Alex McLean

https://post.lurk.org/@yaxu

Non-academic #UKRIFLF research fellow at non-profit org [@thentrythis](https://mastodon.thentrythis.org/@thentrythis ), working on algorithmic patterns ([@alpaca](https://mastodon.thentrythis.org/@alpaca )).

Instigator of TidalCycles (npub1z94…66yf), and co-founder of algorave (npub18wf…5ush), TOPLAP (npub1dzh…xerq), algomech festival, etc

I tend to post live coding related things as Alex McLean (npub1mq9…ak8u)

he/him

#searchable

Home: https://slab.org/
Research: https://thentrythis.org/about/alex-mclean/
Source: https://codeberg.org/yaxu/
Project: https://algorithmicpattern.org/

Public Key

npub1hay5cntueyse6wfywneynylqd2d7ycuzpwztcyqqyhfuf5j8kucqhx5kw2

NIP-05 Address

yaxu_at_post.lurk.org@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqst7j2vf47vjgva8yj8fujfj0sx4xlzvwpqhp9uzqqzt57y6frmwvqprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmntayqq00

Publishing to

relay.momostr.pink

Author Public Key

npub1hay5cntueyse6wfywneynylqd2d7ycuzpwztcyqqyhfuf5j8kucqhx5kw2

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Last Notes

2026-09-08 08:31:25 UTC

How cool would it be if glastonbury festival ended.. it would create room for SO many smaller, more interesting festivals in the UK, creating a massive wave of creativity.
You could replace 'glastonbury festival' with any long-running institution that's overgrown way beyond it's former radical roots
e.g. how amazingly cool would it be if Oxbridge ended, just imagine..

2026-08-31 18:56:10 UTC

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I feel that I've contributed far more to music tech by steering waaay clear of western music theory. I was a research assistant on an optical music score recognition project once and still managed to avoid learning how to read musical scores myself. I honestly think you can't unlearn that crap

2026-08-18 15:11:57 UTC

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Yes we (sheffield pattern club) have been talking with them about being an early adopter, we hope to have our clone up for Sheffield before the year is out!

2026-08-18 15:01:25 UTC

I'm going back to that London for a party "algorave decelerate" on 16th Sept 2026, it's going to be really good
https://gel.now/events/849
Top lineup of live coders! Too many in fact so we decided to make some software to switch between them automatically so we stay EXACTLY on time, 20 minute sets each.
Then this still felt a bit boring so we decided to constrain the tempo for the night, going from super fast to super slow, to search for life beyond techbro accelerationism.
[∞ bpm] Todepond + Jane + 2xAA + Perambulator
[210 bpm] Liimxa + hellocatfood
[180bpm] Mags + illo
[160bpm] nadya via proxy + Seasonings
[130bpm] MYNA + mah:alias
[110bpm] Pondskater + v21
[80bpm] James Walker + deaxmachina
[55bpm] SYNTӘL8 + CHΛU
[30bpm] epiploke + devendork
[20bpm] digital selves + Seasonings + Todepond
[0bpm] we stop
It will all be dance music but will start with techno nosebleeds and get very wacked out towards the end. Life moves pretty fast, if you don't slow down and look around once in a while, you could miss it.
We thought about having a fixed number of beats per person, so that later sets would get longer.. But it was hard to do without early 5 minute sets and late sets going for hours.
Anyway join us in Peckham, it's going to bit a lot of fun. Tickets are only £5+ (pay what you can afford):
https://gel.now/events/849

2026-07-29 15:14:21 UTC

What's your favourite music with five or fewer supporters on bandcamp?

2026-07-22 16:42:38 UTC

Thinking of hosting a 'permacomputing meetup'. What's a permacomputing meetup and what happens at them?

2026-05-21 15:33:07 UTC

Google are using @npub1t2k…dp2g to advertise deepmind, here under "Create music through real-time collaboration: See how Gemini 3.5 Flash coordinates multiple agents to create a song using the Strudel music library." https://deepmind.google/models/gemini/flash/
They've made it sound really awful ! The timing is totally off. Also the music is awful with bad energy.
I'm surprised google employees are allowed anywhere near strudel and its dreaded AGPL license.. https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl-policy

2026-05-10 09:28:24 UTC

If the best known result from a given research field is always wrong, what is the best know result of the live coding field, and in what way is it wrong?
https://slab.org/2011/12/21/best-known-and-wrong/

2026-05-06 13:28:04 UTC

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I haven't really looked into them but surely they are designed, built and controlled by people? The people making them are all about power, so don't know why they wouldn't use their ownership of LLMs to change political opinion etc. Musk has talked about this a lot

2026-05-06 12:59:28 UTC

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Yep I'd generally push back on LLMs being described as algorithms, if noone can see how they work there's no algorithm to talk about, it's just black box statistics. I think here though they are just talking about algorithms in terms of systems/machine-making in general, and LLMs fit that.

2026-05-06 11:21:55 UTC

This from Ingold (being alive 2011, pg. 62) reads as more optimistic than it used to. LLMs are closed rather than open, and can we really say its users aren't losing skill as "the ‘living appendages’ of lifeless mechanism"?
https://post.lurk.org/system/media_attachments/files/116/527/347/587/058/763/original/c7db0e4f7a625f86.png

2026-04-02 13:17:47 UTC

I hear strong rumours that the next Alpaca festival on Algorithmic Patterns in the Creative Arts will happen 6-9th May 2027
https://2027.algorithmicpattern.org/
[@blog](https://2027.algorithmicpattern.org )

2026-02-10 09:37:52 UTC

I was really pleased with the range of @npub1mzx…hw6y microgrants, although it was uncompetitive - we were able to fund all the proposals that fit the open call and had enough detail to evaluate.
Crowdfunding for free/open source at this level is tricky because people do it for fun and intrinsic value, it's hardly possible to fund at a market value, and underpaying while placing expectations on what you do (via bounties or whatever) can be a huge demotivator. We came up with a plan for one option on the open call where people could just ask for some money - not as a payment, but just for some recognition for work they've already done - not to say please do this, or to compensate for the weeks and months poured into the project, but just to say thank you. It's still a bit weird that you have to apply to an open call to be thanked though..

2025-12-06 20:36:26 UTC

Live coding from scratch stream is live, currently from Bogota https://live.eulerroom.com/

2025-12-06 11:21:00 UTC

I really want to be interested in this "dark forest theory of the internet" but just listened to their podcast about the economics of it and they just went on and on about using substack and discord as if that was somehow revelatory? I couldn't get the point of what they were saying at all. Then they talked about how charging for membership of their closed group didn't really make money but helped weed people out, with no consideration that some people don't have spare cash? Then went into crypto and I tuned out but there was something about tax..
https://post.lurk.org/@yaxu/115662439422697358

2025-12-05 08:02:32 UTC

Just released "Compassion through algorithms volume III" - a huge 55 track album full of really great music and noise from the live coding/algorithmic music community, fundraising to support Palestinian health, dignity and culture. Buy it today (name your price!) and bandcamp will waive their fee.
https://algorave.bandcamp.com/album/compassion-through-algorithms-volume-iii
https://post.lurk.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/665/900/434/036/606/original/4e91ea6b59c4c30a.jpg

2025-11-25 18:22:37 UTC

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Seriously though the rest character in tidal's mininotation was ~, and noone pointed out how terrible/impossible that is to type on non-gb keyboards for years, and just suffered. pretty strange really

2025-11-25 16:45:27 UTC

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oh google
https://post.lurk.org/system/media_attachments/files/115/611/344/569/499/788/original/74914ae989fb07b1.png

2025-11-01 09:22:08 UTC

Excitingly, we now have a new home for @npub1tfh…d6d8, more central and with multiple rooms. We might even have space for more people so lmk if you're in Sheffield and are after studio space!

2025-09-26 13:25:47 UTC

Strudel's audio engine is SuperDough (2023) mostly by @npub1r50…t66n, which is based on SuperDirt (2015) mostly by @npub1g53…3akf, which is based on 'dirt' a sampler made by me and originally called 'datadirt' (2005), but very heavily based on MSG (2001) by @npub1lw7…39h7
Some of MSG's features got lost in translation, like line hum (configurable 50Hz or 60Hz) and hiss, and a weird synth controlled by a four-character string, here's the docs for that:
>make [name] from [synthcode] speed [rate]
Creates a new (or, if it already exists, modifies an existing) synth
using the four-digit synthcode. The first digit defines the waveform:
s for sine, t for triangle, q for square and r for random. The next
three digits range from 0.0 (a) to 1.0 (z) and define, respectively, the
pulse width, pulse amplitude, and waveform decay. Thus, using only
four letters, any number of FM-like synthesis sounds can be generated.
Here are a few examples:
'qaaa' - solid square
'qaaz' - sharp pulse (square with maximum decay)
'qmmz' - sharp pulse with 50% resonant pulse
'tilt' - triangular with sharpish edge synth
'slub' - smoothish sinusoidal waveform
* MSG: https://cors.slab.org/MSG-1.10.tar.gz
* datadirt: https://cors.slab.org/datadirt_1.0.0.tar.gz
* dirt: https://codeberg.org/uzu/dirt
* superdirt: https://github.com/musikinformatik/SuperDirt
* superdough: https://codeberg.org/uzu/strudel/src/branch/main/packages/superdough

2025-09-23 16:02:24 UTC

and one by one, the humane computing orgs pivoted to AI

2025-09-07 10:07:25 UTC

Alpaca 2025 (https://2025.algorithmicpattern.org/) is going to be great!
Running a new event about a seemingly niche topic like 'algorithmic patterns' across all the creative arts was a risk. We've had no media coverage so far, have paid social media tech oligarchs no advertising money, but through the power of email and word of mouth there's been loads of interest.
For the festival in Sheffield I'm especially surprised + happy that most music ticket sales are for full weekend passes. I thought we'd included too many festival workshops but they're nearly all full up already. The Sheffield pattern club org team (Lucy + @npub16n0…dxve + Hazel + me) has come together to make it happen and if we manage to pull this off with half the funding we were expecting, we can do anything..
For the conference it's lovely that it's become a multi-hub extravaganza by mistake. Folks in Berlin (at UdK), Barcelona (at @npub15pj…2awk) and Linz (at @npub1gh5…7fge) decided to put on 'watch parties' and they're going to add a lot of flavour to the online conference part. Because the conference is free/open access, there's no real financial barrier or institutional power to stop people doing it. The Berlin one will be a full-blown hub with loads of talks streaming from there including the keynote. We'd have melted a lot more glacier otherwise, something nice to build on!

2025-08-09 16:19:40 UTC

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Of course it's fair to criticise specific institutions for specific reasons as Bartov did, but not to call for all holocaust memorials and museums to close. Treating all Jews as culpable, including those killed in the holocaust, is antisemitic.

2025-08-09 15:50:10 UTC

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Er, @npub1s9u…dnmu is the one distracting from the genocide. He totally misrepresents Bartov here - show me where he supports Fabio's antisemitic argument that European holocaust memorials should close.
https://ghostarchive.org/archive/A4bFM
Lets spend our time focussing on Palestine-led initiatives like BDS rather than defending intellectually dishonest posts from random techbros. Especially when those techbros are apparently proud to break that boycott by working for companies high on BDS list! Bonkers.
https://bdsmovement.net/bookingcom-stop-profiting-war-crimes

2025-07-13 09:07:29 UTC

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Yes I guess the word 'academic' is a strange term that stands for a lot more than 'employed by a university'.. Of course there are some really good academic researchers around but the culture looks pretty strange once you're on the outside.

2025-07-13 08:50:33 UTC

An incomplete list of people excluded from 'international' conferences that are in-person only and aren't streamed or recorded
- People with caring responsibilities
- People with disabilities
- People with health vulnerabilities
- People who don't fly in recognition of climate emergencies
- People who work for orgs with ethical no-fly policies
- People who have their travel disrupted due to climate chaos
- People who only engage with fully open access scholarship (if you have to travel+pay to watch a talk, it's not at all open access, even if a related publication is)
- People who can't leave their country for fear of not being let back in
- People who can't get visas
- Unfunded/underfunded people
- People with unfavourable exchange rates
- People who have limited holidays off work
- People who can't afford it
- etc..
I guess you end up with rooms mostly of academics with travel budgets who are too senior to really do research any more, and research students with stipends. That's fine but the perspectives can feel limited, ungrounded and underinformed.. with a huge environmental cost.

2025-06-30 08:22:28 UTC

I'm no expert, but some UK-oriented suggestions for things to do in response to ongoing genocide and famine in Palestine:
- Change your bank account, there's a UK list of complicit and non-complicit banks here: https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/money-finance/israel-deadly-investments - e.g. it seems Barclays, HSBC, JP Morgan, Lloyds, NatWest, and Santander are using your money to finance the military and settlements
- E-mail your MP https://www.map.org.uk/campaigns/stop-uks-complicity-to-end-israels-atrocities-a
- Donate, I'm not sure what's best but maybe to a mutual aid organisation like the Sameer project https://chuffed.org/project/113222-tent-campaign-the-sameer-project or Dahnoun https://chuffed.org/project/115245-dahnoun-mutual-aid
- Boycott e.g. Google, Amazon, Booking.com, Airbnb, Expedia, Teva, Chevron, Intel, Dell, Siemens, HP, Microsoft, Carrefour, AXA, Reebok, Disney+, Sodastream, Re/max https://bdsmovement.net/Guide-to-BDS-Boycott

2025-06-19 14:53:34 UTC

I was happy be involved in passing @npub1xyg…a6ef PhD in his viva yesterday! Check out his live coding environment for exploring quantum computer music: https://zen.cephasteom.co.uk/ #livecoding

2025-04-14 10:06:34 UTC

"Today is a beautiful day to embrace being cringe."
https://letter.visualgrowth.com/p/cringe
https://post.lurk.org/system/media_attachments/files/114/335/751/140/161/528/original/f5c5501a254ce47c.png

2025-03-10 08:20:31 UTC

It's really tricky to spread the word about events these days! I don't support corporate social media and you don't get read attention there anyway, mailing lists aren't what they once were, and this event wants to reach people across many patterny disciplines..
Any help spreading the word across all the strange pattern-obsessed communities much appreciated!
--
Algorithmic Pattern is a new festival and conference for people curious about the practice and culture of algorithmic pattern-making, across algorithmic music, arts and craft. The first edition will take place both in Sheffield UK and online, during September 2025.
The call for talks/papers is now open, please see our website for details: https://2025.algorithmicpattern.org/call/

2025-02-10 09:24:57 UTC

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One thing I love about the fediverse is that my blog has now started to have comments again, like the old days! https://slab.org/2025/02/01/tidal-a-history-in-types/

2025-02-03 13:15:21 UTC

Academic fields can be SO DISAPPOINTING
Oh, a "critical digital heritage" conference, right up my street!
But the topics are: VR simulations of ancient buildings, Mobile apps and public engagement, Virtual museology and exhibitions, Computer-generated reconstructions of historic sites, etc...
Ooh, a "live electronics" performance! But that just means doodling with max patch parameters and no live soldering AT ALL.
What exciting-sounding academic fields have you been disappointed by?

2025-01-19 16:00:31 UTC

Turing: 'The ... question "Can machines think?" I believe to be too meaningless to deserve discussion.'
Every computer scientist ever since: "Turing said we can prove that machines think by making them trick people."

2025-01-07 17:29:14 UTC

I'd love to accept conference submissions (like the equivalent of 2-4 page papers) in a modern form that can be rendered primarily for the web (for reading on screen with rich/interactive media), and ideally also as a PDF (for printing out and adding to a pile, or whatever people do with them.. ;) ).
In the past I've accepted markdown submissions, which went well but required people to invest time learning commandline tools (pandoc) which might be well outside their comfort zone, and didn't support interactive figures. https://slab.org/2015/07/06/how-to-publish-open-access-conference-proceedings/
More recently I've accepted submissions via the 'pubpub' platform, which was actually close to utopia, but it was a bit temperamental, and is now 'in transition' to a different business model so basically out of scope for 2025 conferences.
I really think there should be a better option for this, easy enough to learn to not exclude people, preferably with a web-based interface that supports collaboration, is free/open source and isn't TeX. Am I missing something?

2025-01-02 10:57:53 UTC

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It would be a bit more practical in an ideographic language like orca, maybe it's already been done @npub1z8r…mrq6 ?
I do like the impracticality of having to coordinate to make words though!

2025-01-02 10:54:53 UTC

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You could potentially have a backchannel where the 'audience' tries to coordinate but I like the idea of trying to communicate ideas silently only through action, like in the magic maze board game.

2025-01-02 10:53:01 UTC

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It would mostly be pretty boring to be the `c`, but you can imagine the X moving up to a scrollY instruction and the Y noticing and moving down. Then if the `c` gets really bored it could head off to a comment, the rest of the line might follow (in a flo[c]k!), and then try to reassemble into a meaningful instruction at the start of it.. then the slash characters might move to bring that instruction into play..

2025-01-02 10:49:51 UTC

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yes it would be a total nightmare, but I just love the idea. It'd be really interesting to see what collective tactics people come up with.

2025-01-02 10:32:23 UTC

Idea that's been in the back of my mind for years: flok but only one live coder (the first person to join) has control of the cursor - moving it around and adding/deleting letters as normal. Everyone else is an ascii character symbol. When they join a session they enter a queue and every time a live coder types a letter someone pops off the queue and becomes that letter (or space or punctuation symbol or whatever). They can move the letter around the screen unless/until they get deleted by the live coder and go to the back of the queue.
Basically this is audience participation where each audience member participates as a character on the screen.
I think it might work quite well. Major troublemakers would just get deleted (they'd try to run away from you, but your cursor could search for that letter and then 'ride' around on them before deleting them). Slashes would work together in pairs to enable/disable different lines.
The only problem is that you'd need an audience of 500 or so to make a complex, well-commented pattern, but could have fun with a lot less.

2024-11-15 07:55:29 UTC

I travelled down to Cambridge University to give a free talk a few weeks ago. Their procedure to reclaim travel expenses is an absolute joke, involving reading and processing three different documents with overlapping info, then sending information they already have to another email address manne which turned out to be manned by the same person who asked me to send it, to register with their system. Two weeks later nothing has happened so I can't even start the actual claim process which looks awful. I feel completely ripped off and disrespected by one of the poshest institutions in the world.

2024-10-16 14:58:25 UTC

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heh sorry

2024-10-16 12:28:53 UTC

I keep on coming back to the total absence of discussion AI in my corner of mastodon, apart from the occasional bit of snark. Someone pointed out the almost total absence of AI at the fairly huge [@emf](https://social.emfcamp.org/@emf ) meeting of technologists. AI still seems front and centre in academia though, although it seems hype is waning in some fields too. How is it where you are?

2024-10-16 10:13:12 UTC

I've been thinking a lot about what a friend pointed out - that mixed gendered spaces often quickly become male-exclusive because men tend to have much higher tolerance for arsehole behaviour than women, so it only takes one dodgy person to destroy a community as all the women basically leave. Once such a community has heavy male bias it can hardly recover, and its lack of representation means it can hardly succeed in any social, cultural or technical aims. Rings true for the extraordinarily bad gender balance in free/open source software in the context of the Stallman report.

2024-09-30 14:19:41 UTC

Academic publishers like Taylor and Francis and Routledge are now selling their back catalogues to Microsoft to train their AIs, increasing their already astonishingly high profit margins even further. A good choice for publishing your work if want to destroy your IP as well as the environment.
https://www.informa.com/globalassets/documents/investor-relations/2024/informa-plc---market-update.pdf

2024-09-28 09:55:11 UTC

Grouse moor burning season is around the corner.. Time for the ultra wealthy to poison us all for a few months while committing ecocide so they can pretend they're hunting tame pet birds
https://www.reddit.com/r/sheffield/comments/1fqyb60/grouse_moor_burning_season/