DieMachin4

This is the Super Power of Generalists

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In this world, there are just too many interesting things happening, and we do not have enough time to explore them all. If you're like me you can observe beauty in the world, but you have a hard time refraining from exploring it. There is a long list of forgotten interests in my past that I picked up and eventually forgot. The temptation of learning how something works is often too strong for me. There has got to be a personality type for this.

For quite some time I struggled with this reality, being a so called "jack of all trades" has not rewarded me in the ways I thought it would. The latter part of the saying is "and a master of none" which is the part that rings true more often than not. It is fitting that generalists in the modern era decided to make themselves feel better by appending "but often times better than a master of one."

What I take from this is that I am not alone. You can master one thing, or divide your attention and develop general capability in many things. With mastery, you will struggle to fit in where your mastery isn't the focus, and with being a generalist you will find something in common with almost anybody, but you are constantly coveting the status of a master. All people fall into the spectrum between the two.

I fall into the extreme generalist category and I used to think I was broken, but then I recognized that the "normalcy" of mastery I was coveting came with its own set of challenges too. This made it apparent that my long list of forgotten interests were useful, in fact they are more like stored treasures, waiting to be rediscovered. My past interests have left me with experiences that can be leveraged to connect with just about anybody.

Over time as I became a manager in business I found myself naturally connecting with team members over shared experiences. Whether it was art, tech, geopolitics, it did not matter, the foundations I developed in a variety of disciplines gave me genuine interest in conversations with people from every walk. It is quite enjoyable seeing someone light up when they talk about something they're passionate about, and the conversations tend to be more fruitful when both people have genuine interest in the topic.

When I discovered this ability, I started to zero in on it, and really enjoy learning from each individual. This developed a natural trust between myself and subordinates which made management more effective, and a lot easier on me. I found myself being able to trust others to solve problems, and communication became a dream as it felt like I could change radio frequency from person to person.

I do not think that because of this discovery the hopelessly curious should not bridle their curiosity, nor do I think the master should pursue distractions from his craft. In fact, both types are important, but there is a specific factor that each side can leverage with the right strategy.

Experiencing different disciplines allows you to think differently when problem solving. It happens all the time without us acknowledging it. We draw parallels between different disciplines to solve unique problems all the time. In fact, when break through happens, the "thinking out of the box" usually involves approaching the problem with a different perspective. Learning different disciplines give you entirely different perspective.

I remember learning how to draw faces and how it changed the way I look at people, mesmerized by the features that make up the face all the way down to the pore. One of the helpful parallels I was able to draw between drawing and music composition came from learning the power of shading to shape objects instead of drawing solid lines. This gave me the idea to use ambience to shade and shape other instruments in my songs. In the same way that light is hitting an object, and shading shows the eye where the natural edges are, reverb helps illicit an idea of the size and environment of instruments which contributes to the feel of the music.

The master can push to further echelons of his craft by learning other disciplines. The generalist can leverage the variety of foundations they have to elevate the disciplines in which they possess a natural affinity toward. I've realized that learning new things in general is the key to becoming a high impact person.

Learning keeps you on your toes, humbling you constantly. When starting with something new you are forced to realize that there is yet another incredibly important discipline that you are not capable in. Life truly is a stage in which we all play a part, and we need each other.

With this in mind I am pushing myself to focus more of my attention on two disciplines while my other interests get the residual effort. No longer am I craving the ability of mastery because it simply is not who I am, but I have a deep appreciation for it. With two disciplines, and a well rounded roster of weekend interests, I can strategically grow into someone who has impact in the areas I care most about, while still being able to connect and learn from people over shared experiences.

If you are also a generalist with too many interests, there is a really interesting video on this strategy I have employed called the "M shaped future" from Youtube channel Unordinary Mind.

What You're Hearing

For a month I have been wanting to sit in a car and listen to Dance X by Gesaffelstein. I finally got my chance and the creative inspiration was so dense I had to roll down the windows to let some out. I created a synth sequence on the Roland S1 and played around with octave shifts for certain notes in the sequence. I was also able to sample the S1 on to the P6 to create layering for the main synth line. It felt like I unlocked a few new tricks on the P6 when making this.

Learning to Code in the age of AI

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 2026 the majority of programming content is focused on the existential nature of the software developer. In fact we've seen headlines from major companies that the developer will be no more in the near future. But the second I started prototyping apps with Claude, it was not enough, there was an intense itch to understand how Claude had produced it. I decided I wanted to learn how to code, but could not foresee the unique mental battles that would come with it in 2026.

This week I finally had a breakthrough with understanding hooks in REACT. These aha moments are killer as they feel like you unlock a new weapon you can wield in an RPG. These moments are incredibly positive, but for me they are usually immediately overshadowed by thoughts of the impending AI jobpocalypse. There is an ongoing battle in my head over whether or not it is worth it to keep learning programming. The wins stoke the fire, but the negative sentiment on the future of software development can suffocate my interest.

I tried completely staying off media platforms to shelter my self from this negativity but that proved to only isolate my self from reality. Especially since I gain so much from interacting with other developers at work or online, the topic of AI induced job loss will always come up eventually, and it needs to be dealt with.

In fact, this is a great opportunity to be a light in the darkness. Regardless of what the AI corporate powers say, you as a software developer are not obsolete, quite the contrary. Programmers need to hear this message on a daily basis because the AI CEOs are not giving us the truth. Whether they are doing it on purpose or not, the general message of AI impact is overblown.

Why can I say this confidently? Since I manage IT projects, and interact with "non-technical" people on a daily basis, I see the fear in the eyes of those are asked to use AI for the first time to do something. People who have never seen a <div> in the wild will not build a website, they are not going to prototype something, in fact they will indeed stick to their lane using AI as a search engine.

We are also told programmers are more prolific with AI tools and therefore we need less of them to do the same work, and this is absolutely true. However, the effect of that was supposed to be increasing a team's productivity across the board, not slashing a quarter of your workforce to maintain current levels of productivity with fewer people.

As a business owner, this behaviour looks familiar, downsizing when times are tough is necessary, otherwise the company dies. But this is not being sold as downsizing, every layoff is being preceded with the CEO citing AI productivity as the reasoning, not financial difficulties or over-hiring.

You would think investors would understand that the messaging is not inline with reality, companies leading the charge with layoffs are not revolutionizing anything, in fact in many cases their products and services are getting worse. Take the recent CoinBase layoffs as an example, they had the confidence to say "non-technical teams are shipping code" and then in comedic fashion experience a devastating outage three days later, even their status page went down. The cited reason was an infrastructure failure at an AWS center, but the proximity of this event to the CEOs tweet creates unfavourable optics to say the least.

I could be completely off-base with all this, but what is driving this line of thinking is how much better my AI experience gets the more technical I become, not the opposite. And what is crazy about this is I am trying hard to limit my AI interactivity while learning! If I am absolutely stuck I use AI to act as a teacher by not giving me the answer, but giving me hints instead to guide me to the right place. But as a rule I'm figuring out that using less AI to learn, makes AI more useful to me, and me more useful to the world.

Once I fully understand a topic, and have put in a significant amount of practice, that is when AI works magic for me because I can give it proper context to return something clean. Otherwise the guesswork the AI has to perform with a non-technical prompt leads to a result that does not fit the use case.

I am trying SO hard not to use autocomplete in VSCode, it temps my flesh constantly, but the more I force myself to physically type out the code, the better my retention is. My next step is to turn autocomplete off entirely, but baby steps my friends...

Regardless of a major market correction or an AI jobpocalypse, what stands out to me is the need for knowledgable programmers. I have been amazed with the level of complexity in this field, and what AI usage shows me is that the more this tooling progresses, the more knowledgeable professionals we need to implement it safely and efficiently. For the record I am officially labeling myself as bullish on software development. If I have to retract this later it will be humbling, but worth it.

Also, I published a song to Youtube recently. I had my brother produce it and add some gritty guitar riffs. I really like infusing industrial rock with electronic music. You can check it out here.

I would normally post the track at the top for you to listen while reading, but this track has vocals, so it may be distracting.

Thanks bros, God bless. Jesus loves you. Keep learning!

The Type of Amnesia We all Struggle With

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

This is my cousin Tyler with his bike. I've recently started joining Tyler on rides to discover the city of Vancouver BC and surrounding area. This process has shown me the benefits of experiencing the sights and sounds of a city from a bike. It gives you an inside perspective you cannot obtain from inside a car.

I find that using AI is in some ways acting like a car in this scenario where I'm being sheltered from the elements that can grant me a wildly different and more meaningful perspective.

I've noticed that for some reason when AI gives me a completely ridiculous output and I recognize it as being false, I still trust the other answers I get on topics I'm less knowledgable in. It is as if I am fine letting it steer me so long as we do not touch on topics I have put sweat into.

This is an example of the Gel-Mann amnesia effect:

The phenomenon of a person trusting newspapers for topics which that person is not knowledgeable about, despite recognizing the newspaper as being extremely inaccurate on certain topics which that person is knowledgeable

After learning about this phenomena I started catching my self doing this constantly. The most recent example for me happened when learning the fundamentals of front-end programming in Javascript. I had vibe coded a few projects before but only once I grasped the fundamentals could I understand that I was being spoon fed fluff by the AI.

I got sick of vibe coding because of the dread that came with not knowing what was happening under the hood. I picked up two books on Javascript for beginners and blasted through the fundamentals. I found it fascinating, in fact this was my reading of choice for the beach in Tofino, BC… That's how you know you have slipped into nerdity.

Since I built a foundation to stand on, for the first time I was able to correct code that the agent spit out. This was exhilarating, but also scary, since I so often took the LLM's output as fact. And I'm not alone in this, nor do I blame others for doing this. AI is being presented to us as an authority and it is being sold well.

Then when picking up REACT, I did something I had not done before, I started reading the documentation… Seasoned programmers are laughing at me right now but I cannot state how helpful this was for my brain. The retention I'm having from reading books and documentation far outweighs the result of a quick LLM chat.

I recognize how simple this sounds, but this newly built habit unveiled the inherent issues with a population surrendering cognitive function to AI. Treating something like AI as the single source of truth allows us to shirk the responsibility of knowing, thinking, disagreeing, basically things that cause friction. We are already primed to do this as proven by the Gel-Mann effect. As longs as we stop learning the fundamentals, there will be nothing to cause friction with.

The positive side is that AI is pushing me into life changing realizations like this, I am ashamed to admit that I was not previously motivated to just pick up a book at the public library to learn something like Javascript. Now I am blown away that I have this resource in my community, and will continue to use it to learn new concepts. The compounding effect of having real fundamental knowledge before using AI is a heavy motivator to read more.

Happy learning everyone!

What You're Hearing

I'm slowly getting better with the Roland P-6 but I can tell I need a groove box to develop more complex arrangements. However, the limitations of the P-6 is forcing creativity that I like to see. For this track I sat down after a bike ride and recorded it within 20 minutes of taking the bike shorts off (and no, not replacing them with pants).

Start Letting AI Reveal You Instead of Replace You

Wed, 29 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The paid subscriptions available for AI chat bots are immensely better than the free tiers. The AI hype raining down on us is not the result of the free tier experience, rather, it comes from paid tier individuals discovering what actually makes AI most effective. This discovery grants users the elixir of unprecedented growth opportunities, let me explain why.

People tend to have an AI "come to Jesus" moment when experiencing two things in succession, 1. moving into the paid tier 2. finally applying a capable AI in a manor that actually moves the needle in your business or daily life. People who move through these steps will almost certainly be net promoters of AI.

These new-comers of the AI faith quickly transition into the exploratory phase of AI adoption where anything and everything can be automated by AI. This is when users make the mistake of trying to have AI replace them, trying to eliminate whatever work comes across their desk, so they can twiddle their thumbs, or doom scroll instead. Let me explain why this gets them nowhere.

Every aha moment I've had with AI has come from augmenting my skillset with AI, not replacing it. My mind has the value, AI needs to help me get it out. A website made by AI sucks… A website made in cooperation with you and your existing web development skills is insanely good. I'm not talking about letting the AI do everything, I'm talking about a cooperation between you and the AI, physically building the website together. I'll illuminate this with an example of an AI product from a developer who has caught on to this.

I recently started using this tool called 'Little Moments' by Jaryd from https://www.the-diff.com/. It's an experimental project on helping humans create meaningful journal entries. This app prompts you with a random keyword everyday, and your responsibility is to write about a moment in your life that the keyword reminds you of.

Every entry you make is added to a dataset the AI has access to. The AI maps out your 'Little Moments' and provides you with beautifully written journal entries you can share with family and friends.

The best part about this process is how the AI responds to your shared moment. Once you write down the moment that came to mind based on the keyword, the AI asks you a meaningful follow up question based on your input, like "What was the first thought that went through your head after stepping on the dog poop while barefoot?". The answer to the follow up question provides the umph the journal entry needs to resonate with others. The AI then seamlessly integrates your follow up answer into the original entry and pins it to your memory board.

My journal entries actually have impact now, I send them to my wife who enjoys reading them because she learns things about me that would not come up in conversation naturally. This is a perfect example of how AI should augment your ability, not replace it. Those journal entries would suck if the AI wrote them for me, it's the human element that produces the best output.

The AI takes a perfectly mundane moment from your life, and asks a meaningful follow up question about a specific detail in that moment to produce a beautiful story. The app itself has shown me how beautiful each moment is that we have. AI was the guide, my unique human experience brought forth the content.

This shows you how AI is most effective. It is not an all knowing being that can magically bring into existence anything you ask it to. It is an extension of human memory with the ability to extract applicable information on demand. Use it with this in mind and you will maximize your existing human potential because that is what truly matters, not AI.

What You're Hearing

When I created this song I was heavily influenced by Mathbonus. Lot's of high-hats and percussion with delay effects. I was staying at a house in Cold Stream British Columbia, probably a 10 minute drive from Vernon, BC. At the time I was working as a helper for a bee farmer, or more professionally known as an apiarist. I had my midi controller and my PC at the house with me. I installed studio one and some native instruments VSTs and let my mind run. When I wasn't feeding bees pollen packs I was creating music, this is the result.

You Need AI to Talk Stupid to You

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

It turns out your conversations with pick your chatbot are directly contributing to mass compute resources that suck the water from the cup in your hands, back through the faucet and all the way to your nearest data center (exaggeration… maybe). Two narratives are gaining traction, 1. we need to make AI more efficient with resources, 2. we need to halt all AI progress altogether.

There is a killer solution that makes everyone happy and that is what we are going to accomplish today. We're going to make AI stupid to save AI Timmy and the planet, but first let me briefly touch on why this matters.

If you're like me, you probably can't work without AI, when that usage limit notification hits, it no longer means Claude is unavailable, it means I'm unavailable. It's not quite that bad, I have been course correcting as I noticed this behavior bubbling up to the surface, but the amount of productivity gains I get from AI usage makes it a crutch I'm willing to stand on.

The reason why I've become annoyed with usage limits is not because I enjoy using AI, it's because it's eliminating all the boring work and leaving me with the fun stuff. Checklists, data entry, meeting notes, auditing, you name it, AI does it and delivers as promised.

The problem is that a lot of people want to eliminate the boring work, and there is endless boring work out there ready to be obliterated by AI Timmy. When I send off AI to do my dirty work I see some flickering imagery and seconds later the task is accomplished and all is well. It's what happens in those milliseconds of compute that requires us to change our posture toward chat agents.

How can we reap the benefits of AI while being earth conscious and thinking of the cute deer in the pasture? You train your AI to talk like a caveman to you. That's correct, not only will this expand your usage, it helps AI Timmy use fewer resources. AI is talking to you like you're some kind of intelligent being that can think independently, and that is costing you time and money, that needs to stop.

Checkout the open-source caveman skill by Julius Brussee. This can be applied to codex (ChatGPT) or Claude Code and help you reduce up to 75% output token usage by eliminating words that fail to drive a technical result. Caveman no make brain smaller, Caveman make mouth smaller is what you'll read on the Git page. In a nutshell it cleans up the agents response, it removes fluff.

Originally I thought this would filter my prompt, but it only affects the AI response. Here's the response from Claude after I told it to summarize the files in my documents.

Pattern clear: Scott run digital services business (Casa Pancho?), does client work (ETTC, Grandpa's Cafe), built own project management tool, studied managed marketplace model.

Now surely this won't have any sort of negative affect on my thinking, speaking, or processing patterns… I digress, this tool is great because it keeps the lights on. If you're like me and you are enjoying the ride of constant relentless progress in the AI realm, stay tuned for more tips on mastering the boring work.

How Tiny Plastic Knobs Can Change Your Life

Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I had no idea tiny plastic knobs would change my perspective on life, let alone my creative process.

When you make music, you can find yourself in a trance when the creative juices are flowing. You feel unstoppable and everything just works. This is usually kickstarted by a wave of inspiration that comes out of nowhere, those are the best creative sessions.

However, any barrier in your way getting that creativity out into something tangible can kill all momentum. Upon receiving inspiration you've got to sit down at the computer, set up your interface, open up your DAW, fix whatever tech issues come up, create a track, and when you hit the keys or strings just pray sounds come out.

There have been so many time's I've acted on creative inspiration only to quit after 20 minutes because my DAW stops working, the mic won't connect, I can't find a cable I need, you name it...

I finally bought a mini beat making machine that runs on battery and this rocked my world. Now when creativity hits, there are tiny plastic knobs at my disposal that I can twist and turn to manipulate sound, and it just works!

As it sits on the shelf I can pick it up while walking by, flick the power switch on and immediately start jamming. The built in mic lets me sample sounds and start prototyping something that's been fermenting in my head.

There's nothing new or special about sound machines with tactility, but there is a reason they are not being forgotten.

It's one device, you sit down to do one thing with it, and when you finish you're delivered one result. Your brain is not constantly being seduced by notifications. You are at peace with full agency.

It is a similar feeling I get when I put everything down to read a book, no devices in the room, just me and the book. Or when I commute to work on my bike, or when I sit down with a paper and a pencil. The tactility of this beat machine made me realize that I forgot about intentionality.

Each day I move from my work computer to my phone, then to my smart TV and back through the cycle, never giving my brain a chance to focus attention on something specific.

Turning the plastic knobs on a beat machine lets you physically transfer creativity from your brain through your body and into the music. The intensity of your motions shape the music in real time just like if you were playing a guitar or the piano.

The beat machine is separated, air-gapped and free from distractions, making it an intentional activity with one purpose. If I incorporate a few of these activities into my day I always feel more clarity, joy and happiness at the end of the day.

What plastic knobs can you start twisting in your day to day?

What You're Hearing

If you're familiar with the DieMachin4 Youtube channel you'll recall a short where I recorded the sounds of a pool haul. I ended up using some pool que strikes from that session and added some delay and reverb to fill them out. I'm heavily influenced by Gesaffelstein and would love to learn how to make darker sounds, but rhythmically speaking I was definitely influenced by all the German deep house I've been listening to as of late.

Tools

Machine: Roland Compact Aira P-6
Field Recorder: Zoom H1 Essential

No plugins I feel the need to apologize for. Sometimes the boring tools make the best sounds.

The player above will let you listen while you read.

Hello, World — Welcome to DieMachin4

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

What This Place Is

DieMachin4 edifies the believer and encourages creating, building, and living freely in Christ while navigating the digital frontier.

The name is a play on die Maschine (German for "the machine") — since we are all cogs in the machine that keeps moving us forward.

The reality of being incorporated into the machine is a hard one, especially since the life of the machine is finite. Accepting this fate is what I like to call "hard reality".

Oddly enough, accepting hard reality is what sets us free, the death of our plans, our control, our egos, and giving into what God has in store is how the soul is set free.

Being a cog is important. You matter. You are loved.

What You'll Find Here

I've always wanted to create a space where like-minded Christians can enjoy pure content and be encouraged in their gifts, especially when it comes to making a living online, where it can often feel like your work is intangible and meaningless.

I'm passionate about the unique skillsets people develop. As an IT project manager and business leader I love coordinating people with God given gifts to accomplish something spectacular.

At DieMachin4 you'll find me blogging about new AI tools, building business online, music I've been working on, life lessons that humble me, and most importantly how my walk with Christ is shaping my view on the subject.

How It's Built

This site is built with Astro 4, styled with Tailwind CSS, and deployed on Cloudflare Pages. Audio files live in a Cloudflare R2 bucket. It ships essentially zero JavaScript — the audio player is a plain HTML5 <audio> element, no framework required.

More soon. Thanks for being here early.