I don’t think anyone said anything about having only three hours to learn music theory. First principles should be taught to computer programmers, who have the needed math (e.g. knowing what a square root is) to…
Yeah, I think a good discussion on music theory is starting from first principles, explaining Pythagorean tuning, then explaining 5-limit just intonation, the explaining we compromised on 12-tone equal temperament…
Yeah, that guy tried to argue that Grade 5 ABRSM [1] is “very basic”. Like, excuse me no. “Very basic” is knowing the notes in a major key, and knowing the I IV V chord progression, as well as a basic 4/4 rhythm (8th…
We recently had a long discussion about this. 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…
Here is what I see typing this is Stockfish 18 and Stockfish 19: position fen 1b3r2/8/4P3/2pP2k1/3nB2p/3P3P/5PP1/5KRR b - - 0 1 d go depth 35 In Stockfish 18: Black is 3.9 pawns ahead, and it wants to play Bg3 In…
Click on the switch to the left of the evaluation to run a local Stockfish 19 eval of the position. Showing Black winning in that position is clearly a bug; at 20 ply Stockfish 19 sees a +0.3 edge for White (which is…
Alpha Zero Chess never made their code or models public. Leela is based on the same ideas as Alpha Zero Chess, but its model and code are public and uses crowd sourcing to generate and refine the model. Stockfish uses a…
Interesting bug or regression. Let’s take the very famous game Kasparov - Topalov, Wijk aan Zee 1999 and look at the position just after Topalov accepts Kasparov’s Rook Sacrifice:…
Here’s that sentence in context: >>>People know that ICE is bad, that law enforcement has a troubled history in this country. Yet when they see Democratic electeds treat riots with kid gloves, they’ll support an…
In addition to the overhead of a /dev/urandom read(), since my programs run in a chroot() sandbox, there’s the possibility that the file descriptor to /dev/urandom will no longer function—since chroot() is not part of…
Linux kernel crypto code has resulted in security issues, e.g. CVE-2026-31431. The advantage of using a cryptographically secure stream cipher [1] is that we only need about 128-256 bits of good entropy to generate an…
“Rolling your own crypto libraries is always a bad idea” Absolutes like this aren’t absolutely true. It’s interesting because in a related comment, someone claimed that I was “rolling my own crypto”…
Talking to myself, some research here. https://www.medieval.org/emfaq/harmony/pyth5.html >>>Around 1300, the English theorist Walter Odington proposes that major and minor thirds (81:64, 32:27) have ratios close to 5:4…
It’s actually an open question of whether “natural” tuning is 3-limit or 5-limit tuning. Five limit tuning, which I discuss above and use to form a major scale, goes back to Ptolemy:…
https://web.archive.org/web/20150610163042/http://www.axs.co... “"Safe and Sound's" trumpet line is partly responsible for the popularity Capital Cities is currently enjoying” >>>The trumpet line in ‘Safe and Sound’,…
Indeed. Bobby McFerrin has a demonstration where, regardless of culture, the pentatonic scale is universal. For the record, a just major pentatonic scale is the notes with the intervals (from the root note) 1, 9/8, 5/4,…
If we teach theory without first principles, all we have to do is say “C + E + G make up a major triad”; we may go as far as to explain that, in a major key, the I, IV, and V chords are major chords, the ii, iii, and vi…
Until we have an established scale, unless one has perfect pitch, one note is the same as another arbitrary note. It’s the ratio between notes that make up music.
I’m convinced that “Safe and Sound” by Capital Cities became a major hit because it uses an actual trumpet for the lead, causing the perfect intervals to be exact instead of the every so slightly off intervals 12-tone…
I distribute the AI summaries on my blog. With paywalled articles and the usual archives having serious reliability issues, it allows readers of my blog to get context about articles I comment on. Here’s an example:…
Actually, it’s because, as per Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., facts cannot be copyrighted. This legal trick only works for rewriting an article reporting on a factual event—since the events are…
The only place where I use AI for writing is to summarize press articles; this allows me to legally have a mirror of a press article I am commenting about in my blog (whenever I use AI, I make a disclaimer that the…
For people with the mind of a programmer, explaining the mathematical basis of equal temperament and then the major scale (the article doesn’t explain the major scale well, but simply says “it sounds better than a…
“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…
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…
I don’t think anyone said anything about having only three hours to learn music theory. First principles should be taught to computer programmers, who have the needed math (e.g. knowing what a square root is) to…
Yeah, I think a good discussion on music theory is starting from first principles, explaining Pythagorean tuning, then explaining 5-limit just intonation, the explaining we compromised on 12-tone equal temperament…
Yeah, that guy tried to argue that Grade 5 ABRSM [1] is “very basic”. Like, excuse me no. “Very basic” is knowing the notes in a major key, and knowing the I IV V chord progression, as well as a basic 4/4 rhythm (8th…
We recently had a long discussion about this. 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…
Here is what I see typing this is Stockfish 18 and Stockfish 19: position fen 1b3r2/8/4P3/2pP2k1/3nB2p/3P3P/5PP1/5KRR b - - 0 1 d go depth 35 In Stockfish 18: Black is 3.9 pawns ahead, and it wants to play Bg3 In…
Click on the switch to the left of the evaluation to run a local Stockfish 19 eval of the position. Showing Black winning in that position is clearly a bug; at 20 ply Stockfish 19 sees a +0.3 edge for White (which is…
Alpha Zero Chess never made their code or models public. Leela is based on the same ideas as Alpha Zero Chess, but its model and code are public and uses crowd sourcing to generate and refine the model. Stockfish uses a…
Interesting bug or regression. Let’s take the very famous game Kasparov - Topalov, Wijk aan Zee 1999 and look at the position just after Topalov accepts Kasparov’s Rook Sacrifice:…
Here’s that sentence in context: >>>People know that ICE is bad, that law enforcement has a troubled history in this country. Yet when they see Democratic electeds treat riots with kid gloves, they’ll support an…
In addition to the overhead of a /dev/urandom read(), since my programs run in a chroot() sandbox, there’s the possibility that the file descriptor to /dev/urandom will no longer function—since chroot() is not part of…
Linux kernel crypto code has resulted in security issues, e.g. CVE-2026-31431. The advantage of using a cryptographically secure stream cipher [1] is that we only need about 128-256 bits of good entropy to generate an…
“Rolling your own crypto libraries is always a bad idea” Absolutes like this aren’t absolutely true. It’s interesting because in a related comment, someone claimed that I was “rolling my own crypto”…
Talking to myself, some research here. https://www.medieval.org/emfaq/harmony/pyth5.html >>>Around 1300, the English theorist Walter Odington proposes that major and minor thirds (81:64, 32:27) have ratios close to 5:4…
It’s actually an open question of whether “natural” tuning is 3-limit or 5-limit tuning. Five limit tuning, which I discuss above and use to form a major scale, goes back to Ptolemy:…
https://web.archive.org/web/20150610163042/http://www.axs.co... “"Safe and Sound's" trumpet line is partly responsible for the popularity Capital Cities is currently enjoying” >>>The trumpet line in ‘Safe and Sound’,…
Indeed. Bobby McFerrin has a demonstration where, regardless of culture, the pentatonic scale is universal. For the record, a just major pentatonic scale is the notes with the intervals (from the root note) 1, 9/8, 5/4,…
If we teach theory without first principles, all we have to do is say “C + E + G make up a major triad”; we may go as far as to explain that, in a major key, the I, IV, and V chords are major chords, the ii, iii, and vi…
Until we have an established scale, unless one has perfect pitch, one note is the same as another arbitrary note. It’s the ratio between notes that make up music.
I’m convinced that “Safe and Sound” by Capital Cities became a major hit because it uses an actual trumpet for the lead, causing the perfect intervals to be exact instead of the every so slightly off intervals 12-tone…
I distribute the AI summaries on my blog. With paywalled articles and the usual archives having serious reliability issues, it allows readers of my blog to get context about articles I comment on. Here’s an example:…
Actually, it’s because, as per Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., facts cannot be copyrighted. This legal trick only works for rewriting an article reporting on a factual event—since the events are…
The only place where I use AI for writing is to summarize press articles; this allows me to legally have a mirror of a press article I am commenting about in my blog (whenever I use AI, I make a disclaimer that the…
For people with the mind of a programmer, explaining the mathematical basis of equal temperament and then the major scale (the article doesn’t explain the major scale well, but simply says “it sounds better than a…
“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…
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…