Now that LLMs have made many kinds of coding a matter of saying what you're looking for, many more programs make sense. This weekend it was audio mixing software, customized for my use case (live sound for contra dancing) and hardware (a specific obsolete audio interface).

In 2011 PreSonus released the 1818VSL, an 8-channel audio interface, with low-latency mixing software. I wrote:

All I really need is a box with some amplifying inputs that send tracks from the mic to the laptop and some outputs that let me send mixes back out again. Then any sort of complex eq, compression, or other effects can happen in software on the laptop. So I got one: it's a Presonus AudioBox VSL1818, with eight usable inputs and eight usable outputs.

At the time I did worry about how long I could expect it to be supported:

AI keeps getting more capable. At some point, likely in the next 1-3 years unless we do something to stop it, we get to where AI systems are able to do everything almost anyone can do. This is often described as leading to a world with "no jobs", but I think this tends to confuse more than help.

One sense in which there might be no jobs is that there might be no people. This is a very real concern, [1] and is the primary reason I think we need to slow down or pause AI development, but isn't what I'm trying to talk about here.

Instead, when people say "no jobs", they're usually talking about a future where there are still people but humans are basically never the best way to go from "I have money" to "my problem is solved". The history of automation has had many rounds of taking some kinds of problem and moving it to machines or human-directed machines: almost all ketchup bottles are filled by machines, almost all dirt is moved by human-controlled machines. As long as there were other things that needed doing which humans could do better than machines, though, humans have moved into other lines of work, and the futures envisioned by a 1930 Keynes in Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren haven't come about. But this is changing fast, as the list of things we can do better than machines rapidly shrinks.

Last weekend I organized a van down from Boston to NYC for EA Global:

I'm very happy I did this, and would definitely do it again. Being able to talk with folks both ways was like a bonus 8hr of the conference [1] and I had a very interesting ride each way.

I'm not sophisticated enough to have noticed improvements in the main phone camera in the past 5-10 years, but distance shots are still not very good. The next generation Pixel Pro was supposed to have an improved "telephoto" camera, and when Google Fi offered me a sufficiently good deal [1] I decided to upgrade.

Going from the 10 Pro to the 11 Pro the telephoto camera goes from a 1/2.51" sensor to 1/1.95", and since this is a diagonal measurement this means bringing in ~65% more light. But does it actually take better pictures?

I wandered around taking pairs of pictures, all at 10x. Of this, 5x is optical zoom and the remaining 2x is cropping: I'm showing the pictures as Google Photos gives them to me. All hand-held: while a tripod would likely improve high-zoom pictures, I'm interested in real-world performance which is all going to be hand-held. Every set is the 10 followed by the 11 (taken back-to-back), cropped to 1100x1100.

I started with some well lit things; here's our garden, ~35ft away:

The kids have been excited about Pig Latin a lot lately. I noticed that there are a few words that are also English words, or homophones thereof. With some help from Claude, especially in figuring out which words would work well and in checking my work, here's a poem about a pie and a naughty plover:

I weigh ache bay, each pay I pay,
Oh say eats whey, each way ice lei,
Away ate play, eye way: a prey
I'll weigh, eat whey, all way: a day.

Oh whey, oh neigh! I may I pay!
Away outstay, overplay ate whey
All whey of whey, I may I pay!
Ooh, yay, I slay eat tray outlay!

I weigh, eat whey, all whey, ashtray,
I weigh, underplay, all whey, eyes pay!
Eat sway, eat stray, I weigh eat whey!
Oh say, Old Bay? Owe whey, I may!

I weigh Amway oh say outstay!
I weigh I flay? Oh neigh, away!
I weigh a stay, I weigh I lay,
I weigh owes day all whey a day!

Several months ago I wrote a program to normalize your clipboard, removing fonts / colors / sizes and mostly leaving semantic information: anything that can't be represented in Markdown was dropped. Now that I can have walk me through things, however, I've made it available as a free app on the Mac App Store: