05-07-2024
5th July: Sim Life, AI vs Music, and after cloud comes?
I am literally powered by Magic Mind right now. It's helping me focus and keep going in some tough weeks of poor sleep and too much to do. If you also need that helping hand, head over to magicmind.com/chinchillasqueaks and use the code "CHINCHILLASQUEAKS20" for 48% of subscriptions or 20% off one time purchases.Like what you’re reading?It’s a tough time for content creators right now. If you enjoy what you read, then consider a contribution. Here’s the ways you can help me out.Or please share or review the newsletter!Thanks :)‘The first few nights were punishing’: how sleep restriction cured my lifelong insomniatheguardian.comI am an on/off long-suffering poor sleeper. The middle-of-the-night insomnia is better than it used to be, but I still find it hard to stay in a deep sleep and wake up too early most of the time. I have also been trying to stay up later, hoping it might mean I wake up later, but it’s not working especially in summer. I am not sure I want to push things to this extreme, but maybe it’s worth trying.Managing Your Mac Menu Bar: A Roundup of My Favorite Bartender Alternativesmacstories.netI love macOS’s menu bar, but it can get cluttered quite quickly. Thanks to Setapp I’ve been using Bartender for some time to keep mine tidy. Recently, the developer sold the company to a new owner who, shall we say, didn’t handle the transition well. Most people’s concerns around security and privacy seem to now be resolved, but it still gave developers of alternative applications a great opportunity, and this list summarises some of the best.Training AI music models is about to get very expensivetechnologyreview.comDid I mention before I used to be a professional musician? I think I did 😅. Anyway, as I still make some money from that part of my life, it makes me more sensitive to those exploiting musicians’ work. Oddly, AI-generated music is one of the rare cases where the archaic archaeology of the music business works in favour of artists. They are not an industry with a reputation for taking a hit to their bottom line lightly, and now the AI companies are firmly in their sights.Are rainy days ahead for cloud computing?bbc.comWhile some companies are still beginning their journey with cloud-native, some of the early adopters are already moving to the next thing, which seems to be back to running your own servers. The promise of flexible costs hasn’t been the reality for many, and the loops and hoops providers make you jump through too much work. 37signals (and isn’t it great to hear from them again!?) are one of many recent examples of this trend. While I don’t think we need to worry about the big three providers yet, what’s next?EuRuKo 20242024.euruko.orgAnd on the subject of Ruby! EuRuKo is the annual European Ruby Conference. I’ll be there in Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina in 2024 on 11th — 13th of September. Hope to see you there!SimCity Isnt a Model of Reality. Its a Libertarian Toy Landwired.comAnyone reading for a while might know I am a fan of building-style games (on the rare occasions I play games anyway). Sim City is a classic of this genre, and it became so popular that its influence spread further than you may realise. “Simulations” being something new meant that the game’s developer was asked to create simulation games for a lot of different industries, but not all of them were as successful as the original.Micropoliswebmicropolisweb.comAnd if all this talk of SimCity makes you nostalgic or experience what we oldies had to put up with, you can play it in the browser thanks to the power of WebAssembly.News from me2024 hasn’t been the best year for many of us. Unfortunately, the same applies to me. Especially in the past few weeks, I have had several projects cancelled, but there’s one I am most annoyed by and would like to try to find a new home for.I was working on a book covering Ableton Live 12, and the project was suddenly cancelled. I was quite enjoying the process and was building up a good plan and body of work covering the topic, bringing a dose of practical “analogue” music experience to a largely electronic topic.It’s too late for a specific Live 12 book now, but I would love to take some of what I have to a new home. A new book, a course, maybe. I was thinking of ideas around “Live for drummers”, or “Live for analogue musicians”, that kind of thing. If you, or anyone you know, might be interested in this, let me know!Finally, I am planning a rebrand of the podcast and newsletter. I still need to investigate a few things and all being well, I will push ahead in August, as it’s a quiet month.I’ve been painting
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