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@@ -9,10 +9,33 @@ references:
url: https://www.viget.com/articles/the-point-of-pointless-corp-in-the-ai-age
date: 2026-03-04T04:31:17Z
file: www-viget-com-7crcce.txt
- title: "Everything is awesome (why I'm an optimist)"
url: https://www.joanwestenberg.com/everything-is-awesome-why-im-an-optimist/
date: 2026-03-10T19:48:59Z
file: www-joanwestenberg-com-3uezea.txt
- title: "The Productive Afterward"
url: https://www.chrbutler.com/the-productive-afterward
date: 2026-03-10T19:49:00Z
file: www-chrbutler-com-avdt2j.txt
- title: "Dan Simmons Is Dead, So It's Time To Read 'Hyperion' | Defector"
url: https://defector.com/dan-simmons-is-dead-so-its-time-to-read-hyperion
date: 2026-03-10T19:48:53Z
file: defector-com-mj4bn2.txt
- title: "How AI Wreaked Havoc on the Lo-Fi Beat Scene | Pitchfork"
url: https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-ai-wreaked-havoc-on-the-lo-fi-beat-scene/
date: 2026-03-10T19:48:49Z
file: pitchfork-com-30jzgl.txt
- title: "Musical Beings Tembo: this magnetic drum machine turns the whole family into beatmakers - SYNTH ANATOMY"
url: https://synthanatomy.com/2026/02/musical-beings-tembo-magnetic-this-magnetic-drum-machine-turns-the-whole-family-into-beatmakers.html
date: 2026-03-10T19:48:57Z
file: synthanatomy-com-xthm71.txt
---
- New (to us) RAV4 Prime
- Went an entire month before it needed gas
- On my deathbed perhaps I'll regret the amount of time I spent hunting down the perfect right-angle quarter-inch TRS-to-XLR audio cable
- My life is keeping things charged
- My wife calls me "the charging fairy," flitting around the house, plugging things in
- [Pointless][1]
- 3D printing
- Valentines
@@ -21,11 +44,10 @@ references:
- Tree work
- Deck project
[1]: https://www.viget.com/articles/the-point-of-pointless-corp-in-the-ai-age
{{<dither IMG_9858.jpeg "782x600">}}Four kids, one couch, absolute chaos.{{</dither>}}
{{<dither IMG_9914.jpeg "782x600">}}A child clings to their grandmother on a swing at the playground.{{</dither>}}
On my deathbed perhaps I'll regret the amount of time I spent hunting down the perfect right-angle quarter-inch TRS-to-XLR audio cable
My life is keeping things charged
My wife calls me "the charging fairy," flitting around the house, plugging things in
[1]: https://www.viget.com/articles/the-point-of-pointless-corp-in-the-ai-age
<!--more-->
@@ -37,20 +59,35 @@ My wife calls me "the charging fairy," flitting around the house, plugging thing
### Reading & Listening
* Fiction: [_Title_][2], Author
* Non-fiction: [_Title_][3], Author
* Music: [_Polymood_][4], L'Eclair
* Fiction: [_The Strength of the Few_][2], James Islington (the [first book][3] in this series was a bit of a slog -- I've read too many books about magic high schools for one lifetime -- but the ending got me pretty good, and this one's a pretty big departure)
* Non-fiction: [_Title_][4], Author
* Music: [_Polymood_][5], L'Eclair
[2]: https://bookshop.org/
[3]: https://bookshop.org/
[4]: https://leclairband.bandcamp.com/album/polymood
[2]: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Strength-of-the-Few/James-Islington/Hierarchy/9781982141233
[3]: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Will-of-the-Many/James-Islington/Hierarchy/9781982141189
[4]: https://bookshop.org/
[5]: https://leclairband.bandcamp.com/album/polymood
### Links
* [Title][5]
* [Title][6]
* [Title][7]
* [Everything is awesome (why I'm an optimist)][6] ([via][7])
[5]: https://example.com/
[6]: https://example.com/
[7]: https://example.com/
> I'm going to argue that the pessimists have the best narratives and the worst track record. The doom scenarios require assumptions that don't survive contact with economic history, and the psychological posture you bring to this moment actually matters for how it turns out.
* [Dan Simmons Is Dead So It's Time To Read 'Hyperion' | Defector][8]
> All that stuff (besides The Terror, which I truly love) might be an acquired taste for non-genre fans. Which brings us to the entire purpose of this blog: me telling you to read Hyperion, and then you coming back later and saying thank you.
* [How AI Wreaked Havoc on the Lo-Fi Beat Scene | Pitchfork][9]
> It’s likely that as AI advances and makes reasonable facsimiles of even more genres, there’ll be a reverse push for realness—akin to listeners obsessing over vinyl or obscure formats, the human touch could become a boutique feature, like raw milk at the farmer’s market. Lo-AI hasn’t won the battle yet; it means too much to these people. “When things get so bleak with lo-fi or just the world, right, it’s very easy to enter a state of nihilism. Like, why should I do any of it, when it’s all so fruitless?” Reade said. “You do it for yourself. That’s the core thing with art and music for me.”
* [Musical Beings Tembo: this magnetic drum machine turns the whole family into beatmakers][10]
> Musical Beings Tembo is a new family-friendly drum machine with real-time sampling capabilities, programmed with magnets.
[6]: https://www.joanwestenberg.com/everything-is-awesome-why-im-an-optimist/
[7]: https://www.chrbutler.com/the-productive-afterward
[8]: https://defector.com/dan-simmons-is-dead-so-its-time-to-read-hyperion
[9]: https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/how-ai-wreaked-havoc-on-the-lo-fi-beat-scene/
[10]: https://synthanatomy.com/2026/02/musical-beings-tembo-magnetic-this-magnetic-drum-machine-turns-the-whole-family-into-beatmakers.html

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[40]Defector Reads A Book
Dan Simmons Is Dead, So It’s Time To Read ‘Hyperion’
[41][hea]
By [42]Barry Petchesky
12:55 PM EDT on March 8, 2026
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WRITER DAN SIMMONS PUBLISHES 'FIRES OF EDEN'
Dan Simmons in 1994.
|Sophie Bassouls/Sygma via Getty Images
[47]
98Comments
Call it the Orson Scott Card problem. You want to recommend a piece of sci-fi
to a friend, but you know that if you do, you'll have to include the disclaimer
that the author's politics are diametrically opposed to your own, and you find
them downright objectionable. You truly love the book, and you think your
friend will love it too, but you wonder if you even want to bother with the
whole rigamarole the disclaimer requires.
The best way I can describe Dan Simmons, who [48]died last month at age 77, is
as someone who got driven crazy by watching too much Fox News after September
11th. Not one but two of his future-set novels feature as major plot points a
Global Islamic Caliphate. One of those, Flashback, is basically [49]one long
rant about how the American left would ruin the world if they gained power. Not
that Simmons didn't have some taste issues before—Song of Kali, his World
Fantasy Award–winning first novel, has some moments that read decades later as
stunningly racist—but late-career Simmons was at times totally unredeemable.
This is a shame, because his best work belongs with the greats of fantasy,
horror, and sci-fi. Summer of Night is a tighter, more satisfying version of
Stephen King's It. Carrion Comfort is a brick-sized epic about psychic vampires
that reads as breezily as a trade paperback. The Terror, which inspired the
well-regarded show, is for its first three-quarters a brilliant and
non-supernatural speculative take on a real doomed Arctic expedition.
Simmons played around with metafiction in ways that, if they didn't always
work, were always interesting. His Ilium and Olympos feature a batshit conceit:
What if future humans turned themselves into the literal Greek Gods and moved
to Mars and reenacted the Iliad and resurrected scholars from our time to
document it? And also there are robots from Jupiter, and Shakespeare's Caliban
is real. Drood is a historical thriller featuring Charles Dickens's
madness-inducing obsession with one of his characters, who may or may not be
real. The Fifth Heart puts Henry James and Sherlock Holmes together to solve a
mystery in Washington, D.C. It's often very silly, but whatever can be said of
Simmons, he committed to the bit.
All that stuff (besides The Terror, which I truly love) might be an acquired
taste for non-genre fans. Which brings us to the entire purpose of this blog:
me telling you to read [50]Hyperion, and then you coming back later and saying
thank you.
Hyperion does not hide its inspirations. Quotes from Keats, whose poem fragment
lends the book its name, litter its chapters. Jack Vance and Pierre Teilhard de
Chardin are referenced by name. The entire book is one large frame story, the
individual tales of seven pilgrims, a Canterbury Tales of the Ekumen. It is the
obvious work of a voracious, small-c catholic reader, bringing disparate
sources and philosophies to bear on the big questions of love, death, and
redemption.
Our seven are seeking the mysterious Shrike, a menacing, quasi-organic creature
who is said to grant one wish to pilgrims, but also oversees the Tree of Pain,
on which it impales its victims for an eternity of hell. Each character gets
their own turn in the spotlight, sharing their past and explaining what they
will wish for. A Catholic priest of a dying religion who must suffer unknowable
pain to prevent a resurrection. A faith-questioning Jewish professor seeking a
cure for his daughter, who is inexorably aging backward. A politician who is
willing to destroy humankind in an act of ecoterrorism, or perhaps just
personal revenge. A soldier in love, trying to prevent a war. A poet looking to
complete his life's work, who believes the Shrike is his ultimate muse. Each
tale stands by itself as an exploration and celebration of some aspect of
humanity. Despite the sci-fi setting, Hyperion is at root an imaginative,
sympathetic portrait of people, and should speak to any reader.
The book ends just as our pilgrims reach the Shrike. The Fall of Hyperion
completes their story, and then two Endymion books extend its themes and some
of its characters into the wider universe. I think you can live without the
last two, though I enjoyed them. And I think there's no reason for me to advise
on the second one, because once you've read Hyperion you'll demand the direct
sequel. It's a genuine achievement in sci-fi, using one of language's oldest
literary structures to push the boundaries of what the genre can say about what
it means to be human. It was always bound to long outlive its author.
Recommended
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[53]102Comments
[54]Pete Segall
March 4, 2026
[55]A collage featuring three of the different paperback covers for "Cleo
Birdwell"'s 1980 novel Amazons.
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[61][hea]
[62]Barry Petchesky
[63]@barryp.bsky.social
Deputy Editor
Read More:
• [64]Books,
• [65]dan simmons,
• [66]hyperion,
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[76]Randy Arozarena #56 of the Mexico in action during the 2026 World Baseball
Classic game between Mexico and the United States.
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[82][GettyImages-1707906347]
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March 10, 2026
[88]James Harden of the LA Clippers carries his brand name wine J-Harden
Cabernet Sauvignon and shoe package as he arrives ahead of their NBA game
against the Toronto Raptors.
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The Kindness Of Familiar Faces
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March 10, 2026
[94]Commuters waiting for a train
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If Cool The Pan Be, A Lousy Breakfast For Thee
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March 10, 2026
[100]Stainless steel pan
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[106]Madison Booker #35 of the Texas Longhorns shoots over Destiney McPhaul #2
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[44] http://www.reddit.com/submit/?title=Dan%20Simmons%20Is%20Dead%2C%20So%20It%E2%80%99s%20Time%20To%20Read%20%E2%80%98Hyperion%E2%80%99&url=https%3A%2F%2Fdefector.com%2Fdan-simmons-is-dead-so-its-time-to-read-hyperion
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How AI Wreaked Havoc on the Lo-Fi Beat Scene
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
[17]Rabbit Holed is Kieran Press-Reynolds’ weekly column exploring songs and
scenes at the intersection of music and digital culture, separating shitpost
genius from shitpassé lameness. This week, he explores how artificial
intelligence has laid waste to the once-burgeoning world of lo-fi beats.
By [18]Kieran Press-Reynolds
July 2, 2025
Play/Pause Button
Graphic by [20]Chris Panicker
Save this story
Save this story
In the mid-2010s, when I was in high school, the genre known as lo-fi beats was
like a brain cleanse for all my time spent mainlining Minecraft and YouTube.
The music was tender, with drums sizzling like kitchen pans and trumpet that
zigzagged over the soundscape’s [23]open pasture. Perfectly timed samples leapt
out like [24]flickers of a memory. Only a few channels soared back then; the
mixes all had whimsical titles and background visuals that simulated the
feeling of sitting indoors, cocooned in a duvet, while rain lightly falls
outside.
Fast-forward to now, and the scene has putrefied into a wasteland of the
percussive undead. The YouTube search results have warped into an apparent AI
breeding ground, [25]crammed with [26]hourlong mixes [27]full of [28]soporific
dreck. The channels have similar names and cartoonish Kawaii imagery. Even the
comments of the videos, which have millions of plays, brim with what look like
fake conversations—pseudoymous accounts prattling on about how the music helped
them unlock their true potential in life. Multiple channels repeat the same
sentence structure like, “I don’t want much! I just want the person reading
this to be healthy, happy, and loved!,” suggesting they’re AI-generated. “To
whoever reads this comment: you are a wonderful person and I love you,” [29]
writes one channel called Coffee Time, which specializes in [30]videos with
titles that read more like Airbnb listings than music: “Happy Morning Jazz |
Elegant Bossa Nova In Luxury Cliffside Cabin Overlooking the Sea for
Relaxation.” It’s the theme song for the [31]dead internet theory, a rave-yard
of zombified AI agents chilling out to death.
Longtime heads who fell in love with lo-fi beats and delicately craft it
themselves are starting to panic. Obsessives on the Reddit forum for lo-fi
beats, which banned AI submissions late last year, recently despaired about how
the scene has been “overtaken” and “[32]lost its soul.” Some artists report
losing significant opportunities and having to switch careers because of the
genre’s downturn; others are paranoid, unable to discern the real from the
hoax.
Mia Eden, a 23-year-old from Manchester, England, is one of a slew of lo-fi
beatmakers who explicitly state that their videos are “made by real people” and
free of AI. She runs a channel called [33]Lofi Louis, inspired by the name of
her friend’s pet rabbit, and records under the alias Rosia! She started making
the music in 2021 after stumbling on channels like the infamous, perpetually
studying [34]Lofi Girl. Eden dug deeper and found the underground lo-fi scene,
a community of artists who happily shared advice, made lo-fi beat-themed
podcasts, and collaborated on compilations. Years ago, Eden earned anywhere
from $500 to $1,500 a month from her songs getting slots on DSP editorial
playlists; now, after the AI boom, that’s mostly dried up—Spotify’s lo-fi
playlists spill with viral songs from suspicious profiles with no descriptions.
Eden first noticed a dumpster’s worth of AI cover art, and then people
full-sending the grift with AI music. She says she’s been tricked by some of
her favorite channels starting to sneakily integrate AI.
“Previously, you could stream a track on Spotify or Apple and almost be certain
you followed them on Instagram or spoke to them on Discord because the
community was so tight-knit,” she says. “Now, it feels so nameless—where this
could be an artist that maybe doesn’t like to show face, or it’s a computer.
You can’t always distinguish now, and I’d say it’s over half [AI].”
Alex Reade, a 32-year-old from the United Kingdom, thinks the genre is “the
most uninviting it’s ever been,” choked in a swamp of shit: listless,
derivative beats and pure AI slop. He came to the genre around the turn of the
decade, and was intrigued by the idea of trying to infuse things like post-rock
into lo-fi. While working overnight shifts at a tech company’s store in an
emptied-out mall, he’d balance out the spectral creepiness of the space with
chill lo-fi beats. Like Eden, he’s seen a sharp dropoff in streams under his
alias [35]Project AER; a skyrocketing count of two million listeners per month
a few years ago has sunk to 420,000 today. Spotify’s fickle playlist placements
and lo-fi’s enshittification has freaked him out. “There’s so much anxiety
around what to do as artists,” he told me. “I’m trying to find any other means
so I can take that reliance that I have on lo-fi out of my life because it
causes me a lot of stress.”
Many people credit lo-fi beats to the [36]mothbitten jazz-hop of J Dilla and
[37]Nujabes. It’s a slightly misleading term, since the sound isn’t always
low-fidelity, and the phrase “lo-fi” already has many other meanings in music.
It goes back to indie rock in the ’90s with one-man noise-makers and fuzzy
bands like Guided by Voices, who made a deliberately imperfect, clangorous
sound—partly as a reaction to the pristine quality of the CD era. “Lo-fi beats”
coasts on the vaguest of associations, and there was never an ideological
motive behind it. But its success online might partly come from it being the
antithesis of so much ultraglossy, hi-fi music in the 2010s, from hyperpop to
mainstream trap and pop. Lo-fi beats are [38]frayed and slipshod, with a [39]
dustiness that carries the hallucination of lowkey intimacy, like you’re [40]
overhearing someone practicing their drumming.
The scene proper didn’t really crystallize until the mid-2010s, when Lofi Girl
and other online hotspots cropped up. The music was unofficially christened as
“lo-fi beats to study to,” taken from the clickbait title of so many [41]
YouTube mixes that curated soothing yet stimulating instrumental music. It
became a macro-genre catchall term for anything vaguely chill, jazzy, wistful,
playlistable: capacious enough to cover both J Dilla and cosmic IDM. The scene
had a slew of [42]mini-stars—producers like [43]eevee and [44]potsu, who’s
maybe most known for making the [45]petal-soft beat that XXXTentacion later
hijacked for his massively popular “[46]Jocelyn Flores.”
The dreamiest beats offered a kind of divine comfort, from sublime bossa nova
soundtracks for Pokémon games that don’t exist to the [47]bittersweet beats
sampling Shiloh Dynasty, the enigmatic vocalist who is basically the scene’s
Imogen Heap. Listening to the Flume-ified tripstream of eery’s “[48]hardly”
instantly takes me back to the days when I first heard it as a teen—it inspired
me to crack FL Studio and try to create my own instrumental mischief.
(Thankfully, I pivoted to writing.)
AI has annexed the lo-fi scene for a hodgepodge of reasons: The lack of vocals,
which typically gives away robo fraudulence, make it easier to infiltrate; the
music’s association with aimless, unfocused listening—vibe music before vibe
became a buzzword—means people aren’t paying as much attention to what’s real
and what’s not; the fixation on fantastical, Studio Ghibli–core visuals, which
image generators can vomit up with ease. Take Mewy Cat Lofi’s “Relaxing Lofi
for Study Time,” which lures passersby with [49]adorable animations of Pusheen
before, five hours into the 12-hour mix, they realize the same chord
progression has seemingly repeated 100 times. YouTube offers [50]creators the
option to disclose if their videos use AI, but they only require disclosure for
some things, such as “altering a famous car chase scene to include a celebrity
who wasn’t in the original movie.” A few [51]viral mixes have “Altered or
synthetic content” warnings in the description, but many don’t.
“It’s a travesty, truly,” groans Dreamwave, a 26-year-old from Washington whose
channel was one of the [52]earliest and biggest lo-fi archives, and who has
never used AI for his carefully curated videos. He describes the arc of his
channel as a slow, soul-crushing descent, from a thriving community of lo-fi
lovers to minimal views on his uploads. He says it’d take him a month to sculpt
a three-hour mix of lo-fi music—discovering and blending the sweetest tunes,
asking for permission—while autobot channels can do it with a few clicks. “With
AI, you can just come up with some ridiculous chord progression and then turn
it into an ambient track where there’s just not a lot going on,” he explains.
“You can almost loop it over and over and then upload that. You can upload
three hour compilations every day.” He believes he’s lost millions of views
because his sparse uploads have been deprioritized in the search results. “It
really pisses me off to see anything AI-generated getting so many views. It
enrages me.”
“The oversaturation caused by AI-generated music is very real,” adds Berkkan
B., the manager of Lofi Records, the label spearheaded by Lofi Girl. “It’s
flooding the platforms, and unless streaming services implement some kind of
regulation, which we hope they will, this will inevitably dilute the presence
and visibility of real artists.” While Berkkan believes AI “can be a powerful
tool” to do things like “enhance workflows” and “refine ideas,” they say that
everything on the Lofi Girl channel comes from human composers and designers.
I spoke with a pseudonymous creator who uses AI to power four separate
channels: jazz music, meditation, rain sounds, and [53]Lofi Tone Art, the
latter of which has amassed over 10 million cumulative views. The clips often
show looping gifs of murky cityspaces and rain-soaked cabins that offer a “[54]
quiet sanctuary in the storm.” They told me they use AI to create everything:
ChatGPT for descriptions; other unspecified software (likely Udio or Suno, the
most popular programs that generate music from text prompts) for the audio. “To
be honest, I think at this stage, AI still struggles to outperform real music
due to its high error rate,” they told me in an email. “However, when used as a
supportive tool, it can be incredibly helpful. When selecting songs, I usually
listen to them repeatedly to ensure they sound smooth and don’t overpower the
mood.”
Detractors might argue that lo-fi beats was always mercenary music engineered
and optimized to hook sad bois with no taste, and good riddance. But to the
aficionados, it’s sacred music—the musical madeleine for a generation that
listened to it through the highs and lows of their adolescence. Dreamwave says
every upload to his channel represents a memory in his life. Reade sounds
jubilant as he expounds upon his love for the somnambulant churn of
Philanthrope and Sleepy Fish’s “[55]Space Cadet,” a track he claims he “could
literally put on repeat and just listen to forever.”
For these lo-fi fanatics, the music came with the bonus of a lovely community.
Eden described the scene as something like a virtual neighborhood, with
specific comps supporting women beatmakers and online friends she’s since met
in real-life, like the founders of the Portuguese label Salad Day Records.
Reade recalls being in a cluster of Twitter chats, along with a Discord channel
called “Lofi Backstage” that’s a who’s-who of “peak era” lo-fi GOATs. Dreamwave
used to play Rocket League with other YouTuber-archivists, and relished the raw
thoughts people left on his videos. “A lot of the comments on my channel are
usually people going like, ‘Hey, I remember when I was listening to this song
with my ex-girlfriend seven years ago, and I just wanted to comment and say
that we broke up.’ You can’t find that in an AI-generated video.”
Many of these artists are fighting back, writing screeds against AI and
commissioning art from illustrators whose livelihoods are being threatened.
There’s a hint of futility in their voices as they wonder about what lo-fi will
look like in a few years, but also a plucky determination, like they’re
bedroom-producer Davids battling big bad Gol-AI-ith. It’s likely that as AI
advances and makes reasonable facsimiles of even more genres, there’ll be a
reverse push for realness—akin to listeners obsessing over vinyl or obscure
formats, the human touch could become a boutique feature, like raw milk at the
farmer’s market. Lo-AI hasn’t won the battle yet; it means too much to these
people. “When things get so bleak with lo-fi or just the world, right, it’s
very easy to enter a state of nihilism. Like, why should I do any of it, when
it’s all so fruitless?” Reade said. “You do it for yourself. That’s the core
thing with art and music for me.”
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
What I’m listening to:
Tags[56]Rabbit Holed
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[17] https://pitchfork.com/tags/rabbit-holed/
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[20] https://www.panicker.design/
[23] https://youtu.be/MmPemW9ZJtE?si=SpJ7p_QB0g9ENnZW
[24] https://youtu.be/HC6xx-GxlUY?si=XNosGThH-JVKNXMD
[25] https://youtu.be/t2WD-eEPXFE?si=nztdyZVbJW_-gPti
[26] https://youtu.be/Bh_QhurLUwU?si=Tdigb5Hj2w3BaVoW
[27] https://youtu.be/9GaBMZRHM3U?si=4p2PReY8V3Q0HRES
[28] https://youtu.be/BCxTQq0UiFs?si=CqBf7ljlGOgqB74S
[29] https://youtu.be/BCxTQq0UiFs?si=Ph1E7NYqWmQSg7nS
[30] https://youtu.be/OZ3yirnnQQE?si=g37Je8NWQVob0Zcq
[31] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory
[32] https://www.reddit.com/r/LofiHipHop/comments/1kxslzd/lofi_has_lost_its_soul/
[33] https://www.youtube.com/@lofilouismusic
[34] https://www.youtube.com/@LofiGirl
[35] https://youtu.be/iwrjRC2qcXU?si=JW33JsBgcQdwY6Cn
[36] https://youtu.be/nrOW7U0pnB4?si=bKlSdzLsawRDpup9
[37] https://youtu.be/8iP3J8jFYdM?si=ce-0yin-4njpes2C
[38] https://youtu.be/naV2N1K0A3g?si=ixxSL99wID4C4HAX
[39] https://youtu.be/9nvytHNsz5M?si=63lPvGYPX_nNdXRy
[40] https://youtu.be/lZq4UDKja24?si=p-11ablZiDFxHioh
[41] https://youtu.be/s49CT4DTAkw?si=MfEeXKa6OYrpDGGW
[42] https://youtu.be/2a-kz_4Yfuw?si=kjPFB3QVy-CiX_sP
[43] https://youtu.be/1_Q3b0NS_Ek?si=J-XUnpamtn2M6aEP
[44] https://youtu.be/WqCpWu8tgRw?si=U9J2afkx96ORrqdw
[45] https://youtu.be/xSB8trUFX1A?si=yR-Eg_uRj8aojeRh
[46] https://youtu.be/FAucVNRx_mU?si=bUOJOAZtvrJJIJSH
[47] https://youtu.be/7ly7Mhle-4M?si=f6fiSvwd0UAZBcL9
[48] https://youtu.be/Vyj0kLPi2IA?si=PQceppX890RRtuMK
[49] https://www.youtube.com/live/LUgjx7_84_Y?si=vGJozd88mdXqDZja
[50] https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/14328491?hl=en&co=GENIE.Platform%3DAndroid
[51] https://youtu.be/Bh_QhurLUwU?si=xX0urBi0IClyNSqZ
[52] https://www.youtube.com/@Dreamwave
[53] https://www.youtube.com/@Lo-fi_chill_mix/videos
[54] https://youtu.be/fWtFZE_du0Y?si=T2Pwu-YNJo6WSMRq
[55] https://youtu.be/aLTo-gmdClw?si=m7Uw6uhnxi_s5lLI
[56] https://pitchfork.com/tags/rabbit-holed/
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[63]Home[64]News[65]Hardware[66]Drum MachinesMusical Beings Tembo: this
magnetic drum machine turns the whole family into beatmakers
Musical Beings Tembo: this magnetic drum machine turns the whole family into
beatmakers
[67]February 24, 2026 [68]Synth Anatomy [69]Drum Machines, [70]Hardware, [71]
News [72]4
SYNTH ANATOMY uses affiliation & partner programs (big red buttons) to finance
a part of the activity. If you use these, you support the website. Thanks! 
Musical Beings Tembo is a new family-friendly drum machine with real-time
sampling capabilities, programmed with magnets.
In recent years, there has been an increasing number of electronic instruments
designed not just for us technically gifted people but for the whole family.
They have very hands-on concepts and can be used by kids, parents, or even your
grandparents.
These have opened up a new field in electronic music instruments. Examples
include the Dato DUO synth, the new Dato Drum, the entry-level Stylophone
gadgets, or the Blipblox series. The newest product in this category is the
Tembo, a playful drum machine from the new company Musical Beings.
[73]Musical Beings TemboMusical Beings Tembo
Musical Beings Tembo
Tembo is a playful drum machine and sampler designed for the whole family. It
lets you jam and create groovy loops in just a few minutes.
Musical Beings has taken many of the things we love about drum machines and
created an original, very immediate, and childlike instrument in Tembo. No, it
doesn’t try to compete with a traditional drum computer from our nerd
universe.
Instead of focusing solely on tech enthusiasts, the goal was to create an
instrument that lowers the barrier to entry and inspires even those with no
experience with drum machines.
[74]Musical Beings TemboMusical Beings Tembo
This is evident in various aspects of the design, starting with the interface.
Programming here is done without a cumbersome menu system or tiny display. The
pattern generator is here, immediate and tangible.
Playful, Tangible Programming
Round magnet dots are used, arranged on a 5×8 grid. Wherever a magnet is placed
on the sequencer, a sound is triggered. To trigger sounds with subdivisions,
several magnets are stacked on top of each other. There is also a swing
function and mute per channel.
Additionally, the interface provides real-time visual feedback of the
sequencer. With 8 steps, the patterns are quite small; after all, you’re not
exactly designing the next techno banger for Berghain in Berlin here.
But who knows what Tembo will do for a child? Maybe they’ll be the next techno
star.
The very playful, direct sound setting allows quick pattern manipulation,
whereas with large tech drum machines, menu diving is necessary. The Musical
Beings Tembo is both a toy and a real instrument with many features of larger
tech-focused machines.
[75]TemboTembo
Sample & Sequence It
As mentioned before, there are 5 tracks, each with an 8-step sequencer. The
sound engine is sample-based. You can either use the sounds built-into the
device.
Alternatively, you can use the built-in sampler in the Tembo hardware with the
built-in mic or the line-in, allowing you to bring in any sound possible. This
is also very direct and immediate. No menus, no finger acrobatics with button
combinations…
Simply press the button, and record your sound into the device. This way, even
children can incorporate sounds from their play area without parental
assistance.
Even though there are no deep sound design options, you can polish any
sequenced sound with an effect or modulation controlled by the knob in each
row.
On top of that, you can easily add backing track loops to your rhythms
[76]Musical Beings TemboMusical Beings Tembo
Take It Further
If your mom or dad is a musician and likes to take the rhythms further, they
can easily export the sounds at any time.
Musical Beings Tembo offers both a line and MIDI connectivity for connecting to
your favorite DAW. It also ships with a companion VST plugin for deeper
integration in your existing setup.
Yes, it comes with a plugin, but Tembo is a standalone instrument that doesn’t
require a computer. It has a built-in rechargeable battery and a loudspeaker,
allowing you to create anywhere.
Plus, it has a headphone socket with its own volume control and ear-protection
limiter to help safeguard your hearing.
Musical Beings Tembo First Impression
I find it exciting that more companies are making the world of electronic music
more accessible, including to children and people who aren’t particularly
familiar with it.
Tembo looks very fun and intuitive, and I can imagine it’s a great way to teach
people a feel for rhythm. We’ll have to see how much all this fun costs.
Musical Beings Tembo price and availability are TBA. It will be available soon
to support on Kickstarter.
More information here: [77]Musical Beings
[78]Hardware Drum Machine News
[79] [80] [81] [82] [83] [84] [85]
• [86]hardware drum machine
• [87]Musical Beings
• [88]Musical Beings Tembo
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ACME Synthworks Roland Jupiter-8 clone is in development
[90]Inear Display pluginsInear Display pluginsNext
The experimental Inear Display plugins are back as pay-what-you-want incl. free
downloads
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4 Comments
1. munkel says:
[111]February 24, 2026 at 8:48 pm
dasja mal n cooles konzept
[112]Reply
2. theeht says:
[113]February 25, 2026 at 4:44 pm
ho wow, it’s very gorgeous, I already love it, thank you for the article!
[114]Reply
3. Delaylaylay. says:
[115]February 26, 2026 at 7:10 pm
I’m loving everything about this thing. Wouldn’t it be just great at an
affordable price point? It seems like the whole point is to be inclusive,
so let’s hope that includes non rich folk too. I’m most certainly in if it
does.
[116]Reply
4. Sangeet says:
[117]February 27, 2026 at 3:30 pm
The first drum machine which triggers me!
[118]Reply
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The Productive Afterward
Summary
JA Westenberg's essay on the merits of optimism is a helpful reminder.
Published on February 25, 2026 by Christopher Butler
[SOT]
[11]This, from JA Westenberg, is well-put:
“I’m going to argue that the pessimists have the best narratives and the
worst track record. The doom scenarios require assumptions that don’t
survive contact with economic history, and the psychological posture you
bring to this moment actually matters for how it turns out.”
Westenberg’s essay is about why optimism at a time like the present makes
sense. It’s exactly the sort of thing—when thoughtfully argued and laden with
examples—that I need to read, as I tend to articulate optimism while
internalizing the opposite. I tend to give every catastrophe a hearing, and
even a momentary “what if this is right” leaves a mark on brain matter. That
isn’t to say that ignoring all warnings is a good idea, nor is that what
Westenberg recommends. But it is a helpful reminder that “catastrophist keep
being wrong.” And one benefit to aging is that you can accumulate many
directly-lived examples of just that.
I do appreciate the implicit message throughout this piece that reminds me of
something important: we do experience great changes—the status quo isn’t
untouchable—but the human drive to do something is both the most reliable force
in ensuring future technological threats to our way of life and the productive
afterward.
[EOT]
© Christopher Butler. All rights reserved.
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STATUS // operational
Westenberg. | v1.0 | 2026
2026-02-25 // 13 min read
Everything is awesome (why I'm an optimist)
AUTHOR // [12]JA Westenberg ACCESS // true
Everything is awesome (why I'm an optimist)
February is the month the internet decided we're all going to die.
In the span of about two weeks, Matt Shumer's [13]Something Big is Happening
racked up over 80 million views on X with its breathless comparison of AI to
the early days of COVID, telling his non-tech friends and family that we're in
the "this seems overblown" phase of something much, much bigger than a
pandemic. Before anyone had finished arguing about that, Citrini Research
published [14]THE 2028 GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE CRISIS (all caps) a fictional
dispatch from June 2028 in which unemployment has hit 10.2%, the S&P 500 has
crashed 38% from its highs, and the consumer economy has been hollowed out by
what they coined "Ghost GDP": output that shows up in the national accounts but
never circulates through the real economy, because, as Citrini helpfully
observed, machines spend zero dollars on discretionary goods. Michael Burry
signal-boosted it. [15]Bloomberg covered it. IBM fell 13%. Software and
payments stocks shed over $200 billion in market cap in a single day,
apparently because a Substack post called upon them by name and investors
decided that constituted news.
The doom loop Citrini described is simple: AI capabilities improve, companies
need fewer workers, white-collar layoffs increase, displaced workers spend
less, margin pressure pushes firms to invest more in AI, AI capabilities
improve. Repeat until civilization unravels. Shumer, meanwhile, told people to
get their financial houses in order because the permanent underclass is
imminent.
Both pieces went stratospherically viral, and both, I believe, are entirely
wrong about where this is heading.
I want to make a case for optimism.
For anyone who read those pieces and felt the dread, whether you're building AI
and worrying about what it means, or you've absorbed the pessimist consensus
and started treating decline as a foregone conclusion, or you’re in the bucket
of people Shumer insists are fucked; I'm going to argue that the pessimists
have the best narratives and the worst track record. The doom scenarios require
assumptions that don't survive contact with economic history, and the
psychological posture you bring to this moment actually matters for how it
turns out.
Why the doom loop feels so right
The central mechanism of the Citrini thesis: when you make intelligence
abundant and cheap, you destroy the income that 70% of GDP depends on. A single
GPU cluster in North Dakota generating the output previously attributed to
10,000 white-collar workers in midtown Manhattan is, in their framing, "more
economic pandemic than economic panacea." The velocity of money flatlines. The
consumer economy withers. Ghost GDP accumulates in the national accounts while
real humans stop being able to pay their mortgages.
Noah Smith, writing on [16]Noahpinion the day after the selloff, called it "a
scary bedtime story" and pointed out that Citrini doesn't use an explicit
macroeconomic model, so you can't actually see what assumptions are driving the
doom spiral. Smith noted that none of the analysts whose job it is to track
Visa and Mastercard stock had apparently thought about AI disruption until a
blogger spelled it out for them, which tells you more about sentiment-driven
trading than it does about macroeconomics. The economist Gerard MacDonell
described the entire piece as "allegorical" but pointed out that it ignores a
basic economic principle: production generates income.
Ben Thompson, on Stratechery, has been making a version of this counterargument
for months, most forcefully in his January piece [17]AI and the Human Condition
, where he argued that even if AI does all of the jobs, humans will still want
humans, creating an economy for labor precisely because it is labor. Thompson's
framing cuts to something the doom narratives consistently miss. They model AI
exclusively as labor substitution: the same economy, minus humans. Every
section of the Citrini piece is about replacing workers and squeezing margins
on existing activity. What they don't model is what the freed-up surplus
creates. As Thompson put it in [18]his analysis of the Citrini selloff, this is
the real error: a refusal to believe in human choice and markets.
It's an error that has been made, in nearly identical form, about every major
technological transformation in modern history. Every single time, the
pessimists looked at what was being destroyed and extrapolated catastrophe,
while failing to imagine what would be created, because the thing that would be
created hadn't been invented yet.
Catastrophists keep being wrong
In 1810, 81% of the American workforce was employed in agriculture. Two hundred
years later, it's about 1%. If you had shown someone in 1810 a chart of
agricultural employment decline and asked them to model the economic
consequences, the only rational projection would have been apocalypse. Where
would 80% of the population find work? What would they do? How would anyone eat
if the farmers were all displaced by machines?
The answer, of course, is that entirely new categories of work were created
that no one in 1810 could have conceived of, and these new jobs paid
dramaticaly more than subsistance farming. Factory work, office work, services,
knowledge work, the entire apparatus of modernity: none of it was visible from
the vantage point of the pre-industrial economy. The transition was brutal and
uneven. The handloom weavers of England suffered. Dickens documented the
squalor of early industrialization in prose that still makes you flinch. But
the trajectory was real, and the people projecting permanent immiseration from
the displacement of agricultural labor were, in the fullest sense,
catastrophically wrong.
Tom Lee of Fundstrat made this point with a specific example that I find
clarifying. The invention of flash-frozen food in the early 1900s disrupted
farming, taking agriculture from 30-40% of employment down to its current
sliver. The economy didn't collapse. It reallocated value elsewhere, into
industries and occupations that the frozen food pioneers couldn't have
imagined. And today, I can't name a single family that subsists on frozen TV
dinners.
The Citrini scenario expects you to believe that AI will be the first major
technological revolution in which this reallocation mechanism fails entirely.
Where every previous wave of automation freed up human labor and capital to
flow into new, higher-value activities, this time the loop... stops. The
surplus accrues to the owners of compute, consumers lose purchasing power, and
the negative feedback loop has no natural brake. It's worth sitting with how
strong a claim that is. It requires every previous pattern of technological
adaptation to be wrong, or at least irrelevant. And when you look at the actual
data, there are signs that white-collar job postings have stabilized, layoff
mentions on earnings calls remain well below early 2023 peaks, and
forward-looking labor indicators show no sign of the displacement spiral that
the doom thesis predicts.
Does that mean AI won't disrupt specific industries and jobs? Obviously it
will. Some of those disruptions will be painful and dislocating for the people
caught in them. But there's an enormous gap between "this technology will cause
serious labor market disruption that we need to manage" and "this technology
will cause a self-reinforcing economic death spiral from which there is no
recovery." Citrini is arguing the latter, while the evidence supports the
former.
Why vivid scenarios beat boring probabilities
There's a reason the doom narratives go viral while the measured
counterarguments get a polite nod // a fraction of the engagement. It has
nothing to do with the quality of the underlying analysis. It has everything to
do with how human brains process information.
Daniel Kahneman's work on the availability heuristic showed that we judge the
probability of events by how easily we can imagine them. Dystopia is easy to
imagine. We have an extraordinarily rich cultural tradition of imagining
technological nightmare scenarios in exquisite detail. Orwell did it
brilliantly. Every season of Black Mirror does it competently. The Terminator
gave us the visual grammar for AI catastrophe decades before anyone had a
working language model. When Citrini describes a world where the unemployment
rate hits 10.2% and the S&P crashes 38%, you can picture it. You can feel the
dread. Hollywood has been training you to feel exactly this dread for your
entire life.
Now try to imagine the positive scenarios. Try to picture, in concrete sensory
detail, a world where AI helps us solve protein folding problems across
thousands of neglected tropical diseases, where it accelerates materials
science research by orders of magnitude, where it makes high-quality legal and
medical advice accessible to people who currently can't afford it, where it
enables forms of creative expression and economic activity that we can't yet
name because they don't exist yet. It's fuzzy and abstract. You can state it
intellectually, but you can't feel it the way you can feel the unemployment
spiral.
This asymmetry isn't trivial. The [19]Ifo Institute has published research
showing that investors are willing to pay more for economic narratives than for
raw forecasts, and that pessimistic narratives command higher prices among
certain investor types. As [20]Joachim Klement put it in his response to the
Citrini selloff: investors value narratives more than actual recession
forecasts. Stories travel faster than spreadsheets.
Shumer's piece is a narrative construction, and a questionable piece of
analysis. He opens with the COVID comparison: remember February 2020, when a
few people were talking about a virus and everyone thought it was overblown? He
positions himself as the insider who sees what's coming, who's been "giving the
polite, cocktail-party version" but can't hold back the truth any longer. [21]
Paulo Carvao, writing in Forbes, noted that it reads at times like a sales
pitch. It’s a used-car pitch at that. The Guardian pointed out that Shumer
"previously excited the internet by announcing the release of the world's 'top
open-source model,' which it was not." (To be clear: this is a kinder way of
saying [22]it was fraud.)
But criticism doesn't travel like fear does. Fear is a better story. And so the
doom narratives accumulate cultural mass while the boring, incremental,
statistically-grounded counterarguments remain niche reading for economists and
strategists.
We remember disasters, not the ones we dodged
Humans are spectacular at remembering disasters, passed down in every format
from the written word to the oral tradition. We are (for obvious reasons)
terrible at remembering the disasters that didn't happen. In 1962, during the
Cuban Missile Crisis, a Soviet submarine officer named Vasili Arkhipov refused
to authorize the launch of a nuclear torpedo, overriding two other officers who
wanted to fire. The world didn't end. Most people today have never heard of
Arkhipov. Everyone knows about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bomb that fell is
seared into collective memory. The bomb that didn't fall is a footnote.
The Y2K bug was going to crash civilization; then billions of dollars of
engineering work fixed it, and everyone retroactively decided it was never a
real threat. The ozone layer was going to disintegrate; then the Montreal
Protocol worked better than almost anyone predicted, and ozone depletion feels
like a quaint 1990s worry. Acid rain was dissolving the forests of North
America; then sulfur dioxide regulations cut emissions drastically, and the
whole issue evaporated from public consciousness. Every one of these was a
genuine threat. Every one was met by human ingenuity and institutional
coordination. Every one was subsequently memory-holed, because success is
boring and failure is vivid.
We're running our forecasting models on a dataset that systematically excludes
our wins. It should be entirely unsurprising that the forecasts come out
somewhat bearish.
Ben Thompson (as usual) gets it right
Thompson's core insight is that humans want humans. He points to the
agricultural revolutions: in the pre-Neolithic era, zero percent of humans
worked in agriculture. By 1810, 81%. By today, 1%. Machines replaced human
agricultural labor entirely, and rather than the economy collapsing, entirely
new categories of work were created that paid dramatically more. This cycle
played out again with industrialization, with computing, with the internet.
Every time, the displacement was real, and every time, new forms of
human-valued work emerged that couldn't have been predicted.
Citrini called DoorDash "the poster child" for AI disruption, imagining
vibe-coded competitors fragmenting the market overnight. Thompson flips it:
DoorDash is the poster child for why the article is absurd. DoorDash didn't
always exist. It was built, and it wins through the active choice of customers,
restaurants, and drivers. The doom thesis treats it as a static rent-extraction
layer sitting on top of human laziness, but DoorDash created its market from
scratch and generated new jobs for millions of drivers along the way. What the
Citrini analysis lacks, Thompson argued, is any belief in human choice or
markets. If your starting assumption is that things are as they are, you can
only envision breaking them.
Citrini predicted AI would collapse real estate commissions by eliminating
information asymmetry. But the internet already did that. You can look up every
house for sale right now, with full history and photos. Real estate agents
still exist, which is one of the better arguments that humans are resourceful
at giving themselves work to do even in fields where they arguably shouldn't
need to.
In a world of AI abundance, the things humans create will become more valuable
precisely because they're human. AI art will make human art more desirable, not
less, because provenance matters. AI-generated content will make
human-generated content worth more, because the imperfections and
idiosyncrasies are features.
Is this optimistic? Yes. Could it be wrong? Sure it could. But it's grounded in
a real observation about human psychology that the doom models don't account
for. Citrini's Ghost GDP thesis assumes that when AI replaces human labor, the
value simply evaporates from the consumer economy. Thompson's counterargument
is that humans will create new forms of value that are specifically human, and
that demand for those forms of value will intensify as machine-generated
alternatives become ubiquitous. The history of technological disruption
suggests Thompson has the stronger case.
Pessimism as a self-fulfilling prophecy
What actually worries me is the second-order effects of the doom narrative
itself.
When the smartest, most technically capable people in a field become convinced
that the field is heading toward catastrophe, several things happen. Some leave
the field entirely, removing exactly the talent you'd want steering the ship.
Some stay but adopt a posture of resigned inevitability, which is functionally
identical to apathy. Some decide that since disaster is coming, they might as
well accelerate and cash out. And a vocal minority become so consumed by
existential risk that they advocate for extreme countermeasures that would
concentrate power in ways that create entirely new categories of danger.
Robert Oppenheimer (in the wake of his famous invocation of the Bhagavad Gita)
spent the years after the Manhattan Project arguing passionately for
international cooperation on nuclear governance. He didn't say "we should never
have done this." He said, essentially, "this is incredibly powerful, and we
need to build institutions that can handle it." He was an optimist in the
meaningful sense: he believed better outcomes were achievable if people worked
to achieve them. He was right about that, because we're still here.
The most effective people working on AI safety and governance right now are,
almost without exception, optimists. They work on alignment because they
believe alignment is solvable. They push for better governance becuase they
believe governance can work. The ones who've concluded that the problem is
unsolvable tend to stop doing useful work, for obvious reasons.
Gramsci wrote about "pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will." You
look at the world clearly. You see the problems. And then you choose to act as
if better outcomes are possible, because that choice is the precondition for
achieving them.
Nobody can see the next economy
What both Shumer and Citrini miss is that they're modeling a future economy
using the structure of the present economy. They see AI replacing white-collar
workers within the existing economic framework and project the consequences of
that replacement within that same framework. But every major technological
transformation has changed the framework itself, creating entirely new economic
structures that were invisible from the vantage point of the old ones.
In 1995, if you told someone that one of the largest employers in America would
be a company that let strangers sleep in each other's homes, they would have
thought you were insane. If you told them that millions of people would make a
living by talking into microphones about their opinions, or recording
themselves playing video games, or writing newsletters on the internet, they'd
have had you committed. The entire creator economy, the gig economy, the app
economy, the SaaS economy that Citrini is now eulogizing: none of it was
predictable from the vantage point of 1995. And that's a 30-year window. The
agricultural revolutions played out over centuries.
What will people do when AI can handle most current white-collar tasks?
I don't know.
And that's the whole point.
Nobody knew what displaced agricultural workers would do, either, until they
did it. The absence of a visible next chapter isn't evidence that there won't
be one. It's evidence that we're bad at predicting what humans will invent when
constraints shift.
Choosing optimism with open eyes
I'm not saying everything will be fine. I'm not saying the transition will be
smooth. I'm not saying that the people displaced by AI won't suffer, or that we
don't need better policy frameworks to handle the disruption. The
distributional concerns at the heart of the Citrini piece are legitimate. If
productivity gains accrue primarily to the owners of compute and capital while
labor income stagnates, that's a genuine problem. Labour's share of GDP has
been declining for decades. These are real numbers pointing to real challenges.
What I am saying is that the leap from "this will be disruptive and we need to
manage it carefully" to "this will cause an irreversible economic death spiral"
isn't supported by the evidence, by economic history, or by what we know about
how humans respond to technological change. The Citrini scenario requires every
adaptive mechanism in the economy to fail simultaneously and completely within
roughly two years. That's a very specific left-tail outcome.
If you're building AI systems, if you're founding companies, if you're writing
code that will shape how people experience the world, your psychological
orientation toward the future is a variable that directly shapes // affects
outcomes. Pessimistic builders build defensively. They hoard and hedge and make
decisions based on fear. Optimistic builders build with ambition. They invest
in safety because they believe safety is achievable. They take on hard problems
because they believe hard problems have solutions.
The tech industry is at a hinge point, and the narrative it tells itself will
shape what it creates. If the dominant narrative is doom, the best people
leave, the remaining people race to extract value before the collapse, and the
governance frameworks get built by people who don't understand the technology.
If the dominant narrative is cautious optimism, the best people stay, the work
is good, and the institutions get built by people who know what they're
building for.
Ed Yardeni, the veteran Wall Street strategist, noted in the wake of the
Citrini selloff that "the AI story has morphed from a Roaring 2020s
productivity booster to an existential threat to our way of life." He found
this striking. I find it absurd. The underlying technology hasn't changed, and
the capabilities haven't shifted. What changed is the narrative, and narratives
are always, always choices.
I choose optimism. I choose it because the alternative is surrender as
sophistication. And because every time I look at the historical record, the
full record that includes both the disasters and the averted disasters, both
the tragedies and the triumphs, the case for human ingenuity and resilience is
stronger than the case against it.
The doomers may have the best stories.
I believe the optimists have the best evidence.
I'll take the evidence.
Everything is (going to be) awesome.
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