It’s been a busy summer. Visions got launched. Probably my favourite application I’ve built so far. Please have a go with it if you haven’t already.
I’ve been trying out a lot of new things to see what feels right next. I had a go at reinforcement learning – Pretty fun but prohibitively expensive and slow to take on as a main project. Even the GPUs available on google colabs aren’t really powerful enough to perform quick experiments on very large datasets like the Chess data I was looking at. I feel like if you solve chess then there are probably a lot of other applications of that degree of power. It would be doable if I didn’t mind only being able to train one version of a model every day then feed back on it the next day. But that’s not going to be a good way to work at the moment.
I’ve looked at a few other things based on the Visions architecture but working on some DSP this week is feeling good. I spent a long time learning it in the past. It was my entry point to programming and development but I’d like to think I’ve grown a lot as a developer since those days, so unsurprisingly coming back to it now I find i’m able to make a lot of things I would have liked to have made years ago but couldn’t work out how. We’ll see how it turns out but I’ve got a lot of ideas sitting around from back then that could have been pretty fun if I knew how to do the details. Its the antialiasing of everything that makes things more mathsy. I think that’s the kind of thing that LLMs can help you with now.
Synths are fun because you can launch them a piece at a time. You can’t really do that with websites. I mean, not at the scale I’m doing it at. I love the idea of developing some new synthesis techniques and slowly making them available to ableton users or something like that. I realised if i’m going to work on another music project it needs to be something with relatively broad appeal and who doesn’t love playing with surprising new synth tones in ableton? Don’t answer that.
I find it pretty draining being between projects. Thankfully I think I’ve found a new one. We’ll see how we get on.