jessetemp

I really enjoy all the alternative music notation projects that popup on HN. Based on the comments, I think this one could use a page explaining the notation and instrument before diving into sheet music. Also looks pretty difficult to use with pen and paper but I'm probably in the minority there

There is also the hide button under every post, which I’ve started using generously. It only takes a few seconds to clean up the front page to your taste

I would like to buy just the back half please. I’m not even joking. I couldn’t find the exact dimensions but at 5.4” diagonal, that would make it even easier to use one handed than the mini

You're saying the vacuum in the economy (people without an income source) will be filled by something else that leaves people without an income source? Who's paying for the robots? If people find themselves with more time than money, they're not going to buy robots to free up more time

All of that already existed for the purpose of biasing people and now it biases ai for free. A company would have to make an effort to remove or change the bias

How do you validate this kind of work to weed out any confabulating by the LLMs?

I kind of agree with you. I think music theory would be way more approachable if it was taught using intervals instead of all the weird naming of western notation. For example, everyone learns major and minor scales which are the interval sequences (in half steps) 2212221 and 2122122 respectively, but the names major minor don't really help you know other scales (excluding modes, maybe). If someone asks you to play hungarian minor, you'd first have to learn and memorize it. But instead, if you understand intervals and are asked to play 2131131, you immediately know how to play it. For me it also encourages experimentation, because there are obviously way more possible interval sequences to explore right?

The problem as others have pointed out is that most musicians in the west already know some degree of western notation, so if you're collaborating, you'll have to translate back to western notation at some point. Even if you invent the perfect notation, it's like asking everyone to switch to esperanto because english grammar is flawed. And you'll still get people defending english "well actually, it's like that because the greeks blah blah blah".

My favorite music notation flaw is C flat. It's a hack. It's an ugly fucking hack and anyone who defends it is defending an ugly hack. The only reason it and double flats exist is because there are some key signatures (this happens with hungarian minor sometimes) where you end up needing to define 3 notes in the span of one space and one line on the staff, and you can't, so you have to borrow from an adjacent space or line. And so sometimes that C is actually a B. It's super annoying but uncommon enough that it's not worth everyone learning a new notation.

Anyway, don't let the nay sayers stop you from learning music however makes the most sense to you. Have fun

I get it now. Had to play around with the code a bit to see it. Very interesting and unintuitive problem. Thanks for the thorough replies

You might be right. It’s been a while since I read snow crash. I just remember the metaverse as a sort sad state of society, but I don’t remember if the evil corp stuff was in there or just in the world at large

I had no idea it was a lord of the rings reference. Here’s an apt quote from wikipedia: “The [palantir] stones were an unreliable guide to action, since what was not shown could be more important than what was selectively presented.”

Makes me wonder what it’s like to identify with the villains in media. Zuck looking at the metaverse and thinking hey that’s a good idea! Or Thanos wasn’t so bad. Those rebel scum had it coming. Homelander is the good guy!

That would actually be a great feature. Opening two file browsers to move stuff around is a really common workflow. Although with current trends we might instead get a chat bot prompt “tell me how you feel about where you want your files to be”

Thank you for the thoughtful reply. Maybe bins is the wrong word to use, so I'll try with intervals. Starting with 1 bit data, there are two numbers and one interval. I think where bins makes it confusing is that inside the interval there are two big rounding errors mapping everything to either 0 or 1 and many people seem to be considering those the bins.

Taking a step back, remember we're ultimately mapping these discrete numbers to some real world continuous variable like the saturation of red, frequency, mass on a scale, whatever. And our digital device can only represent a finite amount of numbers. For 2 bit data, we can represent 0-3, and for 3 bit data we can represent 0-7.

The important part is that 0 represents the minimum and 1,3, and 7 all represent the same maximum real value, and everything that can be measured by the device will fall within those ranges. So comparing 1, 2 and 3 bit data on a linear number line looks like this:

  0                    1
  0      1      2      3
  0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7

You could assume that everything gets assigned to whatever number is nearest in the number scale or come up with another scheme, but that is ultimately defined by the ADC and likely nonlinear. All we know is that those are the numbers we have available to represent the real values we're measuring.

The question is about how to normalize the data. 1 bit data is already normalized. If you normalize 2 bit data by 3 you get [0, 1/3, 2/3, 1]. LGTM. If you normalize it by 4, you get [0, 1/4, 2/4, 3/4] and you're effectively throwing away some of the range of the ADC. You can try to get it back by offsetting by 0.5 then normalizing but now you get [1/8, 3/8, 5/8, 7/8]. And you could stretch that with some clever formula to fill from 0 to 1, but if you do it right then it's the equivalent to normalizing by 3, so why not normalize by 3?

So the answer is, if you have N bit data, you normalize by 2^N-1.