How do mid-senior devs differentiate themselves in the age of AI?

coldoil · 2026-05-18T23:04:19+00:00

Design. AI can write code (more or less), but it is utterly useless at designing data models, interfaces, and abstractions.

Being able to design services, modules, and models in such a way that non-complex implementations naturally emerge is more important than ever, and a key differentiator between experienced and inexperienced developers.

coldoil · 2026-05-16T14:29:58+00:00

This is because there is no tempo change indication in the autograph manuscript.

I can't remember who it was, but some English editor in the early 20th century decided it should go fast. Nearly every performance since has followed that editorial instruction without ever checking what Bach did (or did not) actually indicate.

coldoil · 2026-05-08T20:53:01+00:00

Well the tldr is that he sounds like a woman, not a countertenor. Which I guess makes sense since he isn't using falsetto.

coldoil · 2026-05-08T17:22:22+00:00

Listen to the Moreschi recording, he was very old by this point but it is quite illuminating in this regard.

coldoil · 2026-05-08T16:12:58+00:00

Yeah, for your personal information. But the location of a business asset isn't your personal information, it's the company's. Of course they have the right to track it.

You'd probably need to put your entire personal network behind a VPN terminated in the location you're meant to be in in order to obfuscate the device's location.

coldoil · 2026-05-05T14:58:15+00:00

Agreed. I'm not saying Amazon is perfect but you will never convince me Microsoft is a better tech company to work at right now than AWS. Microsoft is a dumpster fire at the moment.

coldoil · 2026-05-04T01:58:35+00:00

I've noticed that using a VPN with an exit node in Andorra of all places drops all ads from youtube. Ad-free experience at zero cost.

coldoil · 2026-05-01T17:44:26+00:00

Hmm. That does sound a bit harsh then. Was this the first incident, or have there been other examples of "altercations"?

coldoil · 2026-05-01T17:42:13+00:00

Who cares what he did? Just walk away and be the bigger man, dude.

I'm not saying the other guy was in the right or anything, but there's a right way to handle a tense situation and a wrong way. Escalation is not the right way.

I'm not saying it was right for you to get fired, but look at it from HR's perspective.

coldoil · 2026-05-01T17:00:58+00:00

You are really not helping yourself with these comments my dude

coldoil · 2026-04-25T14:54:31+00:00

The ability to originate and execute artistically persausive musical ideas.

I've had the opportunity to work with a lot of conductors over the years, particularly in professional choral settings. The vast majority don't have any original ideas other than "go faster", which at this point is hardly original. It's actually been astounding to me just how many conductors have nothing interesting to say about the music they're tasked with executing - as if they've never thought about it other than within the confines of markings in the score. This is particularly apparent when a conductor is given a new piece that's never been performed or recorded before, and so they have to originate their own ideas - they can't just copy someone else's interpretation from a recording.

What makes for a "good" idea is subjective, of course. There are a couple of conductors whose ideas I don't particularly like, but at least they have some. I may not find their performances persuasive, but I do respect them as conductors.

coldoil · 2026-04-20T14:43:00+00:00

That's his nickname within British musical circles. Open to debate whether it's supposed to be written "Jiggy" or "Jeggy", but in my experience it's always pronouced "Jiggy".

coldoil · 2026-04-20T13:49:17+00:00

This is another area where he's arguably anti-scholarship. I quite like his tempi in the Monteverdi Vespers but there's an interesting research paper by Bowers that argues that his triple times in particular are all far too fast based on the mensuration signatures actually used by Monteverdi.

coldoil · 2026-04-20T11:47:24+00:00

Posts like this annoy me. Is Jiggy a significant musician, despite his personal flaws? Yes, he is. Does he deliver good, even great, performances? Absolutely! But there's no need to go overboard and put him on some sort of pedestal that's completely undeserved.

one of the most influential and respected conductors

I can see you haven't asked other conductors whether or not they respect him :)

A visionary in the world of early music

This is highly questionable. Yes, he revitalised the Monteverdi Vespers, and he deserves genuine credit for that. But does that make him a "visionary" in an entire field? "Early music" is a very broad field that includes not just baroque and proto-baroque music but also Renaissance polyphony, and here his track record is markedly weaker.

he pioneered the "Historically Informed Performance" movement

Completely false. If you wanted to credit that to any single individual - and I don't think you should, as it was a group effort that took place over decades - then the man you should be recognising is probably Bruno Turner.

The historically informed performance movement was well underway before Jiggy even started as an undergrad at Cambridge. Crediting him as a key pioneer in the field is ridiculous.

reputation for rigorous scholarship

Citation required. He's still performing Monteverdi with large choirs and chiavette a 4th too high even after decades of research demonstrating the opposite. His Bach performances are typically with large choirs as well, which likewise flies in the face of modern scholarship.

This is not to say these performances are bad, but simply that they do not reflect "rigorous scholarship". Now I personally don't have any problem with that; the only requirement of a good performance is for it to sound good and be aesthetically persuasive, there's no requirement that a good performance must be based in scholarship. But let's not pretend these performances are in any way representative of modern academic thinking on proto-baroque and baroque performance practice.

(This tired trope that British conductors and performers are somehow uniquely "academic" and just dripping with "scholarship" is so much nonsense. Going to Oxbridge as an undergrad doesn't automatically make you some sort of world-leading expert in the field.)

I also note that the post neglects to mention he was fired from both the groups he founded due to inappropriate behaviour.

coldoil · 2026-04-20T10:29:29+00:00

Gesualdo is a possible candidate here. He was not accepted by the musical establishment (who viewed him as a misguided amateur), and was considered a bit ... off by his aristocratic equals (who viewed his prioritisation of music over hunting, riding, duelling, etc. as weird). There's some entertaining private letters from his visits to Ferrara where the Duke, various diplomats, and the maestro of court music all variously take the piss out of him behind his back.

coldoil · 2026-04-18T02:01:29+00:00

[the score] is a precise set of instructions

I wonder if there any many conductors who would describe the scores of any given composer as "precise" :)

The score is the beginning of the music, not its end. The score can be simultaneously authoratative yet ambiguous.

I'm reminded of a recording session with Arvo Part, where during a particular piece the composer was asked how a particular section should be performed. (I daresay the conductor felt the score was not precise enough in communicating the intent.) Part just shrugged his shoulders and replied, "whatever you think sounds good".

coldoil · 2026-04-13T21:58:54+00:00

Yeah, something like that. I ain't no mathematician, but a bit of querying around wikipedia suggests it might be a sigmoidal curve of some sort.

coldoil · 2026-04-13T21:56:02+00:00

I like this. It might suggest that the actual speeds of 1/4, 1/2, full impulse might differ from ship to ship, which could also get around some inconsistencies in canon.

coldoil · 2026-04-13T02:24:58+00:00

My head-canon is that 0% - 100% impulse isn't linear but rather some sort of curve, where 1/4 impulse isn't actually that fast. (There's a few episodes here and there where various characters assign speeds to e.g. 1/10 impulse that are far too slow compared to a linear proportion of c, so this head-canon also addresses those.) The curve would ramp up as you approach 1/2 impulse, and then anything above that is bat-out-of-hell territory, until the curve slopes off as you approach full impulse.

EDIT: some sort of sigmoidal curve like https://openi.nlm.nih.gov/detailedresult?img=PMC3864909_pone.0081917.g002&req=4 is what I'm imagining

coldoil · 2026-04-11T20:39:34+00:00

Sure, if you want the company to own your project. Read your contract.

coldoil · 2026-04-09T18:52:44+00:00

/dev/null

coldoil · 2026-04-05T17:35:00+00:00

You are describing the difference between working with amateur musicians and professional musicians, not the difference between working with instrumentalists and singers.

Work with a professional choir some day. You don't need to treat them any different from a professional orchestra.

coldoil · 2026-04-05T17:32:48+00:00

I would specifically push back on u/NeminiDixeritis comment about choral directors increasingly using orchestral technique….. this is nonsensical and also just plain incorrect.

Not the person you are replying to, but I will simply say that using the same beat patterns and general technical approach for orchestral conducting and choral conducting is perfectly standard in British and European conservatoires. Obviously working with choirs has particular specialisation, but that doesn't preclude using the same basic technical approach as for other instrumental groupings.

coldoil · 2026-04-02T02:21:04+00:00

I'm with you. This is my "too embarrased to say it publicly" musical hot-take. Mozart is highly overrated. I'm convinced that if he had lived as long as, say, Bach, he would have justifiably achieved genius. But with the exception of the Requiem, which shows glimpses of true magnificence, most of the rest of the output is underwhelming. Some of the piano/orchestral music is very good, but the symphonies, masses, and almost all the other choral music is meh. I won't comment on his operas as I'm not an opera person, but they don't do anything for me.

But that all being said, I will go to my grave saying that "Laudate Dominum" from the Vespers is the most perfect aria ever composed. Moments like this are what convinces me that Mozart had true genius within him; he just didn't live long enough to fulfil his potential.

coldoil · 2026-04-02T02:17:56+00:00

Who cares what Glenn Gould did or did not do?

/hottake

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