pythko's comments

I don’t really understand that idea of complexity, but Rick Beato is addressing this song from a music theory perspective, and I think this song would meet anyone’s definition of complex when it comes to theory.

I don’t think that’s the obvious takeaway. The specific chord voicings are complicated, sure, but the complexity he’s talking about are the key changes and unexpected tonal choices. You can’t remove those without fundamentally changing the feeling of the song.

When I was learning the guitar, I frequently would skip passing chords and simplify voicings I didn’t know how to play. As a result, my covers were pretty boring and lacking the impact of the originals. That’s fine for beginners, but a pro musician is going to take pride in either faithfully recreating a cover or intentionally putting their own stylistic spin on it, not just skipping over stuff that’s hard.

I’m curious for more details on what your templating system was and how it worked. If you’re up for sharing, I’d love to hear about it.

I know the aforementioned EMR puts a lot of emphasis on their After Visit Summaries, which sounds somewhat similar to what you describe.

The 12-TET certainly has some neat mathematical properties, but my point is that it’s not the only way to decide what “notes” are. It’s an interesting debate on whether there’s something fundamental to this particular approach that sounds good to the human ear, but I think it’s clear that there’s a hefty cultural component.

It’s also worth noting that modern 12-TET is not the series of whole number ratios that someone might expect from basing it off a harmonic series [1]. It’s an approximation based off a logarithmic scale. 12 Tone Just (or “Pure”) Intonation sounds pretty weird, and in my opinion, bad. If people had been making music with 12 Tone Just Intonation for the last millennium, maybe it would sound good to me!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_equal_temperament#Just_inte...

It is artificial, in the sense that the western twelve tone scale is essentially arbitrary (why not 6? why not 16?), and it is a constraint in the sense that what most people consider “in tune” is defined by what they’ve gotten used to hearing. Culturally, in western music, that is twelve notes to an octave.

People from all cultures can and do use notes from outside those twelve tones in music. In western music, sometimes you’ll notice (check out King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard[1]), and sometimes you probably won’t (that “raspiness” in blues music is usually because they’re singing/playing a note slightly “out of tune” aka “microtonally”).

Music and “what sounds good” is a cultural construct, and I’d encourage you to check out music from around the world as well experimental microtonal artists if you’re interested in hearing what happens when you aren’t tied to the idea of twelve notes in an octave.

[1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=U72rbtrufws

Traditional western music assigns 12 notes to an octave using a tuning known as Twelve Tone Equal Temperament[1]. These twelve tones include whole tones and semitones. The vast majority of western music is composed exclusively using these twelve notes.

I believe the GGP meant to refer to “microtones,” which are frequencies that don’t fall into the Twelve Tone Equal Temperament tuning system. These are commonly used in non-western music (Indian music is a typical example), and occasionally in some western music styles (blues, some jazz, some sub-genres of rock, maybe), but you’re not going to find microtones in most western music.

The use of microtones would greatly expand the set of possible melodies, but those melodies would also sound very weird to someone who has grown up listening to western music. Also, these legal cases are not decided by precisely comparing the relative frequencies of notes in two different melodies.

Relating all this to the article, I personally feel like music is not a good parallel for the topic of academic plagiarism since the idea is the whole point of academic papers, whereas the point of music is harder to pin down, but it’s certainly not only to expand the set of melodies and chords used in songs.

Anyways, for more on music theory, I’d suggest Adam Neely’s YouTube channel [2].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_equal_temperament

[2] such as this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ghUs-84NAAU

Seconding your experience, except my battery life has been quite good somehow. I’m not sure if that’s due to one of the settings I changed when setting it up, OS (I’m using Pop!_OS), or just luck of the draw.

My touchpad will also just stop clicking sometimes. It’s usually an exercise of finding the right spot to push to reset the hardware clicker itself. I have the fix that Framework sent out about a loose touchpad cable, so it shouldn’t be that. It also occasionally will just stop registering the mouse at all, either from the touchpad or from an external mouse. Closing the lid and reopening it will fix this.

Fractional scaling was a little dicey, but I found 150% hits the sweet spot for me, I don’t have any issues aside from some occasional jagged screen regions while scrolling, which I don’t mind.

Overall, I’ve been happy with mine. It’s not perfect, and it occasionally hiccups in weird ways (like the mouse thing), but that was my expectation going in. As a daily driver and dev machine, it works well and I would recommend the DIY edition to anyone with a little tolerance for issues in their laptop.

Much of the conversation so far in the comments has ignored the context of that sentence in the article:

> He called out my mistakes using words like “crazy,” “nuts,” “ridiculous,” and “stupid.”

> The harsh words stung at first, and caused me to question whether I belonged in theoretical physics. But I couldn’t help noticing that Dick did not seem to take the critical comments as seriously as I did. In the next breath, he would always be encouraging me to try a different approach and inviting me to return when I made progress.

If you have many repeated interactions with the same people where you make it clear you don't think they personally are stupid, and also you are almost never wrong when you call something crazy/nuts/ridiculous/stupid, perhaps you can get away with it. If one of those things is not true, it is not a good way of communicating (in North America, at least).

In the article, the author says "The harsh words stung at first, and caused me to question whether I belonged in theoretical physics."

What prevented the author taking this to heart? "In the next breath, he would always be encouraging me to try a different approach and inviting me to return when I made progress."

The appropriate takeaway is that when you call someone's ideas stupid, that does make them feel stupid unless you counteract it with positive feedback in the same conversation.

> or rather, I don't know how they continue to find enough reward in the activity to make up for the deprivation, repetition.

I totally feel you on this. I’ve done a reasonable amount of backpacking, and more and more, I’m not sure if I like backpacking or like looking back and saying I’ve done it. I certainly feel a sense of accomplishment from the treks I’ve done, but in the moment, it often just feels like drudgery, shading into misery when the days get long and the trail gets hard.

The exception is when the natural beauty of the surrounding area is high enough, the whole experience is totally worthwhile. The American west (Tetons, Sierra Nevada) still does it for me, but the AT definitely does not.

I always love hearing about the logistics of trips like these, and this article leaves me with lots of questions.

On the AT section, they mention starting out with packs that weighed over 20 pounds, which is extremely light for backpacking. That’s probably a few days of food, a change of clothes, 2-3 liters of water, and an ultralight sleeping bag. But then they mention a tent, too! In contrast, I talked with someone who thru-hiked the AT in the winter, and they said that their packs were routinely over 70 pounds, and that they had ditched their tent in favor of staying in the shelters and wrapping their sleeping bags in Tyvek. How were the guys in the article resupplying? Trips into town every few days sounds very time consuming.

The article also casually threw out that they went through 26 pairs of shoes! Are they buying those at retail? Did they get sponsored by someone?

It also says they mailed themselves packages of food to be picked up at post offices, but it wasn’t dehydrated backpacking food: “Almost half of the airtight bags they had stuffed with rice and beans, tortillas and other fare broke, leaving their food covered in mold.” Has anyone else heard of people relying on perishable food to sit in a post office for weeks/months?

Overall, I read this article with a tremendous amount of respect for the physical and mental accomplishment (that’s a lot of miles and those trails are not easy!), envy, and…bewilderment, I guess? Is dropping $25k and taking a year off school to speedrun three of the most iconic trails in the US a good use of time or money? Part of me would have loved the idea when I was that age, but part of me thinks about all the travel, gear, time asked of family, and time asked of myself, and thinks it would not be worth it.

> The worst for me is when they catch the breakaway mere miles from the finish line. Sometimes a person stays away all day only to end up finishing in the group, or at least beaten by all the sprinters.

Yeah, this is why I (and most others, I believe) find most of the sprint stages in the Tour pretty boring. The break vs. peloton dynamic is critical for road races to work (e.g. if there's no one up the road, why don't we all just ride along at 25kph?), but in those flat stages, the sprint teams are so good and care so much about the sprint finish that it's almost a guarantee they catch the break.

It would be nice to believe, but when second place celebrates like she won says she wasn't aware of a rider up the road, it's not just not the story today. Perhaps if they had known and chased, Kiesenhofer still would have been able to hold them off, but we'll never know.

I also wouldn't call the rest of the peloton "unfortunate." They knew keeping track of the breakaway would be especially important given the lack of radio communication with a director in a team car, and they still didn't. I think Kiesenhofer deserves a ton of credit for this win; she was in the break from the very start of the race, and she was solo for over an hour, I believe. You can't do that without a lot of dedicated training and preparation. If anything, I think this is an example of "shoot your shot." You never know when things will break your way!

Part of the reason I love cycling races is that it's a combination of athletic ability and strategic thinking that you don't see in most other sports. The physics of drafting mean that a well coordinated group almost always has the speed advantage over a lone rider, but lone riders often win races because they don't have to deal with the coordination problems of a group. After 4+ hours of racing, people are trying to calculate optimal game theory decisions while at their max heart rate. It can be bonkers to watch!

Some additional context for those who don't follow professional cycling: the Dutch women's team was incredibly strong coming into this road race. All 4 riders on their team are stars in their own right, and the only reason there wasn't a clear favorite for the race overall is that people weren't sure which Dutch rider would win.

So you have a complicated group dynamic, where the majority of the peloton has no interest in pulling the group to catch the break, since they would just get beat by one or more of the Dutch riders, and the Dutch riders didn't seem to have a clear plan on how to control the race and who would sacrifice their chances and work on the front for the rest of the team.

As others have said, there were no radios allowed for riders in the race, so all information about the breakaway came from the race director's car trailing the peloton. This was a well known fact about the race coming in, and it's the same way that the annual World Championship race is run. It's normal for riders to drop back to the team car to get information about the break, and the lead moto for a group of cyclists will occasionally show time gaps on a whiteboard.

At least one of the Dutch riders claimed to have known about the lone rider off the front [1], but somehow that information didn't make it to the rest of the team. It seems that most of the peloton didn't know (or didn't care) how many riders were up the road, and the Dutch team failed to communicate amongst themselves and establish a plan.

All that leads to Kiesenhofer's solo move working out. All credit to her for an extremely strong ride.

[1]https://netherlandsnewslive.com/miscommunication-and-underes...