Notes From An Unspecified Time

After a couple of weeks fielding a few (un)usually stressful projects, I eventually managed to pull my usual stunt of falling ill during a short vacation, during which I mostly sipped tea, watched TV, and played Hades instead of doing anything productive like, for instance, cleaning up my office, which is a complete mess.

But I did manage to get a few things done, albeit they were a bit all over the place. For instance, somehow I tried my hand at implementing K-Means inside Node-RED and other vaguely futile stunts (I wanted my RSS summarizer to use embeddings to group items).

I also played a bit with the Rockchip NPU and LLM tooling:

Yes, that’s yet another DeepSeek distillation, and not a particularly smart one at that. But this time it was running on a Rockchip RK3588 (most specifically, the new ArmSom AI Module 7, which I got an early sample of for testing), and that is interesting for me since I intend to try converting across another model (I am very close to shoehorning a usable LLM into an industrial monitoring solution).

What I’ve found during the past few days I was stuck indoors is that I am increasingly put off by the effort involved in building AI “solutions” – they’re just no fun. Even kicking the tires on new tooling ends up being a waste of time, and (most importantly) I’m not learning anything except new and unexciting ways to concatenate prompts.

Although I am impressed by Claude 3.7 in Zed (if you’ve missed the announcement, it’s already available via GitHub Copilot) and it is nice to ask for quick and dirty code suitable for chores, I still feel that by using AI at all I’m missing the creative spark that makes programming enjoyable.

And, worse, I don’t recognize the code it generates as mine. Which for someone like me who has an uncanny ability to remember code and patterns means I can’t really navigate it as well as I’d like.

In truth, even using LLMs for proofreading feels like too much overhead, although I appreciate the results.

The only upside is that I have finally gotten to test the Picotracker I started assembling a few weeks back, and it works OK, even if the firmware is quirky and it seems to have trouble with my limited sample library (I just dumped all my M8 samples onto a new SD card, and I probably need to convert them to a different, smaller format).

I also seem (knock on wood) to have “fixed” our Clavinova, which (since I know the fix is temporary) led me down the rabbit hole of considering alternatives and, in turn, bingeing far too many YouTube videos about the PSR-SX920 arranger keyboard.

Despite the cheesy reputation of arrangers, it seems to be a better bang for the buck than the Arturia AstroLab (of which I already have most soft instruments anyway).

Given recent events, I should probably start reviewing music gear again. Hey Polyend, let’s have a chat, we’re both in Europe anyway…