BFay's comments

Database Management Systems, aka "The Cow Book"

Wow, yeah it seems entirely plagiarized. It's still a very strange song, but I don't think the AI did anything noteworthy here. Thanks for looking into it!

Oh, yes sorry I didn't realize I could actually link: https://www.musi-co.com/listen/track/test_energylevel

I highly highly recommend listening to the track called "Test_energylevel", it is absolutely bonkers, and more interesting than any of the other tracks I clicked on here. (You have to click on "Explore" and then scroll down a bit to find it)

It starts with a choir of ambient vocals singing "it's a sunshine", there's some bird noises and traffic sounds, a snippet of organ synth flourishes.

Then it all gets started - guitar, sitar, horns, strings a vocal duet singing "Shine your sweet loving down on me"

There's actually a ton going on, every few bars it changes things up, there's clever little harpsichord.

Then a male singer starts proclaiming "It's a sunshine daaaayyy", backed up by a chorus of "yeah, yeah, yeah"s. Honestly it's kind of catchy

The last 30 seconds or so are truly cursed, there's a voice in the right speaker moaning "wide eyed retina. mostly logical", which gets delayed, bitcrushed, and pingponged between the speakers.

Wow! I wonder why this specific track has so much going on compared to the others.

I also enter an absurdly old date, and usually I'll try setting an impossible day/month combo like February 31st... sometimes it actually works!

I really like Jeremy Kun's writing: https://jeremykun.com/ and recommend his book, A Programmer's Introduction to Mathematics: https://pimbook.org/.

So far I've only read the first few chapters of the book, and the exercises often feel too difficult to me. But I think he does a great job of easing into mathematical notation, pausing to reflect on what a seasoned mathematician might be thinking when they come across that notation. He also makes a lot of analogies to programming, and has example programs that are easy to follow. It's helpful to have that angle to understand things from.

This may seem silly, but one of my main reasons for using IntelliJ over Eclipse is because it has a nice looking dark theme. I've tried using the dark theme on Eclipse, and on both Windows and OS X it had very bright scroll bars that clash with the dark editor.

I think my favorite keyboard shortcut in IntelliJ is double-tapping shift to get a really smart search to pop up.

I'll have to look into WavePot, but I'll say that SonicPi is built first and foremost for live-coding; making music in realtime while coding. There's some other languages that focus on this - Gibber in the browser, Tidal in Haskell. Those are probably the best languages to start playing with if you want to get something musical happening quickly.

SuperCollider is much more general - you have a server that can build and execute graphs of unit generators, and a language that has a ton of convenience features for interacting with the server, and abstractions for scheduling events. (sidenote, I'm starting to build an audio patching environment using SuperCollider. It doesn't do anything yet but I'm hoping to have something soon https://github.com/YottaSecond/Triggerfish)

SuperCollider also has a great community - questions on the mailing list are usually answered within a couple of hours, and there's a team of people furiously working on the upcoming 3.7 release.

I love Pure Data to death, it has an amazing community and is actively being developed, but I have some trouble recommending it because of the aging Tcl/Tk interface.

ChucK looks really interesting. In most environments you need to write unit generators in C/C++ to actually do low-level audio processing. ChucK uses a "strongly-timed" programming model, where you can actually use the same language to process sound sample-by-sample and schedule things at real musical intervals.

Extempore is also worth looking into if you aren't afraid of lisp.

So yeah, it depends largely on what you want to do. The live-coding languages like SonicPi are probably the best for getting music going quickly, but the others all have unique things to offer.

And maybe that enjoyment will make you a happier person in general, which will in turn make you more productive because you won't worry and second-guess yourself so much.

Check out The Echo Nest API for some inspiration - I'm pretty sure Spotify and some similar services use it for their recommendations. http://developer.echonest.com/docs/v4

I've had the same issues - with some updates it gets better or worse, it's pretty annoying. Another thing that concerns me with the app is that the setting to only download/stream tracks on wifi doesn't seem to be honored; if I have autoplay on in my car, it will start streaming songs I've never downloaded over 4G.

Apart from that, I love the service, and I'm sad to see it go!

I'm using Arch and I really like it. However, it does take way more time and effort to install than the more mainstream distros like Ubuntu and Fedora, especially if you're like me and you're used to things like wifi "just working."

Antergos and Manjaro are both distros that try to streamline the process of Arch linux installation. I have yet to try either one, I wonder how well they work.

Linux Poetry is relevant: http://linuxpoetry.com/

Just consider the laptop fan additional ambient sound!

It seems very difficult to come up with aath curriculum that works for everyone. I agree that a creative approach might not be as practical as I imagine it, I've definitely suffered from the "aha, monads are burritos, why hasn't anybody told me this" fallacy before.

I keep hearing (mostly negative) things about the Common Core program in the US, I wonder what it's really like. Creative new ways of teaching always sound good on paper, but I hear so many parents complain about the way their kids are being taught. I wonder if most of those complaints are warranted, or if the new style of questions just take getting used to.

Was it the "Yeah" that made the tone seem sarcastic? I didn't really mean it that way, I genuinely do think it would be interesting to see what happens. Sometimes I wish I had been taught math from a more theoretical perspective. When I was younger, math seemed really boring, just problems to solve; how much money is left after this series of transactions, what is the area of this shape, etc. When I did learn simple algebra, it only seemed useful for those kinds of problems.

I've only found mathematics really interesting within the past few years, realizing how useful it is for creative things, like making music and art, or understanding programming at a higher level. If I had learned about functions in a more interactive way, maybe being able to create art on a computer screen, or write up physics systems in games, I think I would have been fascinated, and maybe the concepts would have stuck.

Yeah, it would be interesting to learn about pure functions and referential transparency before basic algebra.

My Windows 10 installation fscked up my linux partitions that were on the same drive, and I was unable to repair tem... probably my own fault for not being careful, but very aggravating. The OS itself seems fairly smooth, though.

I think the gain that people are aiming for is "write once, run everywhere."

Especially if you're a lone developer - it's one thing to learn the intricacies of one platform (like web), but learning the ecosystems for Android, iOS (maybe you don't even own a mac to develop with), and native desktop apps... it's just too much work for one person. But if you could just write it once and have a good experience on each platform, wouldn't that be amazing? I guess that's what React Native is trying to solve, too.

I've been waiting for something like this, it looks great! I hope it can work with "babel-node" without any hiccups, so I can keep my server on ES6.