This is the first time in >20 years that I've tried recording with a mic in a space inhabited by cats. Gigi's all "well fuck, dude, if you're gonna sit on the floor and rub sandpaper in front of that thing I might as well headbutt it repeatedly because that's less bizarre than what you're doing."

It's not a real song until you have tracks with names like "auto parts" and "beard trimmer" and find yourself digging through your sandpaper bin trying to determine which grit is most musical.

Here's a sneak peek at an example I'm experimenting with for my LLM explainer. This shows what happens to the input "I'm a massive Hanna-Barbera fan. I have a brown dog and his name is" as it makes it way through this model's 26 transformer blocks. This looks weird at first, so lemme explain...

I saw a still from Christmas Story where Ralphie had a bar of soap in his mouth and was suddenly overcome with "yup, that sure was a thing parents used to do." I still have the taste memory of Ivory soap. Remember when soap was just...soap? No gender, no for-body, for-hands, for-mouth, just...soap.

I'm going to update my "How to Murder" Skillshare course with "Do you dream of committing the perfect murder? Do you also dream of becoming a novelist/playwright? Before you do anything you'll need to choose which of those dreams you're going to pursue and which one you're going to abandon forever."

@damnslippy.slippy.me Per our earlier discussion about proper bone handling.

Oh hell yeah! While mapping out a plan for getting my code working on newer models I found that just a couple of weeks ago someone put up some software that does exactly what I'm trying to do but waaaaaaaay better. This is where the sausage gets made. I have an explainer in the works.

Bricks is fun. All the knobs for the parameters are bricks.

I think I'm finally done with Hello Kitty's mods. I had some weird issues after installing the new pickup, but chiseling out the tighter areas of the pickup cavity and installing better saddles seems to have fixed them. I'm surprised the saddles didn't cause problems sooner. They were nasty.

Another contender: "This fun creative library was born from the idea of playing Red Hot Chilli Peppers using only peppers."

I'm looking through collections of found sounds virtual instruments. I thought my favorite was Bricks, sounds made with a pile of bricks. But then I found Tim's Face, 4 octaves of tuned percussion of this Tim guy getting his face slapped.

Confession: crackers always make me think of Sandy Duncan.

I've been putting together some code to show what happens with an actual input prompt as it makes its way through an actual LLM. On the one hand, I'm stoked because I think it's a really cool view into the sausage making that helps clear up a lot of confusion and misunderstanding. On the other hand,

I got a portable/desktop strobe tuner since my tank of a rack mount one keeps getting in the way of everything on my desk. A. I love the c. 2001 mp3 player aesthetic B. If you play an instrument that uses a tuner and you've never used a strobe tuner, I HIGHLY recommend you try one out

If you hear anything about a widespread cheese shortage in the coming days, don't look in our fridge. Because there's nothing whatsoever about its contents that could provide any sort of causal explanation for the shortage. Nothing. We don't even like cheese.

30+ years on I'm still bummed that my colossal life implosion coincided with the semester in which I took (well, started taking) linear algebra. Sooo many of my computing interests are neck deep in that shit and it's super cool, but I have an emotional barrier with that math and that math only.

Something in an episode of Pluribus gave me an idea for a sound thing to do in my Don't Worry Be Happy cover and I did it and it's *perfect* for what I was looking for. Ever since I've been realizing how much that show has in common with the space I've been creating for this song to inhabit.

I'm looking at an html page with lynx for Reasons and now I'm wondering how far I could get into the week browsing with lynx exclusively.

Almost every day for the past 3 years I've been running imaginary conversations with potential therapists in my head to get in front of the wall of silence every therapist I've had has put up re: my diagnosis. I have a bunch of files with partially-written scripts to try to cover all the bases...

I just remembered the time I had to go visit a violin luthier to acquire something. His old school violin workshop was a room in the back of the 2nd floor of a tanning salon. It's weird going into a tanning salon and asking the person at the desk if you're in the right place for the violin guy.

@eccentricflower.com I've been thinking of our gated reverb convo today. For this song ending I have the two vocals absolutely drenched in reverb, and I took out the dry signal entirely so instead of "singers with reverb added for space" it's "singers way at the other end of a giant cathedral." ...

Alright which one of these furbeasts puked on my headphones? Sorry I'm a plain, old geezer who still swears by the classic K240s for music work.

Hell yeah. www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2nA...

Sometimes for a tiny sliver of time I'm like, damn, I really like the person I've come to be. By my own measures I really like my creativity and the unique and deep ways I think about stuff and all that. And the rhythmic upheaval of the holidays is going to cut my brain off from that any day now.

Today's sample library find: "A melancholic toilet lid" It has 3 stars.

Holy shit. There's a yearly underground utility locating competition called the Locate Rodeo. The winner gets a wrestling belt! This is fucking awesome. locaterodeo.net

Ooh, this looks neat! Buildings and stuff in a real city in the Czech Republic modeled into 3D printed miniatures, 3D scanned into game assets. Educational strategy set in the 30s and 40s. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nbax...

Allocating new location in hell for "Sites that tell you, when you're visiting them on your laptop doing everything else just fine, that this one little piece of mundane functionality you want, which has nothing whatsoever to do with mobile devices, is arbitrarily only available in the app"

Oh, and for folks who speak math and are interested in this stuff, 3Blue1Brown has an awesome series on neural networks. The three videos on transformers start here. www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjZo...

Question for folks (long thread). Much of my AI interests are in the academic/homebrew/low-level realm. Very far removed from "chatgpt, think for me." Being in with the sausage-making has made me painfully aware of how poorly people outside this realm understand and/or explain this tech.

Every local news program: Coming up next, a local man did something anyone who isn't a psychopath should just fucking do in that situation as a matter of course. See how his local community came together to show their appreciation with a gift of a new squeegee, a parade, and 37 blow jobs

Alright which one of these furbeasts puked on my Les Paul? Buncha goddamn Stratocatsters. I know this guitar isn't popular among the young 'uns these days, but...sheesh.

I watched a cool vid yesterday about image classification neural network academic blah blah blah. Only relevant here in that outputs from the internal layers gave me an idea for a music video. Which gave me an idea for a song to make that music video about. But since Len Can't Make Anything Simple,

There's a recurring mundane bill I have to pay by check. I know damn well how to do checks. I was doing accounts payable for my parents' company when I was fucking 10. But this is always an area where my task sequencing goes to shit. Here's what I know I should do vs what my brain does in the moment

pineapple juice. lime juice. jalapeno. ginger.

Proposal: an HTTP "Celebrates-Christmas: no" header to tell sites "look, I'm just here to buy more anal itch cream* and a site hyperoptimized for gift-buying makes that kinda obnoxious. Please serve me your normal site if possible." *I myself don't need to buy anal itch cream at this juncture, but

I am pleased(?) to report that I successfully impregnated the cheesecake box with my superglue and now my bone nut is high enough, at least for the time being.

It is 3am and I have managed to accidentally lower both of my bone nuts too far and now I'm going to have to impregnate some paperboard with superglue in order to rectify the situation. Also I didn't take my G string off and it keeps getting in the way. Welcome to Len's Guitar Repair: After Dark

Gigi has decided today that any paper towel she sees, she will plop down on and stay there. Doesn't matter if it's on top of a plate or covered in bone dust. Yes. I have a paper towel here with a bunch of bone dust on it. You don't need to know why.

2 failed long thread tries were the meta I needed to nail it succinctly: I'm feeling more isolated because I can't verbalize the increasingly complicated and negative brain experiences I'm having from being on this site, a site I come to so I can practice verbal skills and make sure I don't isolate

I think I've been able to piece together what happened. I believe back then, I installed it, it sounded like ass, I didn't have the brain together-ness to troubleshoot, so I decided to do the popular Hello Kitty-to-metal-guitar pipeline instead. It still sounds like ass, but I think I now know why.

Really cool video. If you haven't seen Usagi Electric's videos before, he's awesome and gets infectiously excited about stuff. Bonus: the barcode he's using as his example is from a soap product his brother sells at his store here in Pittsburgh. Bonus 2: bunny! www.youtube.com/watch?v=YVBJ...

New rule: for some N TBD, if a show/film wants to do an Nth season/sequel, regardless of genre, setting, story so far, or anything else, that season/sequel must be about a sentient cheeseburger who drives a '77 Pacer, runs a multinational conglomerate, and develops an obsession with the lead.

I upgraded the firmware on Floorence the Machine the other day and she's finishing about 30% more quickly. This *might* be a positive side effect of some nav improvements, but here's the thing. She isn't updating the cleaning map so I can verify she's hitting everything. If this were a heist film,

I knew I worded this poorly when writing it but opted to be lazy and not fix it and on reread that was a dumb choice. I was trying to say that not having any interaction at all, online or real, is fine by me, but psychology disagrees. Hence me using social media.

A big reason I use social media is because if I don't, it basically doesn't occur to me to interact with anyone outside of this house. Fine by me, but the psychology party line is that's Really Bad, so I defer to the so-called experts because what do I know. But should I?

I love auto-generated video captions. "Surprisingly, he also told investigators he had a living girlfriend at the time."

Why must 90% of my ideas be ludicrously far outside my brain's competency? Why must I spend so much time every day taunting myself with a need for fulfillment I'll never be able to achieve?

My milkshake (soldering iron) brings all the boys (cats) to the yard (workbench).

Hello Kitty's new pickup. Except the new pickup is still sitting on the workbench. This is the same model, but white, and I didn't realize I had it. I apparently installed it in her 9 years ago and replaced it 3 weeks later because???