How Creatives and Devs Can All Finally Escape the Control of the Silicon Valley of Evil and Make a Trillion Dollars, Audio Style

TL;DR

I recorded an audio version of How Creatives and Devs Can All Finally Escape the Control of the Silicon Valley of Evil and Make a Trillion Dollars by Belle.

You can listen to it here:

Or, Download the mp3.

Or, do the YouTube version¹:

Two things to know before you get started:

1. Belle gave the blessing to post this.
2. There's no AI involved. It's all me².

Outro

I really dug the original post. I mean obviously, given I decided to record it. The framing makes a ton of sense. I learned about The Wretched of the Earth and Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Both of which are now at the top of my non-fiction books to read list³. I learned a little about Haiti and the Black Panthers too. I better for the knowledge.

Give it a listen if you're a dev or a creative. Or, check out the original post if you prefer text.

-a

Endnotes

• I've become a bit obsessed with the Atmosphere. The collective name for apps (like Bluesky) that ride on a tech called AT Protocol. You can make shit without having to build your own storage or login systems. The exact two things that have kept me from fucking around with all kinds of ideas.

  I haven't been this excited about new tech since I first started playing on the web in the 1900s. The post offers a solid lens to consider the environment through.

• A marquee feature of the Atmosphere is the ability to control your content. To move it from one service to another at will. The ability it built in at the foundation. But, the foundation doesn't deal with what's above it. The content itself.

  You can move your data between apps, but if the apps don't understand each other's content you're still effectively locked in. I designed a portable content format that addresses that. It's basically Markdown on steroids. You can check it out at neodoc.style if you're into that type of thing.

Footnotes

1 I spent a solid day working on the audio visualizer for the video. I had one going that I really liked that looked like this:

Only problem is that it was gonna take 10 hours to render on my several year old macbook (which has no discrete graphics card). I spun up a computer in the cloud with a beefy GPU. It didn't help. Turns out the Waveform generator I was using uses the CPU, not the GPU.

I have started looking at shaders and Audio Visualizers and VDMX6. I don't have spoons for that rabbit hole right now. Ended up with an ffmpeg + gnuplot approach that's fine for now I'll write it up if I get the opportunity. (And yeah, I tried ffmepg's showwaves. It was meh.)

2 There's three hours of raw tape for the fifty minute end result. I spent north of eight hours editing it down. I realize now that I should be nuking bad takes during the recording. If it wasn't for the ability to remap hotkeys for faster edits I'd still be doing it.

3 The Wretched of the Earth and Pedagogy of the Oppressed are also two of the favorite books of a professor of rhetoric buddy. That intimidates me a bit, but nothing ventured, etc.