Month: January 2025

Quick Thoughts on “AI Music”

 

The tech is fascinating but the trajectory of it being used to screw artists is already clear. Hopefully artists will lawyer up and get their works out of training data.

Large artist unions should be mandated access to freely and deeply test public models for the purposes of detecting IP in the training data. If you’re making money providing a model, be prepared to show your papers on its training; trust needs to be earned.

Commercial models should be taxed, with revenue supporting ongoing development of tools for smaller artists to protect themselves from being ripped off.

If this effort goes well for artists, I generally expect sound quality of music generation to improve but “humanness” of the public models to sink. Bad news for companies wanting nearly free anodyne music for commercial use, but arguably better for art.

Where do the real prices of services like Udio land after investors stop footing the bills? Do these VC subsidized toys ignite the creative spirit of everyday non-artists to get into the game of actual music creation? What are we missing out on by having a world where very few people make music?

Restarting a node service on macOS boot

 

This was a pain to get right, so here’s what I landed on:

  1. Open System Settings > Energy Saver
  2. Turn on Start up automatically after a power failure
  3. Under Privacy & Security > Full Disk Access, add the executable /usr/sbin/cron
  4. Log in as root: sudo su
  5. Install pm2 globally: npm i -g pm2
  6. Don’t get trapped in vim: export EDITOR=nano
  7. Copy the PATH to clipboard: eval 'echo PATH="$PATH"' | pbcopy
  8. Edit crontab: crontab -e
  9. Paste in the PATH
  10. Create cron entries using the full path for file/directory references (you don’t need it for executables)

Example root cron:

PATH=/Users/steve/.bun/bin:/usr/local/bin:...

@reboot pm2 start /full/path/to/script.js

This creates a PM2 service for the root user. You can only see/remove its entries when logged in as root:

sudo su

# list services
pm2 list

# remove 1st entry
pm2 del 0