Refinement & Deployment

News

The past couple of weeks have been largely about learning through trial & error, elective coursework, and more research. We’ve learned a few cool things though and accomplished some small goals along the way, plus we hope to help the community in a small way by signal boosting an external survey which may end up helping artists long-term. For more details, read on!

In our never-ending quest to create a better system and prepare for the future launch of Knightune, we’ve been doing a deep-dive into server infrastructure, distributed systems, networking, and more. Last year, we started getting a little fancier with containerizing many of the things that run the radio station, website, and web app, but we’re looking to take it to the next level while simultaneously solving a few outstanding issues.

As a bonus, we’ve also learned that server costs have come down in price since our last migration, which means that hopefully we can also solve an issue we’ve seen with occasional overloading. The flipside of that news is that servers have largely been sold out due to global supply issues with computer components such as RAM, so it may be some time before we can complete the new buildout. In the meantime, we’ll continue learning and refining processes in our development environment.

On a more personal note, I recently completed an elective multi-course program which I took with the intent of filling in a knowledge gap I had as a Computer Science & Information Systems major. Around the same time as my final semester, products that use large language models like ChatGPT or Gemini had become commercially recognized, and it’d be an understatement to say it disrupted several industries. However, due to that timing, none of the coursework I took while in school covered the topic of generative AI, nor was it even mentioned in any university handbooks yet.

It’s largely been a self-driven task to learn more about it, figure out what it is, and come up with my own judgments around how it’s affected people. In particular, people in creative roles—once thought to be virtually untouchable by computer automation—have been met with various challenges around authenticity, copyright, and purpose. Even for writers, em dashes have become stigmatized because models tend to use them more often, despite the fact that my Composition I instructor encouraged his students (like me) to use them back in 2018. Like many people out there, I can’t help but feel like a lot of what we’re seeing are just solutions looking for a problem.

In taking coursework that explains what this thing is and how companies are using it, I at least feel a little better armed with the knowledge to be able to talk more about how I don’t want to see it reaching into what should remain the exclusive domain of artists and people with real talent. The CS major in me finds it fascinating that we can make sand talk, but that doesn’t automatically mean it should talk to everyone, everywhere, in every domain; let’s find ways to make the world a better place rather than supplanting the value of people.

Finally, we have a survey that’s being conducted by a couple fans in the community. They’re looking to get input related to how fans find, listen to, and enjoy the kind of music you find on our radio station in the hopes that they can talk to the folks over at Touhou Digital Music Distribution about fan-made music that comes from the west. We think that artists having more options around how to get their work out there is great, so please take a look when you have some time.

Survey link: https://forms.gle/XvA6wPRJ5ttwUVrU7

That’s all for this update, we’ve got our next Live broadcast coming up this weekend, so stay tuned for more music and thanks for listening!

[Knowledge #216]

Suggested Posts