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Rivers Cuomo is an active developer on GitHub
- volleygman180 3y agoIt's fascinating to see how a prominent musician uses coding and custom software in their daily and professional life
- pimlottc 3y agoHe was also on an episode [0] of the Song Exploder podcast where he talked about how he uses a spreadsheet to catalog all his song ideas, with columns for key, tempo, mood, etc. So when he has an idea for a song, he can search for riffs and phrases that might work together. 0: https://songexploder.net/weezer https://songexploder.net/weezer
- nateburke 3y ago[insert mild grumbling about his post-Pinkerton artistic risk aversion]
- LouisLazaris 3y agoHaha, I’m definitely more of an early Weezer lover, but I find it sad how unappreciated the Green Album is. Might be their best melodies, but the overall vibe is not as good as Pinkerton (especially without Matt Sharp). Which reminds me of this legendary SNL skit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab5WvwfLuLM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab5WvwfLuLM
- RajT88 3y agoI forget where I read it, but I think he has evolved since then to a bespoke desktop app with a database backend.
- kjellsbells 3y agoI like the symmetry of Weezer's "Buddy Holly" being one of the first PC videos people ever saw by virtue of it being included on the Windows 95 installation CD, and 30 years later, Cuomo quietly carving out a little piece of the coding universe for themselves. Rock on!
- bigmattystyles 3y agoYou might be interested in this bit https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/18gtc7v/til_weezers_buddy_holly_music_video_was_included/ https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/18gtc7v/til_...
- balls187 3y agoOh man I forgot that video was on the Win95 CD!
- bemusedthrow75 3y agoAlong with one of the low-key greatest white folk-soul ballads ever written -- "Good Times" by Edie Brickell. And some amazing Bill Plympton animations! https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=32853 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/?p=32853
- geoelectric 3y agoI remember the Buddy Holly video but I think I may never have found the Plympton videos. I missed out—was a huge Plymptoons fan back then. I do remember discovering the video for GWAR’s Saddam A-Go-Go inside the Beavis & Butthead adventure game that came out that same year. Weird what sticks in our heads. Good times.
- bemusedthrow75 3y agoI was sure I remembered there was more than one, but likely I misremembered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ob7EEr3t8k https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ob7EEr3t8k It's very short, too. I'm surprised by that. But it definitely stuck in my head.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- nosrepa 3y agoI bet he made all of his commits in his garage.
- thecosmicfrog 3y agoIt's where he feels safe,
- rhythmofrest 3y agoAnd no one cares I commit on main
- kazinator 3y agoOver twenty years ago I discovered Jens Johannson's* site, where he revealed he was into programming. He hacked on someone's Phase Vocoder code: https://www.panix.com/~jens/pvoc.par https://www.panix.com/~jens/pvoc.par I built Jens' version and used it for cleanly slowing down some audio tracks. -- * Keyboard player of Stratovarious, formerly with Yngwie Malmsteen's Rising Force; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jens_Johansson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jens_Johansson
- Gualdrapo 3y ago> formerly with Yngwie Malmsteen's Rising Force Which made me remember that Cuomo is also a pretty good guitar shredder, not long ago there was an interview with him shredding along his favorite lines from Malmsteen
- RajT88 3y agoCuomo can play
- IAmGraydon 3y agoI say this as a guy who’s been playing electric guitar for over 25 years - Rivers is certainly competent on guitar. He’s not some virtuoso and he’s definitely no Yngwie. His real superpower, however, is songwriting. He’s one the best who has ever lived.
- mcbishop 3y agoThe Blue Album is epically good.
- mp05 3y agoYeah you're right, who can forget such classics as: "Goddamn, you half-Japanese girls/Do it to me every time" "Everyone’s a little queer/why can’t she be a little straight?" "When I'm away, she puts her makeup on the shelf." "I wonder what clothes you wear to school/I wonder how you decorate your room/I wonder how you touch yourself and curse myself for being across the sea" (sung about a 14 year old when Rivers was certainly an adult) Yeah that's some real National Archive level creepy content, I'll give you that.
- whoswho 3y agoWould be nice if Autechre open sourced all the crazy max/map stuff they worked on.
- reassembled 3y agoTypo, max/msp
- jauntywundrkind 3y agoFor whatever it's worth, there was a recent submission on Marlon Brando being a crypto-techie too. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39213150 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39213150 https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/marlon-brando-was-a-secret-tech-geek-and-photoshop-124061824672.html https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/marlon-brando-was-a-secr...
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y agoTodd Runtgren was/is an Apple developer. We used to see him at DubDub. Had a software shop, called “Utopia Softworks.” I don’t think much came from it. I think a lot of early electronic musicians were quite engineering-savvy, as their equipment was pretty intense.
- pubby 3y agoPresumably the private repos are for this website: https://riverscuomo.com/home https://riverscuomo.com/home
- amanzi 3y agoHe was on Michael Kennedy's Talk Python podcast a couple of years ago: https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/327/little-automation-tools-in-python https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/327/little-automation-to...
- dvt 3y agoAbout a year ago, he played at a super intimate (and random) spot in LA. He pitched his GitHub during the show and I had a cool conversation with him about his code afterwards. Not a huge Weezer fan or anything (a friend invited me to the thing since she didn't want to go alone), but he seemed like a neat dude.
- xxr 3y agoLiking Rivers Cuomo for his code and not for Weezer is the most Weezer thing I've ever heard
- nocoiner 3y agoNo one hates Weezer more than Weezer fans.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bdcravens 3y agoNever been a big Weezer fan either, but I saw them at the Adobe Max conference party in LA in 2011 (literally a day or two before Steve Jobs passed; I learned of it at the airport going home). No idea if his/their tech interests had anything to do with it, or if it was just another gig.
- aantix 3y agoSay it ain’t so..
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoRelated interview from a few years ago: Rockstar programmer: Rivers Cuomo finds meaning in coding https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25217819 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25217819
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- michael_michael 3y agoHis code was a lot better when he was pairing with Matt Sharp.
- jader201 3y agoAccording to his `new-albums` repo [1]: > I've been learning programming since 2015 So something he’s picked up fairly recently. [1] https://github.com/riverscuomo/new-albums https://github.com/riverscuomo/new-albums
- slashink 3y agoI know time is relative but I realized 2015 is 9 years ago ? Made me feel old.
- syndicatedjelly 3y agoIt only gets worse. Soon a “recent” year will have been decades ago
- burgerrito 3y agoThere's pretty good amount of programmer that are musician I think. _Correct me if I'm wrong_ but I think there's an interview with Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead that says he obsessed with computers and played around with BASIC when he was younger.
- dtaht 3y agoThere are a lot of programmers that dabble as musicians, and vice versa. Licklidder was a pretty good guitarist, I am told.
- 65 3y agoThere are also a lot of visual artists who dabble in programming, and vice versa. Programming is an incredibly creative activity so I can see why there is overlap.
- nostrademons 3y agoJordan Rudess of Dream Theater published a couple apps to the App Store. I'm not sure whether he actually wrote them or served as a product manager and had a contract programmer implement them, but they're pretty cool. Even more old-school, there's Tom Scholz of Boston, who was an MIT-trained engineer who built his own amplifiers and founded a company to market them. A bunch of his inventions are probably familiar to most guitarists: all Rockman branded pedals and other equipment, the Power Soak and Yellow Jackets to get saturated tube amp sound at low volumes, etc.
- nchase 3y agoLots of folks are on this list! Todd Rundgren said “If it weren't for my musical career, I probably would have ended up attending college to become a computer programmer.”
- robust-cactus 3y agoThis was me - made websites for my band, friends bands, made ticketing website for promoter friend, made websites for custom gear companies, ended up in a events startup then to the moon. Yes CS degree happened in the middle of all that too.
- freedomben 3y agoInteresting, he seems to primarily work on a Discord Bot. This is at heavy risk for confirmation bias, but I believe that writing chat bots is one of the best ways for people to get into and enjoy coding, because it's fun and rewarding, and simple enough (with an existing framework to use) that just uses strings. For a large generation it was MySpace and the ability to customize your page heavily with HTML. I know a number of people who learned HTML for that reason. Chat bots seem like the closest modern day equivalent (despite the main platforms making it harder with stuff like difficult to connect to the real time websocket and force use of webhooks). 10 years ago or so when Slack was new and had a gloriously simple API, I even wrote a framework that made it as easy as implementing one function, and you could receive messages (among other metadata like the username of the sender) as strings and send replies easily as strings. It served as an entry point for a few friends who had some fun with it and learned some ruby in the process. Anyway, if you're looking to get into coding but want to do a "real" project (or something very rewarding), start by writing simple chat bots! If you need some ideas, these are simple: 1. Start with writing a simple echo bot that just replies to every message with the same message that it received. 1. Write a bot that responds to every message with a random number between 1 and 100. For a slight increased challenge, have it do fizzbuzz where the nth message received is the counter. 2. Write a bot that that will reverse the message of whatever it receives, so it echoes replies but backwards. 3. Write a bot that will lookup a word when the message sent is "define <word>" and reply with the definition from one of the many dictionary APIs out there. Go from there!
- drooby 3y agoHe was studying CS while touring. Here is a project demo he worked on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Kf4-zMNqq8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Kf4-zMNqq8
- rcv 3y agoThis is wild - looks like he's messing around with OpenAI to create setlists for a show: > base_prompt = """ I want you to act as a show designer for Weezer's upcoming summer tour. The show is divided into four segments of contrasting moods. 1. The Pop Party section will feature upbeat, cheerful songs with a more light-hearted message about love and relationships. It will be high energy and encourage the audience to participate in singing along and dancing. 2. The Emotional Ballads section will feature slower-paced songs with poignant lyrics about love and relationships. The instrumentals provide a reflective atmosphere that may be heavy at times, but ultimately brings comfort. 3. The Dark and Heavy section will focus on heavier topics such as mental health/anxiety struggles or social commentary/satire. These songs will have intense instrumentals to match the mood of the lyrical content, allowing for an honest exploration of these issues in a safe space. 4. the Fun and Uplifting segment will have a similar vibe but with deeper lyrics that speak to mental health/anxiety struggles or spiritual enlightenment. The instrumentals may be slightly slower paced than in the Pop Party section, however they are still uplifting as they celebrate hope for brighter days ahead. You are going to analyze 2 pieces of data: the song's spotify audio feature "energy" and the song's lyrics and then return 1 of these 4 strings, corresponding to the type of song you think it is. Make sure you only return one of these 4 strings with no other test around it. Here are the 4 strings in a list: ["1. Pop Party", "2. Emotional Ballads", "3. Dark and Heavy", "4 . Fun and Uplifting"]. Now here are the song lyrics: """ https://github.com/riverscuomo/apps/blob/master/songdata.py#L202C5-L211C8 https://github.com/riverscuomo/apps/blob/master/songdata.py#...
- nocoiner 3y agoAs a large language model, I must advise you to play every song off Pinkerton, in order, since that is by far the pinnacle of Weezer’s musical achievement. Some early demos and similar deep cuts would also be acceptable.
- Terretta 3y ago> with no other test around it A neat thing about LLMs is unlike code typos, prompt typos work just fine.
- thebiglebrewski 3y ago
- amagitakayosi 3y agoWait, no one remembers now? He once released a mobile app to stream Weezer songs, all written by himself. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/weezify/id1598140531 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/weezify/id1598140531 I'm glad he's still writing code so hard.
- happytiger 3y agoIt’s so great that musicians can have a backup plan that works lol. :)
- dang 3y agoMy parents-in-law had an old friend who with her folk-singer husband ran a club in Montreal in the early 60s. Bob Dylan came through town before he changed his name. They were sitting around after the show and Annette said to him: "Kid. You better go back to college. You need something to fall back on." Dylan told her: "If I don't, you'll eat my hat." She had other great stories. Lenny Cohen played "Suzanne" for her and said "what do you think?" Annette: "it stinks. who wrote it?" Lenny: "I did."
- gonzo 3y agoShe’s not wrong
- dang 3y agoAw come on. It's Suzanne by Lenny Cohen.
- nocoiner 3y agoI don’t know how exactly we got on this topic, but there’s also an excellent Weezer song called “Suzanne.” Edit: I guess it’s actually spelled “Susanne.”
- jmmcd 3y agoLater on, Michael Stipe of REM wrote a song that shamelessly ripped off Suzanne, except it was about merging a human's DNA with a crocodile. He asked Peter Buck what he thought, and Buck said "it's great, but it was great when it was Suzanne too".
- bredren 3y agoHe’s been at it for a while. He was a guest on this kind of buried 2021 episode of Talk Python to Me. https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/327/little-automation-tools-in-python https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/327/little-automation-to... IIRC, he had not started using source code management at the time. When he says this, the other guests describe why he might want to start using git.
- mp05 3y agoIf you've paid any attention to the lyrics from the past 12 or 14 Weezer albums you'd not be surprised that he's quite adept at Markov chains.
- elliotec 3y agoCan you enlighten those of us who haven't? Or is it just the repetition and pattern-nature of the songs?
- mp05 3y agoSure: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/how-weezers-rivers-cuomo-used-google-sheets-to-make-ambitious-new-album-205947/amp/ https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/how-weezer...
- dabber 3y agoWow, that read made me feel a little sad. It works for them obviously, but sounds a bit like everyone besides Rivers may as well be a session musician that he happen to be predictable enough for him to work with.
- syndicatedjelly 3y agoBrave New World
- mp05 3y agoThe drummer seems cool enough; I guess he likes the paychecks,
- jerrysievert 3y agoI was a musician that has tracks on most of the popular music stuff, was a successful professional dj, worked with other semi-successful musicians, authors, and others successful in other careers, heck even I have a musical effects company. it shouldn't be shocking that some of us have more successful careers than me - music leads to ideas and invention, why should that not include software? (says someone who writes postgres extensions for a living)
- paulcole 3y agoTravis Morrison from The Dismemberment Plan also ended up as a programmer. https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/07/travis-morrison-and-the-dismemberment-plan-what-its-like-to-marry-a-rock-star.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/07/travis-morrison-and...
- thebiglebrewski 3y agoLove me some D-Plan, that's pretty wild. The Ice of Boston is muddy...
- StopTheTechies 3y agoSomehow this isn't surprising given their music.
- thr0waway001 3y agoWho dat?
- vitiral 3y agoLet me Google that for you?
- bdcravens 3y agoAs I'm not really a Weezer fan, I didn't recognize the name, but just looking at his profile tells you right away who he his. His employer is literally listed as Weezer.
- romanovcode 3y agoYes, and who is Weezer? This says nothing.
- giantg2 3y agoI guess some people are good at multiple things and others (me) aren't good at any.
- CitizenKane 3y agoWow, he has a better commit graph than me. Very impressive, especially considering that Weezer is still active. Time to step up my game.
- jedberg 3y agoNot entirely surprised. This is the same guy who took time off from being a famous rock star to finish his undergrad at Harvard "just for fun". He probably codes for fun too.
- thekevan 3y agoI like the way he comments on what he repos are. He types them as if he is standing over your shoulder, pointing at the screen and explaining them to you excitedly.
- syndicatedjelly 3y agoThis is an example of what “software will eat the world” means to me.
- bilalq 3y agoSeeing that activity chart reminds me of TJ Holowaychuk (a.k.a., visionmedia). He was such a prolific and inspirational guy. I remember going through college over a decade ago and looking up to him. He accomplished so much, but still made it a point to enjoy hobbies outside of programming. Dude was a great role model.
- milliams 3y agoFrom Mexican Fender, by Weezer: She got a bachelor's degree in physics and a job in computer programming That's pretty cool for a singer in a band so I knew we would end up jamming
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Shinchy 3y agoHe's an extremely smart guy, so I'm not that surprised.
- ants_everywhere 3y agoI do videos on YouTube where I take an improvised look at open source code bases. I've had it on my list to do one of the Rivers Cuomo repos, but I haven't figured out which one I want to look at. I used to play his Weezer wordle game. It was pretty good. I believe it was written in Flutter. The game seems to be defunct now.
- brianzelip 3y agoHe has been featured on the Talk Python podcast, https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/327/little-automation-tools-in-python https://talkpython.fm/episodes/show/327/little-automation-to.... A great episode!
- andreagrandi 3y agoNow we need Taylor SWIFT to develop iOS apps....
- sandos 3y agoWhaaa... I mean I sort of knew he was a "nerd", but not to this extent... at all!
- d--b 3y agoOne of the main two guys working on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrecord https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrecord is a French rapper.
- SimianLogic 3y agoThe headline is bad. No idea who that is and it sounds like they work there. Maybe: The lead singer of Weezer has an active Github account.
- Suppafly 3y agotbf, if you don't recognize his name, you likely wouldn't recognize the band either.