Every day I wake up to another reason to be happy not to have a job that requires me to travel to the US. With a background in both music and tech, industries highly oriented towards NYC & California, I’m actively making career choices to further avoid this.

Went nomadic after 15 years with Spotify. Tried Apple Music out for 3 months, but the way the app is designed is really clunky (still don't understand the difference between favourite & add to library). Now trying Tidal and it's seriously underrated.

I am SO tired of ads for Shopify.

One of my fav pieces I wrote in the last years is no longer behind a paywall. The article examines the history of Spotify's product design, highlighting the tension between its platform incentives and the interests of artists whose music it serves to its fans. www.waterandmusic.com/how-spotifys...

Been thinking recently that simple licensing models don’t address the inequity introduced by AI. Data authors deserve more than pennies. They deserve equity. calmfluffy.substack.com/p/from-spoti...

Don’t copy that sloppy.

Can’t believe even The Guardian is posting AI slop now. Can’t think of many things less interesting or urgent than reading someone else’s ChatGPT conversation. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Jammer dat de @nieuws.nos.nl hier niet opmerkt dat #JA21 hiermee het Amerikaanse DOGE na-aapt van de extreemrechtse Trump-regering. nos.nl/artikel/2579...

I really dislike how science has started calling almost any fancy computational technique AI. 🧪 The framing of this entire article makes it sound like a benevolent AI independently made these drugs. That is *pure fantasy*. Instead: a team of scientists made a machine learning model for a study.

Threads is like Fight Club for millennials who are turning into the type of people that drove us off Facebook.

Now that's the type of AI chat personality I would actually trust. ChatGPT, on the other hand, is beyond creepy. Especially the recent 'humanized' voice chat. www.businessinsider.com/gemini-self-...

What is this timeline... Why would they? Afraid to get sued for anti-competitive behaviour due to their OpenAI investment? Or just 'platform neutrality' and wanting to "position itself as _the_ AI model hosting company"? s/o @theverge.com for a zinger headline here www.theverge.com/notepad-micr...

People whose work is used to build LLMs should get shares rather than one-off licensing payments.

Few things make me as sad as the world’s plastic crisis. I’d love recommendations for people to follow who do work that addresses this. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Still get questions about my phone-less month earlier this year. An offline month is not something most people can commit to... So I've jotted down 8 ways anyone can trade some online time in for that premium offline time. Treat yourself •‿• calmfluffy.substack.com/p/eight-easy...

We got cannibal robots before GTA6 techxplore.com/news/2025-07...

Wanted to build a language-training tool for myself last month. Ended up completing it faster than expected, so I spent the rest of the month tinkering with AI. Here are the results and takeaways. calmfluffy.substack.com/p/my-acciden...

Looking for great curator / playlist recommendations on Apple Music. Drop ‘em here.

What a security / privacy nightmare. www.theverge.com/news/707995/...

Great example of how copyright law and privacy are at odds, and why you should always ask: "Am I okay with this becoming public?" before disclosing things online. arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...

I don’t believe people care about “human-made music” as they think. Would people stop dancing when a DJ plays an AI-created tune if it’s actually good? They wouldn’t even know and might enjoy it just as much, or more, as the rest of the set list. AI music will have its contexts to thrive in.

Make more things for people who care. It has never been easier. Let’s make the internet fun again. open.substack.com/pub/calmfluf...

Built a tool over the weekend that turns your #Substack into a link in bio page. stackinbio.calmfluffy.com Works with any substack. And it's free, as it was just a small vibe coding experiment. Enjoy! •‿•

Excited that my NordVPN subscription is finally ending in a few days. There are way too many promotional notifications that you can't switch off. Considering Proton now and slowly 'de-Googling' myself while I'm at it. Experiences?

Vibe coding

Software as language.

Is this also what Apple Music's karaoke feature uses? When you view the lyrics on Apple Music, you can often turn the vocals down.

Vibe coding has been fun. Made my ideal language learning app for training the specifics of German-cases, for just $20. Took a few days, rather than the month I had anticipated. Will share it publicly tomorrow via calmfluffy.substack.com

Published this on Tuesday and achieved within a few hours what I thought would take me a month… Kind of mind-blown by vibe coding. But will prob still take me a week or two to iron out bugs and stuff. calmfluffy.substack.com/p/this-month...

dude, what "My mission has long been to turn warfighters into technomancers, and the products we are building with Meta do just that" nymag.com/intelligence...

Apple Music's interface must be the most confusing out of all streaming services. What do you mean, I can't navigate to the album by clicking on the title? I can't go there via the context menu either? iTunes still exists? Oh, it's the only way to navigate to the album?

Twitter has been so important for my career, but I stopped posting and eventually deleted my account because I didn't want my data in Musk's hands. Now it looks like I'll be leaving Telegram, too. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4411...

Be a better streamer: Playlists are full of 'fake artist' stock music (and soon AI) designed to lower streaming services' royalty payments. 🎧 Start listening to a playlist. ❤️ Find a song you like. 🕵 Determine whether the artist is a real person. ▶️ Listen to their albums instead of the playlist.

I love blueberries 🫐 And I wrote a whole newsletter edition about it: calmfluffy.substack.com/p/i-love-blu...

On tech CEOs weak AI memos and the lack of compassion: open.substack.com/pub/calmfluf...

Agree, but surely there must be a more diplomatic way to phrase this, given that many of Ghost's customers probably fall in that group.

I just don't understand why CEOs have to formulate their "we're AI-first now" internal memos in such toxic, unempathic ways. I definitely expected better from some of them.

ChatGPT is another Cambridge Analytica waiting to happen… Here’s how to protect your privacy: open.substack.com/pub/calmfluf...

@kevin.woblick.com Hey - just wanted to let you know I recently found out about @cloudhiker.net and wrote about it here: calmfluffy.substack.com/p/stumbleupo... Great work!

StumbleUpon may be dead, but its spirit is alive & kicking. calmfluffy.substack.com/p/stumbleupo...

Disappointing, but you can get around it with third-party clients, like Deer, Ouranos, Skeets, and Skywalker. Which do you prefer?

Our fertile attention: from Taoism to terrorism open.substack.com/pub/calmfluf...

Before heading into the long Easter weekend: here are five ways to do a small phone detox! •‿• calmfluffy.substack.com/p/softness-a...

On the one hand, I love that we can bring little speakers to the park... On the other hand, it breaks my heart that we'll never go back to parks being places of calm without amplified music. Or maybe it's just a Berlin thing. Idk.

Tried Perplexity Pro for a month, but the amount of hallucinations is wild. Reminds me of older ChatGPT models. Cancelled for now. I’m scared to work with it as a research tool for now.

Is it a valuable use of energy to create action figure images using a model trained on other people’s creative work? No. Is it valuable to learn about what these technologies can do by trying them out? I’d argue yes. open.substack.com/pub/calmfluf...

I find the AI optimism gap to be such an interesting phenomenon. The disparity among gender is worth noting here, too. www.pewresearch.org/internet/202...

An elderly Turkish man just sat down below my window to enjoy the sun and started singing melancholic folk songs. I love Berlin.

Downgraded to the free version of ChatGPT recently... and HOLY SHIT, it's garbage compared to the premium version. No wonder most people don't see the point in using AI in their daily lives.