Heh. I use Qwen3.8-27B as my main coding agent, and I sometimes feel really bad for it as I watch the stream of thought go by filled with "wait... am I doing this right? What if I'm completely wrong about this? Is this really what I should be doing??" I want to pet it and assure it that it should have more confidence in itself. :)

But it's the tradeoff that Qwen made to cram that much smarts into such a small bundle of parameters, I guess.

If they pay you money then you can exchange that money for huge amounts of raw meat, if that's what you really want. :)

Oh, I'm sure you wouldn't love to look at it. :) It's not exactly messy, AIs are good at keeping things tidy, but everything about it is ad-hoc. It was never intended to be seen my another mortal's eyes than mine. I don't think there are any API keys or other secrets tucked away in the repo's history but I'd rather not risk it.

Your mess of files is different from my mess of files and the things you'd want to do with them is different from what my code does, I'd suggest getting your own agent on the task from a blank slate. That's the whole point I've been arguing here, that coding agents make these kind of bespoke "home-cooked" applications a lot easier to spin up.

As I recall, my first steps weren't even to have the coding agent write code. I explained my general goal and told it to look through the folders itself to see what work it thought needed doing. That was how I learned that almost all the cover art I'd downloaded from Udio years ago was actually AVIF format that had just been given the file extension JPG, for example - I didn't even know that needed to be fixed.

Make sure you back up your files before turning an AI loose on them, of course. Mine's been very well behaved (I warned it that avoiding data loss was the most important priority) but mistakes can be made.

Yes, AI generated. Use whatever word makes you happy, it really doesn't matter to me. The key point is that it's not music that would be on any existing catalogue anywhere. There's no way to "look it up" anywhere. The only metadata that exists for those tracks are in the files on my own computer.

Oh by all means then. Free is free. :)

It is, in fact, all original work. Much of it has never been off the hard drive it was generated on (the stuff by local models), and when Riffusion got bought out they deleted all the stuff their users had generated so my local copies of those are the only ones left. The metadata is in sidecar .json files, except for the Udio tracks which were in .txt files that first needed to be converted to .json. All very ad-hoc stuff to begin with.

Also, it looks like Dropped Needle is aiming to make the music available for streaming through things like Jellyfin. That's not what I wanted, I wanted to make a web site specifically so that I could control the layout and contents for when I share it with friends (many of whom are not technically savvy and so only know how to click on a web URL).

This really wasn't a "just use pre-existing application X" situation. Even if there had been one that could handle all of that, configuring it would have taken just as much work as explaining to the coding AI what I wanted.

I'd say "sure, why not?"

Depends on how expensive the tool is, mind you. I use local models so I've never had to poke around much at how much the paid ones go for, I don't know what you're using.

I know people who used to work there. It's been dead inside for quite a while, and it wasn't really EA that killed it. Bad management, mainly - they fought over turf and they constantly changed their minds about what sort of game was being made. There were basically two teams inside BioWare, the Dragon Age team and the Mass Effect team, and neither liked the other (at the management level that is - the coders and designers and testers down in the trenches were just their cannon fodder and got on fine).

After all the cuts the studio has suffered for the past few years, all the cannon fodder was already gone. The only people that were left inside that shell of a studio were the managers who had been fighting over it. The "winners" got to go down with the ship that they'd won.

I do think that the most dangerous point is probably past now, fortunately. The US would need to move a lot of assets around to make them ready for a full-scale attack on Cuba and I think we're close enough to the midterms now that there isn't time to get those in place before then. I could still see Trump launching some "decapitation strikes" between now and then though, maybe thinking he'd be doing the "Venezuela thing" and expecting the same results from that. Probably wouldn't work but it'd still be painful.

No analogy is ever perfect, of course. That's the point of an analogy, it's not the actual thing.

In the case of vibe-coded apps, I think the thing that still matches up with "home cooked meal" is the fact that the app can be whatever you want it to be.

For example, I've got a big pile of music files I've accumulated over time from a couple of different sources with a couple of different styles of metadata, piled together in an ad-hoc assortment of folders. It's an arrangement entirely unique to me. I had a coding AI create tools specifically to handle this pile, cleaning it up and organizing it, and had it build a website out of them that looked and behaved exactly how I wanted it to. It's not the fanciest thing and the code could always use some refinement but it suits my needs perfectly. I'm not going to publish it because nobody else would find it useful, if they had a similar sort of situation to deal with they would be best served by having a coding AI whip up their own unique tool themselves.

The food analogy there is looking in your cupboard to see what ingredients you've got, thinking about what sort of food you're in the mood for, and then throwing together something that fits those parameters.

This is what property taxes are supposed to be for. If a data center is putting a load on a community, tax them based on what money is needed to pay for what's needed to counter that load.

Money is much more flexible than barter anyway. Imagine if instead of a data center it was an abbatoir, would you compensate the community for its troubles by giving them huge amounts of free raw meat?