Rivers Cuomo is an active developer on GitHub(github.com) |
Rivers Cuomo is an active developer on GitHub(github.com) |
Rockstar programmer: Rivers Cuomo finds meaning in coding
She had other great stories. Lenny Cohen played "Suzanne" for her and said "what do you think?" Annette: "it stinks. who wrote it?" Lenny: "I did."
This is at heavy risk for confirmation bias, but I believe that writing chat bots is one of the best ways for people to get into and enjoy coding, because it's fun and rewarding, and simple enough (with an existing framework to use) that just uses strings. For a large generation it was MySpace and the ability to customize your page heavily with HTML. I know a number of people who learned HTML for that reason.
Chat bots seem like the closest modern day equivalent (despite the main platforms making it harder with stuff like difficult to connect to the real time websocket and force use of webhooks). 10 years ago or so when Slack was new and had a gloriously simple API, I even wrote a framework that made it as easy as implementing one function, and you could receive messages (among other metadata like the username of the sender) as strings and send replies easily as strings. It served as an entry point for a few friends who had some fun with it and learned some ruby in the process.
Anyway, if you're looking to get into coding but want to do a "real" project (or something very rewarding), start by writing simple chat bots! If you need some ideas, these are simple:
1. Start with writing a simple echo bot that just replies to every message with the same message that it received.
1. Write a bot that responds to every message with a random number between 1 and 100. For a slight increased challenge, have it do fizzbuzz where the nth message received is the counter.
2. Write a bot that that will reverse the message of whatever it receives, so it echoes replies but backwards.
3. Write a bot that will lookup a word when the message sent is "define <word>" and reply with the definition from one of the many dictionary APIs out there.
Go from there!
1) auth/identity is built in
2) the UX is highly constrained (having students lose a month to CSS issues is perhaps good prep for the real world but feels awful)
3) all of the tooling is free*
*With the restrictions on free Heroku and the removal of free orgs on fly (it seems) I’ve had to retool a bit but codespaces cover a lot of what students need.
To anyone who wants to build and host a hobby bot, I've had a good experience with using fly.io to host mine. They don't charge you for any monthly billing periods whose total cost would be less than five dollars (USD), so for small projects that would never get close to meeting that threshold, it's free ninety nine. Hard to beat that!
No, that's just his only public repo. It only has 95 commits but he makes on average 1,000 commits per year on private repos (including Weezify, presumably). So it's really a very small fraction of his activity.
It's a quick and easy return on investment. You see results and you can share results with friends, and the APIs aren't too hard.
> base_prompt = """ I want you to act as a show designer for Weezer's upcoming summer tour. The show is divided into four segments of contrasting moods. 1. The Pop Party section will feature upbeat, cheerful songs with a more light-hearted message about love and relationships. It will be high energy and encourage the audience to participate in singing along and dancing. 2. The Emotional Ballads section will feature slower-paced songs with poignant lyrics about love and relationships. The instrumentals provide a reflective atmosphere that may be heavy at times, but ultimately brings comfort. 3. The Dark and Heavy section will focus on heavier topics such as mental health/anxiety struggles or social commentary/satire. These songs will have intense instrumentals to match the mood of the lyrical content, allowing for an honest exploration of these issues in a safe space. 4. the Fun and Uplifting segment will have a similar vibe but with deeper lyrics that speak to mental health/anxiety struggles or spiritual enlightenment. The instrumentals may be slightly slower paced than in the Pop Party section, however they are still uplifting as they celebrate hope for brighter days ahead. You are going to analyze 2 pieces of data: the song's spotify audio feature "energy" and the song's lyrics and then return 1 of these 4 strings, corresponding to the type of song you think it is. Make sure you only return one of these 4 strings with no other test around it. Here are the 4 strings in a list: ["1. Pop Party", "2. Emotional Ballads", "3. Dark and Heavy", "4 . Fun and Uplifting"]. Now here are the song lyrics: """
https://github.com/riverscuomo/apps/blob/master/songdata.py#...
A neat thing about LLMs is unlike code typos, prompt typos work just fine.
He hacked on someone's Phase Vocoder code:
https://www.panix.com/~jens/pvoc.par
I built Jens' version and used it for cleanly slowing down some audio tracks.
--
* Keyboard player of Stratovarious, formerly with Yngwie Malmsteen's Rising Force; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jens_Johansson
Which made me remember that Cuomo is also a pretty good guitar shredder, not long ago there was an interview with him shredding along his favorite lines from Malmsteen
I just saw it a couple of weeks ago, it's great. I linked to him trying to remember one of those lines, but the whole interview is worth listening to
And some amazing Bill Plympton animations!
Which reminds me of this legendary SNL skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab5WvwfLuLM
(says someone who writes postgres extensions for a living)
https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/327/little-automation-to...
Had a software shop, called “Utopia Softworks.” I don’t think much came from it.
I think a lot of early electronic musicians were quite engineering-savvy, as their equipment was pretty intense.
Even more old-school, there's Tom Scholz of Boston, who was an MIT-trained engineer who built his own amplifiers and founded a company to market them. A bunch of his inventions are probably familiar to most guitarists: all Rockman branded pedals and other equipment, the Power Soak and Yellow Jackets to get saturated tube amp sound at low volumes, etc.
Todd Rundgren said “If it weren't for my musical career, I probably would have ended up attending college to become a computer programmer.”
> I've been learning programming since 2015
So something he’s picked up fairly recently.
https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/07/travis-morrison-and...
Maybe:
The lead singer of Weezer has an active Github account.
She got a bachelor's degree in physics and a job in computer programming
That's pretty cool for a singer in a band so I knew we would end up jamminghttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39213150 https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/marlon-brando-was-a-secr...
https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/327/little-automation-to...
IIRC, he had not started using source code management at the time. When he says this, the other guests describe why he might want to start using git.
I used to play his Weezer wordle game. It was pretty good. I believe it was written in Flutter. The game seems to be defunct now.
Sure for experienced developers command line tools are used daily (at least for some developers), but for many students it can be alien world that they don't use outside the lessons.
Also overall usefulness. Simple terminal program that responds with a fixed message, is just an exerciser but otherwise useless. You need to get a lot more complicated to make useful tool. But a chatbot which responds with fixed messages (usually FAQ type stuff) is a commonly used tool for the purpose of community management.
2. The social component is fun. Students can easily show their work to each other. Don't underestimate the power of memes.
3. The Discord server provides shared history/some persistance without the students needing to implement their own servers.
Discord also supports some simple UI elements - images, buttons, form fields, and dropdowns - so it’s a nice step above a CLI for teaching UX, which is part of the course.
Good news from Fly.io! We don’t collect bills smaller than $5.00.
This month, your bill of $2.01 falls below that threshold, so we’re discounting it by 100%.
But through it all, you're learning and building skills. Hell you're having fun.
Maximize for "f**ing around and finding out"
(And even if you do exceed the $5 threshold, it's still waaaaaay cheaper than other options I've seen. RIP to Heroku's free hobby tier.)
Cheers from Montréal!
I do remember discovering the video for GWAR’s Saddam A-Go-Go inside the Beavis & Butthead adventure game that came out that same year. Weird what sticks in our heads. Good times.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ob7EEr3t8k
It's very short, too. I'm surprised by that. But it definitely stuck in my head.
"Goddamn, you half-Japanese girls/Do it to me every time"
"Everyone’s a little queer/why can’t she be a little straight?"
"When I'm away, she puts her makeup on the shelf."
"I wonder what clothes you wear to school/I wonder how you decorate your room/I wonder how you touch yourself and curse myself for being across the sea" (sung about a 14 year old when Rivers was certainly an adult)
Yeah that's some real National Archive level creepy content, I'll give you that.
18 year old girl, according to the first line of the song. I still think the song has a creepy/desperate tone, but not because she's legally a child.
> "When I'm away, she puts her makeup on the shelf."
For what it's worth, No One Else and The World Has Turned (the following song on the album) are usually taken to be related songs, including by Cuomo himself. The first song is about the jealousy that pushes the girl away, and the second is about life after she leaves.
In the context of Cuomo being into meditation his whole life, I've always taken it as a personification and exaggeration of his actual jealousy, kind of like Mara in the Buddhist tradition. I'd like to hope those lyrics aren't a literal representation of his thinking at the time. At any rate, the two songs together make it clear that the jealousy is a problem rather than something to be celebrated.
As for the half-Japanese stuff... I don't know. I think that's likely accurate to what he was going through in college. Cuomo is in my opinion very likely to be autistic, and for whatever reason lots of people on the spectrum are into Japanese culture and lots of men on the spectrum are attracted to Japanese women.
The context for the whole second album is he feels conflicted about sleeping with groupies (Tired of Sex) and becomes celibate until marriage. So he's at Harvard and unable to have sex until he meets someone he wants to spend the rest of his life with. So yeah the album is dripping with sexual frustration and I don't fault anyone for finding it creepy.
But I do kind of feel like how many of us would go to Harvard as a rock star and refuse to have sex until marriage? The vast majority of men in that situation would be hooking up regularly, and I guess he felt like he couldn't respect himself or the women in his life if he was doing that.
But - there's definitely a type of fan who admires the "creepy stalker" bent of the lyrics. I have a friend who is in that camp for sure.
Look, if you're still an adult listening to this stuff and it's not just a "once a year because of nostalgia" deal... I have serious questions.
Just to be clear, the point I was making was the opposite. He seems to struggle relating to other people, and other people struggle to relate to him.
Personally, my take is that it's worth developing empathy in general and I think that responding to people with disgust is an anti-pattern. As the cliche goes, be hard on the problem, soft on the person.