I’m the production manager and audio engineer for an independent venue, but I also do enough extracurricular, 1099 work that I needed to start spending money to write off on my taxes.

So, I bought a nice PC a few years ago, started using a friend’s old laptop (that I just replaced with my recent, copilot-infected purchase) to take multitrack recordings for local artists at work, and have been making my way into the mixing and mastering world at home. I figured getting some experience on the studio side would improve my live sound skills and give me something of a fallback, just in case.

Not quite sure how that’s panning out, but I have learned a few things and have gotten some decent sounds just recording with standard, live audio gear!

Since I read it in college (a long-ass time ago), I probably didn’t mind the nihilism too much lol

I definitely remember the book going in a completely different direction than what I expected, which I liked!

Maybe I misunderstood OP?

I don’t think I’ve ever read The Jargon File or The New Hacker’s Dictionary, but I definitely read Heinlen for fun in college. My educational background is in the social sciences and humanities.

Good point about his lack of context though!

I just rewatched a show called Devs with a friend. One of the striking moments was when one of the characters recites some poetry and the techy boss didn’t seem to care about how literature can inform and enrich our lives.

I’ve heard that Carla is the way to go, but how much more overhead will it cost when basically all the plugins I use are vst3? At least one project on my tower pc is pretty much maxed out as it is with them running natively on Windows.

My other issue is simply time: this is already side project stuff that I do for a little extra money/learning/career development, and at this point, I simply don’t have time to try alternatives.

If I was just researching and writing papers like I did back in grad school, Windows would be gone, but as it stands, the path of least resistance for the audio work I’m doing is just to deal with what I’ve got.

Got a new laptop recently. Copilot pops up, so I asked it how to permanently disable Copilot.

It gave me a wordy non-answer, along with a “fun fact” about my local area — totally relevant and not creepy at all.

Then, after I demanded it tell me how to permanently disable itself, Copilot gave me a completely wrong answer.

After specifying the “app or service” I’m using (Windows, you fucking clueless piece of shit), it then gave me a half-baked answer that called commands which weren’t installed by default.

I then used duckduckgo to figure out how to install the configuration tool copilot said to use but that Windows had decided to hide from me.

Good job completely wasting my time, you ai-loving fucks at Microsoft. I don’t need new reasons to nuke your shitty software and install Linux, but now I have them. If Linux had native vst3 support, I wouldn’t have even booted into Windows.

Edit: Stranger in a Strange Land is a great book, and being the sci-fi novel backgrounding hippie culture, I wouldn’t have expected Musk to have read it.