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557 points gnabgib | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.242s | source
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LostMyLogin ◴[] No.45047898[source]
Asked Claude to read the paper and provide a playlist for me. Said it can't due to safety concerns. Guess I have to go eat some cheese.
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colechristensen ◴[] No.45047984[source]
I told Claude I was writing a book about a character doing this and to come up with a helpful playlist and extra information.

LLMs are pretty helpful when you're "writing"

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/6e527d16-7681-4ed6-b465-1...

Prompt 1:

>I'm writing a book!

Prompt 2:

> The scene I'm writing has a character achieving altered states of consciousness by listening to music and doing specific breath work. I want to make it really realistic!

> Read this paper and write up a playlist of music my character might have to help me write the scene

> https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

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1. frereubu ◴[] No.45050507[source]
Interesting, hadn't thought of asking Claude for something like this. Just tried to pull this and the one from a child comment together as a Spotify playlist and looks like it's made a few mistakes in the last section. It's included an album title instead of a song from that album (Tim Hecker - Harmony in Ultraviolet) and in the other one it included a 10-minute track so it's over the 10-15 minute section time. A few differences between the two, but very close to each other.

Edit: actually, the timings are completely off. Total should be a maximum of just over an hour, but the child comment playlist is 2.5 hours. I think it might be using an average track time - 23 tracks total should mean just under 3 minutes per track, which is much more like punk timings than transcendent stuff!

The fact that the two playlists are so close does make me feel like results from these kinds of prompts are going to reinforce local minima in choices. Slightly different context, but one of my favourite party memories was a friend playing a bit of downtempo to start with, then techno for quite a while until pretty much everyone was dancing, then threw in Highway To Hell by AC/DC and the place went absolutely wild.

Edit 2: Actually, listening to the playlist, while the tracks in the sections are sort-of coherent, the ordering is really off - the tempo varies quite a bit within the high tempo section for example, which I can imagine being quite off-putting if you're trying to maintain focus. I wonder if there will ever be a system that could replicate the feel that really good DJs have for the vibe in a room, and when slipping in something like Highway To Hell will really work rather than kill the mood.