I got up today, had my morning coffee, and was surprised to find that AI music is pretty much solved. Okay, there are still some audible artifacts, and you can argue that the song I linked to is generic if it makes you feel better. Still, as someone who’s dabbled with music and composition and worked in the AI field for a while, this is incredibly impressive. We now have a software system that can crank out more catchy music than 99 out of 100 musicians, and do it about 100,000 faster than a human could. The end game of AI music seems pretty obvious. Soon, you’ll be able to have access to an a ..read more

Since the beginning of this year, I’ve been casually working on UVM, a project to a minimalistic virtual machine that is portable and easy to target. As part of this project, I’ve also been working on a toy C compiler to make creating software for this VM easier. I first wrote about UVM on February 24th, and got a fairly mixed reaction on Hacker News. Many people couldn’t see the appeal/interest in creating yet another VM or bytecode format when there’s already technology such as the JVM and WASM out there. I’m doing this in part for the learning experience, and also because I think it’s fun ..read more

We don’t always think of it this way, but on modern machines, memory and pointers are an abstraction. Today’s machines have virtual memory, divided in blocks called “pages”, such that the addresses represented by pointers don’t necessarily map to the same address in physical RAM. In fact, mmap even makes it possible to map files to memory, so some of these addresses aren’t even mapped to RAM addresses at all. Two weeks ago, I wrote about UVM, the small virtual machine I’ve been building in my spare time. This VM has a relatively low-level design where it has untyped instructions and pointers f ..read more

Just over a year ago, I wrote a blog post about a topic that’s very important to me, which is the problem of code rot, of software constantly breaking because of shifting foundations, and the toll it takes on programmers, and on society at large. We’re no doubt collectively wasting billions of dollars and millions of human hours every year because of broken software that should never have been broken in the first place My own belief is that stability is undervalued. In order to build robust, reliable software, it’s important to be able to build such software on stable foundations. One of the p ..read more

One of the things that’s been on my mind recently is the idea of building a virtual machine for code archival purposes. Something that’s optimized for long-term stability and longevity, with the goal of helping prevent code rot. This is a fundamentally hard problem to solve, because the world changes, and so software changes with it, but at the same time, there’s no fundamental reason why software written 5, 10, 20 or even 50 years ago couldn’t run anymore. To some extent, you can still run 50 year old software if you have the right emulator, but I think that this is going to become harder and ..read more

Four years ago, I wrote a blog post titled Minimalism in Programming, in which I tried to formulate an argument as to why it’s usually a good idea to try to minimize complexity in your programming projects. Today, I want to write about something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, which is the idea that we also ought to take a more intentionally minimalistic philosophy when designing programming languages. Designing a programming language to be intentionally minimalistic is an idea that’s highly underrated in my opinion. Most modern programming languages adopt much more of a maximalist d ..read more

The last two weeks have been a painful reminder that, as comfortable as we may have it in the west, democracy is not the default state of the world. Historically speaking, democracy has been a relatively recent and scarce concept. Even today, two of the largest countries in the world are ruled by authoritarian dictatorships. It’s both scary and sad to be reminded that one person’s ego, when left unchecked, can cause an incalculable amount of suffering, and the deaths of tens of thousands, or even millions. One clear similarity between authoritarian regimes is that in order to maintain their po ..read more

Two months ago, I wrote about NoiseCraft, the visual programming language slash modular synth that runs in a browser that I’ve been working on in my spare time. This is very much a passion project, but what I’m hoping to achieve with this is to build a small online community for the exchange of synth patches and musical ideas, and to learn a lot more about sound synthesis in the project. Since the announcement, the project went on to get over 520 stars on GitHub, the app got over 66,000 hits and 155 new users registered accounts at noisecraft.app. The first thing I noticed is that the number o ..read more

One of the most frustrating experiences, both as an end user and as a programmer, is to try to run a piece of software that used to work perfectly not that long ago, only to find out that it’s now broken, the software won’t run anymore, and it’s not clear why. The software didn’t change, but something broke, seemingly for no reason. This is often due to the phenomenon known as “code rot”, or “bit rot”. I used to work in a deep learning research lab, and I’ve seen cases where researchers had published code just six months ago, but one or more of the dependencies on which they relied had since m ..read more

I’ve seen multiple discussions online as to the negative effects of the internet on society. There’s definitely harmful content online. It makes me sad to see the internet being used as a tool to spread anger and hate, and to further the political divide, but today I’m going to share a personal story about how, in the late 90s and early 2000s, the internet changed my life. When I was a kid, my mother worked as a journalist. She would often bring me to book launches and events of the sort. I distinctly remember being offered Perrier water to drink and hating it (how could anyone drink this?), a ..read more