Algorithmic supremacists have a pretty bleak vision for the future. But how much damage can they do over the next four years? Well, to my mind, their understanding of the present is equally disturbing. Algorithmic supremacists show a disdain for the inefficient ways humans read, write, draw, compose, and create, wanting us to outsource those activities to machines that can spit out mathematical variations of what uncredited human artists produced with heart and soul.
David Weitzner, We must fight back against the rise of ‘algorithmic supremacists’
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May 2025
Housing
At the end of April, we realized that the 110 year old cast iron sewer line beneath our house had collapsed, so May’s project around the house will be cutting through the basement slab and trenching in a new sewer line from the front to the back of the house.
Synth Building
In April I got the circuit board for the Melodic Orchestration module I designed and assembled them. So far it seems to be working fairly well, with a couple of minor flaws that I can probably kludge on to the circuit board to get it working as intended. My first program that I want to code is a Roland J-6 emulator, which plays arpeggios and chords.
I also want to get the circuit board design underway for my YM3812 synthesizer, which I’ll base off of Tyler Klein’s design, and will leverage some of the same circuit design as the Melodic Orchestration for the display and control interfaces.
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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 -
Robin Sloan in Syntheizers as Utopian Technologies
This recalls the early days of synthesizers; what was Switched-On Bach if not “I see what you did there”? I hope that analogy is right, because the synth provides a healthy, sustainable template for these tools (AI). Ubiquitous and unremarkable, controllable and hackable, with flavors ranging from fully corporate to gloriously DIY … I’m realizing, as I type this, that synthesizers might be one of the truly utopian technologies.
Robin Sloan, Notes on a Genre -
Dying Young by Ninj
The Great Pyramid of Giza was completed around 2680 BC and is still going strong almost five millenia later. The Parthenon was errected in 27 BC and is still keepin’ it real more than 20 centuries later. Notre Dame Cathedral was completed in 1330 AD and has been doing its thing without interruption for the past 674 years.
Back in the day when these sturdy symphonies in stone were built, their intended lifespans were measured not in terms of business cycles but in terms of ages. This was back when people really took pride in their work, or at least the work of their slaves, and designed and built not just to fulfill a temporary business need but to forge lasting tributes to the things that really mattered to them, and in the process created symbols that would survive the centuries.
It’s odd that modern civilization is nowhere near as good at building things as our ancient and medieval forebears. Today, most new buildings are designed to have functional lifespans of a mere 25 to 100 years.
The average age of buildings in many cities is plummeting as the old stone stalwarts are torn down or suffer insulting façadectomies, and are replaced with temporary, hastily tossed together squats fashioned of plywood, glass and drywall, rarely designed to outlive their owners.
In many cities, average architectural lifespans are rapidly descending to the level of human lifespans in Somalia or the Congo. As in those sad, sisphusian societies, when there are no wise elders to provide stability, guidance and a sense of connection to the past, the notion of progress disappears and little lasts or improves from one generation to the next.
We must stop designing flimsy, temporary structures that are engineered for obsolescence. We must return to the practice of making buildings that outlast us for centuries and get firmly woven into the DNA of our urban environments. Businesses and governments need need to think beyond the immediate, selfish desires of their shareholders and constituents. Corporate entities and their architects are great at thinking big, but they also need to think long.
Economically and technologically, if not socially, we are advanced enough to build structures that will outlast the pyramids. We should not be repeatedly wasting money, energy and materials building office towers designed to fall apart after 30 years. If every generation left behind useful, sturdy structures for the generations to come, there’d probably be no housing shortage today, and many people would probably feel a greater connection to their environment.
Watching a beloved building being prematurely smashed into rubble is painful, nasty and bad, and we endured it again and again when making this issue. None of the magnificent buildings demolished or gutted while we were making this issue had a chance to celebrate their 100th birthday. Anything we missed or failed to take decent pictures of is gone, though definitely not forgotten.
Ninj, Dying Young, Infiltration, Issue 23, May 2004 -
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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John MacIntosh on Finance Aesthetics
Finance is everywhere in the cultural imaginary; it represents itself largely on its own terms, a set of appearances that do not correspond to its practise.
John MacIntosh, Finance Aesthetics -
xQc on AI Generated Art
Why would I care? I don’t consume the method, I consume the product.
xQc -
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.
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March 2025
Housing
Over the course of February, we finished unpacking everything in the living areas of the house and have gotten settled in to the new place. We were able to host friends for the first time mid-month in February which was a great feeling.
Late February in Calgary saw a very rapid thaw after a long cold snap which managed to loosen the eavestrough on the east side of the house, so one of the first impromptu repairs was erecting some scaffolding to reach and secure it again. As expected it was two hours building and tearing down scaffolding for a fifteen minute repair.
I have a bunch of small jobs around the house to get to in March, but nothing too major planned.
Synth Building
Late in February I started designing the circuit for the Melodic Orchestration module I’m building, but realized that there’s enough new techniques that I should slow down and do some prototyping before I move to designing circuit boards. The new designs which I’ll be using in Melodic Orchestration that I need to prototype in March include:
- Using a bare microcontroller in the circuit
- ISCP / FTDI programming of said microcontroller
- A new CV input handling circuit
- Using an onboard buck / boost power converter on the module
- MIDI in and out
- Using multiple I2C devices (display, storage, DAC)
- Scaled inputs and outputs for velocity control
Game Design
As I continue reading The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses by Jesse Schell, I realize that my initial concept was woefully inadequate, which is a blessing and a curse. It’s good I didn’t rush a half baked idea into reality, but at the same time I feel a bit overwhelmed by the task of conceiving of a better idea.
I’m going to keep reading, learning, and hopefully inspiration will strike at some point in the near future with a more workable idea.
Outdoors
In February I entered a team into the Beltline Bonspiel and somehow managed to eke out a second place finish despite my personal lack of talent. This confirms what I learned at the Ironman Bonspiel, bad ice is the great equalizer as it handicaps professional players quite effectively.
In March I want to spend some time researching and planning some hikes for the season so I have a rolodex of outings ready to go when I have the time or opportunity.