agapi-kalyptei

[agapi-kalyptei]

You have to keep outgrowing yourself.

Washing my face I remembered a friend who used to get herself out of panic attacks and deep depression by watching, on repeat, an unmentionable video that comedically combined one innocent and one vulgar song to create a surreal mashup. It seemed funny then, and the inappropriate aspect made it a form of rebellion against the stuck up society that loved to get offended by anything.

And then you wash your face and realize that was fifteen years ago and you can't justify that sort of humor anymore. Not everything ages well, and not every inside joke ages poorly either, but every now and then we have to go through the mental closet and admit that the notion of being an adult from age 18 onward is not applicable to maturity levels.

Take this post as an inspiration. Dust off the mental cobwebs and grant yourself the permission to abandon some old joke or phrase or media or friendship or opinion that served you once, but doesn't align with the mental model of maturity you have now.

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(trying to make a new friend) "hey do you wanna try extremely expired pop rocks"

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I'm not dead, there's no end, my face is red

My blood flows harshly

My heart beats loudly

My chest still draws breath, I hold it

I'm buoyant

There's no end

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[transcript for easier readability] [Michi, the player character, and Pinky⭐visit the town's car mechanic for the first time. After discussing illegal car upgrades, about which Michi is dismissive, the conversation continues:] Pinky⭐: I don't have whatever brain virus you have that makes you think that, so trust me when I say, WRONG. Pinky⭐: This truck can barely make it up a hill. It definitely can't pick up hot babes or compete in drift races. Michi: We don't need to do either of those things. Pinky⭐: SHUT Pinky⭐: UP Pinky⭐: MICHI Pinky⭐: I know that you've replaced intimate companionship in your life with loving this truck, but it's not cool. You need help. And if you ask me- Michi: I didn't. Pinky⭐: -we need to put more nitrous boost in here, get some kind of railgun to destroy obstacles and make this piece of junk amphibious. Michi: No, we don't.

I already love everything about this game, it's going to be an instant purchase if I've ever seen one.

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imagine being the person who invented jewellery. like you found a shiny thing and banged it into a shape and put it around your finger and everyone was like. ew freak. and they killed you. and some time later they started doing that to show how cool and rich they are and nobody even knows who you are.

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software developer job offer at our company - Node.js+TypeScript, Tallinn, Estonia

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tumblr users meeting normies for the first time

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personal stuff that's kinda dark, dw if you're a friend you can skip this, i'm alright (relatively yk)

all our mothers had the same idea. he went too young. this could be my child. this could be my child. this could be my child.

my classmate, who was on and off one of the best friends and worst assholes (or... ok he was only a mild asshole) has passed away on Wednesday. Today was his funeral. Two group chats, from the elementary school and gymnazium classes, had the same sentiment - I can't believe this, he was so young, does anyone know what happened, his parents must be devastated. Nobody dared to say the obvious.

We were all worried of our own mortality. Just finishing 4 decades, we all know now the era of divorces, cancers, heart attacks and strokes is becoming real. My classmate probably drank himself to death, over time. He's been isolating himself for some time. At some point he unfriended me on facebook, already 10 years ago, after my posting became more... well. Let's say I was hanging out with an international crowd and he was going to the gym and shooting range with cops.

Who knows what he was really like in the last few years. I don't. I don't know any of my classmates anymore, not in any substantial way. Most have kids. A lot of them are good people, I'm sure. I'm sad about his passing, of course. But I'm not particularly shaken.

I've been contemplating my own mortality for ages. Depressed and anxious since I was 8-10, I didn't think I'd live past 25. When I lived past 25, I moved it to 35. When I was 35 I had the time of my life and didn't want to stop living. But you don't forget what it's like to have a death wish, what's it's like to simultaneously be worried about dying too soon.

And so what becomes a foolish wish when you're 15 or 20 or 25 suddenly becomes the opposite fight. You're not self-sabotaging anymore, you don't "go hitchhiking at 3am". Now your choice of food, you pushing yourself to exercise even when you're dead tired, attempting healthy social life even if you want to sit at home and read and hide from the world under very cozy blankets, that's now your fight for survival. If you value life, you have to dedicate time to work on it. Survival isn't guaranteed anymore like when you're in your 20s where you just drink a few times a week and bounce right off after drinking a liter of coca cola and two red bulls while gulping down fried cheese with fries or whatever trash fast food has the most salt.

It's good be alive, but the era is changing. I'm told we have enough microplastic in our brains to make a plastic spoon, and I guess we're doing well enough given those conditions, but the era is changing and the problems we're facing will be taken a notch or two higher.

Even on higher difficulty settings. It is good to be alive. Please remember that. Take care of yourself and your loved ones.

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Taylor Lorenz recently published an interview about a small amount of the nasty stuff that Spotify is doing, how it manipulates artists and the culture. There's a lot to be said about how the amount they pay per stream has gone down 50% over ten years, how they don't pay royalties for strongs with <1000 streams, how their partners remove catalogs of random people they suspect of botting streams, without any proof, how they paid $100M+ to a conspiracy theorist and nazi platformer, how their license music for a few dollars and then put it on their playlist to get hundreds of millions of plays for which they will pay $0 to the artist (as discussed in the video linked), how they're not profitable and do accounting gymnastics to increase the share value, how they pay $1.1bln+ per year to just a few of the top executives, etc.

Anyway, you have the option to pay - you, as a musician, as an artist, as someone who is trying to make money on Spotify - they give you the option to _pay Spotify_ to recommend your music. Because you know, platform decay. But what I want to write about is another place where you can do that, SubmitHub.

The concept of SubmitHub (and similar services) is simple: if you have popular playlists on Spotify and elsewhere, you join as a seller/provider. If you're a musician, you join as a buyer. You search for playlist-havers, offer your song to them in exchange for credits (generally $2-$4 that I've seen), and then they listen to a few seconds of your song and reply "no thanks" and take your money.

Venus Theory pointed out problems with it, but whatever. I spent a few bucks to test the waters ahead of time before I release my EP this year (hopefully) and got a few responses for my songs (free listen on my bandcamp, or on Deezer or, well, on Spotify).

Feedback / rejections I received for my two songs, Smallness and Catching up:

"Thanks again again for your song. While I enjoyed the farfisa usage and the dynamics, I am going to pass as the genre is quite crowded and the ambiance did not set itself apart for me tonight. Best of luck with this one regardless, Andrew"

"Thank you Kindness Matters. While I enjoyed the dynamics and synths, I am going to pass as the melody did not capture me for repeat listening. Best of luck with your song regardless, Andrew"

"Hello Kindness Matters, thank you for introducing your music to me and for your interest in my playlists. I like the immersive cinematic atmosphere this piece creates. Nice lush and warm sounding synths, lovely melodic variations and expansive arrangement that keeps you engaged throughout the track. I like your sound selection and musical ideas, but unfortunately, it's not a match for either of my playlists. I'm looking for tracks with prominent melodic hooks and some organic sound elements, similar to the style and sound of such artists as Bonobo or Four Tet for my downtempo playlist and minimalistic felt piano music for my cinematic selection. Your piece is really interesting, just in a different space. Sorry, can't help you with a placement this time, but wishing you the best with the rest of the campaign and with your future projects.

Have a great weekend! Domas"

"Hey Thanks for submitting this track, It´s a fine composition, However its not fitting to the overall concept of the playlists. We are looking for more drone/texture pieces that is darker and slower evolving with less chord progression. Great piece though. Kind Regards Ambient Soundscape"

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it amuses me when someone still thinks that software developers are cool and rational. like. ma'am. software developers are some of the most biased, petty, privileged assholes out there. even the ones who aren't tech bros are generally very territorial and neurotic and insecure, no matter what their perceived "intelligence" is. biases and intelligence are wholly unrelated.

C++ developers, for the first time in their life, face actual "threat" in the form of a language that is equally powerful and more reliable than C++, Rust. Instead of going "yay progress!" there's a lot of C++ developers now on a crusade, saying unhinged stuff like "my life mission is to eradicate Rust and make sure it's not used anymore". Like buddy. Pal. Listen even if everyone in the world, developers, corporations, governments - even if they agreed that Rust is good and C++ is bad, and to stop writing any new projects in C/C++ - even then - do you think you'll lose your job? Do you think there won't be hundreds of millions of C++ projects that need fixing and maintaining? Do you think your value on the market will drop drastically?

It's pure pettiness. It's fascinating to see. Especially since the world is burning and none of the code will make any difference when you can't afford bread and there is civil unrest outside.

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As a dubious reward for answering the poll, here, have Firefox Translate'd page for Vastlapäev

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babe wake up. a new type of magnetism just dropped

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save me proton pump inhibitors. pantoprazol-ratiopharm 20mg save me.

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today's schedule:

do everything

be really surprised and disappointed at the end of the day that everything is not done

say "tomorrow will be different"

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I thought about going back in time to be a teenager again but with all my wisdom+knowledge+memories so that I would have a do-over knowing I have ADHD and be overall more responsible in life and stop wasting time and just make a lot of music from early age, but then I realized I would need to wait for some of my favorite bands to even be formed and then release my favorite albums and decided that would be too much to bear so SORRY i'm staying in this timeline for now

[agapi-kalyptei]

Two short thoughts about LLMs as programmers:

First, non-developers vastly overestimate both how capable something like ChatGPT will be when programming, and underestimate how much work it is to even explain to them what they want to achieve. Of course, I don't really blame them for it when all they hear on the news is how AI will replace our jobs "soon".

Second, investors and a lot of AI-enthusiasts, including developers, don't realize how fundamentally unready AI is, and always will be, for maintaining software. Even if AI will be able to write more than simple CRUD servers or whatever other well documented algorithms, what it fundamentally lacks is context and a long term memory. (As I explained in one of my previous posts.)

What happens in real companies is that if something is complex and weird, you walk over to Joe's desk, and ask Joe what was he thinking 4 or 7 or 13 years ago when he wrote it. Joe is a cryptid, but he wrote a lot of code, some good, some less good, and even with his memory slowly failing, after sufficient poking you can get an answer out of him like "oh this was bad from the start, it was done in a rush but then we kept building more features on top of the faulty solution, sorry it's such a mess" or "oh no there's actually this legal requirement in Denmark so for these users we have to make an XML, zip it up and upload it to an FTP or we face hefty legal fines".

ChatGPT will never, never, never, never, n-e-v-e-r be able to do that.