ycombiredd

Thanks for the kind comment.

Thanks for the specificity. I may eventually redo the README to be more palatable. I've realized I tend to make assumptions about how much "wall of text" people are willing to climb without knowing anything about the content, the writer's style, etc - that is, whether it will have been worth their time to read, and historically have made little effort to make it look inviting or otherwise give them a reason to read, leading to "nope." and clicking away. This is good stuff to remember, as even if I never revisit the fambigen README, I do have other newer things I'd like to generate discussion about, so I'll need to remember these lessons.

I don't think we disagree, but the shape of your message confuses me a little. "People say shit like this..." "if you understand the product well enough to communicate..." "then turn around and nitpick", these things read to me as a pretty harsh indictment and a claim about something I did or do.

What I think I said was that the comments made me realize that it is not enough to make something cool, tell people you made something cool, and expect them to figure out why it is cool with a minimalist, slightly ugly demo page, and that is I really want other people to be able to experience the joy I did, I'll have to take more time on the presentation of the documentation so they immediately see with little effort why they might want to try it. So then the choice for me becomes "how much do I care if something I made will bring a stranger joy?", and spend the appropriate amount of time on that marketing or "selling" angle.

For this particular project after the initial response, my interest shifted to "hmm, curious that these folks focused more on some alleged copyright or theft angle" and I lost interest in sharing it with people. Until I saw this conversation and thought I'd mention the previous experience, and the comment you replied to was me stating what I think I learned from the comments here.

Your "communicate its key points" is in line with what I took away from these comments, but the "shit like this and then nitpick" seems a bit hostile, to the point where I'm not even sure it is directed at me.

Thanks for the comment though.

Sounds reasonable. I have a marketing problem. To restate what I get from your and other comments:

If I really want to spread something that brings me joy to other people so that they might experience it too, I may have to resort to polishing up the presentation. The fact that I'm trying to give something with no strings does not obviate the need to make it look palatable. This is a reasonable take I think. I also think I've known and have had a sense for that, even if I try to ignore it, because "selling" something is typically uninteresting to me. I'll try to keep it in mind the next time I have something I think I want to share with strangers, and put more effort into how it is presented so they might be more inclined to look into the actual thing I'm trying to show them.

I'll make my own analogy, with it being like trying to share a chocolate cake that looks like literal turds to strangers.

That's a very kind way to phrase a review and I feel honored that you chose to write that.

Thanks!

Well, I'd disagree with the "too much thought" suggestion. Too many words? Oh probably so, but not much thought. Wait, that sounds dismissive or like faux-humility, but that isn't how I meant it.

Working as I have for over three decades continually in IT, spanning industries, skills, tools, languages, responsibilities, seeing the coming and going of many "next" generations, etc.. I suppose the pool of words to choose from and the range of things to use as metaphors is just pretty large and much deprecated, outside of the contrived use case of tech nerd battle rap.

Nerd flexing boast/diss tracks until now, I didn't know was already a thing. I kinda thought I was innovating. Lol, maybe I was from your description of it being too loaded with technical jargon, but the jargon, the word play, was the point. I was having fun with it. Some are shallow puns, others, like the ReiserFS lines were amusing to me because of the way they just wrote themselves. Hmm. There may be a distinction between real connections and patterns and apophenia, and there may be a way that it is missing in my head or blurred, in which case it may also be the case that the symbolism I find obvious and amusing just seems inane or pointless to everyone else. That would explain a lot of things now that I think about it. Heh.

I knew "nerdy white guy raps" was a thing from a show called "Dave" (I think) a year or so ago with a (I think) real rapper called Lil Dicky. (Again, "I think".) The show was good but I wasn't connected enough to modern pop culture to really know how much was fictionalized or otherwise. (I did recently see that Selena Gomez got married and was a little too excited, announcing to nobody "that's... that's! From the show!" I just looked it up and his name is Benny Blanco so that part of the show was at least accurate about him existing in real life and being a producer or somehow connected to hip hop. That said, your message is the second time in a handful of days someone has mentioned ytcracker but the first time had less context, and the context I did have (it was related to a video) caused me to assume it was a mangled or auto-corrected term and that ytcracker referred to some tool for downloading videos (like yt-dl/yt-dlp) and so I didn't look further. I guess this is signal that maybe I should.

I don't actually plan on making another track of this sort (though it has occurred to me a few times even though it wasn't on the table prior to putting it out there; I've never had so many people tell me they've had it on repeat - or maybe I've never had anyone ever tell me that about any music I've put out until this one, for which the response has been way more positive than expected.

On the audio output from network traffic (oh congrats on the developing eurorack habit btw) I did something enough in that zone that it causes me to want to recommend a rabbit hole to you (if it is not one you've already been down.) That rabbit hole is Sonification. My entrance was specifically parameter-mapped sonification and a search will find you many interesting papers. I might save you some time, or possibly send you straight into an ocean of time-suckage by suggesting you start with "The Sonification Handbook". On the plus side it will reference and was edited by one of the authors of one of the main papers I was about to have to look up until. i remembered the larger work so there's two birds to get started, on the down-side it references loads of stuff that are rabbit holes of specialization that could prolong your foray underground. I hope that is useful to you.

Yes, but maybe you know how it is... similar to that threshold where "I've done this three times before, if I had automated it, I'd maybe have spent the same amount of time writing the automation, but the fourth time on would be free" and doing the sort of quick on-the-fly gut-math cost/benefit analysis that either results in an eventual time savings to be celebrated, or a "dammit, I should have just done this by hand again" unique type of regret.

So for this particular set of words and timing, I found I really disliked eyeballing the lines and doing quick time arithmetic and sanity checks because there were no obvious errors the two or three passes I made. So I found myself making a quick script to return the differences, to try to see what odd combination might be triggering a bug, etc. plus although what you see now looks like just standard subtitles, the original burn of them used some of the ass format's unique rendering capabilities and, as with the one-off script type automation cost/benefit.. I think it's actually cool enough and potentially useful for other cases (generative TTS/ai vocals, etc) that even if I never make another "rap"-style track and video, someone else is likely to encounter the same problem and find this solution useful.

But probably mostly it's a combination of sunk cost fallacy and stubbornness, with some laziness and fatigue thrown on top that has now a video for a song I wanted to share with whoever it might reach with broken subtitles and an unfinished tool to correct them.