simonask

4 ms·

31.
by simonask 29d ago
> The conventions were discovered first, music theory came after composers did things. Broadly completely untrue. If you're trying to say that humans were making music before we had a theory for it - absolutely. But every advanced m
32.
by simonask 29d ago
> That's part of it, but you can make music with none of it. Does anybody, though? Would anybody listen to it? Every culture on Earth has music. All of them use chords, scales, and rhythm, in various ways. Definitely not all of them
33.
by simonask 29d ago
You're confusing some tenses here. At the time when Blues became widely known, "Western music theory" covered Beethoven. That's about it.
34.
by simonask 29d ago
It's also a really strong example of "missing the forest for the trees". Deriving Western music traditions from first principles does not help you to understand why, what, and how any of it actually works.
35.
by simonask 29d ago
If you think music theory is about frequencies and math, you certainly have no idea what you’re talking about.
36.
by simonask 29d ago
Music theory is absolutely an indispensable tool for musicians and composers. You can play music without it, but that’s just putting an unnecessary upper bound on what you can achieve. More than anything, it’s a vocabulary to talk about the
37.
by simonask 29d ago
Spoken like someone with absolutely zero grasp of music theory or modern electronic music. I almost want to congratulate you for the worst-informed comment I’ve read today.
38.
by simonask 1mo ago
Totally agree with your comment, but I just wanted to add that the major scales aren’t what’s prioritized - every major scale has a parallel minor scale with the same key signature. In fact, this is true for all diatonic scales, which are t
39.
by simonask 1mo ago
Getting very good at C++ takes more than a decade. There are no shortcuts. You will have to start by getting in the trenches and write some code.
40.
by simonask 1mo ago
Right now there isn’t really a convincing use case for local LLMs outside of enthusiast or specific niches. It takes a lot of expensive hardware, and most people don’t have extreme enough requirements to recoup that investment. That might c
41.
by simonask 1mo ago
We don’t currently have any data that shows any clear way to halt or slow Alzheimer’s. As someone with family affected by this disease, it’s a very personal choice whether you want to know or not, but I wish people understood that there are
42.
by simonask 2mo ago
It is a testament to the complete failure of the GNU/Linux userland that something like this seems at all attractive to spend time on (or, it seems, LLM tokens). Actually, scratch that, because Windows and macOS have historically strug
43.
by simonask 2mo ago
That's such an unbelievably niche use case for an image file format, though. Extremely the wrong thing to optimize for.
44.
by simonask 2mo ago
> The capabilities of various SIMD ISAs don't have enough intersection to be portable outside of relatively trivial cases. I would argue that the "trivial" cases (those relating to linear algebra in 3 dimensions) are also
45.
by simonask 2mo ago
> GPUs aren't really SIMD, they're SIMT (single instruction multiple thread). This might be more confusing than it needs to be. SIMD and SIMT are not mutually exclusive. People commonly think of things like vector registers whe
46.
by simonask 2mo ago
> Granted, society benefits most from the work of the exceptional, so it may still be worth it. That's a baffling proposition. I think society benefits overwhelmingly more from the sum of average contributions, not the rare exceptio
47.
by simonask 2mo ago
> And then a lot of humans... most humans... drift through life without any sense of purpose. Whoever told you this or gave you that impression? It certainly does not reflect anyone in my life. It sounds like symptoms of major depression
48.
by simonask 2mo ago
The moat around billionaires isn't money, it's the political apathy of the American working class, which somehow believes itself to not exist. Well, it's also money, because it influences politics to maintain that apathy, but
49.
by simonask 2mo ago
What's unfathomable to me is that so many people seem to believe that a sense of purpose can only be derived from need. Humans aren't like that. They don't deprive themselves of activity like a bored dog unless you (who?) giv
50.
by simonask 2mo ago
Yeah, absolutely. I would be worried about a JSON parser facing the internet that had these kinds of problems, for example. But it's only the very first in a long line of potential vulnerabilities such a system has to consider. What go
51.
by simonask 2mo ago
C++ can be slow to compile, but as I said, parsing is not the bottleneck. Even for really huge automatically generated C++ files, or old-school concatenated "unity builds", the parsing step is generally tiny compared to everything
52.
by simonask 2mo ago
I think the second-hardest thing is to accept that CS spent decades optimizing parsing algorithms and grammars, and this is still a significant part of CS curricula in many places. But the practical reality is that parsing is almost never a
53.
by simonask 2mo ago
C++ just lets you pass a reference or pointer from one task's stack to another task or thread, with no assurance that the callee task terminates before the caller's stack is deallocated (i.e. the caller returns before its children
54.
by simonask 2mo ago
Skimming the proposal, that looks like the equivalent of the "executor" (scheduler) and "task" (sender) implemented in Rust async runtimes. I could have missed it, but I don't see anything in particular to help with
55.
by simonask 2mo ago
Right, of course. Yeah, it's an API riddled with so many double negatives it's hard to keep track.
56.
by simonask 2mo ago
I'm very probably missing something, but as a user I would definitely expect `Iterator::Item: Move`, but then also that `&{mut} T: Move where T: ?Move`. But yeah I can see how these bounds are somewhat viral. Thanks!
57.
by simonask 2mo ago
I really want to like OCaml. One day I'll get around to learning it.
58.
by simonask 2mo ago
I agree with most of that, but there's one important detail (that I'm sure the designers of this proposal are thinking about): The current contract of Pin in Rust (the only standard support for expressing immobility) doesn't
59.
by simonask 2mo ago
I guess `!Move` is largely equivalent to `Unpin` for the purposes of `Pin`, so for example Pin's safe constructor `Pin::new()` can be re-expressed in terms of `!Move` instead of `Unpin`. Today you need unsafe code to pin a `!Unpin` (i.
60.
by simonask 2mo ago
Wait, how does it actually change the recursive async story? The problem today is that the compiler-synthesized struct implementing `Future` for each async function cannot contain an instance of itself without boxing, because it would creat

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