#interview

83 links · 2011–2024

interview with Peter Chung

“I think people, in order to work, they have to focus on the process because the content doesn’t inspire them. […] Blinded by the process so that they, you know, are interested in at least something because, yeah, it’s a hard reality when the thing that you’re working on just isn’t really good.”

“It’s completely wrong to apply the same standards of critique to works that are made with different intents.”

“We’re actually working on that now with Paul. We’re taking the sessions from the record, which were mixed and mastered some time ago, and we’re diving back into those and pulling elements out, and then re-recording more variation, more complimentary sounds. […] You know that you have to make a record and that the record has to make sense and be accessible, and at the same time you know that all of that music is totally destroyable and it’s going to be atomized and rendered in a great number of variations.”

“But the way it tends to play out is that most generated stuff tends towards ambient and quite granular, soft, synth-y stuff because the nature of a computer game as opposed to scoring a film means that the music’s never quite sure what action it’s about to be soundtracking. It could be anything because the player’s got agency. Having a soft, ambient soundtrack that can react very quickly tends to work best, but obviously the further you go in that direction the less memorable, the less melodic it becomes.”

interview with James Thomson of PCalc: anecdotes from working at Apple and developing a calculator app for the most of the career

Simon Peyton Jones, coauthor of GHC, on types as APIs, Haskell intermediate language, 30k cores parallelism, Erlang as a Haskell library, CS education for kids, Google Dart, and more.

“I sometimes run a very old version of The Sims to optimize living conditions for two people with busy lives who want to achieve maximum happiness and self actualization. […] Turns out that an errant chair or a table configuration might cause undue friction and, over time, decrease joy and happiness. […] It’s kind of my version of debugging life, and it’s another reason why I have a PC lying around. I don’t play the game unless I’m trying to figure out a more optimal living condition. I don’t use this religiously by any means, but as more of thought experiment.”

“We’re delighted when people who can’t afford our books don’t pay us for them, if they go out and do something useful with that information.”


links collected by
Maciej Konieczny

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