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bossyTeacheron Music Theory for Programmers

> The western theory stuff you describe has almost no relevance at all when considered non-western musical cultures.

Say it louder for those at the back. People keep forgetting that western theory was unable to explain why the blues (the American music form by excellence) worked at all. And arguably, a lot of the western music theory is more akin to a codification of existing musical practices in the western world rather than some scientific model. But a lot of music theory fans seem to dogmatically treat it as THE science of ALL music.

bossyTeacheron Music Theory for Programmers

Done on purpose. The assumption here is that this theory is the one and only theory.

bossyTeacheron Music Theory for Programmers

> if you get to the point where feel you want to learn more and take it seriously in and of itself, buy “The Jazz Theory Book” by Mark Levine[1]. In spite of what it says, there really isn’t any such thing as Jazz theory - it’s just music theory

Your recommendation seems to mostly apply to western music (I assume so since you only mentioned western music), no? Will Jazz Levine's book help with ragga or gamelan?

bossyTeacheron Music Theory for Programmers

"The problem was never the practice. It was that every explanation of music theory seemed to miss out the fundamental reasons for how and why things are the way they are. Here is a staff. Here are the notes on it. This is a major scale, memorise the pattern. Why those notes? Why that pattern? Because that is the convention." This has the signature LLM writing style.

bossyTeacheron South African diamond mines are closing due to weak sales and lab-grown stones

Hopefully, the have foreseen this and they have diversified adequately. Relying on a single source for most of your income is never good. Whether that is diamonds or oil. Hopefully they got their own sovereign fund up and running/

bossyTeacheron Nobody is saying why OpenAI and Anthropic had outages

I feel like some of the comments in here are astroturfing. HN is the wrong place to push for "it was a coincidence" explanations.

bossyTeacheron OpenAI Cut Off a Billion-Dollar Customer to Avoid Elon Musk

"Disagreeable" is an euphemism. He seems to have embraced whatever core values he had. His incursion into politics and associations with far right, neo nazi and similar movements is quickly making him a person non grata. Americans seem to still like him judging by HN commentary.

bossyTeacheron Grok outage

https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/850-of-elon-musks-recent-x-p...

https://religiondispatches.org/2026/01/09/musk-endorsed-whit...

bossyTeacheron .name Termination

Priorities. /s

bossyTeacheron How AI can put out its PR dumpster fire

Paywall bypass: https://archive.is/20260903043457/https://www.ft.com/content...

bossyTeacheron Maybe We Shouldn't Be Reviewing All This Code

> one person at the keyboard and the other person saying what's next

My understanding is that there is no one person saying what's next but what's next gets decided by both people. Otherwise, the other person is just a typist.

bossyTeacheron Uber shuts operations in Nigeria and Uganda with immediate effect

> They've also used "‘kill switch’ during raids to stop police seeing data

If Uber wasn't a VC backed company, they would have been charged with destruction of evidence or similar.

bossyTeacheron The turbulent AI era is here

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

bossyTeacheron The turbulent AI era is here

I disagree. The moat is now is your marketing skills. Look at music artists on Instagram trying to play the algorithm to gain visibility. That is what is coming to knowledge workers who sell their output for a living. Your quality tool still needs to be found and the more tools are out there (regardless of their quality) the harder it is for yours to be found.

bossyTeacheron Can I opt out of my input or output data being used for training?

Sovereignty. Not everything is about performance.

bossyTeacheron Can I opt out of my input or output data being used for training?

Sovereignty.

bossyTeacheron Playa Phone

Thank you! The obsession with posting every experience dissected on the internet has no limits! It's as if people disliked the privacy and intimacy that their individuality confers.

bossyTeacheron Understanding ChatGPT Work

> fill out this multistep immigration electronic travel authorisation form using my passport files saved in the folder

I would never send my passport details to OpenAI. That's a lot of trust you have on the tech and the company behind it.

bossyTeacheron Mark Zuckerberg's Social Reckoning

What other platforms (I think you mean social media) exist in the West? It's just Meta (Facebook, Instagram) and whatever company manages the western Tik Tok. Luckily, they are easy to stay away from. There is more to the internet than these 2 companies.

bossyTeacheron Coding expertise is going to collapse from AI reliance

LeetCode Medium. :)

bossyTeacheron Six months of writing code exclusively with agents

Not quite.

In a car world, riding a bike is free but acquiring a bike is incredibly expensive because they are not mass produced and are instead a luxury that rich people pay for to get a single bike manufactured for them.

The equivalent is that in the future, most open source dies, and the little open source software that remains is low-level, systems critical. And so, if you want to write code, you must first use an LLM to make you a compiler for your desired language that works in [insert future pc architecture] as any of the old 2026 era compilers stopped working decades ago. If you don't have enough tokens for that, tough luck.

bossyTeacheron Six months of writing code exclusively with agents

> I don't think it'd take more than a few weeks for a high schooler to learn how to prompt well.

Devs are notoriously bad at estimating tasks.

bossyTeacheron Six months of writing code exclusively with agents

>But people act like all you have to do is carefully plan everything out up front, double check it at the end, and bob's your uncle.

It's a coping mechanism. Goal shifting to protect yourself.

bossyTeacheron Tell HN: PayPal blocks GrapheneOS

They have blocked rooted phones based on the error provided. Nothing to do with verification. They treat rooted phones to a level they don't with phones without critical security updates. That's the tension. Non-rooted phones aren't necessarily unsafer.

bossyTeacheron U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications

> You’re approaching it from a perspective where you’re being asked to leave and your reentry is a right. It’s not. They never said, if you leave you can come back. They said, leave and we’ll see.

This so much. Ultimately, you are a guest and the host country can kick you out with no notice.

UPDATE: Looks like I ruffled some feathers here

bossyTeacheron U.S. State Department pauses immigrant visa applications

> The leaving part is not the issue, as you try to immigrate into a country you're subject to the rules that country sets.

The ultimate uncertainty is that regardless of who you are and what you do, a country always has the right to kick you out when you are there on a visa regardless of what the rights and rules of that visa. Nothing is guaranteed ultimately.