
The Joy of a Never-Ending Search for Hobbies [video] - wallflower
http://www.theatlantic.com/video/index/421509/the-joy-of-a-never-ending-search-for-hobbies/?single_page=true
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lazyjones
This made me sad - people try to leave something behind as they get older and
more aware of the finiteness of life, but in IT we rarely build stuff that
lasts as long as a musical instrument (programming languages, algorithms, file
formats perhaps). It was much more about craftsmanship 35 years ago when I
started, today everything I build feels like it'll fall apart at the next
browser/OS/hardware upgrade or be obsolete due to superior alternatives.

I guess I need a new creative hobby.

~~~
cJ0th
This also tremendously affects human culture. While the information you need
to perform a piece of classical music can easily get stored for ever (high
quality, archival grade ink and paper plus loads of copies from time to time,
stored in a save area) there is no such thing for recorded music.

There isn't even a future proof way to capture a simple house beat. For
instance, the drums are sampled from vinyl then go into a 12 bit sampler then
got digitalized a decade later. Finally a row of skillfully tweaked digital
effects gets applied to the individual hits and the sequence as a whole.

All this is necessary to make a simple house beat sound/feel the way it does.
But there is no notation for the process you have to go through to achieve
this result. Drums in a different style of music that use the very same simple
drum pattern have a very different feel to them.

You could argue that there is no need for a notation as there are ways to
preserve the files of your DAW and thus the process is sort of documented. But
whether or not you can open these files in the future depends entirely on
economic interests of hard- and software manufacturers.

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m52go
> _To live a life of just wasting time and just entertaining yourself is not
> enough...it has to be someting that 's meaningful not only to you and those
> you know but your friends, your people, your family..._

So many of us could use this reminder. That shot at the end of the video with
the man and his finished work was beautiful.

~~~
shenanigoat
Thanks for typing that out. I thought that to be a very poignant remark.

