gnulinux

Can your European lawyer not find you a reliable US lawyer that then you meet in person (in prison) and give them legal authority to handle your financial affairs?

But yeah I understand. Once you're dealing with multiple countries every financial/legal situation becomes much much harder.

I'm really curious, how does that work? Can you not give a lawyer written permission to make certain financial decisions for you such as taking money off of a bank account? Or is it that you had to sell assets such as stocks etc for which you weren't allowed? Or is it that banks froze all your accounts because you're under detention? Or is it that it's not possible to give lawyers such financial permissions in the US?

It was just a shorthand. Of course everybody knows it didn't start with Bach, duh. He is a very central figure though, and any work you'll put into an artistic tradition will inevitably be compared to the greats of the tradition.

> needlessly avant garde

I'm sorry to say this but there is no such thing as "needlessly avant garde" in Western classical music tradition imho. WCM is about an artist finding his own sound, finding a unique musical language that puts them in the continuum all the way from Bach to him. If your music is not avant garde, it may be great music, but it's not going to be good WCM music. This is just my humble opinion. I almost exclusively listen to contemporary WCM these days, and the way I engage with WCM is different than the way I engage with other genres of music.

Put it as film analogy, the goal is not to make the best horror movie, the best drama, the best scifi; the goal is to make the most creative/innovative/novel/personal/weird movie that happens to be horror, that happens to be drama, that happens to be scifi. At least that's how I enjoy WCM. Everybody experiences music differently, which is what makes it one of the most beautiful human phenomena.

So in short, the more avant garde the better. Note that Schoenberg's music is already grandpa's grandpa music. We want innovation that goes well well beyond Schoenberg. I would consider 12 tone row music ancient at this point, not even remotely avant garde/experimental.

Me too. It's not a convincing direction for art music imho. This is my biggest criticism of Ligeti. I don't think he needed that detuned flute in his Violin Concerto. Otherwise love his music to my bones.

Luciano Berio's Sequenza aren't traditionally considered serialist (absolutely gorgeous and stunning set of compositions BTW). Although he certainly "sounds" serialist "as a style" the same way Elliot Carter is a "serialist" even though he claims he never used it as a "technique".

I really like your point with respect to "Rite of Spring" vs his "Movements for Piano & Orchestra". But let's please note that he likely never attempted to invoke the same kind of vibe anyway, so I don't think it really proves anything. The reality is, composers used serialistic techniques for something other than what neoclassicists wanted to create. For a better comparison, compare Elliot Carter's late piano works with his first piano sonata, which he wanted to write in neoclassical style. You can see the same Carter hue (that's likely more similar to "Movements for Piano & Orchestra" than Stravinsky's "Violin Concerto") in both so it's a more direct comparison in my very humble opinion.

With respect to:

> why modern classical music tends to be rejected

I find this claim that contemporary Western classical music is irrelevant wrong. I think its cultural force is significant. I wrote more about this in HN here [1] if you care to read. But in short, just because an artistic movement inspires artists and not the audience, it doesn't mean it won't indirectly impact the audience, since artists who will go and create mainstream art may be inspired by the innovators of their era.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37424409

People won't care until something major happens and after that they'll implement some draconian half-measure that doesn't fix anything like snooping on office WiFi.

I don't find Reich as convincing because I don't think he was prolific enough and canonical (with respect to forms he used) enough to make the profound statement Glass was able to pull off with his Violin Concertos, String Quartets and Operas [1]. Really, I see art as a tradition and Glass managed to put WCM (mostly concertos, symphonies, quartets, operas, solo piano really...) in the most novel context since Schoenberg. Reich is a great composer, but it's a tremendously harder pursuit to innovate within the tradition rather than reject it all and restart.

Also you talk about counterpoint and incidentally early Glass sounds very contrapuntal (like early Reich) but I think a core message in Glass' body of works is that this entire bike shedding on harmony is so silly. There is so much to music beyond just pitch, and you can literally pick 4 chords and go crazy with it. He treats harmony as a solved problem. I think Reich would agree with this but I don't think his message is as profound. Think about Adams' "Harmonielehre" where he claims he wanted to combine minimalism and early 20th century harmony. The problem here I see here is that common practice harmony revolves around richness and variety. Fux himself says as much. It sounds gorgeous and new, but it doesn't go a long way to innovate anything. Although Glass' music sounds unserious, he actually tried to force himself to innovate. Which is what Schoenberg tried to do. Restrictions motivate artists to be creative.

Listen to Glass first string quartet, it was composed in 1966 before Reich's phase music.

[1] And of course his piano etudes but pianists insist they serve no pedagogical purpose, even though I still can't find someone who can actually play them well except Maki Namekawa. Roll eyes.

> There's an argument that serialism forces composers to use those operations instead of falling back towards conventional theory. But in fact the opposite happened. It didn't take long for serial composers to start mining serialism for tonal elements.

Nothing of this sort happened except in very exceptional cases where it's very obvious and clearly intentional, such as Alban Berg (who chose adversarially tonal tone rows). Besides you assume the only benefit you get from serialism is atonality but that makes no sense because many composers used tonal rows too (i.e. tone rows with 7 or 9 pitch classes in the Major or Minor system). Not only that but different composers used serialism for different purposes.

You are however right that Schoenberg assumed 12 tone serialism implies some form of atonality, which is incorrect. Research shows that he had a bias towards atonal tone rows.

Lerdahl's criticism of serialism is also convincing, i.e. the abstract structure of music does not translate to the heard structure of music. It's fair to classify this as the "art" part of writing serialistic pieces that theory is insufficient.

Besides all of this, traditional music theory teaching focuses too much on serialism as a "technique" and not enough as a "structure", which was the main point of Schoenberg. For example, Elliot Carter claims he doesn't intentionally use row vectors or row matrices in his compositions, but his works can certainly be analyzed and understood this way. It seems like for a minor subset of free atonal compositions serialism is the natural structure of this kind of music. This point is often missed.

I firmly disagree with your points about Schoenberg. I think he's one of the two gigantic innovators of music in 20th century: Philip Glass and him. (I understand this is extremely controversial, opinions are mine). It really takes a lot to make artistic statements so profound your works look misplaced in your canon but are still firmly part of it.

This is what I always say. In college/studying you learn programming, CS, algorithms etc. Once you're a software engineer, you realize that programming, CS, algorithms etc are the easiest part of your job. If the code is too hard for you you're most definitely losing on other things. It sounds very obvious, but think about it, part of being a good software engineer is that programming should be trivial.

This is what ChatGPT does to me whenever I ask anything non-trivial. I find it funny people think it'll take over our jobs, it simply can't even do the most basic things beyond the beaten path.

You're missing the most important points:

* Syncs between devices. I can login to my accounts in all my devices. If I can access my Dropbox account, I can access everything else with the master password.

* Auto password generation. I don't ever even bother looking at the passwords. Just generate something like 32 characters with all ASCII characters, including "special" characters. This goes a long way.

Having used KeePass (with Dropbox sync) since ~2018 I don't even know how people operate without a password manager. It's so intensely convenient. Just dump all the info in the database. I can even take notes in my database. Write my credit card number, SSN, other private info. Put SSH keys. Put website info. Describe where I put my tax documents. Password manager is a pointer to everything else.

My point is that -- in my experience and musical taste -- deterministic algorithms (e.g. literal scripts you write yourself to generate MusicXML, MIDI, lilypond, PDF etc) are orders of magnitude more useful than these neural network ML models that give you monolithic chunks of music. You can still use NN models in your scripts (e.g. have a model to determine chord distance, tonality etc) but there is no universal musical model that has come remotely close to convincing me so far. Of course, when it comes to Western classical music, "counterpoint" is probably the closest you can get to a universal musical model that you'll attempt to find in all pieces of music, but even that comes nowhere near even remotely close to explaining great majority of musical statements (even in something as contrapuntal as Bach). Especially when we come to 20th and 21st century music when people actively react to this model.

Yes I'm familiar and...

> Here's a taste of things to come

it sounds like randomly generated MIDI... Doesn't sound like anything to me at all.

Music is very subjective but I've so far seen no model that's convincing. If you like it that's cool I suppose. I personally use algorithmic composing plenty in my own compositions (I write music for piano) and these kind of models don't do it for me. They're definitely tools, you can use them like ChatGPT to get a sense of things but we're decades away from producing "music" this way imho.

> If you want notes that will actually sound good when played back, it's hard to beat it.

I strongly disagree with this. There is no good algorithmic music generator trained on MIDI. They all generate elevator music.

How about MEI?

https://music-encoding.org/about/

This is what MuseScore 4 will soon start using.

MIDI is absolutely horrible for ML. It lacks very necessary information such as articulation etc which are important to make sense of music. It's popular because it's simple but there is no way to understand music by just looking at MIDI.

I'm a hobbyist in this space (am a composer myself as well a software engineer) and currently all tools are very poor. MusicXML is better than MIDI. MEI [1] is better than MusicXML etc.

The problem is there is miniscule amount of effort and money spent into this field because music overall makes peanuts. It really doesn't justify training expensive ML algorithms which is unfortunate.

[1] https://music-encoding.org/about/

Yes absolutely! As per my original comment neutral names are better. "Finite" has a meaning.

Just use less common names like Brice or Werner or Rubin?

Well at the end of the day you will have to name your container, or instance, or server, or git repo, or db table etc... Conceptually I agree with you, behavior matters. But as the article details, when we communicate with humans, all we have is names, so we have to use names to communicate behavior.

> And please, after 20+ years of DDD at least, give Evans some credit: name your things after your business domain...!

This doesn't hold up in all companies. My company has more than 100 services (yeah yeah microservices suck yada yada, I don't make the decisions) you can't just name 150 things after your business domain, ultimately you're required to follow some kind of convention like "x {verb}er" etc.

This is why I'm a big fan of "name it Steve" philosophy. When we create a new service many people are inclined to call it something like "rhombus keyboard fibriculator" or "octatonic runner". Usually it's of the form "{verb}er" or "{noun} {verb}er" or "{adj} {noun} {verb}er" or whatever. It's never accurate, and it's super confusing because chances are there is some other "{x} {y} {verb}er" with the same "verb". Not to mention it's super long.

Just name your things as things. Name it Pluto, Calvin, Steve, Jon, Ted, Ann, Mobius, Orpheus, Martha, Alex... I don't care. Maybe even Tomato, Artichoke, Celery, Broccoli, Pumpkin, Rooibus etc... It just needs to be as neutral as possible.

This is the power of mathematics really. When I say "monoid" do you have any idea what it might be? No, well that's great, because here is a very formal definition of this thing called "monoid". Old school names like "group", "category" etc are worse. Names like "Kolmogorov complexity", "P-Complete", "Galois Field", "Ultrafilter" are much better.

Yeah, it's gorgeous. Makes me jealous. Reminds me of some author I read recently but I can't put my name on them...

I regularly take Amtrak between Boston - NYC but this website is missing this. Just a single datapoint.

This is the kind of thing you learn in the first lecture of a discrete mathematics class that's required for every single CS program in the world.

It's very obvious if you think about it. If the encoding on the memory is n that doesn't mean it represents "n" data conceptually. It can be n+x for any value of x. For example, you can declare 0 represents $0, 1 represents $0.01, 2 represents $0.02 and so n represents n cents. This is pretty common in tax calculation applications. Then, you can also say n represents n+99^99 so that what GP said holds. They just provided a formal argument for it which proves it by induction, as we call it.

But Skyrim is extraordinarily trivial and any spec/build/config can slap the game no problem. So it hardly works in favor of Skyrim.

If it's costly it's similarly pointless. What if you respec but then all the game gives is ice monsters? Either way you gotta know the entire game to minmax. The point of playing as fire mage is to like being a fire mage even when there are no ice monsters.

This is why the only way to play RPG -- in my very very humble opinion -- is via permadeath. Each death tells you a unique story as to why you optimized your character poorly.

Ilya himself said he's against fully open source models because they're not safe enough. He's definitely against open source, my hunch is that we will see OpenAI being less open after his takeover.

Full interview here ("No Priors Ep. 39 | With OpenAI Co-Founder & Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever" from 2 weeks ago): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft0gTO2K85A

What do you mean by AI executive order?

Because cities are made for people to live in.