Karhin’s Blog
Apps, Design and Music
It's me!

Hello hello

I'm Mikalaj Karhin

I create apps and music, and write about both.

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Black Friday sale at Ekran!

In the Ekran there is a big 50% discount. You can use the promo code via the link. Depending on the region, the price will be approximately 10 dollars.

If you have never used the app, you can read this article. It is an application that helps you quickly edit a screen recording or a screenshot for social media.

One-time purchase

The simplest solution

Once, on a master, I had this annoying click in just one spot. It showed up because of a mess of automations, special effects, unlucky layering of everything imaginable, and the piano sample had a super short attack that made it kind of "pop".

I spent about an hour heroically trying to redo all the automations, trying to figure out why it was happening. I even managed to break the entire project at one point, thankfully I had backups. I did eventually find the cause in one messed-up automation curve, but once I started fixing it, the vibe disappeared (and I would have had to rework the previous minute completely).

Then I thought, what on earth am I doing, and just added an automation that muted the click for a few milliseconds right in that spot. Sometimes, instead of messing around and wasting a ton of time while breaking everything else, you can just fix the problem with duct tape.

By the way, this is good advice in general: don’t overcomplicate things you can fix with simple solutions.

Apałaje liście (Ambient Reprise)

If the autumn vibes outside your window aren't quite enough, here's a soundtrack to go with the season. Too bad you can't attach the smell of a campfire to music, so for the full experience, you might want to find one yourself.

My track Apałaje liście (Falling leaves) is now out on streaming platforms in a new ambient version, with soaring synths, piano, and atmospheric textures.

I first wrote this piece a year ago, and it appeared on my album Natatki. Since then, it's taken on different forms, from laid-back hip-hop to house. But from the beginning I knew I'd eventually turn it into an ambient track. Honestly, it couldn't have come out in any other season.

Links to all streaming platforms.

AI effect

I remember how fascinated I was by the first version of DALL·E, back when it was still invite-only, and the shock it gave me. The world had changed! It seemed to me that it was for the better.

Over these past few years, generative models have become much better and more natural. The results are now almost indistinguishable from real photographs. And as for drawn images forget it. Try now to tell apart hours of human effort from something generated in a second.

I don't know if this is good or bad, but psychologically it's easier for me to perceive and trust something made by a person. There's value in it: human labor, effort, creativity. And all of that was devalued in an instant. I would rather computers take away monotonous, mindless work from people, not their creativity.

In short, I'm biased against all creative content produced by AI. And it's starting to play a cruel trick on me, when I mistakenly take human work for a machine's output and devalue it.

The other day I was rewatching Spider-Man from 1994. It's one of the most classic Spider-Man cartoons. Back then, such graphics weren't possible, the standards for visuals were lower, and sometimes the artists saved time where they could.

– You're AI. No, you're AI. In reality, this is a frame from the 1968 cartoon, but I couldn't resist inserting it here.

And the joke is that if you showed these frames today to someone who hadn’t seen that cartoon, they would most likely say it was drawn by some cheap, low-budget model. A classic was devalued in an instant.

Cartoons have already been taken from us. Ordinary videos are almost gone. Music will be taken tomorrow.

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