simonask

7 ms·

1.
by simonask 3d ago
Obviously, "slow" has very different meanings depending on context. Allocating a task object or interacting with the runtime in any way may be quite slow when you're in a tight inner loop, but it may be perfectly fast in the
2.
by simonask 3d ago
It's not really like there's a budget for it, and "!" is already a type people have seen in the return position of extremely common macros (panic!, todo!, etc.), functions (std::process::exit, etc.), and expressions (ret
3.
by simonask 3d ago
Well, one thing that every Rust programmer knows is the `panic!(...)` macro, and its return type is "!". That's why this compiles, even though not even match arm produces a value, which I think many Rust programmers are famil
4.
by simonask 4d ago
Languages with effect systems typically let callers inherit the effects of their callees (e.g., calling an async function means the caller also is async), or force them to handle the effect (e.g., spawn the async call as a task and waiting
5.
by simonask 5d ago
You’d just say “over 30” for that kind of temperature, or “almost 40” if it’s at the higher end. I think you’re taking your own unfamiliarity and just assuming that we’re all struggling because you don’t know how to translate what you’re us
6.
by simonask 5d ago
The problem is that understanding everything from first principles is often the longest and least efficient road to learning the things that are actually useful. Psychoacoustics is interesting, but it's not something that really helps
7.
by simonask 7d ago
Why would you assume that this particular turn of phrase would be common at all? People usually just say the temperature they’ve heard in the weather report, without giving a range. If you say “over 20”, people don’t assume “close to 30”, b
8.
by simonask 7d ago
FYI, none of this has ever made any sense at all to somebody who didn’t grow up with Fahrenheit. Numbers don’t need to go roughly between 40 and 100, and then occasionally 212 and 450. The difference between 20 C and 20.5 C is not generally
9.
by simonask 7d ago
33.3 cm is easy to measure out, and 99.9 cm is exactly 1 mm short of 1 meter, well within tolerances for carpentry. Narrower than the mark left by your pencil. But also like, we have calculators…
10.
by simonask 8d ago
2 years is not a long time. What I’m telling you is that sentiments have changed dramatically, and every government and company board across the continent is taking actions to position itself according to those sentiments. You won’t see the
11.
by simonask 8d ago
Hedging your country’s future on American presidential approval numbers is political suicide in Europe, as it rightly should be.
12.
by simonask 8d ago
Also, what lip service, exactly? This is what I mean: Americans don’t understand the immense dividends they have enjoyed from being the defacto symbol of “progress” in the 20th and 21st centuries so far. American solutions were chosen by Eu
13.
by simonask 8d ago
> In the event of some schism … In the views of most Europeans, that schism already happened. Europe was perfectly happy to rely on US software and services for decades. None of the large US tech companies would be nearly as profitable i
14.
by simonask 9d ago
Perfect pitch is quite debated. What we know is that: 1) Most people with perfect pitch have it mostly on their main instrument, and they translate the pitch in their inner ear if they hear a different instrument, and 2) Many with perfect p
15.
by simonask 9d ago
The tried and true approach is to find a piano teacher in your area, schedule weekly appointments, set aside at least one hour of practice every day between lessons.
16.
by simonask 9d ago
My point is that it’s great to understand “why” Western music is the way it is, but it’s largely not the point of music theory. Music theory is useful because it establishes a vocabulary.
17.
by simonask 10d ago
All of those systems you mention also include those so-called "pleasant" ratios.
18.
by simonask 10d ago
I'm a programmer with a degree in musicology as well. This ain't it. I'm reading your comment with a certain disdain for analysis and theory, which I get - a lot of people come out scarred from music theory training, and I&#x
19.
by simonask 10d ago
> The conventions were discovered first, music theory came after composers did things. Broadly completely untrue. If you're trying to say that humans were making music before we had a theory for it - absolutely. But every advanced m
20.
by simonask 10d ago
> That's part of it, but you can make music with none of it. Does anybody, though? Would anybody listen to it? Every culture on Earth has music. All of them use chords, scales, and rhythm, in various ways. Definitely not all of them
21.
by simonask 10d ago
You're confusing some tenses here. At the time when Blues became widely known, "Western music theory" covered Beethoven. That's about it.
22.
by simonask 10d ago
It's also a really strong example of "missing the forest for the trees". Deriving Western music traditions from first principles does not help you to understand why, what, and how any of it actually works.
23.
by simonask 10d ago
If you think music theory is about frequencies and math, you certainly have no idea what you’re talking about.
24.
by simonask 10d ago
Music theory is absolutely an indispensable tool for musicians and composers. You can play music without it, but that’s just putting an unnecessary upper bound on what you can achieve. More than anything, it’s a vocabulary to talk about the
25.
by simonask 10d ago
Spoken like someone with absolutely zero grasp of music theory or modern electronic music. I almost want to congratulate you for the worst-informed comment I’ve read today.
26.
by simonask 13d ago
Totally agree with your comment, but I just wanted to add that the major scales aren’t what’s prioritized - every major scale has a parallel minor scale with the same key signature. In fact, this is true for all diatonic scales, which are t
27.
by simonask 14d ago
Getting very good at C++ takes more than a decade. There are no shortcuts. You will have to start by getting in the trenches and write some code.
28.
by simonask 20d ago
Right now there isn’t really a convincing use case for local LLMs outside of enthusiast or specific niches. It takes a lot of expensive hardware, and most people don’t have extreme enough requirements to recoup that investment. That might c
29.
by simonask 23d ago
We don’t currently have any data that shows any clear way to halt or slow Alzheimer’s. As someone with family affected by this disease, it’s a very personal choice whether you want to know or not, but I wish people understood that there are
30.
by simonask 29d ago
It is a testament to the complete failure of the GNU/Linux userland that something like this seems at all attractive to spend time on (or, it seems, LLM tokens). Actually, scratch that, because Windows and macOS have historically strug

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