Formerly at COLORS, IDAGIO, and founded the MUSIC x newsletter. Now: Calm & Fluffy newsletter. @calmfluffy.com https://bas.grasmayer.com/
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One of my fav pieces I wrote in the last years is no longer behind a paywall. The article examines the history of Spotify's product design, highlighting the tension between its platform incentives and the interests of artists whose music it serves to its fans. www.waterandmusic.com/how-spotifys...
Equity could be a solution if cash is too expensive. bsky.app/profile/arst...
Been thinking recently that simple licensing models don’t address the inequity introduced by AI. Data authors deserve more than pennies. They deserve equity. calmfluffy.substack.com/p/from-spoti...
Tip from a country where this rhetoric went mainstream a long time ago: We’ve been using this comparison for 25 years in The Netherlands, since Fortuyn and later Wilders, and it doesn’t work. The only people who get it are people who’d never side with the far right anyway.
Don’t copy that sloppy.
Can’t believe even The Guardian is posting AI slop now. Can’t think of many things less interesting or urgent than reading someone else’s ChatGPT conversation. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...
Are all the US billionaires shitposting on ketamine now? What is going on… 🤔
Waarom wordt DOGE niet genoemd in dit artikel? Lijkt me belangrijke context.
Jammer dat de @nieuws.nos.nl hier niet opmerkt dat #JA21 hiermee het Amerikaanse DOGE na-aapt van de extreemrechtse Trump-regering. nos.nl/artikel/2579...
I really dislike how science has started calling almost any fancy computational technique AI. 🧪 The framing of this entire article makes it sound like a benevolent AI independently made these drugs. That is *pure fantasy*. Instead: a team of scientists made a machine learning model for a study.
Threads is like Fight Club for millennials who are turning into the type of people that drove us off Facebook.
Now that's the type of AI chat personality I would actually trust. ChatGPT, on the other hand, is beyond creepy. Especially the recent 'humanized' voice chat. www.businessinsider.com/gemini-self-...
What is this timeline... Why would they? Afraid to get sued for anti-competitive behaviour due to their OpenAI investment? Or just 'platform neutrality' and wanting to "position itself as _the_ AI model hosting company"? s/o @theverge.com for a zinger headline here www.theverge.com/notepad-micr...
This is so cool. Back to the promises of the early Web 2.0 days. Let’s make things interoperable again.
Have actually noticed a trend on socials of people saying they’re turning to piracy. Well done, industry 👏
💯 + That has the exact same economic incentives as Spotify (if not worse)
People whose work is used to build LLMs should get shares rather than one-off licensing payments.
Few things make me as sad as the world’s plastic crisis. I’d love recommendations for people to follow who do work that addresses this. www.theguardian.com/environment/...
Still get questions about my phone-less month earlier this year. An offline month is not something most people can commit to... So I've jotted down 8 ways anyone can trade some online time in for that premium offline time. Treat yourself •‿• calmfluffy.substack.com/p/eight-easy...
Curious about this too
spacehey.com
Quick, use copyright to shut him down
We got cannibal robots before GTA6 techxplore.com/news/2025-07...
Wanted to build a language-training tool for myself last month. Ended up completing it faster than expected, so I spent the rest of the month tinkering with AI. Here are the results and takeaways. calmfluffy.substack.com/p/my-acciden...
Looking for great curator / playlist recommendations on Apple Music. Drop ‘em here.
What a security / privacy nightmare. www.theverge.com/news/707995/...
Great example of how copyright law and privacy are at odds, and why you should always ask: "Am I okay with this becoming public?" before disclosing things online. arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...
Maybe I’m biased because a large chunk of music I listen to is electronic and void of lyrics. Doesn’t make it soulless, though.
I don’t believe people care about “human-made music” as they think. Would people stop dancing when a DJ plays an AI-created tune if it’s actually good? They wouldn’t even know and might enjoy it just as much, or more, as the rest of the set list. AI music will have its contexts to thrive in.
Make more things for people who care. It has never been easier. Let’s make the internet fun again. open.substack.com/pub/calmfluf...
Wish Threads figured out a way to roll this out to the EU though. It’s still unavailable here, probably due to GDPR constraints (eg how can Meta remove personal data after it’s syndicated across Fediverse).
As a migrant I enjoy being able to get around certain geo restrictions •‿•
Built a tool over the weekend that turns your #Substack into a link in bio page. stackinbio.calmfluffy.com Works with any substack. And it's free, as it was just a small vibe coding experiment. Enjoy! •‿•
Thx! Have you also tried out their VPN?
Excited that my NordVPN subscription is finally ending in a few days. There are way too many promotional notifications that you can't switch off. Considering Proton now and slowly 'de-Googling' myself while I'm at it. Experiences?
Vibe coding
Yeah, I think the conversation models for LLMs will quickly shift to interface-generating models. Penned my thoughts down in the second half of this piece: open.substack.com/pub/calmfluf...
Software as language.
Is this also what Apple Music's karaoke feature uses? When you view the lyrics on Apple Music, you can often turn the vocals down.
The question is how they'll get these OS's to run on hardware, because Apple, Microsoft and Google have a huge advantage there. But maybe it will be web-based OSs. Back in the early web 2.0 days, people thought Facebook would become an OS, too.
I think we're going to get personalized app-engines with UIs that adjust to each user, similar to how we have personalized music / movie / content recommendation on streaming services and social media. And that will become the norm within the next 5 years, with LLM companies providing the OS.
Meanwhile, I've run out of tokens, so I'll fix the last few bugs myself.
Vibe coding has been fun. Made my ideal language learning app for training the specifics of German-cases, for just $20. Took a few days, rather than the month I had anticipated. Will share it publicly tomorrow via calmfluffy.substack.com
Niet in Berlijn helaas. 😢
Published this on Tuesday and achieved within a few hours what I thought would take me a month… Kind of mind-blown by vibe coding. But will prob still take me a week or two to iron out bugs and stuff. calmfluffy.substack.com/p/this-month...
dude, what "My mission has long been to turn warfighters into technomancers, and the products we are building with Meta do just that" nymag.com/intelligence...
I’m actually surprised. It’s like Apple’s not developing Apple Music at all, except for the Dolby Atmos stuff.
Oh, so I can open the album in Apple Music by first opening iTunes inside Apple Music and then clicking the Listen Now button which takes me back to Apple Music in Apple Music? In most cases, btw. Not in the case of this album. The Listen Now button does nothing when you click it.
Apple Music's interface must be the most confusing out of all streaming services. What do you mean, I can't navigate to the album by clicking on the title? I can't go there via the context menu either? iTunes still exists? Oh, it's the only way to navigate to the album?
Twitter has been so important for my career, but I stopped posting and eventually deleted my account because I didn't want my data in Musk's hands. Now it looks like I'll be leaving Telegram, too. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4411...
More background + tips here: calmfluffy.substack.com/p/the-slow-s...
Be a better streamer: Playlists are full of 'fake artist' stock music (and soon AI) designed to lower streaming services' royalty payments. 🎧 Start listening to a playlist. ❤️ Find a song you like. 🕵 Determine whether the artist is a real person. ▶️ Listen to their albums instead of the playlist.
I love blueberries 🫐 And I wrote a whole newsletter edition about it: calmfluffy.substack.com/p/i-love-blu...
Thank you!
On tech CEOs weak AI memos and the lack of compassion: open.substack.com/pub/calmfluf...
Agree, but surely there must be a more diplomatic way to phrase this, given that many of Ghost's customers probably fall in that group.
I just don't understand why CEOs have to formulate their "we're AI-first now" internal memos in such toxic, unempathic ways. I definitely expected better from some of them.
ChatGPT is another Cambridge Analytica waiting to happen… Here’s how to protect your privacy: open.substack.com/pub/calmfluf...
@kevin.woblick.com Hey - just wanted to let you know I recently found out about @cloudhiker.net and wrote about it here: calmfluffy.substack.com/p/stumbleupo... Great work!
I’ve actually struggled with Perplexity hallucinating. It would make up entire quotes that were then nowhere to be found in the sources. Tried it out for a few days earlier this month, but cancelled my sub because of it.
Happy anniversary!
StumbleUpon may be dead, but its spirit is alive & kicking. calmfluffy.substack.com/p/stumbleupo...
It has very active communities. It pretty much captured the entire DJ community from X. It does feel a bit like the Facebook of tweet-like social networks, which is apt.
Disappointing, but you can get around it with third-party clients, like Deer, Ouranos, Skeets, and Skywalker. Which do you prefer?
Our fertile attention: from Taoism to terrorism open.substack.com/pub/calmfluf...
Before heading into the long Easter weekend: here are five ways to do a small phone detox! •‿• calmfluffy.substack.com/p/softness-a...
On the one hand, I love that we can bring little speakers to the park... On the other hand, it breaks my heart that we'll never go back to parks being places of calm without amplified music. Or maybe it's just a Berlin thing. Idk.
Tried Perplexity Pro for a month, but the amount of hallucinations is wild. Reminds me of older ChatGPT models. Cancelled for now. I’m scared to work with it as a research tool for now.
Is it a valuable use of energy to create action figure images using a model trained on other people’s creative work? No. Is it valuable to learn about what these technologies can do by trying them out? I’d argue yes. open.substack.com/pub/calmfluf...
I find the AI optimism gap to be such an interesting phenomenon. The disparity among gender is worth noting here, too. www.pewresearch.org/internet/202...
An elderly Turkish man just sat down below my window to enjoy the sun and started singing melancholic folk songs. I love Berlin.
It’s all just vibes now
Downgraded to the free version of ChatGPT recently... and HOLY SHIT, it's garbage compared to the premium version. No wonder most people don't see the point in using AI in their daily lives.
Trying out Opal. What are your favourite screen time management apps for iOS / MacOS?
Do you ever listen to friends’ voice messages at 2x speed and then meet them in real life and think, damn, why are you speaking so slowly?
oh I guess we don't call them tweets here 🐥
The piece was also inspired by thoughts from @lizpelly.bsky.social, @mrtrick.bsky.social, @austinrobey.xyz, @opiumhum.bsky.social, @djgilla.bsky.social 💛
Relevant tweet: bsky.app/profile/jher...
I hear a lot of complaints about Spotify's low per-stream rate. The solutions offered usually don't address the root of the problem. In this piece, I explain the issue at the heart of music streaming and what individual listeners can do: calmfluffy.substack.com/p/the-slow-s...
Nothing changes if nothing changes.
Now that Elon Musk's mask has come fully off, it surprises–and appals– me how normalised posting on X still is. If you wouldn't buy a Tesla, because of Elon, you shouldn't post on X, unless your livelihood depends on it, imo.
“It’s easier, physically, to send a message to the other side of the world than it is to tie your own shoe.” The remarkable things we take for granted. From Christine Rosen’s The Extinction of Experience.
Erik Hoel put this in much better words than I did actually: open.substack.com/pub/erikhoel...
4. It's infuriating that this once again sets up billionaires to profit through extraction from the 99%.
3. It's terrible that the wishes of creators (eg for remuneration, credit, limits, participation in training data, etc) are not respected at all.
2. It's sad everyone's imagination is limited to memes in the style of Studio Ghibli apparently.
1. It's exciting how easy it is for people to turn imagination into reality.
ChatGPT doesn’t put spaces around em dashes.
📵 Thx to all the friends who unwillingly take part in my phone-free month experiment… meeting up requires a bit more careful coordination. 😅 Read more here: calmfluffy.substack.com/t/a-month-wi...
Imagine that stage presence as a rapper. Or facing him in a freestyle battle. I'd be shitting my pants as soon as he opens his mouth.
This small joy of starting a new newsletter: seeing people sign up whose names you've never seen before. thank you <3
"The smartphone introduced loads of certainty and tore any sense of adventure out of everyday life. I’m not letting it take that away from me a second time." Approaching the end of my month-long experiment, I ask myself what I want out of my smartphone. calmfluffy.substack.com/p/how-i-woul...
That means soon it's LimeWire or WinAmp's turn again. 🍿
Who’s the photographer?
Can't believe it took me until 2025 to see Oldboy. Partly, because I falsely thought I'd already seen it. Excellent cinema. What would you recommend I watch next?
You can read more about my 1 month challenge in my newsletter: calmfluffy.substack.com/p/were-addic...
Need to get my bike fixed. Should show the receipt. Not bringing my phone outside for the month of March, so need to print it. Printer broken. Saving the receipt to a USB drive, to print at a copy shop... Not bringing my phone definitely fills up my free time.
“The city is full of music. You don’t need headphones to hear it.” Observations from my month without taking my phone outside. calmfluffy.substack.com/p/the-city-i...
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