Listen to Episode 27b

Leveling up on Music

It’s been a while since I found even a whif of feedback on the internets. So I was plesantly suprised when I wrote a parody song for the Nerd! podcast’s She-Ra Movie Episode and saw this:

icansortofdrawish comments on Nerd! Pro Tip: @icansortofdrawish is a nice IG follow if you like comic book illustration

I’ve recently written three new songs for podcasts.

First off, YGCTO needs a new theme song for every season. To write a song, there has to be an idea. Even a stupid one will do as long as its SOMETHING that can guide the writing process. For this theme, my idea was a Steely Dan pastiche with heavy Michael McDonald-style backing vocals introducing the Power Fantasy. Armed with that idea, this is what came out:

You’ll get that for the next three main episodes. I’m keeping the minisode theme until I have a halfway decent stupid idea.

Next up, I created a parody song of the theme from the She-Ra/He-Man crossover movie. That was just the first five she-episodes strung together like a Grogu film. You can and should listen to that episode. First, because its a top-notch show with Jeff May and my YGCTO co-host Dre. They also had me on as a guest, so there’s that.

Listen to the Nerd! Podcast Here on the Jeff Has Cool Friends podcast channel.

More recently, I remixed Atif Myers theme for his masterful comic review podcast “Sus Stories”. Atif has a theme he sings with a “Ba Ba Ba, De De Da Do” style cadence. I sampled his latest theme and added instruments and an arrangement.

The purpose was to have intro music for Atif whenever he guests on YGCTO. You’ll hear him on the second Power Fantasy Episode here. When I sent it to him for permission, he liked it enough to ask if he could use it on his podcast.

Go listen to Sus Stories for the best quick bite comic podcast on the internet.

OK, that’s it for fun stuff. Time to climb on the AI soapbox again.

You Can Skip This Part, It’s About AI Tech Class Politics

Since I said everything last week about the show, I’ll give myself a tangent on tech world politics in light of Babylon 5. Essentially, I think the tech bro class that forced AI upon us saying that it was “inevitable” were correct… but they were hiding a truth that in a capitalist system, the inevitability is that it would only benefit them.

Lessons from the internet

AI is like the internet in that it DID become ubiquitous. Although less in the way the tech class thought it would like the internet. It’s more like the way U2 forced everyone to own their album and lost all credibility.

The tech class seems to be turning on itself after pushing a product that no one really wants for so long. More importantly, its becoming clearer that this is only for the people who will profit the greatest from it. And its exactly what we all knew when this shitshow started: it will let them do everything they want without having to pay actual people to do the work.

My Situation

My cards on the table - I have to use Claude at work now for assisting with code. I still write the code myself, but will use it to check my work and get suggestions for improvements. I’ll also use it to help plan out large new features on legacy codebases.

The trap for developers is to use it all the time. I held out for a while after hearing from several other senior devs that they could feel their skills fading as they relies on it. One of the hidden costs of AI development is the brain drain. We are clearly not hiring junior positions anymore - or at least we’re hiring substantially less across the industry

Now image that coupled with the types of Pull Requests (PRs) the senior developers get now. PRs happen when a member of the team wants to get a code change approved before getting merged in to the application. Its a formal vetting process. Those PR counts go way up when Claude is writing code. Problem is that those PRs tend to be much more complicated if simply passed on rather than written by a human. So not only is the senior dev finding a lack of juniors to train, thereby assuring the company can grow stably - their time is spent reviewing more and more complicated PRs rather than executing stable design principals. And eventually, this leads to just not reviewing PRs and letting Claude write everything.

I take a stand at using AI in creating art. There is no safe line to cross when using AI to assist with art. If you use it to create music or visual art - you are quite simply a fraud and a thief.

Tying it back in

Back to the ruling tech class, they are correct that - under capitalism - AI usage is inevitable and will help them more than it does anyone else. The hope is that this is one of the factors that pushes us further toward Democratic Socialism. Under a truly fair system where economics can work to help all of us, AI might have a place. Unfortunately, that’s not where we’re at and probably not where we’er getting to anytime soon.

Babylon 5 warned us about the insidiousness of fascist regimes and how they will use anything against their own people. Think shadow tech on EarthForce ships. I don’t trust our current batch of leaders to do anything positive with this technology.

So when you hear any music on this podcast, I pledge that every note was played by yoours truly from an actual instrument. Or at least a keyboard for the synths. I use a drum machine for the drums, but convert that to MIDI and tweak parts of the programmed beats so its never just off a template.

This Week’s Guest

Our guest this week is Karl Wolf.

Karl Wolf Karl Wolf

What Did We Learn?

Creativity is for humans

Next Episode

For the next full episode, we begin our coverage of Kieron Gillen and Casper Winjgard’s “The Power Fantasy” comic with Carin Slater.

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Cheers, all!