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Comment by ergonaught | Hacker News Reader

I want to read it, because it’s interesting. And yet.

https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/05/the-revolt-of-the-re...

It looks good at the begining, but at some point it starts saying "half truths", or stating facts/conclusions with confidence as if that was the main reason, but its just half of it (and maybe not the most important half)...

I wanted to read it because I like the topic, but i somehow felt it was folluting my brain. I think i will also start joining the club of AI;dr to protect myself from pollution, even though i may miss some iteresting articles.

yeah, this is robot garbage.

the post says: I wanted to start from scratch and learn music from first principles, and I began that journey by writing code.

but we know that's not true. you began that journey in Claude Code, or Codex, or ChatGPT, or whatever. you just want to demo your startup that embeds JavaScript in web pages.

I did read it, found it mildly informative/interesting, then saw your comment, read the link, and pasted in two paragraphs into Pangram 4... ouch! I guess I'm not LLM-weary enough?

https://www.pangram.com/history/25773627-adfa-4efb-8c10-f4fd...

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.

It'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.

You 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.

Sure, I'll agree it's often obtuse, I'm just saying it does communicate some information, however poorly.

“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.”

Articles 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.

What does "break" mean here? What does "at this level there are no notes yet, just a number" mean?

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.

I mostly did not read it, but skimmed the words, and played with the code. That's much more instructive.

It's not "music theory" proper, it's rather about the underpinnings of the "music language", the basics you need to know to even be able to speak about music theory, and in this regard it's quite useful.

It was a really good article up and until it explained the octave, the perfect fifth, and the equal tempered scale. It didn’t do a full explanation of equal temperament—we use it because, with it, it’s easy to change keys.

Once it jumps from the chromatic scale to the diatonic scale, it doesn’t explain the theoretical basis for the major scale. To understand the major scale, we need to first explain the major third then the major chord. From the major chord, perfect fourth, and perfect fifth, we can build up the major scale.

There’s also no discussion of time signature and rhythm.

It’s LLM slop by a JavaScript script kiddie. What did you expect?

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