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dfltr

689 karma · joined May 10, 2012

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dfltr··on Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom
I don't really agree with the person replying to my original comment, but I can see where they're coming from with respect to notating something like the pitched snares in Renegade Snares (chosen specifically because it's an Amen break that I don't know how I could write down in standard rhythm notation).
dfltr··on Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom
The English language is messy as hell, and yet, here we are using it because it's a shared set of rules and symbols that pretty much everyone who wants to join in on this conversation already knows.

Same with staff notation: If you want to communicate music to other people, learning the slightly clunky but universally-known written language is generally the way to go.

dfltr··on Show HN: FrontierHarness Eval – 9 harness, same model, cost per pass varies 17x
It does seem a bit odd to say "We tested all of these bicycles with the same rider" when one of the test cases is actually a bare high-end frame with no components on it.

It's even weirder given that another of the test cases is essentially "We put parts on the frame (OhMyPi) and it went faster!"

dfltr··on Claude Fable 5.1 and Claude Mythos 5.1
This feels kind of petty, but what is going on with those fuckass clouds in the background? Did no one notice how uncanny that whole thing looks?
dfltr··on Show HN: FnScribe – Open-source, offline dictation for macOS
Or https://github.com/FrigadeHQ/yap which is the only one I've seen so far that uses the new/improved speech-to-text API in MacOS 26 that outperforms the Whisper models. I expect most dictation software is going to start supporting the local API pretty soon, it's free real estate.
dfltr··on Show HN: Free Inference Engineer and Model Training Roadmap
Yeah, just the landing page. Can't speak for other people, but for me it's one of those "first impression" things where if your initial offering is clearly human-written, seeing AI-assisted docs or other materials later isn't a big deal because it's like oh, ok, you put work into this up front.
dfltr··on Show HN: Free Inference Engineer and Model Training Roadmap
The resource itself is cool, but I'm so tired of reading generated text. It's exhausting to look at something that's supposed to be giving me info and have to wade through the extra mental load of translating from LLM-ese back to human.
dfltr··on Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't
His instagram account (https://www.instagram.com/crime_pays_but_botany_doesnt) is up there with Chuck Tingle in terms of subscribing to little bits of life-affirming joy in a difficult world.
dfltr··on Incident CVE-2026-LGTM
Torturer Class ROU CVE-2026-LGTM would absolutely be a member of the Interesting Times Gang.
dfltr··on Trains halted across Germany because of communication system problem
For DB, this type of outage is referred to as "Tuesday".
dfltr··on Magic the Gathering format: Fun 40
Yes: Premodern and Legacy. Personally I like Modern and don't mind having things shaken up fairly regularly, but if you want more stability play Legacy and if you want ultimate stability with no new cards ever, play Premodern.
dfltr··on Get Shit Done: A meta-prompting, context engineering and spec-driven dev system
GSD has a reputation for being a token burner compared to something like Superpowers. Has that changed lately? Always open to revisiting things as they improve.
dfltr··on Claude Composer
We make art because humans are compelled to express themselves. That's it. That's the whole thing. It's not stack ranked. Humans make art because, in the words of Pile, "I want answers to some questions that I can’t speak."

The idea that you'd stop trying to express yourself because you're comparing your own artistic voice to the output of an LLM and somehow seeing it as less valid, or less worthwhile, is just sad.

I don't mean that as an insult, I mean it's genuinely sad for you and for all of us as a species.

dfltr··on Learning music with Strudel
Strudel is dope and a ton of fun, but every single piece of its interface seems determined to confuse people who already know music theory and composition.

That's not really a point against it, it's a great tool and it's a ton of fun, but I wish there was a way to use it that at least kind of sort of mapped back to traditional music notation, especially rhythm notation.

dfltr··on What Killed Perl?
I vividly remember the first time a friend showed me PHP in the late 90s. You're saying I can just write a script that generates HTML and throw it in /foo/index.php and that's the whole thing?

It's wild that right up until Rails got popular, we were writing code that served billions of requests off of homebrewed MVC-ish PHP frankenframeworks.

dfltr··on Composer: Building a fast frontier model with RL
Awesome, thanks for the clarification. So are the rumors around Cheetah being based on a Grok model just straight up untrue? I want to try Composer but have a pretty strict no X/Grok policy.
dfltr··on Composer: Building a fast frontier model with RL
Is it true that Cheetah is Grok Code Fast 2? Does this mean that the new Cursor model is also based on Grok?
dfltr··on 10M people watched a YouTuber shim a lock; the lock company sued him – bad idea
Good old "sketch-resistant materials". If a tweaker can't get through your lock/chain before the cops (might) show up, you're probably fine.

When all else fails, drummers are the best security anyway: https://loudwire.com/sleeping-drummer-stops-band-trailer-the...

dfltr··on Rivian's TM-B electric bike
If only there were some way to take all that work of pedaling and efficiently translate it into torque on the rear wheel, right?
dfltr··on Valorant's 128-Tick Servers (2020)
> I assume there'd be a big single rectangular bounding box or sphere, and only once a projectile is in that range, then animations occur.

Now that's a fun one to think about. Hitscan attacks are just vectors right? So would there be some perf benefit to doing that initial intersection check with a less-detailed hitbox, then running the higher res animated check if the initial one reports back as "Yeah, this one could potentially intersect"? Or is the check itself expensive enough that it's faster to just run it once at full resolution?

Either way, this stuff is engineering catnip.

dfltr··on Show HN: Autism Simulator
> You'll annoy the hell out of some people, and thats fine.

Some of those people sign my paycheck though.

dfltr··on Voronoi map generation in Civilization VII
This kind of exploratory/creative programming is bar none the most fun you can have as a software engineer. I love reading write-ups about projects like this because you can practically feel the nerdy joy radiating off the screen.
dfltr··on Haiku Validator
Plus the translation issues, where you can have an absolute sledgehammer of a haiku that would need to be watered down in order fit the "correct" meter in English:

in kyoto / hearing the cry of the cuckoo / i long for kyoto

dfltr··on Should we drain the Everglades?
Until the scenery gains an appreciation for them, you might say.
dfltr··on Bertrand Russell to Oswald Mosley (1962)
It's amazing how much fuck-you-and-fuck-who-you-fuck-with Russell managed to fit into a few ink smudges on a piece of paper.
dfltr··on Weaponizing image scaling against production AI systems
Don't forget to implement the crucially important "no returnsies" security algo on top of it, or you'll be vulnerable to rubber-glue attacks.
dfltr··on Warp sends a terminal session to LLM without user consent
Anyone got a recommendation for a replacement? I'm currently using Warp and the history/context-aware autocomplete-on-meth is nice, but I don't use any of the new agentic features.
dfltr··on Emacs as your video-trimming tool
I love that (and I say this with zero shade intended) you can never really tell which "Use Emacs for x" posts are goofs and which ones are serious.
dfltr··on Robot hand could harvest blackberries better than humans
> ...and farm labor has been limited in recent years.

"Train routes across Germany have been a bit congested recently."

dfltr··on Game theory illustrated by an animated cartoon game
I remember that as well, but only because it's mentioned in book 8 of The Expanse.
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