jrickert

Joined 10 years ago

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Member since

Jan 25

https://github.com/madisonrickert

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Comment · 11 days ago

I’m a lifelong musician and producer who has been experimenting a lot with Suno for music creation this year.

It’s been interesting to notice that Suno-generated tracks have all kinds of subtle tempo drift, and the tempo maps look very similar to the irregularities shown in the article, at least from a numerical perspective. I have actually spent a lot of time quantizing AI-generated tracks to the grid (to aid chopping/editing), even creating automations that do it for me now when I ingest Suno tracks into Ableton for follow-up production work.

Unknown to me whether this is A) an emergent “imperfection” fundamental to the model and its training dataset, or B) something Suno intentionally injects to “humanize” their output, but knowing that low-effort Suno-generated tracks are currently flooding music distributors, I think it’s ironic that the same factor the author describes as exemplifying the very humanity of recorded music may also be one of the biggest tells that a song was AI-generated, for music being released today.

Comment · 1 month ago

Signed up for the beta! :) would love to put this through some real-world shootouts against traditional LLMs to see where this type of model really excels.

I’m guessing it might be able to replace maybe 40-70% of LLM calls for a given pipeline depending on the business task, cutting the API costs on those calls by an order of magnitude.

Comment · 3 months ago

Training someone to change the perceived gender of their own voice is a similar process to training them to speak with a new accent. I recently prototyped a gender-affirming voice therapy app for transgender women: https://own-voice-dev.netlify.app/

So now I’m curious if our two applications use the same approach under the hood! I have a detailed tech stack rundown on this page: https://own-voice-dev.netlify.app/#/info but in brief I use OpenVoice v2 to convert someone’s voice toward a differently-gendered reference voice, but leave it at only like 30%-60% transformed so it still sounds like them and not the reference. This transformed voice then becomes a practice reference for drilling.

Comment · 3 months ago

I think this is a super intriguing project! I’ve been experimenting with some similar work on my old unfinished songs from eons past. It’s been really fulfilling to take that old work and see the original vision spring to life through modern tools.

Comment · 4 months ago

Location: Oakland, California

Remote: Yes, preferred. Open to hybrid in SF Bay Area.

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Gen AI (both user and engineering side), TypeScript, React, Python, SQL, Rust, cloud infrastructure, video and audio engineering

Résumé/CV: https://linkedin.com/in/madisonrickert

Email: m [at] madisonrickert [dot] com

Open to: Senior SWE, FDE, Solutions Engineer, Senior Backend Engineer.

Domain verticals: AI, video/film tech, audio/music tech, financial tools, realtime software (games, rich interactive UX), business process automation.

Open Source: https://github.com/madisonrickert

Hi, I'm Madison Rickert, a senior software engineer who has been shipping code to production for over 20 years. Experienced engineering leader, presently all-in on agentic engineering, shipping code daily and finding new ways to push the envelope on its capabilities.

I'm an active contributor to several open-source MCP servers, build agent-first CLI tools, solve computer vision problems, and maintain a growing library of agent skills and agent harnesses I rely on daily. For the past five-plus years I've been a partner and the in-house technical force at a creative studio. Before that, I was a senior IC and fractional engineering lead for a variety of startups and nonprofits, working across the full stack and mentoring teams of up to 5. I have a penchant for both business and personal finance. Across my businesses and clients, I've been responsible for managing organizational finances and countless projects with typical budgets in the 5 to 6 figure range. Over the years this led me into financial automation, and I have several open-source projects in my portfolio in areas around agentic financial automation and investment management. I'm also a working musician, and a hyper-organized Burning Man camp lead, best known around the Northern California festival scene for my saxophone performances for crowds up to 3,000 people.

I'm pivoting back to senior IC engineering after a long stretch as partner-operator. I'm excited to keep expanding the capabilities of AI, and my creative-tech and financial background will be a real asset to the right organization. If you're building software for creative work, media systems, music tech, financial tools, or AI tooling, I'd love to hear about it.

Comment · 5 months ago

I spent my day hacking on this to see what it’s capable of (built a simple little tool that displays MIDI clips as sheet music: https://github.com/madisonrickert/ableton-sheet-music-extens...)

My initial take on its strengths/weaknesses:

- Strong: Using the TS/JS ecosystem to render UI and tools

- Medium: Creating custom application windows in a web view. Window management features are pretty limited currently (can’t resize or render a native “close” button on the window chrome)

- Strong: Creating custom control panels for integrating with external services (like pushing and pulling audio clips or midi to/from an external service)

- Weak: Anything real-time, that’s still the domain of Max4Live or other control APIs, so don’t expect playback automation

- Medium: Tinkering with the Ableton project, clips, tracks, etc. API surface is still incomplete. Like I can read warp markers but not create them, for example. And I can’t access the global time signature settings.

The extensions are pretty aggressively sandboxed, and I appreciate that security consciousness in this season of the js ecosystem. It’s a hassle though if you want to save or load files outside of your little sandbox folder.

Comment · 5 months ago

Location: Oakland, California

Remote: Yes, preferred. Open to hybrid in SF Bay Area.

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Gen AI (both user and engineering side), TypeScript, React, Python, SQL, Rust, cloud infrastructure, video and audio engineering

Résumé/CV: https://linkedin.com/in/madisonrickert

Email: m [at] madisonrickert [dot] com

Open to: Senior SWE, FDE, Solutions Engineer, Senior Backend Engineer.

Domain verticals: AI, video/film tech, audio/music tech, financial tools, realtime software (games, rich interactive UX), business process automation.

Open Source: https://github.com/madisonrickert

For the past five-plus years I've been a partner and the in-house technical force at a creative studio. Before that, I was a senior IC and fractional engineering lead for a variety of startups and nonprofits, working across the full stack and mentoring teams of up to 5.

I have a penchant for both business and personal finance. Across my businesses and clients, I've been responsible for managing organizational finances and countless projects with typical budgets in the 5 to 6 figure range. Over the years this led me into financial automation, and I have several open-source projects in my portfolio in areas around agentic financial automation and investment management.

I'm also a working musician, and a hyper-organized Burning Man camp lead, best known around the Northern California festival scene for my saxophone performances for crowds up to 3,000 people.

Comment · 5 months ago

Redundant verification is built into the workflow, both at the agent-instruction level and downstream. Reconciling a monthly bank statement with your account register in QuickBooks, for example, has the benefit of making sure you haven’t omitted transactions or added phantom ones, and once you finish reconciling a period you lock the register to prevent further changes. I supervise mutations closely and can relax my oversight when I know there are redundant checks for correctness downstream.

The class of human errors I’m encountering most often are ones caused by missing context: misfiling of transactions because my bookkeeper didn’t recognize a vendor, didn’t know a transaction needed to be attached to a specific project or client, lacked access to my calendar, didn’t have my login to pull receipts, didn’t have time to understand a spreadsheet. Claude has ready access to all of these has been remarkably adept at synthesizing that to help it come at accounting tasks with a level of detailed-oriented obsessiveness that no human I’ve ever hired has shown.

Comment · 5 months ago

I’ve given it access to my small business books for the last few months (attended sessions only) and so far it’s helped me clean up countless errors made by humans, at the expense of a small handful of duplicated transactions that got shaken out pretty quickly.

Comment · 5 months ago

I’ll admit this article was enough to convince me to port one of my CLI tools from Python to Rust last night and I got a 30x performance gain with a binary 20% of the size. Not bad!

Comment · 1 year ago

I’ve been using Blender for 20 years and it’s been amazing to see how far it’s come.

Sadly, the writing is on the wall for my trusty Hackintosh since they recently decided to drop support for AMD GPU acceleration on macOS.

Comment · 4 years ago

Yeah, a USB-C hub should do it. Also some cameras record directly to USB-C drives.

Comment · 4 years ago

Lifelong musician, originally went to school back in 2009 for media arts with an emphasis on sound engineering.

It isn't my only source of income, but I've been diligent about growing it as a business and am starting to see some payoff.

I primarily work in Ableton Live. It's not only the most inspiring DAW that I know, but it is a fantastic performance tool as well.

Comment · 4 years ago

Intriguingly, ADHD is correlated with crime as well. Some studies would estimate that it's 4-10x (or more) as prevalent in prison populations as in the general population.[1][2]

We could conclude that a lot of people are self-medicating without realizing it.

[1](https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2009/dec/27/adhd-prisons-ment...) [2](https://adultaddstrengths.com/2011/01/12/adhd-and-crime-igno...)

Comment · 5 years ago

Growing up in the Midwest, these were a Halloween staple.