HN user
Great story.
I don't think you need to feel like a piece of shit for your brief defense of the student. Erasing and replacing the answer is unusual. As is photocopying all the tests.
Asking someone for an explanation of an unusual circumstance is perfectly natural. Perhaps TA#2 should feel like a piece of shit for her lousy explanation!
Indeed it described an output and was also a UI. I meant that describing the output could be the UI. I pictured a textbox or a whisper-style text to speech session. Basically an ai chatbot specialized for generating music.
I couldn't figure out precisely what that video showed, but it was fascinating. Somehow it reminded me of the orca music programming environment.
Wonderful question. I suspect it's partially the culture issue you point to, but also a practical issue of composition. If we decompose sound into the basic waveforms, similar to the subject pdf on page 18, we then have parts that we can reassemble. We can take the defense-funded DSP math of the likes of a John Cooley or a John Tukey and build an engine for assembling the parts of sound.
All this being said, I think that's a process of convenience and a historical path not a absolute constraint. We have some more flexible means of communicating with the machines today. And I strongly encourage someone to work on a new UI for computer music. "Jazz trio piano, upright bass, and drums. start drummer laid-back, piano blowing over the changes, then piano on top."
It looks like the top 10% from 6th to 8th grade Society of Science fairs are invited to participate. They are then selected down to a top 300[1] and a top 30.[2] You can find a project name for the top 300 and a paragraph on each of the top 30.
[1] https://www.societyforscience.org/jic/2025-top-300-junior-in... [2] https://www.societyforscience.org/jic/2025-finalists/
This is great. Asking questions of library code is a big pattern of mine too.
Here's an example I saw on twitter. Asking an LLM to document a protocol from the codebase:
https://ampcode.com/threads/T-f02e59f8-e474-493d-9558-11fddf...
Do you think you will be able to capture any of this extra value? I think I'm faster at coding, but the overall corporate project timeline feels about the same. I feel more relaxed and confident that the work can be done. Not sure how to get a raise out of this.