David Eisinger

Journal > Dispatch #29 (July 2025)

Posted 2025-07-03 under #dispatch

Big month: birthdays, travel, lots of music. My boy turned one – time friggin’ flies. He is on the move, talking up a storm, and getting into everything.

We spent a week at Holden Beach with Claire’s family. Great to see everyone, and great to take a proper vacation. Both kids are changing so quickly (Nico starting to walk, Nev taking an interest in swimming and playing piano) and it was nice to take a break from work and spend bunch of dedicated time with them.

Poolsuite FM was the soundtrack to the week, and it inspired me to make a house track one evening. Musically, I spend a lot of time trying to make music that doesn’t sound so electronic, so it was nice to sort of lean into it; my little travel music setup is pretty well suited for it. Check it out:

We then traveled up to Richmond to meet up with my family to celebrate my dad’s 70th. Nice to get all the cousins together, if only for an afternoon. The Richmond Children’s Museum is great.

I took the kids to Angel Island one evening, where I was able to reproduce this Eisinger family classic:

(That’s Nico on the left, and a young me on the right.)

Finally, my buddy Ken and I met up at the Eastern Shore in Virginia (at the same place we stayed a few years ago). I rented a Jeep Wrangler off of Turo, which was a fun way to try out a car I’ll almost certainly never own. We brought a whole bunch of gear and spent most of the weekend making music.

Here’s a track we made, called “Heat Lightning”:

It was cool to make music with another person, something I’ve never really done before. Ken’s process is a lot different than mine, more DAW-focused, more live playing, less MIDI sequencing (he’s an accomplished percussionist & his timing is much better than mine). I definitely learned a lot, and I’m keen to lean more into Ableton. At the same time, the genesis of the track came from just jamming with my Circuit Tracks and a few other pieces of gear, so I still think there’s a place for the hardware stuff I’m already doing and enjoying.

That was a whirlwind of a month. We’re headed to Lake Norman for the long weekend, but then hoping to have a slower-paced July. I’d like to get back into running and exercise (despite the heat), get Ableton working well with my setup, and generally just enjoy summer here in Durham.

This Month

• Adventure: Lake Norman for Independence Day
• Project: use Ableton to produce a track (including effects, dynamics, and a mix of sequencing and live recording)
• Skill: Ableton

Reading & Listening

• Fiction: Firewalkers, Adrian Tchaikovsky
• Non-fiction: not reading much non-fiction these days
• Music: Iteration, Com Truse

Links

• Opinion | Sarah McBride on Why the Left Lost on Trans Rights - The New York Times

  Maybe it is hurtful, but you can’t foster social change if you don’t have a conversation. You can’t change people if you exclude them. And I will just say, you can’t have absolutism on the left or the right without authoritarianism.

• Generative AI as a magic system – Tracy Durnell’s Mind Garden

  We treat generative AI like magic… and magic systems have rules. When creating fantasy worlds, writers think about who can use magic, how magic is performed, what it’s able to do, what its constraints are, what the source of magic is, and what it costs. I’m applying a bit of reverse worldbuilding to the real world to extrapolate the rules of the AI magic system.

• Toward A Theory Of Kevin Roose

  My suspicion, my awful awful newfound theory, is that there are people with a sincere and even kind of innocent belief that we are all just picking winners, in everything: that ideology, advocacy, analysis, criticism, affinity, even taste and style and association are essentially predictions. That what a person tries to do, the essential task of a person, is to identify who and what is going to come out on top, and align with it.

• Helix

  It’s pretty nice! It launches quickly. No plugin system so the futzmonkey sort of has to stay in its cage, but it’s very batteries-included. I found a tutorial for setting it up for Markdown that wasn’t overwhelming and helped me get a sense of how its config works.

• How Field Notes went from side project to cult notebook

  Two decades after Aaron Draplin and Jim Coudal launched Field Notes, the analog notebook company is crushing it in the digital age.

• My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts · The Fly Blog

  And here I rejoin your company. I read Simon Willison, and that’s all I really need. But all day, every day, a sizable chunk of the front page of HN is allocated to LLMs: incremental model updates, startups doing things with LLMs, LLM tutorials, screeds against LLMs. It’s annoying! But AI is also incredibly — a word I use advisedly — important. It’s getting the same kind of attention that smart phones got in 2008, and not as much as the Internet got. That seems about right.