ooo_shiny

In an ideal world, housing costs would be more predictable so that ordinary people can plan around them and get on with their lives. We purchased in the last few years and are not badly off, but could have done without the $100k haircut in our bank equity. Sure, doesn’t affect us too much, but makes renovations harder.

Embarrassing for BMW.

This looks like the business. With that much customisation they’re taking on Origin Effects and that sort of thing.

This is interesting news. I hope it’s a positive mood. Even before our current tariff-filled economy I felt that Source Audio found it a tad difficult to get the attention that its products deserved, because the core sounds that they produce are top notch.

Source Audio puts themselves up against Strymon, which is some tough competition. Source Audio can make a compelling claim that its algorithms are slightly better and that its pedals are better value, but Strymon has some slick UI and aesthetics. The UI in particular is an important aspect for musicians wanting to dial in a sound quickly.

I’ve wanted a Source Audio Artifakt since it came out but it’s hard to justify with the recent birth of my daughter.

Seems like granular processing’s having a moment. I’m glad to see there’s commercial potential in it — there must be, or they wouldn’t be bringing this pedal back.

I wonder which musicians are buying it, though? Guitar pedals sit at a fun intersection of technical innovation and musical creativity.

MXR’s doing some great stuff lately.

I find most kids quite receptive to a discussion about the effect that phone use has on cognition and social aspects (eg. cyber bullying, stranger danger). There’s hope yet!

Yes — I think if I were to teach a large undergraduate class tomorrow I would go with a combination of handwritten exams and, for homework assignments, critical analyses of the most obscure examples of whatever is being studied possible so that AI has no idea what you’re even on about (in my field, ask it to analyse music; it’s hopeless). Multiple choice is fine for stuff that can be rote learned.

Ah, the ‘are we there yet?’ problem. I suspect parents will always do what they have to do in that situation. It also sounds like you’re teaching healthy phone usage.

The big difference between phones and TVs is that phones serve up short-form content on the TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube type apps that kids just flick through. There is no need to watch them for a sustained amount of time to figure out what’s interesting about each piece of media, and they’re addictive: people choose to spend time on these apps rather than doing other things. I believe that kids these days have a shorter attention span as a result of the increased consumption of short-form media vs traditional tv shows and movies.

The gold standard would be to make each student do an oral defense of their work. Hand-written exams are good too. Both of these approaches are time-consuming to mark, though.

Assessment design can require students to perform analysis of rare and obscure source material, so that there are no published materials for AI to draw on (which can make it struggle). Similarly, asking for a good bibliography that lists the sources used in the text and formats it correctly would show up the hallucinatory tendencies of AI, I think — though I haven’t tried the latest models.

I can’t be the only one who actively tries to reduce the number of subscriptions I have. It’s terrible for the monthly budget. Gamepass lasted only a few months for me before I decided that I didn’t get sufficient value out of it. Something about paying monthly to retain access to a game that I can otherwise buy rubbed me the wrong way.

I’m a teacher so I guess I’m on the front lines here. The thing that worries me most is that some parents use phones and tablets to replace parenting for their babies and younger children. In high school, I don’t see many kids these days choosing to read books for fun anymore. It’s really sad, and it all definitely affects the way that our kids function (or don’t) in schools.

Governments will tinker with the educational system to try and fix the growing problem of student academic underachievement, but will shy away from the real problem, which is that the level of parental involvement in and support of their child’s learning has decreased. Parents are addicted to their phones too, after all. It’s made me determined as a parent not to let phone use come between me and my own child as she grows up.