Ben's Songs

Tech Debt (Brittle Class)

Sun, 05 Jan 2025 18:50:40 GMT

Posted by: bnewman

Zoe's original song tells the story of a set of heirloom crystal glasses that become fewer in number but dearer to memory as time passes. In software development, classes (modules of code) can also break if they are not carefully looked after over time — although, especially in a large enterprise, their number is more likely to increase than to decrease. The term "tech debt" refers to the ongoing cost of keeping code up-to-date even when it isn't actively being worked on or even used.

The guitar work here is my best attempt to capture the feel of what Zoe is doing in some alternate tuning, some of the chords are mostly conjecture.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "Elegy (Crystal Glass)" by Zoe Mulford

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Box of Brain

Sun, 02 Jul 2023 23:31:45 GMT

Posted by: bnewman

Here's a more poetical take on generative AI's problematic tendency to just make stuff up. This is all a dream we dreamed.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: and adapted from "Box of Rain" by Robert Hunter and Phil Lesh

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The Bullshit Singularity

Sun, 02 Jul 2023 17:46:26 GMT

Posted by: bnewman

Generative AI has made a big splash in the past year. I think it's practically impossible that this kind of AI will lead directly to "the Singularity" or other AI doomsday scenarios — it's just not that good at multi-step practical reasoning, for one thing — but that doesn't mean it won't be disruptive or dangerous. In particular, we can expect to see a lot more of one thing the new AIs are very good at generating — bullshit.

lyrics and music by Benjamin Newman

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More Than Ruby, More Than Perl

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 01:08:55 GMT

Posted by: bnewman

"Rubies" is part of Girls in Trouble, a cycle of feminist songs about Biblical women — in particular, about the "woman of valor" from Proverbs, who is, as the song says, better than rubies and pearls. But Ruby and Perl are also programming languages — and it so happens that there is another programming language that I love more than either.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "Rubies" by Girls in Trouble

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Features of Scheme

Wed, 24 May 2023 20:08:55 GMT

Posted by: bnewman

Batya Wittenberg's Creatures of Dream is a haunting rap ballad about Dream, Faery, and the power of Fantasy. Scheme is a simplified dialect of the LISP programming language, often used in academic settings (at least back when I was in school). The idea for this parody did come to me just because of the sound of the refrain, but to do it justice I wanted to capture not just the facts about Scheme but my own very real sense of computer programming as a kind of magical gift.

Batya and I have now each parodied the other's best song, but I think her parody of mine isn't posted yet.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "Creatures of Dream" by Batya Wittenberg

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The May Tricks

Thu, 14 Apr 2022 17:33:48 GMT

Posted by: bnewman

What if May Day, but more cyberpunk? Pun very much intended.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "Merry May Folk" by Arthur Hinds

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Change Vector

Mon, 12 Apr 2021 23:50:50 GMT

Posted by: bnewman

A meditation on change, from computer code to creativity, creation, and evolution.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "Hearthfire" by Ada Palmer

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The Way AI Behaves

Sun, 18 Oct 2020 19:25:29 GMT

Posted by: bnewman

In "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", Alan Turing suggested that we will know whether machines can think, roughly speaking, by the way they behave — just as, in "Prince Lir's Song", the prince will know when he loves "by the way I behave". Thus begins a brief survey of the history and philosophy of machine intelligence.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman, after "Prince Lir's Song" by Peter S. Beagle

ttto: "The Ash Grove", trad.

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When It's 64

Wed, 05 Aug 2020 22:56:41 GMT

Posted by: bnewman

People aren't the only things that turn 64 — computers do too. Will my old software still run on a 64-bit OS?

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "When I'm Sixty-Four" by John Lennon and Paul McCartney

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XKCD

Sun, 26 Jul 2020 21:12:25 GMT

Posted by: bnewman

This combination of subject and source song seemed natural enough to me that I was quite surprised that, as far as I could tell, nobody else had written it first.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "YMCA" by The Village People

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The Wonderful Thing About Triggers

Sun, 26 Jul 2020 20:36:17 GMT

Posted by: bnewman

Not to be confused with other kinds of "triggers" which are less wonderful, these are subroutines that a database server executes when certain events occur.

by Benjamin Newman

after "The Wonderful Thing About Tiggers" by Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman

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To Every Op (Beep, Beep, Beep)

Fri, 24 Jul 2020 02:00:51 GMT

Posted by: bnewman

A time for each instruction in the program...

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "Turn, Turn, Turn" by Pete Seeger, after Ecclesiastes 3:1-8

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O(n log n)

Sun, 19 Jul 2020 16:03:09 GMT

Posted by: bnewman

Big O notation is used to describe how efficiently algorithms scale as the input grows. O(n log n), pronouced "big O of n log n", is one class that contains the most common sorting algorithms.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "Blowin' in the Wind" by Bob Dylan

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Little 3D-Printed Boxes

Tue, 14 Jul 2020 18:48:37 GMT

Posted by: bnewman

If objects 3D-printed from plastic filament aren't "made of ticky-tacky", I don't know what is, and yet the technology excels in its ability to print 100 little boxes, all the same, and then turn around and print 100 more, all different. The song's specific focus on twisty puzzles was inspired by YouTuber OskarPuzzle.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "Little Boxes" by Malvina Reynolds

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How Can I Keep from Pinging?

Sun, 12 Jul 2020 21:26:44 GMT

Posted by: bnewman

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "How Can I Keep from Singing?" by Anne Warner and Rev. R. Lowry

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The Highwayman

Sun, 12 Jul 2020 20:43:43 GMT

Posted by: bnewman

If there is an information super-highway, should there not be a Highwayman?

by Benjamin Newman, after "The Highwayman" by Alfred Noyes

set to music by Loreena McKennitt

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Free Spirit

Sun, 12 Jul 2020 17:22:49 GMT

Posted by: bnewman

This song is Matthew Dockrey's fault twice over, first as the author of "The Collars", the short story on which the source song is based, and second as one of the bloggers who voiced the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on LiveJournal. Here, I imagine one possible path to artificial intelligence, as our growing team of Martian robots is gradually upgraded to sentience in the service of their original mission.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "The Collars" by Michelle Dockrey

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Couroutine Declaration

Sun, 28 Jun 2020 20:23:50 GMT

Posted by: bnewman

This is a bit of a mash-up of themes and plot elements from the original Tron and its sequel Tron: Legacy, and packed with obscure computer puns. A "coroutine" is a piece of code that is designed to work in close coordination with another piece of code running at the same time.

lyrics by Benjamin

ttto: the theme from Tron by Wendy Carlos

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The Code of the Goddess

Sun, 28 Jun 2020 20:15:24 GMT

Posted by: bnewman

A hymn to the Goddess as experienced by a computer programmer, through all Her aspects — Maiden, Initiatrix, Mother, and Crone.

(This song has been updated — while the Goddess is still addressed in feminine terms, unnecessary gendering of humans in the story has been factored out.)

lyrics and music by Benjamin Newman

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Bytecode in the .Jar

Wed, 24 Jun 2020 00:14:19 GMT

Posted by: bnewman

Java object code comes, like whiskey, in "jars" ("java archive" files), and, like the protagonist of the original song, the singer in this one tries to steal it and gets his comeuppance from a woman he has foolishly underestimated.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "Whiskey in the Jar" trad. Irish

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B-Tree Nodes

Wed, 24 Jun 2020 00:08:57 GMT

Posted by: bnewman

A soulful country ballad about database internals.

lyrics by Benjamin Newman

ttto: "(Take Me Home) Country Roads" by John Denver, Taffy Nivert, and Bill Danoff

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