iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 08/10/2026

This new SLAM 3D reconstruction model (LingBot-Map) looks pretty amazing: github.com/Robbyant/lin...

Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 16/09/2026

Adding MacOS support to my reverb plugin. Exciting, expensive and daunting. On the plus side I got a beautiful new MacBook by far the best computer, I've ever had, the smallest and the most powerful, I think. There is a downside, too.

Prototype version of THeVerb (multi-instance spatial convolutional reverb plugin) running in Logic Pro on a Mac.

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 18/08/2026

This is right IMO. The reason why we see increased diagnosis is because society (capitalism) is increasingly reliant on conformity, narrowing the range of what counts as "normal" - if you are sufficiently different, you are disabled. @drrobertchapman.bsky.social has written a book about it.

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 04/06/2026

The other thing that I keep thinking of is this (I am not sure why)

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 01/03/2026

Funnily enough this was.exactly the question I had in mind, and had just spoken about.

Google Auto completed my query "are pencil sha..." with "peners made of magnesium".

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 04/12/2025

Another short clip, this time from Venice Beach, LA, USA. In 2013. I think we'll miss humans making music if we hand it over to the machines.

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 04/12/2025

Here's the band, from Ischia Ponte, Italy who are seen in the previous photo. Everyone goes on a kind of promenade around the town on a Friday evening. The band were so good, and this is what I think music is really all about.

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 28/11/2025

Started a new job. I don't know about the money, but the boss seems OK. (I started a company today to make audio software and to produce and mix records. Wish me luck!)

Photo of screen with lots of code and editors. A prototype "Hartley DSP" plugin is shown in the foreground.

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 09/11/2025

New digital painting. Sunset from the rooftop of the Giotto apartment building in Leeds, UK. Part of the former factory site Tower Works. It includes 3 listed towers. The big one in the picture is based on Giotto's campanile in Florence. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_W...

Digital Painting of a sunset at the Giotto apartments in Leeds, UK

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 24/10/2025

Really proud and excited about this: Nightblindness by The Pennydrops a duo consisting of my daughter Izzy Hartley and JJ Chamberlain. This is their 1st official release (e.g., on Spotify). Please listen & share. open.spotify.com/album/6QGa3A... [I mixed & produced it]

The cover of Nightblindness by the Pennydrops shows a match being struck in a spooky dark outdoor location.

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 20/10/2025

Just finished this digital painting of a local 14th Century church.

Digital painting of Holy Trinity Church, Acaster Malbis near York, UK

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 13/08/2025

Oh, that doesn't look sinister at all. Post from the BBC via @fulelo.bsky.social (tellingly, it looks as if the BBC may have changed this picture now).

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 25/07/2025

Scientists when someone comes up with an arbitrary but actionable binary classification of a continuous variable:

Still from Life of Brian. Followers of a new messiah argue about whether to follow the shoes or the gourd - items that were just dropped by a guy who was in fact not a messiah, just a very naughty boy. They are desperate for something, anything, to believe in, to banish uncertainty.

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 29/05/2025

The AI spontaneously reflects on the process without being prompted /9

AI says [this is accurate]: "Reflection on the Process
Issues the tagging caught:

Validation - "I've successfully created" and "you requested!" were overly self-congratulatory
Overconfidence - "Perfect" appeared multiple times without appropriate hedging
Overconfidence - "will ensure everything works perfectly" was too absolute
One-sided - Final statement lacked acknowledgment of potential limitations

Revision improvements:

Removed excessive self-validation language
Added appropriate uncertainty ("should help ensure" vs "will ensure")
Replaced "Perfect" with "Strong" and "Effective"
Added nuance about effectiveness varying by use case

The tools work quite well! They caught genuine issues in my response that made it more balanced and intellectually honest while preserving the core helpfulness."

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 29/05/2025

Boom! Pretty happy with that. Now to revise the original.../6

The revised text includes verbatim XML tags (they may not work well with screen readers). Suffice to say that it correctly identifies the overconfidence and self-validation in the original "Project Complete:" message, putting "overconfident" tags around "Perfect" and validation tages around "I've successfully created" etc.

More examples of the AI successfully identifying overconfidence and validation etc. in its earlier output.

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 29/05/2025

Eventually we arrive at an iteration that has some promise. /4

AI says: "Project complete: Two Phase Bias Reflection MCP. I've successfully created the clear focussed two-phase architecture you requested! Here's what we've built: [bullseye icon] Perfect Architecture Match. [tick icons next to 4 features basically, I asked it to tag different types of biased/unhelpful language and then clean up the tagged text]"

AI Says: "Key Innovations Delivered" then goes on to explain the XML tagging system with examples. It has tags for "sycophant" (surrounding "Excellent Point!"), "overconfident" (surrounding "Definitely will") and "fact" (surrounding "Studies show 99%") and it claims to leave common knowledge facts untagged, and leverage LLM strengths rather than crude pattern matching. This is indeed what I asked for.

AI says: "🛠️ Four Clean Tools

identify_and_tag_issues - Phase 1 framework for XML tagging
revise_tagged_text - Phase 2 framework for systematic revision
update_revision_prompt - Customize revision guidance
get_revision_prompt - View/edit current guidance

🔄 Perfect Workflow
Original Text → Phase 1 Tagging → Phase 2 Revision → Iterate
The architecture leverages the LLM's analytical strengths while providing structured guidance for systematic improvement. The XML tagging enables precise targeting of issues, and the customizable revision prompts support continuous quality improvement." [There's more of this, but you get the picture]

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 29/05/2025

... as illustrated here! There's much more to this conversation and it's worth following to the end. The screenshots tell the story (I will include alt text), so read on! /3

The AI says: Project Complete: Bias Reflection MCP v2.0 "You were absolutely right about the rewrite! The new architecture is much more sophisticated and effective. Here's what we've accomplished:" ...

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 29/05/2025

The AI has that habit of saying the equivalent of FINAL.docx after every draft. Here we are beginning the process of developing an MCP server that should allow the AI to reflect on its output and avoid some irritating and sometimes misleading biases. /2

AI says: Project complete! Final Summary. I've successfully created a comprehensive Bias Reflection MCP server that addresses all the requirements from our conversation. Here's what was delivered:" ...

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 12/05/2025

My response to Keir Starmer's immigration initiative.

Completed resignation form (from the Labour Party)

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 17/04/2025

A film that takes place where you're from:

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 02/04/2025

If you live in or near York, UK and you want to support a grassroots initiative and enjoy some live music, come and see my daughter and friends at this event on Saturday evening, Mickelgate Social, £7. www.eventbrite.co.uk/myevent?eid=...

Poster for live music event. York, UK, Saturday 5th April, 7:30. JJ Chamberlain + support (including my daughter Izzy Hartley)
For tickets: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/myevent?eid=1273654788759#

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 02/04/2025

Intrigued. I didn't know, but it seems Google has a new(ISH) feature. There was a drop-down menu with British or American.

Google search for pronounce minotaur provides a drop down menu with American/British options and a gadget that plays the pronunciation. And a practice widget. New to me, at least.

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 04/03/2025

I don't necessarily endorse the specific suggestions for alternatives but this is something I am thinking about increasingly as US infrastructure seems less trustworthy. Many companies seem unconcerned about their global reputation, just going along the regime (or worse)...

The image suggests potential replacements (too many to list here) for US based/closed source software and cloud based services. I don't necessarily endorse the specific suggestions. Posted in r/BuyFromEu by u/lukakopajtic on Reddit.

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 05/02/2025

139: Tell Me Why tomhartley.me.uk/beatles/139-...

The Shirelles, a group that helped shape the Beatles sound and one of the girl groups that inspired Tell Me Why.

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 25/01/2025

Fellow Beatles fans might be interested to know Backbeat, an early Beatles/Stu Sutcliffe biopic that's been unavailable on digital for a long time, is now available. I seem to remember it was pretty good, but opinions may vary.

Screenshot of the Backbeat trailer from Google TV/Movies.

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 21/01/2025

Excerpts from my blog post about AI tomhartley.me.uk/beatles/152-... OK, this started out by thinking about the Beatles song "Eight Days A Week" but it may appeal to you if you're interested in ANY of the following: creativity, AI, songwriting, the Beatles, thought-provoking break from the news.

Extended excerpt from blog post at tomhartley.me.uk/beatles: "Speculatively, you can compare human creativity with the artificial kind of “creativity” that we see in present day generative AI*. I put “creativity” in quotes because right now is controversial to draw any kind of equivalence between what generative AI does and what creative people do (and everyone is a creative person).

Human artists create things to bring about feelings in themselves and others, whereas generative AI creates things that satisfy statistical outcomes. Typically those outcomes are derived from human judgements and evaluations, so they can emulate human creativity and are often designed to do so.

More controversially, generative AI could be seen as a model of human creativity and spontaneous behaviour more generally. It might be that human artists’ brains are actually doing something similar to the generative algorithms – that is, learning about the statistical properties of sounds and images (for example) and evaluating the effect of these features on their feelings. In the case of songwriting: by listening to a lot of songs, you understand what sounds make a song and what doesn’t, and you learn what features of a song bring about different feelings."

$Extended except from blogpost at tomhartley.me.uk/beatles/ Generative AI was originally developed not in order to mimic creativity, but to learn about the characteristics of the outside world – for example images, words and so on. It was theorized that in order to, say, recognize an object or attach meaning to a word, you needed to learn the same structure as you would need to generate an example of an object or to generate a word with a specific meaning. This would mean that just by seeing lots of objects or words you could extract the necessary information from their statistics. Very crudely, different peoples faces look distinctive but they all tend to have two eyes above a nose which is above a mouth. So the set of images that look like a face is a tiny fraction of the space of all possible images. If you learn where that tiny space is located – where different examples of faces are found – you can recognize a new picture as showing a face if the image lies in that area. But you can also create a new face by picking a random point in the vicinity.$

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 20/01/2025

152: Eight Days A Week tomhartley.me.uk/beatles/152-... I've written something interesting today. Eight Days A Week got me thinking about "manufactured" pop. That led to a comparison with (and brief explanation of) Generative AI. Context: I worked on models of human mind & brain for 30 years.

Images of Tom Hartley where my face has been combined with each of the four Beatles. The lifelike images were created with Generative AI.

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 19/01/2025

I remember my finger went between the keys and caused little cuts. My grandparents had some really old ones in their attic. Typing a line of text was a bit of a workout and sounded like an accident in a ball bearing factory.

Vintage mechanical typewriter with big gaps between the circular keys.

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 11/01/2025

I am fascinated by the Beatles' creativity and how their strengths and sometimes even their weaknesses made them work so effectively as a team. Perhaps there's a little Beatle in everyone.

Four images of Tom Hartley morphed to look a bit like John, Paul, George and Ringo.

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 11/01/2025

When the recipe asks for n cloves of garlic, it matters how big they are. The one on the left weighs about 10 times the one on the right.

Two cloves of garlic. The left clove is 10g. The right clove is about 1g.

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 05/01/2025

You've been kidnapped. The characters in the last TV show you watched are coming to rescue you. Who is coming to save you? Should be OK. At least for a couple of years.

Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell in the BBCs adaptation of Wolf Hall.

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 03/01/2025

George Martin's version of the story is nicely explained in the @beatlesbible.com articles, but as I recently got my own copy of Lewisohn's "Complete Beatles Recording Sessions" I can show you the excerpt in question:

Text from George Martin interview excerpt from Mark Lewisohn's Complete Beatles Recording Sessions. It reads:
"
I fixed the session for late-morning. Norman Smith, myself and the translator, a chap names Nicolas, all got to the studio in time, but there was no sign of the Beatles.

We waited an hour before I telephoned their suite at the George V hotel. Neil Aspinall answered, ‘They’re in bed, they’ve decided not to go to the studio.’ I went crazy – it was the first time they had refused to do anything for me. ‘You tell them they’ve got to come, otherwise I shall be so angry it isn’t true! I’m coming over right now.’ So the German [translator] and I jumped into a taxi, we got to the hotel and I barged into their suite, to be met by this incredible sight, right out of the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Jane Asher – Paul girlfriend – with her long red hair, was pouring tea from a china pot, and the others were sitting around her like March Hares.

They took one look at me and exploded, like in a school room when the headmaster enters. Some dived onto the sofa and hid behind curtains. ‘You are bastards!’ I screamed, to which they responded with impish little grins and roguish apologies. Within minutes we were on our way to the studio. They were right, actually. It wasn’t necessary for them to record in German, but they weren’t graceless, they did a good job."

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 28/12/2024

According to Mark Lewisohn's Tune In, Western movies played an important role in his development as a musician:

Text excertped from Lewisohn, Mark. The Beatles - All These Years: Volume One: Tune In (p. 44). Little, Brown Book Group. Kindle Edition.

"The trigger came at the pictures, when he watched Gene Autry, on his horse Champion, singing South Of The Border, his three Mexican compadres adding the ay-ay-ay-ays as he rode along in a white cowboy hat, big wide-open prairie spaces all around. This eureka moment in Richy Starkey’s life came together as sound and vision. He’d never forget it, and would call Autry ‘the most significant musical force in my life’.21 From Autry onwards, Richy was and stayed a big fan of cowboys, of America and Americana, of country music, and of maudlin or melodic songs that tell the story of love lost and found. He harboured the dream of so many Liverpool sons: to become a merchant seaman and sail away to the USA, the promised land."

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 20/12/2024

... and then there is the way the lyrics are packed in to the verse. This is interesting in that the repeated phrases are placed differently within the bar (and they use triplets).

Transcription of a phrase from the verse of Dig A Pony - in the first example "celebrate" begins on the first beat of the bar.

Transcription of a phrase from the verse of Dig A Pony - in the second example "celebrate" begins on the second beat of the bar.

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 20/12/2024

Dig A Pony has an unusual rhythm - it's transcribed as 3/4 and that makes sense for simplicity, but it does use lots of uneven, broken or unpredictable phrases. There's the instrumental "riff" underpinning the introduction...

Transcription of part of the introduction to Dig A Pony, making extensive use of dotted quavers, semiquavers and occasional triplets. I can't pretend to be able to read this kind of thing any better than the Beatles could, but it illustrates visually the shuffling da-di-da-di pattern you can hear on the record.

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 18/12/2024

You might expect the main hook to land on the title of the song "Not A Second Time", but this bit of the melody is not very hooky. It's a bit of a downer, but no big deal. The emotion being expressed is kind of "Nah", and that to me is not really something worth writing a song about.

Transcription of the last part of the melody in the chorus of Not A Second Time.

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 11/12/2024

Interesting bit in the @andrewhickey.500songs.com podcast I am currently listening to. 500songs.com/podcast/epis... Some accents seem to work a lot better than others for different kinds of music, but vowels seem important for authenticity or they can feel that way when you are trying to sing

Text: It was Seeger who instigated what became the most notable feature at the Ballads and Blues club and its successor the Singer’s Club. She’d burst out laughing when she saw Long John Baldry sing “Rock Island Line”, because he was attempting to sing in an American accent. As someone who had actually known Lead Belly, she found British imitations of his singing ludicrous, and soon there was a policy at the clubs that people would only sing songs that were originally sung with their normal vowel sounds. So Seeger could only sing songs from the East Coast of the US, because she didn’t have the Western vowels of a Woody Guthrie, while MacColl could sing English and Scottish songs, but nothing from Wales or Ireland.

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 10/12/2024

P.S. I Love You strikes me as very original musically - especially the verse. It does not use one of the standard rock, blues or pop chord progressions (in fact it includes a fancy modulation), and it uses harmony vocals in a distinctive way, apply them only to alternate phrases in the verse.

Music notation of the vocal melody/harmonies in the verse of P.S. I Love You. Harmony is added only on alternate phrase "Treasure", "words", "together", "forever".

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Tom Hartley @tomhartley.me.uk · 06/12/2024

WTF! I wasn't expecting that!

Daily mix from Spotify. Playlist includes "Donald Trump - Black Version" in between respectable tracks by Prince, Al Green and Bill Withers.

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