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Comment by Fraterkes | Hacker News Reader

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Please don't cross into personal attack on HN generally, and especially please not in Show HN threads. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

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Hacker News has become weirdly anti-hacker in the last 5 or so years, so please keep building stuff and keep posting it. This is literally what HN is supposed to be. The "AI slop" tirade is just bottom of the barrel bandwaggoning for upvotes because it's popular to hate AI today

One of the counterintuitive aspects of the LLM boom is that agentic coding allows for more weird/unique projects that spark joy with less risk due to the increased efficiency. Nowadays, anything that's weird is considered AI slop and that's not even limited to software development.

No, "LLMs can only output what's in their training data" hasn't been true for awhile.

Thanks for the support. Honestly, I probably shouldn’t get so defensive either, it’s a bad habit and a pretty poor "evolutionary holdover" in the internet age of anonymity and social media.

I thought one way to help mitigate my emotional responses was to desensitize myself, but who really wants to expose themselves to the requisite sufficient threshold of personal attacks? That’s not exactly a fun callus to develop.

Pay me no heed, I'm sure you'd find many of the things I've made insubstantive.

> With all due respect, I'll stack up anything I've ever created against anything of yours at any time.

I love this response. for what its worth there is some thought here on this app.

> With all due respect, I'll stack up anything I've ever created against anything of yours at any time

I realize the GP comment was a provocation, but please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes things worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'm normally in the camp of "why flood HN with AI crap" and if you are not a musician then I can see why this seems unnecessary. But as a musician, this is a great learning tool. Every musician should be able to play by ear (and I had to ramp up the difficulty substantially to get a bit of a challenge). AI generated or not, this is useful.

Yeah I've been playing 40 years and did a stint in music school. Other than fat-fingered note entry errors my ear nailed all the ones I did. IMO this seems to start from a pretty advanced level off the bat.

I've been playing piano for 40 years, tend to hate anything with AI-buzzwords anywhere adjacent to it. But I generally think this particularly one is a good thing.

Curious what you mean by no attempt to teach. We learn multiplication tables by rote. Are flash cards a genuine instrument of learning? The only way to learn intervals is to practice identifying them. This is how you do it. You can read about music theory (and should) but the only way to build your listening skills is to practice it starting with basic stuff.

This teaches intervals like Duolingo teaches language rules. You sort of pick them up because you need them to figure out the small melody it plays. But you don't get the concept of a 'fourth' or a 'fifth' and there's never a moment where the actual rules are explained.

That said, I think it's very useful for what it is and highlights that whatever your view on AI, there is a niche here that AI can fill that people otherwise would just not build either because they don't think it is interesting, or because no one would pay enough for it.

It's ear training, not theory training, right?

Yes, which is why it doesn’t teach intervals, but is still useful.

I addressed that. You should read a book to learn the definition of intervals. But in addition, there's no substitute for ear training. Grinding on interval identification is just as valid as this. Once you get to a level where you can identify intervals on the keyboard, the skills are pretty transferable. But there's just no way to learn what a fifth sounds like by reading a book. You need something like this. There is probably room to add a mode that says "this is a fifth" after you identify a fifth. Or to choose a named interval or chord quality based on hearing it. But I don't think any of that diminishes the utility of what's here.

FWIW I think it's probably more useful to play what you hear than it is to be able to name it. Although they're both good.

Right, and I addressed all that as well. I doubt we are in serious disagreement here and calls for me to “read a book” are frankly rude. I think you need to be more generous in the interpretation of others words because I actually disagree with the original poster for the most part, but you obviously have a different definition of “teach” than he. Flash cards don’t teach. They assist memorization or practice. Memorizing times tables doesn’t teach multiplication except trivially for the numbers you’ve memorized. It does assist in learning multiplication. Likewise this ear training can trivialize learning and identifying intervals later but is not itself “teaching intervals”.

I'm not asking you to read a book. Sorry for being unclear. The reading a book stuff all started from this in my original comment:

> You can read about music theory (and should) but the only way to [...]

My point is just that "you" (an abstract you) can learn music abstractly and in practice. Some things require book reading. Some things require practice and listening. Nothing intended about the cgriswald "you".

I know how to do long-hand multiplication and have memorized the 12x12 multiplication table. I'm not sure which one is more valuable, but I think they complement each other.

I'm not sure if we actually disagree about anything, except maybe the relative value of knowing what an interval sounds like vs what it's called.

Ah, apologies for my misunderstanding. Maybe I should be more generous in interpreting others words. I don’t think we disagree about that either. To me it isn’t about “What it’s called” but about the concept itself. Intervals are “hidden” in this ear training. You get them for free but you don’t necessarily learn that the pattern is there at all. I can agree that the doing ability is more important than the concept but it’s not just about the name. That’s just what we have to use to talk about it.

The key thing is that you teach multiplication tables in a structured, incremental manner. Yes, it's just rote memorization, but the structure makes it way easier. You don't just dump all tables on the student at once and start quizzing them until they get it.

Imo not being able to select a subset of intervals to train heavily limits how useful this is.

There are plenty of musicians here saying this is useful for them or would be useful while learning.

As meta commentary, those not in a subgroup sometime fail to see utility of a thing built for that subgroup and it's easy to feel a sense of superiority "oh how dumb and trivial this thing is", but it may be better to first have curiosity and see how the intended audience responds. Often it's not dumb or trivial, you're missing context and experience to see the value.

It’s the typical “engineer thinking they’re smarter than everyone else” trope. From my experience, engineers fall squarely in the middle of the bell curve. The AI hate is just used as justification, so I don’t even take it that seriously. And fwiw, as someone that played piano when I was younger, this is 100% a useful tool. In fact, during quarantine I was learning to play guitar and used tools like this to learn which string is which by ear.

I've played the piano for years. Your immediate conclusion that my dislike must stem from inexperience instead of a more nuanced place strikes me as the exact kind of thing you're lamenting in your comment.

> a more nuanced place

Your original comment implies "it's GenAI so it must be bad."

As the other poster said, your comment didn't really leave any room for nuance, it was "ai bad". And it's also clear you're too egoistic/defensive to reflect on it.

Other commentary is you're not owed courtesy you yourself didn't give.

I think this is much better as a relative pitch training tool for people with a very basic background in piano and music in general. I would have loved something like this back in high school to use for practicing over and over.

I think "teach" is a high bar, but I do think it's a good practice tool.

My one and only complaint is that sometimes the melodies it generates are tough to play back because they don't really sound like a real melody and I have to fight my brain telling me to play back the one that would actually sound good. Sort of like having to memorize a random string of words vs memorizing a normal sentence.

As someone that like to play piano and guitar - I could see this immediately as something to improve my skills and playing by ear

For me I was thinking a thought I almost never think and is long forgotten "where is that old home button in my browser so I can set this as my homepage, or maybe I have to solve 2-3 of these before I can log in to my computer" xD

"insubstantive" is a nice word - software that is modifiable by the user at run time - I guess like scripting "it's just throw away" or emacs bit of elisp and keyboard macro and move on "insubstantive"

Embrace the insubstantive! Otherwise - enjoy when you have a "problem" sitting down and having to abstract more and find the general and solve for "N" because the time investment was high and the tools did not allow for this sort of sketching, insubstantive, throwaway type thing.

This doesn't really seem 'generic' at all to me?

Click the "?" on the game to see the AI slop popup dialogs blocking other popup dialogs.

The good news is that this means you can quickly make the same app yourself at home, and improve it to suit your needs.

When I go to their homepage, I get a Cloudflare SSL handshake failed error -- feels like a classical vibecode bug.

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