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.
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?
> 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.
“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.”
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.
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.
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.
Similarish trajectory, and I bought the "new" C64 as soon as it was available and display it proudly. I started with a Vic 20 first (and Gorf), and I learned assembly as soon as I could finish entering all the damn numbers (ie: LADS, via Machine Language for Beginners by Richard Mansfield, the Compute! book), but alllllmost everything in my life is downstream of that Vic 20 and C64.
The reality is that most humans do very little actual thinking of their own anyway, and, if you believe that what LLMs produce constitutes a form of intelligence, it does seem "more intelligent" than most humans.
So: is outsourcing thinking a net improvement for a majority of users?
I use several models, daily, and they seem "reasonably conditioned" that they are only input to my thinking and not "my thinking". I correct them constantly; they are wrong (in reasoning/logic, in actual facts) frequently. They are demonstrably "not smarter" than I am. And yet I know many people who can "do more" with them as a "thinking" tool. I can say that "the problem" is they can't spot the errors, but they can't or won't do that in their ordinary lives, either, so, again, is it a net improvement for them?
I asked it a question about indoor carbon dioxide levels (wholly innocuous question), which it flagged as involving biology, therefore downgraded to Opus.
It's a pretty good strategy if they're hoping to fail as a business, I guess.
emacs -nw takes about 2 seconds on my mac. I don't use server/daemon, and those 2 seconds are processing my startup elisp files (it's ready nearly instantly without prepping my junk).
A government sign off on release potentially reduces liability/exposure if the models can do what it says on the box. I’m sure Anthro wants this applied to everyone and not only them, but there is a potential benefit to them.
The term MMO is about the game/server architecture more than the size of the game. MMOs are online games with a single (or sharded) persistent gamestate. That's it.
Most shooters have rounds that restart, breaking the persistence quality of the game. Other games like Minecraft emphasize individual / private servers and break the "single gamestate" proposition. The "Massively" word refers to that
single gamestate that many users can interact with, not how many do actually play.
To me, The "play offline" option is more against the MMO definition than the actual number of players.
"Multiplayer" or "Online Multiplayer". Pretty common in the days before WoW. They didn't invent "MMO" (was that Ultima?), but people called those a lot of different things, like "MUD" or "MUCK", because the niches played differently. MMO became a catch all around the time of WoW, though. Made for a clear, simple distinction between internet scale player count games and countable concurrent player games.
Edit: didn't realize you were the author, asking a practical question about how to describe your project. Sorry about that. For that, I personally think you're fine. You're trying to tell people what it is, not be super technically accurate.
> Edit: didn't realize you were the author, asking a practical question about how to describe your project. Sorry about that. For that, I personally think you're fine. You're trying to tell people what it is, not be super technically accurate.
So if they weren’t the author you’d be tickety-boo with this smart-ass rude reply? Christ almighty.
What was smart asssed, or rude, about it? That's what those games are called. GoldenEye was multiplayer. Halo 2 was online multiplayer. If you were asking what to call a game that has P2P multiplayer support using webrtc and therefore only supported countable concurrent players, my honest thought would be to call it an online multiplayer game and forget about the "massive" part because it's just not relevant. Even though it is meant to mimic the gameplay of games that happen to be MMOs doesn't mean it needs to adopt the moniker. Final fantasy 12 mimicked the gameplay of MMOs, but it's just a "single player game".
On the contrary, if you're trying to convey to a mass audience that what you have built resembles something else, the best strategy is to reference that thing by its most familiar name.
Sorry if I came off as petty. Was just trying to answer honestly, and realized I didn't have the right context.
https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/05/the-revolt-of-the-re...