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glenn mcdonald

@glennmcdonald.bsky.social
2.5K followers 194 following 878 posts

Music, furia.com, everynoise.com, books, soccer, food, civilization, pickleball, technology, music. Bridges.

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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
If you have a good new idea about AI, OpenAI and Anthropic will probably copy it in a week. This is grim if you're a capitalist who doesn't already have lots of OpenAI and Anthropic stock, but quite intriguing if you have good new ideas and want them to reach people.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
Sometimes casually commenting on a Reddit post is how you realize that you should both delete your comment and leave that subreddit.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
I know a place.
MUNA in concert
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Thanks, aisshole.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
If you grew up under a castle on the hill, and you somehow got old enough to no longer routinely puke without thinking about your relationship to power, it's time for that now.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
If you're curious about we do at Imbue, here's the latest thing we've been working on. imbue.com/product/studio
imbue.com
Studio: Your personal AI operating system
Customize a second brain for running your business and work. Chat with Studio about what kind of interface and tasks you want for email, Slack, Notion, GitHub, Calendar, etc, and Studio will make pers...
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Em dashes are only a problem if you use them as an eject lever to get you out of a crashing sentence instead of rewriting it because you're a word-generator and they didn't give you any way to ungenerate.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
No smart people think he's smart.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
If your idea of "triumph" includes filling an arch in the middle of your capital with drones and snipers to shoot at your own people, you have failed at humanity.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
While I was in Mumbai for All About Music, I also got interviewed for Billboard India. billboardind.com/can-artists-...
billboardind.com
Can Artists Game The Algorithm?
Glenn McDonald, a former Spotify data scientist, has spent years examining the listening behaviour of millions of customers to build algorithms that support music discovery. He’s distilled all his lea...
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
What's the point of being Ed Sheeran if you still can't stand up for anything?
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
Measuring coding productivity by lines of code is, to be fair, exactly in the spirit of measuring prosperity by currency units moved.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I realize you were in line before me, but I got the Wordle in 2 today.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
Bad technology can still be bad even if a few people have perverted it for decent ends.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
Threat of annihilation is what they offer us when they fear that promises of utopia are becoming unconvincing.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
I will pay Trump $5k to resign right now. I'll even let him sign the check himself.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
The roombas are coming, but I can sell you a roomba to protect from you from the roombas.
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Reposted by glenn mcdonald
Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
API-based functions on everynoise.com are now operational again.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
I expected to feel conspicuous, at this Indian music conference, for the shallowness of my knowledge of Indian music, but actually it's much more that I am not buying or selling anything.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
Remedial humanity tip: the exciting thing about a cancer treatment is not how much money it could make.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
I'm pretty sure we will come to believe that most of the ways we're currently trying to use AI were dumb, but it's also truly amazing that I can write instructions in English and they can be implemented in Turkish.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
These are the Yamaha DX7s of AI.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
I growl at em-dashes in AI writing as much as any human, but also it *would* be useful if English had a punctuation mark that was a colon with negative polarity.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 14/08/2026
This band is so good. www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsxo...
youtube.com
METROCK 2026 -羊文学 Hitsujibungaku-
YouTube video by りょうP
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
Putting an invisible watermark in Claude-written text to mark it as written by Claude is like putting a flavorless trace-chemical in a bowl of clam chowder to mark it as made out of clams.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
like a knife that, no matter how you cut with it, always makes things into little tugboat shapes that smell of mango
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
What's a good word for the combination of assiduous, gratuitous and condescending? I'm trying to name the valley that comes after the Uncanny one.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
If you use everynoise.com, @everynoise.bsky.social has some updates.
everynoise.com
Every Noise at Once
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
www.coyotemedia.org/funding-bay-...
coyotemedia.org
A Modest Proposal for Funding Transit Instead of AI
In the ’60s, the Bay Area almost got a high-speed train from Marin to San Jose. What could happen if we dreamed big again?
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 02/08/2026
Kickstarter needs an option where you take away money from bad ideas.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
If only there was some way for me to do the same things I already do, but in a way that consumes exponentially more resources and money, and shifts my own focus from my goals to the processes.
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Reposted by glenn mcdonald
Every Noise at Once @everynoise.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
If you're near Mumbai and want to hear me talk about music and algorithms and humanity, I'll be speaking at the All About Music conference on August 26th! www.allaboutmusic.in/glenn-mcdona...
allaboutmusic.in
Glenn McDonald - ALL ABOUT MUSIC
Glenn McDonald Algorithm Designer Glenn McDonald is a music evangelist, algorithm designer, software engineer and technology strategist. He created the...
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
Right now, somebody is inventing something that could have been the next guitar, except they will ship it with a list of pre-played songs and an automatic next-chord recommender so anybody can learn it, and then nobody will.
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Reposted by glenn mcdonald
DACTAL.org @dactal.org · 22/07/2026
I'm very actively undecided about how I think AI should be used to write code, or really at all, but if you're having AI write apps for you, and want to try having it write them so that their data and algorithms are open to inspection, here's an AI-written Skill for that. dactal.org/dactal.html?...
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
I'm not convinced or claiming that it's possible to talk to engineers effectively about love as their goal, but I failed to stop myself from trying. furia.com/log/524
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
A future in which the makers of your software tell it to do something dumb, and you can say "that's dumb" to it and it will say "you're right" and stop doing that.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 16/07/2026
Soon, robots will be able to play pickleball for you.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 15/07/2026
I feel uncertain, this week, about what seems like everything until I notice that it definitely isn't.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 12/07/2026
Subbed off unexpectedly in overtime.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
It's not just that deferring to magic makes you less resourceful, it's also that tolerating the automatic application of magic makes you even more lost when for some reason it doesn't happen.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
If you follow 2024 election fretting, you might know that there were some NY precincts with weird party skew between the President and Senate votes. I happened to be poking at election data in my work on data tools, so here's the relevant view for all precincts by state.
State-by-state graphs of 2024 voting polarity, Senate polarity on the X axis, President polarity on the Y axis (and color spectrum).
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
AI coding is a godsend for everybody who loves solving logic puzzles and hates arguing across obdurately unexplained cultural barriers with unintelligibly motivated customer service reps. I hope I'm using "godsend" right. Existential torment.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 26/06/2026
With actual humans you rarely get one so simultaneously desperate to prove that they are brilliant and that you are brilliant and that every question is conclusively resolved by your combined brilliances. It's refreshing. No, not "refreshing". what's the word I'm looking for? Excruciating.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 19/06/2026
DACTAL, the query language and data knife I've been working on at @imbue-ai.bsky.social, has been capable of complex things for a while, but is starting to also be capable of some simple things.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 18/06/2026
You won't become a better cook JUST by not using a microwave, but every opportunity to use a microwave is also an opportunity to make better food and learn more about heat and food if you don't. This is not a post about cooking or microwaves.
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Reposted by glenn mcdonald
DACTAL.org @dactal.org · 18/06/2026
Club teammates, but World Cup group opponents? Yes, several. dactal.org?dbname=wc202...
dactal.org
DACTAL
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
I admit to being viscerally impressed that Claude not only can play Connections given just an unexplained screenshot, but can and knows to explain the day's trap. Of course this is exactly a language-completion task, so I know I should be less surprised. But this is why this AI is hard to evaluate.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 05/06/2026
1981 misses us. open.spotify.com/track/0jSLiZ...
Triumph performing "Magic Power" in Boston, 2026-06-04.
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glenn mcdonald @glennmcdonald.bsky.social · 04/06/2026
Arguably this was fine as a single sentence, but I also allowed it to become a blog post. furia.com/log/522
furia.com
furialog
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