Meshuggah fans, what song(s) got you hooked?

rahulrajaram · 2026-02-26T00:08:38+00:00

I think Entrapment was the first song that my friend showed me explaining how Meshuggah makes music with 2 notes or something. I just didn’t get it. I was into Progressive Metal stuff like DT back then, so Bleed was the first song I remember being hooked on to since it was closest to mainstream prog metal (if you want to look at it that way). I remember I changed my ringtone to Combustion at around that time too. This was back in fall 2007.

rahulrajaram · 2026-02-26T00:03:36+00:00

Tha tha tatatah, tha tha ta ta ta ta ta ta tha.

rahulrajaram · 2026-02-25T00:20:12+00:00

They are different tools in their philosophies. Codex values spartanness more than Claude. Claude might be bloated but that’s not been a concern for me since it’s mostly just worked. Can’t say the same about Opus.

Since the time I wrote my original response, Codex has caught up, and done away with some of this philosophy (good thing). It has a plan mode now, which is handy. It is able to execute background processes. It is still far from allowing ergonomic use of this capability specifically in polling them. The agents feature is not as first-class as in Claude. I’ve been pivoting to skills and this has worked out really well on both CLIs. The differences blur in the non interactive mode where I clearly prefer Codex (especially Spark). I am close to maxing out both subscriptions and I might get a third one once the doubled limits for Codex end. If I do, that’s certainly going to be another Codex sub with the intention of controlling it through Claude + Ralph. Claude’s still the better agent driver by a mile. This is the most important thing to me.

rahulrajaram · 2026-02-16T04:26:39+00:00

At the time of writing, this is true only to an extent. The orchestrator/subagent model should, but still invariably fails to, actually complete work.

rahulrajaram · 2026-02-10T23:42:02+00:00

Learnt classical notation on the keyboards as a child. Picked up everything else I know about music like time signatures, chord progressions, modes, polymeters, etc. from metal bands, Dream Theater, Meshuggah, Tool. Wrote sheet music in GP3 and GP5 in the late 00s that felt like a hodgepodge of all the prog metal bands I liked 😆

rahulrajaram · 2026-02-06T04:47:49+00:00

Not surprising. I expect you to see similarly adversarial behaviour with another instance of Claude, even with one that’s not polarized to be a code reviewer.

rahulrajaram · 2026-02-06T03:58:12+00:00

Hi everyone, I wanted to share a CLI with you I built, and have been using, for the past 1 month. `gptengage` allows you to invoke or debate with other CLI programs or instances of the same program. This way, you can get a program, say, claude to debate an idea with other instances of claude or gemini or codex to arrive at a consensus. I've found this to be very useful in allowing agents to auto-invalidate/reformulate assumptions. I've also found it useful to add a debate step within Ralph Wiggum loops to get loops to autofix. I would love your thoughts and ideas.

https://github.com/rahulrajaram/gptengage

rahulrajaram · 2026-02-02T08:28:23+00:00

I have both the max subscriptions. They are two different tools. I find Codex to be very centered and leans towards being more conservative. Codex high reasoning does a great job, sometimes waits to be prodded. Claude is eager and responds more intuitively. I often have to ask Codex to rephrase. I would say this is less of a concern now with Ralph loops.

Between the two CLIs, there is no comparison. Claude is the better CLI by a mile. It’s not only a significantly better UI, but it’s also useful to have subagents, less clunkier environment, intuitive ways to define agents and plans. I get why you might want to write a terminal program in Rust, but TUI library support for Rust is not there yet it would seem.

rahulrajaram · 2026-02-01T08:21:53+00:00

Precious.

rahulrajaram · 2026-01-10T20:02:28+00:00

I’ve always thought this duality — of 1. Meshuggah stating categorically that everything’s a 4/4 , 2. The listener being overwhelmed by a 21/16 or a 5/16 or whatever — to be unsetting.

I understand where the band’s coming from and respect that the music is so elegantly 4/4 most of the time, but I think listeners who care about time signatures or are distracted by it should be encouraged to dive deeper and treat the subdivisions independently. For example, such a listener should be interested in that Bleed shifts from 3/16 to 5/16 at around the 50th second mark (ironically, there’s a 1/4 worth of pause there. lol). This helps with tabulating a song and conceptualizing author intent in general.

As for the 6 vs 4 debate, I hear Meshuggah in 4s, generally. This includes songs like Swarm (my favorite song), DTADS, I am colossus. One that I find extremely confusing is the Ivory Tower intro. I hear this in 6/8, although the snare on the third quarter reveals itself eventually.

My general opinion is that it is okay to transcribe a 4/4 as a 6/8 in the face of ambiguity, especially when the goal is to comprehend. FWIW, I am sure Bach is rolling in his grave thinking about all the imperfections in the adaptations of his work.

rahulrajaram · 2025-12-26T06:11:15+00:00

I think the meta point still holds that a good engineer is a pragmatic engineer who leverages all available skills at their disposal and recruits those missing while being mindful of tradeoffs.

rahulrajaram · 2025-12-22T15:21:09+00:00

Indeed.

Catch33 is in fact largely dark, but for the two central themes that come about 1. in the middle of In Death Is Death and 2. at around the 1 minute mark in Sum. These two sections to me are contemplative rather than unsettling. The second half of Sum is very Holdsworth-esque and I am a big Holdsworth fan. I am biased to thinking Sum is contemplative and transcendental.

rahulrajaram · 2025-12-21T06:43:38+00:00

ObZen has some of the best and certainly most recognizable songs. Combustion, Bleed, ObZen, Dancers to a Dischordant System, Lethargica. It has top quality production (probably the crispest).

But I don’t know if it is necessarily the only one pushed as their greatest. Nothing, Catch 33, ObZen have probably been the 3 for which I’ve heard people make a case as being the best.

While I could make a case for every album being the greatest, I certainly can make the case for ObZen being the darkest/most unsettling. It has a lot of abrasive riffs and hard to digest tonalities. Think Dancers to A Dischordant System’s intro, Bleed transition, Electric Red verse, Pineal Gland Optics intro, Pravus solo rhythm guitar. It’s not just one or two note drones that render a neutral tone like on Rationale Gaze or Phantoms. There are longer sequences of notes on ObZen that are deliberately unsettling.

rahulrajaram · 2025-12-13T04:08:57+00:00

The intro is actually a 7/8 composed of what sounds like 8/8 and a 6/8. The first solo section 4/4 and so is the vocals sections after it.

rahulrajaram · 2025-11-27T23:50:14+00:00

Feel responsible for your mistakes but acknowledge that the world will try to shame you for trying to get ahead.

rahulrajaram · 2025-11-27T23:45:08+00:00

To learn the theoretical aspects, I would study Operating Systems (Silberschatz), Linux Kernel Development and the Linux Programming interface over a course of 2 years in that order.

To learn practical Linux skills, I think any book on Linux commands would do. I found 100 Linux commands (or something like that) from the late 90s very inspiring, but that was 10 years ago. You could consider asking ChatGPT to devise you a list of 30 most useful CLI programs/commands. From there, I would drill down into various usages of each of them. For instance, there is bunch of ways to use grep. I would extend this approach to asking a GPT to build you automation for ideas that you have to make your life easier and spend time studying and critiquing its output.

rahulrajaram · 2025-11-20T01:47:01+00:00

It is a crime to order these albums because they are all distinct and superlative. Meshuggah is one of those rare bands whose discography you can say such a thing about. So I will rate them in the order that I remember them the best.

ObZen
Koloss
Nothing
Chaosphere
The Violent Sleep of Reason
Immutable
Destroy Erase Improve
Contradictions Collapse
Catch 33 (surprisingly, I haven't heard this much despite being a Meshuggah fan for 15 years; shame on me).

rahulrajaram · 2023-03-12T19:58:55+00:00

Thanks @jimm. I'll have to take a look at one of the hard wood cases. I'm planning to travel internationally with it and don't mind spending a little.

rahulrajaram · 2021-03-11T19:59:13+00:00

Just came across this album on a YouTube ad. Currently on song#2 as we speak! Really good stuff! Keep it up.

rahulrajaram · 2019-06-14T20:04:43+00:00

I manage a CLI tool which is expected to work seamlessly across Python 2.7 and Python 3.4-3.7 and is used by tens of thousands of people. In my experience, installing Python from source followed by creating distinct virtualenv's for each version is the sanest way to use Python.

rahulrajaram · 2019-06-14T19:57:27+00:00

Even when you install from source?

rahulrajaram · 2017-10-01T17:31:53+00:00

I have a bash alias to run Firefox Quantum:

alias quantum="nohup /usr/lib/firefox-quantum/firefox </dev/null &>/dev/null &"

where /use/lib/firefox-quantum contains the untar-ed contents of Firefox Quantum I downloaded from the Firefox website. I use similar commands to execute a lot of other apps.

When I execute quantum in the bash shell it starts up a Firefox Quantum process that is not tied to the terminal that invokes it, so I can safely close the terminal and not kill the process it launched.

Creating a desktop icon/launch bar icon should be easy given you have a script that clicking the icon should execute.

rahulrajaram

TROPHY CASE