6 ms·
When you read something like this > Change it to 300 and run it again. You get a different pitch and nothing breaks, because at this level there are no notes y
by alew1 26d ago
When you read something like this
> Change it to 300 and run it again. You get a different pitch and nothing breaks, because at this level there are no notes yet, just a number.
does it make sense? Or perhaps it just seems like something easy enough to skim past without worrying about whether it makes sense?
Before LMs, I would have assumed that a person intentionally wrote that sentence, and perhaps spent some time trying to understand what could possibly "break" if there were "notes" rather than "just a number." Now there is a simpler explanation: the sentence actually doesn't mean anything.
- rcxdude 26d agoIt's a very idiosyncratic (and often irritating) style, but I don't find it particularly difficult to understand. It's not meaningless, just weirdly phrased.
- mpalmer 26d agoYou might consider how much of your reading deals with topics that are already familiar to you. Or how closely you're reading things. If you're trying to learn new information, you will trip over low-quality content like this more often.
- rcxdude 26d agoSure, I'll agree it's often obtuse, I'm just saying it does communicate some information, however poorly.
- strenholme 26d ago“Change it to 300 and run it again. You get a different pitch and nothing breaks, because at this level there are no notes yet, just a number.” What the article is trying to explain here is that A=440 is just a convention. This is probably where the article should have had a discussion about perfect pitch vs. relative pitch. I would have written it like this: “Since this note is 440 hertz, in Western music, because of convention, we call this note ‘A’. Now, let’s play a note that is 400hz. For most people, given enough time after hearing the 440hz note, this second note will sound like the first note. There is a minority of people with a talent called perfect pitch who would be able to tell that the 440hz note is in tune, while, with conventional Western music, 400hz is out of tune, because they are able to tell the absolute pitch of notes. Most people (including the famous composer Wagner) cannot do this: One pitch by itself sounds like another pitch by itself.”
- mpalmer 26d agoArticles don't "try". Models don't "try". And if one prompts an LLM to write one's educational blog, one is not "trying". You are giving an LLM entirely too much credit.
- bonsai_bar 26d agoWhat does "break" mean here? What does "at this level there are no notes yet, just a number" mean?
- strenholme 25d agoUntil we have an established scale, unless one has perfect pitch, one note is the same as another arbitrary note. It’s the ratios between notes that make up music.