stackghost

My background is a field most would consider "hard", so I'm no stranger to jargon or dense notation optimized for real-world use. So, I don't buy the excuse that you can't have both good pedagogy and usable notation.

Some people are okay with being told "memorize this list of arbitrary factoids" and there's nothing wrong with that, I'm just not one of those people who can pretend that that's good pedagogy.

> I come from the “music theory makes a lot more sense once one understands that 2:1, 3:2, 4:3 sound really whole and good to the human ear, 5:4 has a little more tension, and 6:5 has even more tension” school of thought

Ah, well, that makes sense. I come from the "music theory is a quintessentially rigid, British-Schoolroom-coded subject that emphasizes rote memorization over actual understanding" school of thought. The musical equivalent to Americans requiring their children to recite the Pledge of Allegiance before they can even understand what the words mean.

The student seeking to build their understanding asks: why is the order of sharps FCGDAEB? Why is the mode with a sharp 4th note the Lydian mode?

Music theory responds: Because fuck you, that's why.

Sure, I knew what they meant. But if they are sloppy with their terminology on the knucklehead stuff then it doesn’t bode well for the esoteric stuff to follow.

My point was not to showcase my confusion, rather to reinforce the fact that music theory texts are just generally low quality, and music theory as a field seems to be okay with that.

Suffers from the same problem that all music theory texts seem unable to avoid: they require the reader to simply accept a bunch of random facts to memorize with no context.

Example: memorize the major scale as a series of whole and half steps but we won’t provide you with any context or motivation for why this is so.

Similar: in a major scale all notes are played and none are skipped or repeated. Except if your scale goes D–E–F#–G, in which case you skip F. The only way for this to be correct is apparently we consider F and F# to be the same note for purposes of scales even though this directly contradicts a previous section.

I was expecting a “21st century” music theory reference to have an emphasis on building intuition. Music theorists are apparently allergic to good pedagogy.

So, people in Yemen are running full on weapons development programs. Meanwhile 5.6 sol claims it found a vulnerability in one of my side projects but won’t describe the attack chain to me because “we take safety seriously”

What the fuck

What crooks?

It just sounds like the behaviours of an unprofessional douchebag to me, not mental illness

> But I have big hands, and I can't use my iphone 17 now without two hands.

Are you a woman by any chance? I am currently typing this one handed on an iPhone 17 pro (not the pro max) and don’t consider my hands to be particularly large, for a man, but my wife has to two hand her android which is roughly the same size

Apple are king of form over function. Have we already forgotten that hack Jony Ive and his fetish for removing usefulness in favor of a few mm of thinness? Or the stupid fucking Touch Bar keyboard?

I still have a touch bar MacBook and the keyboard is unusable now.

Run through pysdr[0], which I found has the right complexity gradient and the right levels of abstraction for people with technical chops but who aren’t familiar with SDR

[0] https://www.pysdr.org/

No no, not "mods". The phpbb people were always weirdly militant about calling them them MODS, uppercase.

Why, I'm not sure, because it's not an acronym. Eventually they decided to start calling them Extensions, which is probably a more apt term. Or maybe a more APT term.

I guess in this extremely contrived hypothetical where a Navy helicopter flies through heavily-irradiated dust cloud from a nuclear detonation, yes, the blade alarms might go off spuriously. Well done.

Nothing I wrote refutes that

It is, but a) it's a probabilistic process and b) most of the products decay rapidly, down to the background level in a matter of days.

Exposure to a nuclear blast doesn't necessarily make things radioactive. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not radioactive wastelands. Even in Chernobyl, the other reactors continued to operate for a time after the accident, and nature is thriving.

But, the radiation detector is on the upper surface of the rear fuselage. Hypothetical Beta particles from the ground will strike the underside of the aircraft and not the detector.

Tell me you haven't used LibreOffice without telling me you haven't used LibreOffice.

It's actually a pretty great software suite.

I'm interested in learning more about "Io's shenanigans". What are you referring to?

Can anyone summarize? Not going to risk watching a 2 hour video.

>In a twisted kind of way, the replies were reasonable and logical. They're not dumb, they can see it was crap. No one org can actually own this fix, so in that kind of situation it realistically requires someone like Bill to choose someone to drive it, and demand updates to ensure that everyone gets aligned. Telling his execs, especially in a company so notoriously political and "empire" oriented as it was, isn't going to work.

This goes right back to the leadership failure on Bill's part. If your company is structurally incapable of producing good products (which Microsoft assuredly is and still was) then it's on you as the CEO to implement the correct structures.

That's literally the purpose of upper management: you create the conditions for success to happen.

>To me that's just a very tedious pedantic argument that simply fails to capture the actual meaning behind why/when we might call something low level.

The part I find tedious is C programmers who cling to the language by claiming it lets you understand and finely control what the machine is doing, when it clearly does not, because x86 assembly itself is being emulated by the cpu underneath. To me, anyway, that's where I find some credence in the "C is a high-level language" meme.

Isn't the point that x86 instructions are themselves no longer a good mental model for what the processor is actually doing under the hood, and thus C which was long billed as a thin layer over top of assembly is itself a higher abstraction?

There is AFAIK no way to express or interact with speculative execution/branch prediction, for example.

>Tesla offloaded the hardest, least profitable part of the Solar Roof — the physical install and the customer relationship — onto small local companies, let them absorb the training and tooling costs, and then pulled the product out from under them. Tesla keeps a manageable warranty liability on 3,000 roofs. The installers keep the stranded investment, the abandoned pipelines, and the awkward job of servicing a discontinued product for the next two decades.

Well, that's certainly on-brand for Elon Musk. Over promise, under deliver, pay a PR firm to operate sock puppet accounts to tell you how great he is. That is his MO.

Agreed. From the comments, lots of people down-thread who clearly haven't worked in large orgs.

They are arguing about not wanting to take ownership because they know the organizational structure is going to be an impediment. The problems Bill describes could not have been solved by Microsoft without a massive internal restructuring. We know this because Microsoft's UX is still abysmal.

Nobody wants to have the inevitable failure hung around their necks by "owning" something that depends on the cooperation and coordination of departments that don't report to them.

>Look at the histogram and think about what distribution one could reasonably impute from samples. And what you would set as bounds for "outliers", per your needs. While we're at it, let me also say that it might be useful to specify outlier bounds not just based on the spread in sample values, but the costs/payoffs they imply for your application.

Only people with prior education/training in statistics are capable of doing this. The people who don't need a textbook.

Something like 60% of US adults read at or below the 6th grade level, and 25% of US adults struggle to comprehend graphs or charts entirely. Someone who has no idea what a standard deviation is can't intuit about distributions. I think you're dramatically overestimating the average person.

Oh good, the vegans are here to leave smug comments

>It's because Europe is absolutely obsessed with the United States and obsessed with Americans.

Is this the new cope?

The USA is a Goliath on the world stage. The deranged tweets of your president move global markets and the next time Israel manipulates him into starting another war it might not be Iran, it might be Denmark, or Canada.

People pay close attention to the US not because they want to buy because they basically have to.

I mean if I had someone tailoring workouts to me, keeping me motivated to stick with a training regimen, and free time enough to get super fit and look great naked, I'd sure be happier.

?

As with many things, it's easier to stay healthy if you are wealthy.

You can buy personal training services, workout gear, a home in traffic-calmed neighborhoods where you aren't jogging or cycling along rural highways, a pool, etc.

You can buy fresh fruit and vegetables instead of highly-processed food. If you're American you can buy imported or certified organic meat instead of the hormone-filled shit on the shelves at grocery stores. You can spend less time working and more time cooking healthy, with no pressure to eat fast food because you're in a rush.

Money really does buy happiness.

Music theory has very little to do with playing music.