iainctduncan

I can't be the only one who has ditched google search because it now returns a half a page of AI summaries (frequently with errors even I can spot) followed a by a second half page of sponsored results....

Like lobbying, but spineless.

almost like he's a ... CEO. sigh

I work in tech diligence so I speak to software companies all the time, from startups to $5B transactions. In "normal" companies, remote jobs are still very common. Can't speak to teach giants and their decisions, which rarely have anything to do with actually developing software though

"Software teams are capturing a lot of the speedup in the form of more leisure or quasi-leisure time. (To greatly simplify: software teams are offering 2x speedups to their companies. They're then using tools that allow them to work 10x as efficiently, and taking nice long coffee breaks.)"

This is not what I am hearing from people who work in LLM heavy environments at all. The exact opposite seems to be the case.

Don't suppose you have blogged about this? Or have recos for resources on combining Zotero with emacs? this sounds very intriguing!

Dear OP, allow me to give you some onsolicited feedback!

You have poor grasp of human dynamics, communication, coaching, and probably leadership. You are probaly a hubristic ass who is awful to work for.

You are welcome! What a guy I am, so thoughtful.

My PhD supervisor, George Tzanetakis recently published his tutorials on understanding the Fourier on medium, they are really great. Doing DFTs from scratch in his course on synthesis was a great way to demistify it. Figured this would be of interest to many here

Interesting aside, George was also the first person to successfully use machine learning to determine musical genres back in the early 2000s.

Related from CBC in BC Canada (where I am) on the BC Attorney General reaction

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/mother-jones...

I work both in the creative arts (currently phd candidate in music and CS, run a jazz night, author of open source music hacking tools) and in the bowels of the tech investment world (diligence practitioner for a company that assesses for PE investment).

Two things: Whether the anti AI slant would work is a marketing question. I happen to think it will, but we are all famously terrible at answering marketing questions until it's hindsight. The only way to know is to start small and find out if your slant resonates.

IMHO, this will absolutely, 100%, need to start bootstrapped and have a plan that involves NEVER giving up more >= 50% ownership. Which can definitely be done, and I've even helped PE firms invest (minority) in these companies. I've seen some fantastic ones. Investors expect you to just do whatever seems like the easy money now, and they are all fucking breathless over AI everywhere right now, to sometimes an astonishingly stupid degree.

Especially if you're not a pianist. I play a monophonic instrument, so even though I did plenty of piano, it sure it wasn't up to "casually sightreading examples from the literature" level.

I wouldn't even call this "humans planning poorly", I'd call it "humans pretending to plan poorly for publicity". Weasels gonna weasel.

It has embedded youtube videos of examples. I certainly didn't have that in my 20th century theory text books and it would have been very helpful!

This resource looks excellent

I guess we disagree on whether that should change anything.

In the all the textbooks I have or have seen, those are called "acoustics" (and more specifically "tuning and temperament"). They are covered in the text book I had for acoustics, and not covered in any of the textbooks I used for theory (jazz or classical). For example, in Rossings "The Science of Sound", it's in a chapter called "Musical Scales and Temperament".

Look, I agree that they should be. I have literally had discussions with one of my PhD supervisors (who taught acoustics) about how much better some students would understand some of harmony if they started with some acoustics! But they aren't, so if one is going to redefine common uses of terms, at very least this should be explained in detail to the student prior to use.

My call on this stuff is always determined by "What will help my student learn most efficiently, without frustration or confusion". That article fails badly on that count.

It seems you arguing how things should be, not what they are. I don't disagree that in music we have lots of inconsistent nomenclature that could have better names. But writing an intro to a topic and using non-standard nomenclature (without explaining that that's what you're doing) is still a source of confusion to learners.

Whether or not this info should be in acoustics books or theory books is not relevant to the new learner, that's where it is! I actually think a crash course in acoustics would be a good addition to a comprehensive theory book, but it doesn't change the fact that no theory course or book has this stuff (not even my pitch set texts!)

I teach music students regularly. I spend a lot of time explaining what something is called in various contexts. They need to know this to learn in a productive and not frustrating manner. They can then learn later why the terms are imperfect and used differently in different subcultures.

But no argument on that is going to convince me that it's good pedagogy to tell new readers that a post on acoustics and synthesis is on music theory. That's just counterproductive at best, or ignorant at worst.

Sure, but none of that changes the fact that is someone reads that article and says "wow I like music theory!" and orders the best theory books or signs up for a course or lessons, they are going to be PISSED. They will get some books that don't cover what they think music theory is at all and that touch on basically nothing in this article.

On the other hand, if the author had said something like "Intro to the acoustics behind musical scales", then they might go on to order great books like Kyle Gann's or Gareth Loy's and be off to the races.

Redefining normal terms just makes people sound like they have no clue, and that is, 100%, a serious disservice to the reader/student.

"Music theory" has a near universally accepted meaning. This article is not about that, it's about what we all call in music academia acoustics and digital synthesis (which of course I know you know as I know your work). The derivation of scales from acoustic principles is not in theory books; it's in acoustics books. I've taken numerous theory courses and also taken university acoustics courses and digital synthesis courses, so I can certainly comment on what was taught where! If people go here and think they are learning music theory and then want to go on, they will be frustrated by not finding what they want, they will have issues communicating with others in the field, and they will lose credibility by not knowing the standard nomenclature. That kind of redefinition of standard terms is not good pedagogy.

Look, it's like me writing an introduction to "colour theory" and then writing about something else that eventually leads to how we see colour.

I'm not debating that the article has useful content – it does – but it's title and framing is misleading, which is a disservice to the new student. I happen to personally believe everyone getting into music theory would be well served by knowing more acoustics and that this is useful material. But muddying the waters by using terms in weird ways is off.

And when you write about a field and use the wrong terms, you lose credibility. Sorry, I don't trust authors who can't be arsed to use the standard nomenclature for a topic, it really doesn't make them sound trustworthy.

This is not an article about music theory, it's an introduction to what is called "acoustics" in educated music circles, along with examples from digital synthesis.

It's a decent enough intro to acoustics and digital synthesis, but saying it's music theory is just redefining terms with accepted meanings in their fields.

PhD Candidate in music and computer science and gigging jazz musicain here. It is not too harsh. Articles like this confuse people who interested in learning a topic more than they help.

Yet another case of programmers thinking "I'm a programmer so I should blog about this thing I barely know anything about as if I'm an expert, what could possibly be the downside?"

Our clients do indeed see multi-cloud as a nice-to-have, but it costs so much more to do, and the big clouds are so trusted, that it's rare that I see it.

On the other hand, nobody trusts the big AI companies not to pull shenanigans or dramatically raise prices... or even be in business in five years.

The thing is, for big companies (or even small ones owned by PE, which is MOST of them), it's not just about cost. The big thing is risk.

In my experience as a tech diligence assessor for PE firms for the last 7 years, investors really, really don't like companies being beholded to single entities that they don't control. Anthropic and OpenAI have demonstrated that they are not trustworthy, or predicatable, or finanically safe, or even capable of hitting three fucking nines. Investors know they need companies to be on the AI train, but they really don't like vendor lockin to the big AI companies. Every diligence I get asked "how easily can they change models?"

I think when open models reach 80% or 90% capability (or maybe even less!) a whole lot of companies are going to say "almost as good with way less risk is a better deal".

uh no...it's not gatekeeping... because it's an article of advice from a professional to students.

That's called teaching. Having people who know how to do something well tell you how to get better at – even by doing things that are uncomfortable and not what you prefer - is how you learn a god-damned craft.

you mean, because of the em dashes? Five years ago I was happil using them without having to worry about this bullshit. sigh

The article is about writers, not regular people. It's explicitly directed at people trying to make a living writing.

We found it because of HN, but his audience - the only one's who's opinion he should give a shit about - are his readers, who presumably know him because of his (according to the article) Raymond Chandler-influenced sci fi. I'm willing to bet those people are not put off by some swearing. :-)

If you are trying to make a living writing you should a) be fucking reading and b) appreciate all the wild and wonderful facets of language.. like using a good cuss word for deliberately over the top emphasis.

You are quoting him out of context. That was directed at wannabe-writers who don't make time to read. Which is completely fucking batshit crazy. If anyone deserves some f-bombs, it's them.

Additionally, the very next sentence is "Joking. I would never say that. But I certainly fucking think it."

If you like those, a less well knowned Scheme you will likely really like is s7. :-)

Racket is made by academics. Academics piss on each other a lot, it's unfortanately part of the culture and has (historically) been rewarded in the system (I am a PhD candidate, FWIW, and so have many, many friends "in the system").

If you're going to get excited about academics being pissy and condescending to their rivals, you're going to eliminate an awful lot of useful things from your life when you peek behind the curtain at the conversations between the makers.

Personally, I find academic pissing matches far, far less offensive than the self-agrandizing bullshitting we find in industry. Look hard enough, and there are people being at least occasional jerks everywhere.