Clojurians Log v2

peaceful.

🇳🇴 🇸🇪 🇩🇰 ?

🇳🇴☺️

nods in Scandinavic heisann

🇩🇰 here

Dejligt, god aften!

.... One question that people kept asking was variations on “why would you use a macro?” ... I’m not sure I answered that one to everyone’s satisfactionFor performance reasons in certain cases and when creating a DSL in others. I can’t think of anything else... I guess you would need a few examples at hand for things that can only be solved with macros.

the main objective is FP, not so much Clojure. But I'll try and sneak it in there of course

> I guess you need a few examples at hand for things that can only be solved with macros. Yes, I agree. But I think that I failed to explain the context of these situations and why macros solved the problem in a way that everyone in the group found satisfactory. I think that our experiences of programming were too different. Even after you've identified the different assumptions or values that are held by the people involved, it's hard to actually convince people that strongly held beliefs are just opinions that can be questioned. I don't think I was prepared for that battle. But this was a 1000 person corporate environment and I had recently transitioned from a startup. We barely spoke the same language ;). My experience will not be yours and I'm sure you'll do better than I could at the time.

I have never ever written a macro.... I kinda understand them in the context of the threading macro and and and or but something like the go routine from code.async is something I don't think I can understand.

let us know how it's going! I'm very curious!

will do, and this is probably a multiyear project.

I tried that once, but somebody kept talking about scala so we had to disband to preserve my sanity 😜

There are some kotlin teams so they might show up.

... I'm perfectly happy for people to write scala, so long as they do it in the safety of their own homes, behind closed doors ... but I wouldn't put any of it in production ... I'm only joking btw ... kotlin people tend to be more pragmatic (in my experience) and there's some good ideas that can cross pollinate 😉 .... One question that people kept asking was variations on "why would you use a macro?" ... I'm not sure I answered that one to everyone's satisfaction ... also have a good answer to "what about monads?" in your box of tricks 😉

... hmm ... I've had a day of long braindead meetings and I think I'm not making much sense now - so apologies if I'm coming across like a dribbling idiot ... good luck with your guild

thank you

bit more pleasant to be outside too. Seven degrees in Oslo today! Our afternoon stroll was quite pleasant.

Roll the tape: where's that quote from?

"Intelligence is the art of using memory", I read somewhere. I guess that's what AIs are doing, but imho Intelligence is something else, a mystery,...

So far, AI only increases the costs of using memory 🤷🏻‍♂️

I kinda want AI to remain a cold mechanical tool while I focus on the art partThat's my view as well. I want to delegate toil, and sharpen the impact of my time spent. Can I achieve this with today's LLMs? Sometimes. Other times it just wastes and distracts my time 😅

Every tool requires trust and one acquires trust through use, acquaintance and understanding. AI is inscrutable by design, which is why I cannot trust it.

I would say your mind, @raymcdermott, is even more inscrutible than current LLMs — even so, I'd trust your words rather than the word vomit from an LLM!

ha, you're right ... I have a very limited scale however 🙂

And so far, you haven't made memory ridiculously expensive. Thank you for that.

I appreciate your trust ...

Maybe I should also have said that I'm not a tool but some people might debate it 🙂

some people describe the foundation of trust as compentence, ethics and integrity. • comptence: can you actually do the stuff you said you'd do? • ethics: do you actually want to leave me better off? • integrity: do your words reflect reality, or do you lie? How do LLMs fare? I don't really trust them on any of the three 😅

Clearly the ethical part of these large models should be scrutinized, lots of it is driven by the unconscious pursuit of profit and domination, not what we need or what's good for us. This is the part I am not trusting. I prefer some ethically developed open models, like some Open AIs :)

https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2026/02/making-wolfram-tech-available-as-a-foundation-tool-for-llm-systems/'s attempt to have precise knowledge is interesting. https://multiversecomputing.com/compactifai/deployment open models are also interesting for me.

Thanks for sharing! I was actually looking for some open models. Anyone have any experience writing Clojure with them?

And cool something like Wolfram seems very valuable

I don't know much about the philosophy of what art is and isn't. My current stance is that I find it objectionable to support someone who lets AI do the majority of the heavy lifting. For example, on Youtube I've heard snippets of e.g. full City Pop albums or something like a funk version of a Red Hot Chili Peppers album that were generated by AI and which sounded pretty good, and maybe it even took a lot of prompting and finicking to get to the final result, I have no idea. But there was no artist name attached, nothing to read in the user profile, and no information about how the music was created, it was pretty much devoid of any real information. This, to me, reeks of a low effort cash grab, someone using AI with as little effort as possible to make money off of Youtube residuals or whatever it's called. Even if it sounds good, it feels bad to listen, knowing that. I've also enjoyed a couple of things that could plausibly be low-effort. These shorts depicting otherworldly creatures driven by a spoken word narrative, where the images, voice and underlying music seems AI-generated, are quite fun imo. Why am I not so bothered about them? Maybe because I feel they're a bit more creative than the examples above? A message from the Pale Lodge - The Giftfather https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRz6uj4rR1s The Cavern of the Sleepers https://www.youtube.com/shorts/X-krHU7kfNY When AI-generated Youtube content first started appearing (or when I first started noticing it), I quite enjoyed discovering the then-current abilities of AI through a series of imagined Balenciaga commercials/photo shoots with various themes, like Harry Potter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iE39q-IKOzA and other pop culture stuff. Though I'm pretty sure that the underlying techno music, not AI generated, was also a big part of it 😄 Thip Throng - Lightvessel https://youtu.be/AjwTjHeTbaY?si=kwsD_uQjG39WGCRD I've also seen people interact with AI for fun results, like Oneyplays, a Youtube Let'splayer/streamer, "calling up" various characters and having "phone conversations" with the voice, typically goading them into depraved scenarios. I won't post it here, pretty NSFW stuff with gore and so on, yes I like both high brow and low brow humour 😛 It's not exactly "creative" in the sense of a painting or sculpting, but still. Something is created, and it makes me laugh, so it has some value. Also, more innocent, is Thomas Middleditch's (of Silicon Valley fame) series of improv acting up against AI characters. This feels like more justified decent use of AI, imo https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2FnRSFrTTaE

There are other gray lines, too. I saw a Youtuber explaining that he didn't directly use AI in his work in remixing music, but that he used a tool to separate the stems of a track to isolate the vocals, and that tool was based on AI. So he indirectly used it. Also seems fine to me.

> But there was no artist name attached, nothing to read in the user profile, and no information about how the music was created This is actually the key reason why AI art is not really taking off. People want to know the person behind the creation, without it they tend to lose interest.

Well, a reason not sure about the key reason. But I've noticed this sentiment a lot

Yeah, honest effort is key. I love seeing people make things as they learn. It's not perfect, but the effort is honest. They put in hours, it gets better.

Yeah there's the effort and knowing someone worked to produce something. There's also a human connection, when you go see a show everyone experiences the music but also connects to and experiences the artist.

Sometimes even more so than the music 😄, Paul McCartney said he liked all the girls screaming but at some point it got annoying because they couldn't hear the music anymore. But that's another story haha

Some would argue that loud screams drowning the music denotes lack of connection!

I kinda want AI to remain a cold mechanical tool while I focus on the art part

I've seen some fun, artful usages of "AI"

Of course I didn't mean to be so black and white :). I’m interested in some examples, any Artful AI examples come to mind?

This interaction got me thinking a bit about who's really creating when using AI. I'm curious what others' views are on the topic. I must be getting older ranting about what art is to internet strangers but yolo, I hope you can indulge my raw thoughts for a second. Assuming we are talking about generative AI, in my understanding the AI itself is just a bunch of numbers stored somewhere waiting for some boundaries, the prompt, within which it does it's generative thing. To me, setting the boundaries is the creative process. A sculptor doesn't manifest the marble but rather decides what marble is part of the statue and which isn't. Similarly a musician carves vibrations out of silence. When you create a beautiful mould and fill it up with some goo, the artist is the one designing the mould not the machine that filled it. Sure Suno can create entire songs based on two sentences. I'd argue usually these songs are boring as hell because of the lack of interesting boundaries. You need to get either really lucky, or have an interesting prompt like 'a crossover between Celtic traditional music and trap'. But there you are, that was the main creative part of the artist. A subjective thought about feeling: as a musician, I notice that whenever I'm making music from rational thinking it feels empty and almost as pretentious as this message. But when I make music from intuition and flow it becomes infinitely more magical. Generative AI feels like the rational thinking one. Which can be useful to advance a production or a mix, but not to create something truly new or beautiful. So in this little mental framework I'd argue no generative AI is every producing art even if the output looks like it. Should I ever use it I'd still consider it a cold machine filling my moulds with goo.

Art is pure humanity

I hope everyone is coming to the realisation that AI as we have it is a tool for domination and oppression and not something liberating or helpful to human happiness

"Pure oppression" is further than I'd take it, but point acknowledged!

I've come to appreciate genuine human effort more in the age of AI. It also helps that I'm struggling to learn an instrument, so everyone else's playing suddenly is more impressive, almost regardless of level 😁

My experience too @reefersleep