strenholme

3 ms·

1.
by strenholme 5d ago
Another extension to this encoding: If we have an 0b11xx_xxxx byte which isn’t proceeded by a 0b10xx_xxxx byte, the numeric value of the byte is its corresponding codepoint. This gives us all of the accented letters western European langua
2.
by strenholme 5d ago
Actually, my proposed encoding only needs to add 64 to the code point (or subtract 64 when encoding a code point), not 128. That in mind, ♥ is encoded as follows: ♥ → 0b0010_0110_0110_0101 → 0b0010_0110_0010_0101 (subtract 64) → 0b10_00_00
3.
by strenholme 6d ago
“completely new backwards-incompatible standards” A reasonable person would assume you’re talking about UTF-8000. It’s not completely new: RFC2279, the original UTF-8 proposal, worked exactly like UTF-8000 for codepoints 31 bits or small
4.
by strenholme 6d ago
I agree C has a lot of problems. The nice thing about C is that it’s a rigorous standard (C90, C99, C23, etc.) with multiple actively maintained implementations (GCC, LLVM/clang, TCC, etc.) so standards compliant C code should (in the
5.
by strenholme 6d ago
That’s a pretty harsh comparison. It’s a fairly simple encoding which is UTF-8 compatible and allows codepoints to be arbitrarily large. It’s a real encoding proposal with a simple rigorous specification. I don’t have a use case for needi
6.
by strenholme 6d ago
I have entertained ideas like this every since becoming familiar with the original RFC2279 UTF-8 well over two decades ago, before UTF-8 was subsequently restricted to 21 bits. Another idea that would work is to start an encoding with 0b10x
7.
by strenholme 12d ago
I don’t think anyone said anything about having only three hours to learn music theory. First principles should be taught to computer programmers, who have the needed math (e.g. knowing what a square root is) to understand music from that
8.
by strenholme 15d ago
Yeah, I think a good discussion on music theory is starting from first principles, explaining Pythagorean tuning, then explaining 5-limit just intonation, the explaining we compromised on 12-tone equal temperament because it made tuning and
9.
by strenholme 15d ago
Yeah, that guy tried to argue that Grade 5 ABRSM [1] is “very basic”. Like, excuse me no. “Very basic” is knowing the notes in a major key, and knowing the I IV V chord progression, as well as a basic 4/4 rhythm (8th note hi hats, qu
10.
by strenholme 16d ago
We recently had a long discussion about this. I come from the “music theory makes a lot more sense once one understands that 2:1, 3:2, 4:3 sound really whole and good to the human ear, 5:4 has a little more tension, and 6:5 has even more t
11.
by strenholme 16d ago
Here is what I see typing this is Stockfish 18 and Stockfish 19: position fen 1b3r2/8/4P3/2pP2k1/3nB2p/3P3P/5PP1/5KRR b - - 0 1 d go depth 35 In Stockfish 18: Black is 3.9 pawns ahead, and it wa
12.
by strenholme 16d ago
Click on the switch to the left of the evaluation to run a local Stockfish 19 eval of the position. Showing Black winning in that position is clearly a bug; at 20 ply Stockfish 19 sees a +0.3 edge for White (which is also wrong; it’s about
13.
by strenholme 16d ago
Alpha Zero Chess never made their code or models public. Leela is based on the same ideas as Alpha Zero Chess, but its model and code are public and uses crowd sourcing to generate and refine the model. Stockfish uses a combination of clas
14.
by strenholme 16d ago
Interesting bug or regression. Let’s take the very famous game Kasparov - Topalov, Wijk aan Zee 1999 and look at the position just after Topalov accepts Kasparov’s Rook Sacrifice: https://samboy.github.io/blog/Kasparov.
15.
by strenholme 17d ago
Here’s that sentence in context: >>>People know that ICE is bad, that law enforcement has a troubled history in this country. Yet when they see Democratic electeds treat riots with kid gloves, they’ll support an authoritarian right
16.
by strenholme 18d ago
In addition to the overhead of a /dev/urandom read(), since my programs run in a chroot() sandbox, there’s the possibility that the file descriptor to /dev/urandom will no longer function—since chroot() is not part of PO
17.
by strenholme 18d ago
Linux kernel crypto code has resulted in security issues, e.g. CVE-2026-31431. The advantage of using a cryptographically secure stream cipher [1] is that we only need about 128-256 bits of good entropy to generate an arbitrary large number
18.
by strenholme 18d ago
“Rolling your own crypto libraries is always a bad idea” Absolutes like this aren’t absolutely true. It’s interesting because in a related comment, someone claimed that I was “rolling my own crypto” https://news.ycombinator.com&#
19.
by strenholme 18d ago
Talking to myself, some research here. https://www.medieval.org/emfaq/harmony/pyth5.html >>>Around 1300, the English theorist Walter Odington proposes that major and minor thirds (81:64, 32:27) have ratio
20.
by strenholme 19d ago
It’s actually an open question of whether “natural” tuning is 3-limit or 5-limit tuning. Five limit tuning, which I discuss above and use to form a major scale, goes back to Ptolemy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ptole
21.
by strenholme 19d ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20150610163042/http://www.axs.co... “"Safe and Sound's" trumpet line is partly responsible for the popularity Capital Cities is currently enjoying” >>>
22.
by strenholme 20d ago
Indeed. Bobby McFerrin has a demonstration where, regardless of culture, the pentatonic scale is universal. For the record, a just major pentatonic scale is the notes with the intervals (from the root note) 1, 9/8, 5/4, 3/2
23.
by strenholme 20d ago
If we teach theory without first principles, all we have to do is say “C + E + G make up a major triad”; we may go as far as to explain that, in a major key, the I, IV, and V chords are major chords, the ii, iii, and vi chords are minor cho
24.
by strenholme 20d ago
Until 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.
25.
by strenholme 20d ago
I’m convinced that “Safe and Sound” by Capital Cities became a major hit because it uses an actual trumpet for the lead, causing the perfect intervals to be exact instead of the every so slightly off intervals 12-tone equal temperament has.
26.
by strenholme 20d ago
Copyright only covers distribution, but I distribute the AI summaries on my blog. With paywalled articles and the usual archives having serious reliability issues, it allows readers of my blog to get context about articles I comment on. He
27.
by strenholme 20d ago
Actually, it’s because, as per Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co. , facts cannot be copyrighted. This legal trick only works for rewriting an article reporting on a factual event—since the events are uncopyrightable fa
28.
by strenholme 20d ago
The only place where I use AI for writing is to summarize press articles; this allows me to legally have a mirror of a press article I am commenting about in my blog (whenever I use AI, I make a disclaimer that the prose is AI-generated; ED
29.
by strenholme 20d ago
For people with the mind of a programmer, explaining the mathematical basis of equal temperament and then the major scale (the article doesn’t explain the major scale well, but simply says “it sounds better than a chromatic scale”) allows a
30.
by strenholme 20d 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

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