Music and tech, but mostly an interesting quote

A very cool quote from this interview with Benn Jordan and Rick Beato:

Why do you need to “break out” as a musician to be a successful musician? Being a successful musician is someone who makes music and is happy making music.

So good. And applies to so many things. It’s so easy to overload the word “success” with an amount of money, or a tangible kind of status-symbol. But, like, what if we didn’t? What if we remembered that “success” is the thing we get (maybe) as a result of all that stuff. The feelings. The free time. The state of being.

The interview is decent. It’s Benn and Rick talking about the state of the music industry, AI, weaponized audio, microphone jamming devices… y’know, normal stuff for musicians. 😆

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How to get more from the LLMs

This is a good, practical, and short blog post with an explicit example on how to get better results from LLMs (things like Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, etc): “Prompt engineering for humans”.

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A good anecdote I’ve been agreeing with: Treat these things like a “new employee”. They can be quite capable. But they do not know where the supply closet is, or that Rhonda really prefers blue pens.

The more “context” you are able to front-load, the better.

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AI Vocabulary Word

(I’m trying a new thing here. Tell me if you hate it.)

“Machine Learning”. This is at the heart of most of what we’re calling “AI” lately. Machine Learning is concept that moves computer programming from a whole lot of rigid rules (if this, then that) to choosing outcomes based on seeing lots of previous examples.

You can imagine “training” a program by showing thousands of labelled photos of cats and dogs. Eventually, that training data can be used to guess if a new photo contains a cat or a dog.

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SEO

Tell your friends with small businesses to make sure they fill out every field of their Google My Business profile (or whatever Google calls it this week). This is 100% going to help them show up in Maps results.

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Puppy news

Toby is doing well! He’s figuring out the house rules, and very excited to play. If you follow Laura or I on Instagram, you have surely seen his face.

Magic news

Laura and I went to see Justin Willman on his “One for the ages” tour. Very fun magic show. Very family friendly.

Dishwasher news

I astonished someone recently, by explaining that yes, I had actually watched a full ~40 minute long video about dishwashers. Indeed, one of my fave YouTube channels Technology Connections has a shorter remake called “Your dishwasher is better than you think (tips, tricks, and how they work)”. It’s just 27 minutes long! That is probably worth watching if you have a dishwasher in your life. 😆

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Whew! I should stop here!