na1026

I'm not a saxophonist but I believe that a lot of Coltrane's rapid scale traversal approach comes from transcribing or appropriating Art Tatum pieces for the saxophone.

> For my taste, his harmonic language tips over the threshold where it goes from being viscerally enjoyable to a more heady, academic exercise. It all feels like a blur to me. Maximal in it’s vocabulary, and yet flat in it’s overall effect. It’s often so dense that it ends up feeling “same-y” and grey to me. Like Schoenberg’s serial music.

I felt exactly like this about Coltrane for years, which I think now was a consequence of primarily being exposed to Coltrane via his work with the first great Miles Davis quintet. Coltrane's albums as band leader come a bit later in his career and he drops a lot of the Art-Tatum-translated-to-sax "sheets of sound" approach in favor of a more lyrical yet still unorthodox style. Any of the late-50s or early-60s albums with Coltrane as band leader and McCoy Tyner on piano are really very good. From my perspective Coltrane had the fire and competitiveness as well as the pop sensibility of a player like Sonny Rollins and the thoroughly studied devotion to "the new thing" of players like Eric Dolphy.

Anyway all that is to say that I heard screeds like this from Coltrane devotees for years and there is really something amazing there. The albums with Coltrane as leader are quite good and worth giving another chance if you're in the mood to listen to some good jazz recordings.

> I've been friends with Jack over 15 years now so I'm inclined to take him at his word

That's all I needed to hear to completely disregard your motivated reasoning.

Edit: I've hit the rate limit, but I'd like to disavow the bad-faith accusations made against me and my account in the replies to this comment.

Second edit: I am not trolling. Why should I take your opinion on LLM code generation seriously when you have been friends with the founder of Anthropic for well over a decade? Obviously you are not in a position to make a rational evaluation of this technology.

> If I release a wild monkey in your rare antiques shop, it’s my fault as the responsible party for the monkey.

Sounds like motivated reasoning from someone worried about having their job stolen by wild monkeys.

If AI is as powerful as an atomic bomb why could it only manage to kill a couple hundred Iranian school girls? Surely a truly society-shifting technology could manage to execute 1000 innocent children at least.

> he who carries the heart of a machine in his breast loses his simplicity.

A lot of these AI guys seem pretty simple to me...

> It's like half the people have turned off their brain.

LLMs are for people who want to turn off their brain. If you want your team to improve, you should lead by example and stop using LLMs. You need to create an environment where it is unacceptable to turn off your brain. Your underlings will never use LLM tools the way you want them to. LLM tools are designed to be used the way your underlings use them.

Wow, I had never considered it, but it really seems like a huge benefit that all implementations in the company codebase are now perpetually refactored.