The false equivalency in this explanation is off the scale.
It wasn't just that crypto was an obvious grift; it was that you didn't need to be an experienced developer to confirm that 99% of the "web 3.0" nonsense that what was being thrown around literally made no technical sense.
You might reject LLMs on principle, or find that they don't work for you. But I think we're well past any debate of whether they do anything at all, which is exactly where crypto was sitting at peak hype.
Crypto also obviously does something at all. If anyone was saying it didn't, they were just as delusional as people saying that AI does nothing at all.
What's funny about this is that it sounds like your coworker reviews his LLM output roughly as well as you read the other replies before assuming that this was an anti-LLM pile-on thread.
I did read the other replies. I don't think my comment is that LLMs are bad. I use LLMs and agents for work. I think my "oh shit" moment is the dynamic that giving someone LLMs amplifies their impact (positive or negative).
For example, some people give kids tiny go karts and that's acceptable because the damage they can do with a very tiny battery powered 4 wheeler is minimal. We now live in a world where everyone has access to a tank and can plow over everything.
I've often felt as though the way to make a DAW that competes with Ableton today would be to build the entire UI around composable scripted modules.
Far too much of Ableton's secret sauce is hidden away behind Max for Live and top-tier pricing only features. This is a great step in the right direction.
There are massive communities around tools far more simple than Ableton was even a decade ago, like SP404, Akai MPCs, Elektron Digitakt.
Many musicians treat any item as an instrument, not as a plaform. There are probably dozens of videos on youtube, where musicians explain, why they use more limited tools instead of Ableton.
To make a successful music tool (that includes DAW), you have to own a powerful workflow, that some group of musicians love or need. Extensibility is fine, but not the only way to succeed.
There are now people making music on pocket trackers that have ± same amount of features as modplug Tracker I used in the end of 90s.
The thing is, when you make a music with a guitar, you don't want your guitar to be 'built around composable scripted modules'. You want to play an instrument, and the UX should enable it, and generally get out of the way.
I believe that you misunderstood my message, which actually means that I didn't communicate well. Let me do better.
I am not proposing that someone needs to disrupt or make Ableton obsolete.
I am suggesting that the existence of Reaper strongly implies that there's an under-served demographic of people who (correctly) understand that the DAW can be more than a way to translate audio data from buffers to hard drive and VST host.
In the same way that there is currently a lot of innovation in mixers that don't just sum channels, it's not at all unreasonable to imagine that the DAW itself could be an instrument or at least provide composable functions that make other instruments more interesting.
One of the best things about the golden age of music tools that we're experiencing is that guitars and guitarists have been decentered from the conversation. We don't call them guitar pedals anymore; they are effects pedals now. We're moving past the GROG TURN OVERDRIVE ON OR OFF phase into a much cooler place where pedals are usually MIDI controlled and often have CV inputs as well. Arguably the most lauded pedal of 2025 was the Polyend Mess, which literally allows sequencing of effects. It's awesome!
The cool thing about a truly composable modular DAW is that it doesn't have to get more complex. Being able to strip things down is also totally valid. Perhaps then folks wouldn't be making such a big deal about Tape:
Ableton and Max are totally separate codebases, and "Max for Live" is just a ~VST interface between them.
I do agree that "scriptable Ableton" would be far better for production and sound design than Max, because they make all the hard parts easy: MIDI, sequencing, mixing, etc.
In Max, you have to build everything from scratch, every time.
>Ableton and Max are totally separate codebases, and "Max for Live" is just a ~VST interface between them.
This is not strictly true, and Max for Live (M4L) is much more than a pseudo-VST. In the context of Live, the Max runtime is controlled by the DAW, which itself then exposes part of its interface to Max. So there's realtime bi-directional communication going on, more akin to how Propellerhead Software's (now deprecated) ReWire protocol used to work, the host passing control information (transport position, note data, etc.) and audio buffers into the client software and vice-versa. There is some superficial similarity with VST in this sense, but with M4L it's much more deeply integrated into the DAW as a whole. The Live Object Model[1], while not complete, is extensive, and there is very little that is off-limits to a M4L device to manipulate, with the caveat that care must be taken to avoid overflow of the control stream coming back from Max into Live (certain operations must be placed in the low-priority scheduler thread).
This new API gives much of the same control that M4L already did, but without having to have Max involved.
>In Max, you have to build everything from scratch, every time.
Again, not strictly true. Editing a M4L device opens the full Max environment, which has a snippets[2] feature much like any other good IDE. You can easily build a large library of boilerplate code for your own specific purposes with it. There are also many basic examples included out of the box.
I don't own Max for Live. If I want to use it, I either need to upgrade to Ableton Suite for $500 or I need to upgrade to Standard and buy Max for Live separately (also $500).
There's a huge ecosystem of tools that are implemented as Max for Live packages which I cannot access because I haven't paid the toll.
I see that even this new Extensions SDK is only available to people who have paid for the full Suite edition.
I answered this in a different branch of the thread, but you're kind of missing my point. I don't own Max for Live, so the large ecosystem of useful tools that I'd enjoy trying out is unavailable to me.
It's not about special powers, just being forced to pay the gatekeeper to the otherwise free/OSS ecosystem.
>I don't own Max for Live, so the large ecosystem of useful tools that I'd enjoy trying out is unavailable to me.
Well, it's not that difficult to purchase as an update to Suite or by itself, on a typical western salary.
The ecosystem has tons of free/open source devices. Is it that bad that Ableton doesn't make Max (which they had to buy the whole company for) free too?
I prefer they have actual product revenue like that, and don't go the VC route, gifting stuff to get market share, and then coasting and rent-seeking like NI and others.
Max/MSP has always been a paid tool. There was never a situation when you were going to be able to participate without paying.
This sounds a little like you're complaining that you cannot watch all of the free Youtube content because you don't want to pay for the device that will display it.
What it is, though, is a misguided attempt to move the goal posts on what I actually said, which is that a huge amount of the value of Ableton is gatekept behind paid addons.
If a DAW was structured like Blender or KiCAD and designed from the ground up to be extensible (or minimal!) then you wouldn't have any impetus to try to shame people who haven't paid a gate toll to execute software people have contributed to the public domain.
I'm annoyed because you keep referring to the cost of a license as "gate-keeping" or somehow "hiding away" your ability to use the software. Pay the cost for a license or don't. It's a reasonable price for the tools.
> I don't own Max for Live, so the large ecosystem of useful tools that I'd enjoy trying out is unavailable to me. t's not about special powers, just being forced to pay the gatekeeper to the otherwise free/OSS ecosystem.
You seem mistaken about Max/MSP being free or open source, which it has never been. Certainly not in the last eighteen years since I've been using it.
You seem to be saying that it would be a whole lot nicer if Ableton were an open source tool that we didn't have to pay for and could develop ourselves. Maybe that WOULD be an improvement in some ways. It would at least be free. A lot of things might be better. Some things not so much.
But it's not. Live is a paid product. And so is Max/MSP. And I'm very happy to continue paying these developers to keep doing a great job because they make tools that are tremendously helpful to me and they don't abuse that relationship with things like monthly subscriptions or unreasonable restrictions. In many ways Ableton is a model company that is self-governed and largely free of outside influence like private equity. I want them to succeed and I want more companies like them to thrive.
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There is a free and open-sourced alternative to Max/MSP: Pure Data. If you think open-sourcing this type of software is such a great idea, then you should develop in Pure Data instead of Max/MSP. There are probably open-sourced DAW projects out there too that you can integrate into as well.
Maybe then you'll realize that Live and Max/MSP's asking price is not so high after all.
That's actually exactly what I do! And I highly recommend it as a viable alternative to Max/MSP. It's the native way to create patches for the Organelle and many other instruments.
PlugData in particular has been a real joy to play around with.
I'm glad that your tools are working out well for you. I do reject the idea that I should STFU about being annoyed that I can't run Max for Live scripts, though. Native Instruments Kontakt isn't my favourite piece of software (or company) but at least they understood from early on that making the player free drastically increases the value of a paid license for the people who make content on that platform.
It's 2026. I'd hoped that we were well past needing to debate whether OSS is good or not. Apparently we're not!
Well, you're also describing Ardour (with the proviso that we don't allow scripts to much on the GUI side of things). Access to the "object model" from Lua is extremely wide-ranging, and since Ardour itself is open source, you can add whatever other access you need or want rather easily.
You're fundamentally misunderstanding how MCU families work, I'm afraid.
There's not 10+ versions with different features. The word version strongly implies that there's an incremental progression over time, and they keep screwing up by adding and taking away modules. What jerks!
What's actually happening is that you have 4-5 different product lines that all share the same SDK, design philosophy, pricing structure, supply chain and support channels. Each one of these dimensions is extremely important to engineering teams designing products around them. It's not about hobbyists who are learning the ropes, although IMO they do a pretty good job of supporting those folks, too.
Within those lines (at this point, primarily S, C, H and P) you actually do have versions; for example, ESP32-S2 is no longer recommended for new designs because you should use ESP32-S3.
Ultimately, the lens you need to use to understand this stuff is: can I place an ESP32-labeled chip on my PCB and program it using the same SDK?
The same is true for the RP2XXX series of MCUs; if someone is confused by the difference between a microcontroller and a SBC then they might just be in the wrong place.
Bigger picture, some advice: when confronted by something like this, you will get further faster if you don't lead with the assumption that you have things figured out and everyone else is doing it wrong. Instead, keep an open mind and ask lots of questions. We're living in a golden era of enabling autodidacts but that's only true for folks who go long on humble curiosity.
Lots of assumptions off a comment that is mostly just me stating my preference for short and unique part numbers. Nothing would be wrong with ESP32xx ESP33xx, ESP34xx, etc.
Espressif only have 312 SKUs [0]. You're telling me nobody could come up with a naming scheme where more than 2/3 of them don't have part numbers longer than 18 characters?
Doesn't really matter either way, but short part numbers do fit nicely in a BOM table without using really wide columns. (even though I usually find capacitors to have even longer names).
Haha, that I did! I spent a good while narrowing down that very list to pick one of my first ones out last year. By coincidence, I ran into the very same part number in a completely different circumstance a few months later. What are the chances of that!? Did help me feel that I hadn't picked out a real oddball one though.
Part number was still just 15 characters, and that's enough to specify if you want the tape and reel version. Not that anyone's counting :).
I guess those long part numbers do get burned into your head after a while after all.
It's never occurred to me to even try getting an LLM to design or layout a circuit for me.
Instead, I have dozens or hundreds of chats in my history where I debate the merits of different parts for different tasks and scenarios, the nuances of decoupling strategies (package size vs deregulation), work out resistor network ratios from the reels I have on hand.
Then being able to feed an LLM a datasheet and have it write a custom driver against the registers I need so that it does exactly what I want without the cognitive overhead of a buggy package with someone else's strong opinions about how a part should be used is amazing.
Frontier models are incredibly good at electronics, and it's got nothing to do with what happens inside the EDA.
Design, no... but I've definitely thought about letting one route traces... while autorouters work, I was hoping Claude could do matched traces better. At the time, it didn't want to generate the kicad pcbnew file though. /shrug
Everyone is different, but board layout is one area where I aggressively don't want any LLM input until such a time as it is as good at board layout as it is at refactoring code.
We're still a ways off from that, and that's likely because board layout requires a much more nuanced perspective of the enclosure shape, power requirements, heat dissipation, RF...
It's really not about placing ICs with caps nearby. I actually really enjoy that part anyhow. That's the fun part!
Just make sure that you switch to the Italian audio track when the music kicks in or you will be profoundly confused by the auto-dubbing attempting to translate for you.
It's funny to me that he wrote the song to prove that his fans would buy any American-sounding song no matter the lyrics, but it was such a banger that even we in America love to listen to it. Backfired in the best way possible.
This is not the reaction of someone trying to keep an open mind, especially given that this isn't your usual cup of tea.
If you can get over your preconceived notions, I'd bet that you'd really enjoy this movie. It's extremely well executed and genuinely unsettling without ever getting gory, comedic or stupid.
What I find unsettling is that large swathes of mainstream society seem to consistently tack towards safe, unchallenging pablum. Why watch Parasite when you could watch a Happy Gilmore sequel?
I'm not saying this to be contrarian or give you a hard time. You should watch whatever makes you feel joy.
However, you shouldn't be surprised that for a lot of people, music, movies, television and books (I kid, I kid) that don't surprise, challenge, shock, confuse or inspire us feels vapid, hollow and intellectually insulting.
I'm a long-term "OG" Kane Pixels fan. I took a friend to see the opening night preview and we both loved it.
Anyone not familiar with Kane - who was 16 when he started making his "found footage" films in Blender - the guy is a truly brilliant mind. Listening to him talk... you can close your eyes and he speaks like someone middle aged. It's almost uncanny.
Anyhow, in addition to his genuinely excellent Backrooms videos, I highly recommend you turn off the lights and take in his The Oldest View series as well.
I wasn't aware he was behind the oldest view. That makes me more excited to see this movie because that was really good on what couldn't have been much of a budget to begin with.
It wasn't just that crypto was an obvious grift; it was that you didn't need to be an experienced developer to confirm that 99% of the "web 3.0" nonsense that what was being thrown around literally made no technical sense.
You might reject LLMs on principle, or find that they don't work for you. But I think we're well past any debate of whether they do anything at all, which is exactly where crypto was sitting at peak hype.
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