Musk probably came across the shape as a child and drew it on a napkin to carry it with him, like he did with the Cybertruck design after "beating" Car Designer on either the Apple II or PC
But I am annoyed at these GUIs implementing features I don’t care about. I want them to just wrap my harness and forward it to my iPhone, but they can’t help themselves from feature creep.
I did have some issues getting it installed on a headless server. I sort of gave up and installed the instance that I use as the remote server on a Debian + xfce machine I had laying around.
I found it appalling when working with remote setup — tabs disappearing and appearing after some time, screen hangs up, projects disappear. Tried to fix some issues with PR, but team is not accepting for 2w+.
I did try this - I found it overly dev focused - e.g. git +/- changes in left sidebar. I wanted something close to what I am use to with Codex/Claude - just for open models.
The author admits that this article applies to only a specific flavor of music theory, and says that it only covers a small part of it. The article even mentions at the end it does not cover some of the topics you think are missing.
The article is not a comprehensive syllabus of all elementary music theory, and it does not claim to be. I believe you are being too harsh, as this approach to understanding music feels much more intuitive to some (like the author, and myself), compared to traditional music education.
I would not call it harsh. The author don't even bother to assemble sentences themselves. And a title "Music Theory for Programmers" imply it is comprehensive even at an elementary scale.
The title does not imply it's comprehensive. If anything, a title like that suggests that it's only scratching the surface. If I read an article like "Haskell for C# Developers" I would not expect to be an expert in Haskell at the end. I would expect to have enough intuition to begin actually learning the language properly
PhD Candidate in music and computer science and gigging jazz musicain here. It is not too harsh. Articles like this confuse people who interested in learning a topic more than they help.
Yet another case of programmers thinking "I'm a programmer so I should blog about this thing I barely know anything about as if I'm an expert, what could possibly be the downside?"
There is "western music theory" ala Schenker, voice leading, serialism etc (to mention a couple of names that some people might have heard of) but that describes things to do once you've got a scale and chord system.
This is "12T music theory", describing how you might get to a scale and chord system.
I don't see how it is confusing. You can spend a lot of time doing "western music theory" without ever understanding most of what is in this article, that is certainly true. But the fact this this outlines a bunch of stuff that undergirds what a composing (or improvising) musician might consider "music theory" doesn't invalidate it, or make it confusing, IMO.
"Music theory" has a near universally accepted meaning. This article is not about that, it's about what we all call in music academia acoustics and digital synthesis (which of course I know you know as I know your work). The derivation of scales from acoustic principles is not in theory books; it's in acoustics books. I've taken numerous theory courses and also taken university acoustics courses and digital synthesis courses, so I can certainly comment on what was taught where! If people go here and think they are learning music theory and then want to go on, they will be frustrated by not finding what they want, they will have issues communicating with others in the field, and they will lose credibility by not knowing the standard nomenclature. That kind of redefinition of standard terms is not good pedagogy.
Look, it's like me writing an introduction to "colour theory" and then writing about something else that eventually leads to how we see colour.
I'm not debating that the article has useful content – it does – but it's title and framing is misleading, which is a disservice to the new student. I happen to personally believe everyone getting into music theory would be well served by knowing more acoustics and that this is useful material. But muddying the waters by using terms in weird ways is off.
And when you write about a field and use the wrong terms, you lose credibility. Sorry, I don't trust authors who can't be arsed to use the standard nomenclature for a topic, it really doesn't make them sound trustworthy.
Are Peano's axioms number theory? No one really uses them directly (other than induction) when working on practical number theory problems, but they are considered part of it.
Scales and chords build the fundamental basic blocks for Western music (I would introduce equal temperament third but that's only a matter of ordering). They are taken for granted in musical practice, I agree, but only because musical practice concerns itself about how/what to play and why. If somebody comes from the point of view that clefs and stems (which are undoubtedly musical tools) are gatekeeping and all you need is a piano roll, this article explains from first principles enough musical building blocks to tell them why they're wrong.
Sure, but none of that changes the fact that is someone reads that article and says "wow I like music theory!" and orders the best theory books or signs up for a course or lessons, they are going to be PISSED. They will get some books that don't cover what they think music theory is at all and that touch on basically nothing in this article.
On the other hand, if the author had said something like "Intro to the acoustics behind musical scales", then they might go on to order great books like Kyle Gann's or Gareth Loy's and be off to the races.
Redefining normal terms just makes people sound like they have no clue, and that is, 100%, a serious disservice to the reader/student.
Or maybe not... surely if you are shown figured bass you will be pissed, but on the other hand understanding triads and sevenths provides some intuition about inversions, voice leading, rootless voicings, upper structures, diatonic movement of voices. Certainly not enough to orchestrate a piece, but enough to listen to educational YouTube videos, follow lead sheets, think about what you're hearing.
Harmonics and temperament aren't really relevant to all this, though at some point you have to explain why certain intervals are naturally consonant but "boring", and others can be made to make sense but mostly within a more complex voicing (which reconnects to topics like inversions and voice leading).
(For disclosure I studied piano until ~20, both classical and jazz, and I would call my knowledge of jazz theory "decent" for someone with zero professional or academic experience. Obviously not comparable to yours and not even in English, so perhaps what I wrote above will sound really stupid).
> The derivation of scales from acoustic principles is not in theory books; it's in acoustics books.
And this is correct because ... ?
There are whole subsectors of "music theory" that cover precisely this sort of thing, even though they are fairly arcane. I'm thinking of things like pitch set theory.
My own take is that western musical pedagogy, at least historically, is one of the worst examples of pedagogy that exists, precisely because of what is taught, in what order, and why. It pretends (or used to) to have some sort of universality or inevitability, when even a scant familiarity with other musical cultures would make it clear that this is false. It is emphasizes a note-centric rather than interval-centric approach to melody (and chords) that ignores centuries of (folk) musical practice (most simply known as transposition, but the implications of it are staggering, and largely elided).
So, defending what that pedagogy calls "music theory" seems like weak sauce to me. Especially given, as many others have pointed out, western/european "music theory" is a codification of existing practice for the most, not a generative theory.
It seems you arguing how things should be, not what they are. I don't disagree that in music we have lots of inconsistent nomenclature that could have better names. But writing an intro to a topic and using non-standard nomenclature (without explaining that that's what you're doing) is still a source of confusion to learners.
Whether or not this info should be in acoustics books or theory books is not relevant to the new learner, that's where it is! I actually think a crash course in acoustics would be a good addition to a comprehensive theory book, but it doesn't change the fact that no theory course or book has this stuff (not even my pitch set texts!)
I teach music students regularly. I spend a lot of time explaining what something is called in various contexts. They need to know this to learn in a productive and not frustrating manner. They can then learn later why the terms are imperfect and used differently in different subcultures.
But no argument on that is going to convince me that it's good pedagogy to tell new readers that a post on acoustics and synthesis is on music theory. That's just counterproductive at best, or ignorant at worst.
What would you call the topic of "why are there 12 notes to the octave?" "why is the perfect fifth the most consonant chord?" "why do we use equal temperament?"
In the all the textbooks I have or have seen, those are called "acoustics" (and more specifically "tuning and temperament"). They are covered in the text book I had for acoustics, and not covered in any of the textbooks I used for theory (jazz or classical). For example, in Rossings "The Science of Sound", it's in a chapter called "Musical Scales and Temperament".
Look, I agree that they should be. I have literally had discussions with one of my PhD supervisors (who taught acoustics) about how much better some students would understand some of harmony if they started with some acoustics! But they aren't, so if one is going to redefine common uses of terms, at very least this should be explained in detail to the student prior to use.
My call on this stuff is always determined by "What will help my student learn most efficiently, without frustration or confusion". That article fails badly on that count.
While these are helpful topics to understand, they are not beginner topics. Not if you want to make music. They are fundamental questions in that they reside at the base of why things are the way they are, but they are not fundamental in the sense that you should teach them to a beginner who wants to make music.
The point is to make music. And the most practical way to do so is to teach instrument technique, intervals, scales, chords, and melody. Not low-level acoustic phenomena.
To make an (imperfect) programming analogy, you are proposing to teach low-level computation when most students would benefit from some Python, if/else statements, and functions. Not memory allocation and assembly. They're useful someday, but less useful when your first goal is to simply write a program.
Because music is pleasurable to play, to experience, and it's gratifying to be creative and to discover your creative potential.
If you have an alternative reason to learn music and to start learning through acoustic phenomena then let's hear it.
Most people don't get into molecular gastronomy if they don't intend to cook a meal. And I'm going to go out on a limb and say that 99% of aspiring cooks shouldn't learn cooking via that discipline without first starting with something more practical and immediate.
It’s also worth mentioning that these are very western ideas. Lots of other cultures derive alternative structures not based around 12 half steps to an octave and so on.
Oddly, or perhaps predictably, or both, most of them still converge on the same basic pitch classes.
The example I'm most familiar with is Carnatic and Hindustani music, where there are theoretically 22 tones per octave, and in fact the tones in most cases actually cover a range of frequencies rather than a single one. Nevertheless, the most common and most popular music from those traditions tends to only use about 7 tones per octave (equivalent to a western "scale"), and they still have a very central for tone ratios like 3/2.
This dude has been doing it for 25 years, and actually this is a dns provider for domain names which I'm decently sure makes it more complicated than public dns.
They're allowed to say they don't want to pay for it anymore, I just think their logic is bad. Or maybe their lawyer said they're running risks just ignoring takedown and they didn't want to deal with it anymore.
They mean it's authoritative DNS, not a resolver. The two are completely different services. Authoritative DNS is the side that serves the records for your website, resolver is the part that follows the tree of authoritative servers on behalf of the client.
It's a legal problem (granted, you could still call that both a scaling problem and a cost problem), not a technical nor infrastructural one. That's where Quad9 has specific experience with public hosting that Mullvad doesn't.
I'm sure that the time, effort, money, and exposure that goes into responding and adhering to legal requests for a publicly offered service is something Mullvad wasn't expecting and would rather not be doing considering it's not their core focus.
What is intrinsic difficulty? A product at scale has many intrinsic dimensions, not just technical. Saying scaling is not an intrinsic difficulty is pretty weird given a highly scalable product usually looks nothing like their 1-user counterpart even when they have the same functionality.
”less touchy” is an understatement, it happily complies with running exploits, reverse engineering and decompiling. Asking Claude to do that will give you an error and make you feel like you’re about to get banned.
I am calm. GHB has wreaked havoc in The Netherlands, it is something tweakers consume. Recommending microdosing GHB in my eyes is like recommending microdosing heroin.
> GHB is difficult to dose. The difference between a dose with pleasant effects and the dose at which someone becomes overwhelmed by sleep and becomes unconscious is very small. People quickly take too much GHB. The combination with alcohol enhances the effects of GHB. This means that people can become unconscious even with a small dose of GHB.
To jump in with a nitpick, I would point out that a "microdose", by definition, would be far below "a dose with pleasant effects", and so wouldn't be too hard to dose at all†.
The reason GHB has a narrow tolerance window (which, note, is not exactly the same thing as a therapeutic index, as the upper bound here isn't where the drug becomes toxic; it's just where the drug stops being recreationally "fun" and becomes a potent sleep drug instead) is because you actually require a decently high amount of the drug to get the recreational effect; and then only a little more of it will put you to sleep. But a "microdose" would imply that you're not going anywhere near the dose that gives you the recreational effect in the first place.
The term "microdose" is usually employed in conversations like this to specifically mean "a dose of a normally-conceptualized-as-recreational drug, too small to experience recreational effects" — although it can technically also mean "a dose of a prescription medicine too small to see the regular clinical effect."
People talk about microdoses of e.g. LSD, MDMA, or ketamine, as potential treatments for various mood disorders. In none of these cases is there an expectation that you'd "feel" the drug. It's a microdose, not a dose.
(And a fun tangent, back on the clinical end of things: sometimes microdoses of drugs can have paradoxical or unique effects, due to the particular ligand having higher binding affinity for a postsynaptic autoreceptor than for regular presynaptic receptors, such that microdoses of the ligand will only agonize the autoreceptors, with no accompanying agonism of the regular receptors. Activating the autoreceptor without activating the regular receptors can potentially do all sorts of wacky things — you're essentially giving the receptor's coupled ion channel a "negative stimulus", which for most gated ion channels isn't something they're they know what to do with; it's an "undefined behavior" kind of state. But some of these "undefined behavior" states are very useful! Low-dose naltrexone [LDN] therapy, for example: it has none of the subjective anti-euphoric effects of regular naltrexone therapy; but nor does it have pro-euphoric effects. Instead, it has anti-inflammatory effects, specifically on the tissues of the brain itself [astrocytes + microglia] that express opioid autoreceptors. LDN therapy is thus being investigated as a treatment for ME/CFS.)
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† Presuming that what you have is actually pure GHB. Microdosing GHB's cousin GBL would be a different story, since it is extremely potent, with its active dose (and tolerance window) being measured in micrograms. Don't try to microdose GBL, kids. Not even if you know what solvents dissolve GBL and what serial dilution is.
GHB’s sodium salt (sodium oxybate, Xyrem/etc) is a legal prescription drug in several countries, used for treating narcolepsy, alcoholism, and also as an anaesthetic.
I don’t see what’s the problem with someone taking any drug legally prescribed to them by their doctor. Lots of prescription drugs are potentially addictive, but that’s a risk to be weighed against the potential benefits.
Controlled medicinal use of sodium oxybate under the supervision of a medical professional differs greatly from microdosing/self-medicating cleaning agents turned into GHB by yourself or your local dealer
Yes, I agree that taking drugs manufactured by unregulated black market operators is dangerous and not to be recommended.
But "microdosing" per se isn't the issue.
I once stumbled upon a psychiatry case report about a man with a psychotic illness, who found out by experimentation that taking significantly less of his antipsychotics than prescribed, along with up-titration when he began to notice the prodromal signs of relapse, helped him avoid relapse while also avoiding most of the unpleasant side effects. He did this on his own, only later confided in his psychiatrist he was doing it. Some psychiatrists would have reacted rather negatively, but his (being somewhat influenced by R. D. Laing & friends) actually thought it was smart, and wrote it up.
Everything is addictive to the right/wrong person. GHB is no more addictive than alcohol [IMO] , just much more dangerous at high doses. Although safer at low doses.
Alcohol is extremely addictive so I don't understand the point you're trying to make. You shouldn't microdose alcohol either. Millions of people are addicted to alcohol and many more (ab)use it in the form of a bad habit.
On your last point, imagine worktree A talks to a database assuming some specific schema. If worktree B changes the schema (let’s day, we remove a column from a table), then worktree A can run into some errors.
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