AI has taken one sentence’s worth of actual communication intended to convey the big, numinous, irreducible feeling and diluted it amongst a thousand brushtrokes or 10,000 words. I think this is what we mean when we say AI art is soul-less and sterile. … the AI is padding out the part that makes this art – the microdecisions intended to convey the big, numinous, irreducible feeling – with a bunch of stuff that has no communicative intent and therefore can’t be art.
Cory Doctorow, Why I Don’t Like AI ArtI think this resonated with me since it aligns with what I learnt from Suzy, that art is intended to communicate and to convey. When the means by which you are creating art is a prompt of only a few sentences it really limits the amount of meaning that which can be conveyed in the work.
Popular Posts I’ve Wrote
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One of the biggest steps you can take to ensure your security online is to keep the software on your devices up to date and install any software updates that come out. This advice doesn’t just apply to your computers and phones, but also internet of things devices like a Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone Black. Luckily this is an easy process with the help of one important software package.
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One of the best ways to understand data is through the use of descriptive statistics, figuring out the minimum and maximum values, the median value, and the quartiles. When you’re working with smaller datasets this is easy, but with larger datasets you need to parse a lot of data to get these metrics. Luckily, you can use SQL to get descriptive statistics for your data directly from the database.
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A key component in data acquisition or reporting is the ability to trigger your script to run at a set time each day. Whether you are attempting to download the latest stock prices or update corporate earnings reports, once you’ve created the script to do the actual work, you need to find a way for it to be run on the correct schedule.
Latest Synthesizer Modules I’ve Built
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Latest Books I’ve Read
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