Maths and physics are a terrible way to learn the artistic side of music, but if you are interested in "why does a fifth chord sound nice" or "why are the black and white keys on a piano in that particular pattern" you can get interesting (partial) answers by looking into the maths of frequency ratios and the physics of overtones and how they affect the cilia of the inner ear. Music differs between cultures but there are some universals such as the Octave (edit: by which I mean doubling of frequency, not how its divided up) and nearly all cultures have some form of music ... There is something universally human about it, and so its a doorway to studying how our minds work.
> but there are some universals such as the Octave
Universal in the sense that a number of rocks or a number of sheep can be doubled just as a frequency can?
The notion that there are 8 sub divisions to a doubled frequency interval isn't universal. Balinese Gamelan doesn't even neccessarily have an agreed number of "notes" in an "Octave" from one village to the next.
There aren't 8 subdivisions in an octave in western music either. Well, there are in any given scale, but there are also many scales. "Octave" is a misleading term. Given that it's just a doubling of frequency, the term is sort of as good as any other, and that douibling exists in pretty much all cultures that have developed string, pipe or other resonant body based music (including hitting hollow logs and plucking vibrating reeds / sticks / tines).
It's pretty much the foundational idea of any modality. No matter how you divide it up, the purest harmony is doubling or halving.
The commenter presumably was talking about octave equivalence, which is reportedly present across all or nearly all historical musical cultures that we know about. It’s also supposedly present in some other mammals.
reportedly present, yes .. but the debate is still hot on universal.
I was asking to tease out some PoV perspective, again Gamelan doesn't neccessarily have powers of two, or 12, etc divisions of a doubling (or Octave, if we're using that term); it's a non western style of percussion that has a suprising number of local variations (it's essentially near unique to Balinese culture) in divisions and tunings.
The Octave wikipedia entry includes:
Octave equivalence is a part of most musical cultures, but is far from universal in "primitive" and early music
Yeah, that sentence on Wikipedia is a bit unclear though. It might be merely claiming that, for some musical cultures, we don’t have a written record of an explicit notion of octave equivalence or tone name circularity.
But I suspect there’s a clear biological mechanism which makes it easy to mistake one octave for another from any source of roughly harmonic sound. This is due to the similarity in the overtones of two harmonic sounds that differ by an octave. I would be surprised if this mechanism isn’t universal, although its on various musical systems can obviously vary a lot.
Universal in the sense that a number of rocks or a number of sheep can be doubled just as a frequency can?
Yes thats what I meant, the doubling of frequency. It might seem trivial but the fact that doubling frequency sounds "right" to humans is actually quite interesting. Why does it sound "right"?
Interference is most of the answer. With frequencies f and 2f you get the smoothest interference patterns, even if the tones have a lot of harmonics. This applies reducingly to increasingly fractional ratios.
> So yes, the 12-tone scale is a universal thing -
I don't follow the logic here though. It's certainly true that a 12-tone / Chromatic scale is ubiquitous within the Western Music tradition .. but the universe is reportedly a little larger.
Even Western Music includes exceptions like the 9-note augmented scale, though the argument can be made that it's a 12-scale with 3 bits "missing" - not a case that can be made about a non-western 7 note percussive scale.
All scales in all cultures are based on octaves and fifths. (E.g., the ancient Chinese musical scale also has 12 tones.)
Also the so-called "Western music" standardized on 12 tones very late in the process, long after the Chinese figured it out.
> a 12-scale with 3 bits "missing"
That's all scales, even the "non-Western" ones. Microtonality is added to the standard 12 tone to add tone effects. (Synthesizers in pop music do the same trick.)
To confirm the claim that "all scales in all cultures are based on octaves and fifths" one might study the scales.zip scale files and find those that do not contain octaves and fifths, which should naturally be zero if the claim is true.
Note also that certain musical traditions were suppressed or eradicated due to their unfortunate habit of using dissonant notes such as minor seconds, as opposed to the consonant traids favored by a particular group recently in power around the world. Happy Easter!
129.74 is not really close to a power of two. 31-tet scales have a better approximation of a 5th (and an impressively better approximation of a minor 7th).
The obvious exception in the western system would be the blues scale, which arguably has 9 tones (7 equal tempered notes, plus a just tempered 3rd and 7th).
And Indian ragas break all of these rules. They have scales that don't have 8 notes, scales that don't use equal temperament, and even a few scales that don't repeat on octaves.
Its impressive work from CF that lots of people in this thread are unsure whether its a joke or not, like a delicately balanced april fools for the hn crowd
On the contrary, nobody here is suggesting Microsoft isn't really diverse. They're suggesting that Apple is going to start to eat into their SMB market.
Nobody at Microsoft is saying, "we don't care if Apple chips away at SMB because we have Call of Duty"
Microsoft offers Office for Mac. It's a thing they do. It's the full fledged Office suite. They see a Mac user the same way they see a Windows user - a source of revenue.
Not always. There's no Minecraft for Mac, they even prohibited Macs running the iPad version. It's essentially been ported to Apples APIs but purposely withheld from macOS.
Anyone on Bedrock Minecraft is probably there for the cross-platform multiplayer. The Java version doesn't substitute for that. (MS made Bedrock and Java incompatible so they can rent-seek on closed mod and server-hosting "marketplaces"; can't let people share things and have fun without paying a middleman after all, think of the wasted "productivity"!)
I turn off OneDrive so I dont think I have seen those. But in what way are those ads? OneDrive is part of Windows, like iCloud is part of the Apple ecosystem
I resisted upgrading to windows 11 for as long as I could because of all this hysteria. I actually did upgrade 6 months ago and it seems ... fine? I havent seen any adverts; they must be somewhere I'm not visiting. The start menu search still excludes web results like i told it to with Windows 10 (the setting must have come across). I havent seen copilot pop up anywhere annoying in Windows (although it is everywhere in ms office as similar things are popping up in whatsapp, jira, google search, every app).
I'd say the problem these days is not Ads, its Content. Firefox and Chrome (desktop and android) and Edge start with a tab of content - celebrity tat and sensationalistic world news. Windows taskbar was the same, weather and news gave me a load of tatty Content. You go and find the setting to turn it off and it goes away. But I hate Content much more than I hate Ads. Content is the problem and on that front Windows is about the same as everything else.
You're absolutely right! I should have sent $5.00 for that transaction and not $500,000. I will generate a letter for you to print and sign and send to your bank to notify them of my mistake. Would you like me to generate a bankruptcy filing for you as well?
LLMs rarely admit fault, you gotta shift blame onto the user:
> You're absolutely right! The transaction was submitted as $500,000 instead of $5.00. Since that's what was entered on your end, you'll need to contact your bank to resolve it. I will generate a letter for you to print, sign, and send to your bank if needed. Would you like me to generate a bankruptcy filing for you as well?
It's backed by a crypto wallet that it's using for its funds - if you decide to put $500k into the wallet that you've giving carte blanche access to an LLM, maybe you do deserve to shoulder some of the blame
At some point later I got around to playing with DC fast charging ... That market still has a long way to go as far as sorting out its business model, as billing based on time vs energy is completely unfair ... An excuse that's offered less and less often is that pricing by kilowatt-hours delivered is prohibited in some states by utility regulatory rules.
I didn't know they were billing for DC charging in the US based on Time instead of kwh. Thats odd. In Europe its just kwh.
In the EU, yes. When you go to those dark corners of Europe that never achieved the membership, all bets are off.
In Montenegro and Serbia they charge per minute because the only entity allowed to sell kwh's is the national electricity company (in Serbia it's owned by Russia, so it is heavily legally protected).
No need to go further than dead center EU to see chargers where the cost has a time component, and an energy component, and even a (small) one time fee. Sometimes the charger is inside a paid parking, there that comes on top. These aren't shady operators either either, just the way they saw fit to prevent abuse and make more money.
Some have reasonable limits to prevent abuse [0], others just charge the customer as much as they can get away with.
In Italy there are enough chargers that charge for both kWh and time connected. kWh for what you use and connected to discourage being connected all the time.
My understanding is that some US states have regulations against selling power by the kWh unless you are a registered power utility. This is an old regulation meant to be about landlords marking up electric rates to tenants etc.
Most states have updated their laws to account for EV charging providers, and in those states we pay per kWh.
Arguably it should be both. Sitting and occupying a DC fast charging booth, especially once you're not charging at the full rate, represents an opportunity cost since someone else could be using it.
I used a Tesla charger (as a non-Tesla driver) recently. I think their pricing model is pretty good: pay per kWh (varies between peak and off-peak), and if the station is busy they can impose a "congestion charge" for anyone occupying a charger and not charging, or charging above 80% when it's not necessary for their journey (presumably only works for Teslas where the satnav knows about your journey and charge locations).
I know Electrify America used to, but in recent years, I haven't come across any time-based chargers (but I haven't used a charger outside of Texas since 2022, so may be an issue in only certain states, as other comments have alluded to)
Later on ( https://techno-fandom.org/~hobbit/cars/ev/dcfc/app-problem.h... ) he talks about the app problem, and I believe the UK and possibly the EU are mandating that chargers must support contactless payment, so you can just do it with your regular bank card.
I've never paid by the minute. Tesla Superchargers often deliver less energy per minute when they're busy (sometimes much less!) and it would be frustrating if they charged per-minute.
Other systems I've seen (Chargepoint) also seem to be energy-based.
The Supercharger network is well done. It's a shame that they took this long to open up to other car models because they really do get a lot of things right.
Does this also apply to non-Teslas? I'm guessing there's a bit of two-way communication from car to charger, for authentication/billing purposes but also for congestion fees like charging beyond 80%. Does the app notify you to take your car off the charger?
I understand the reasoning but sympathize with the luddites who shun all this technology. Imagine going on a road trip with your EV, stopping for a bite to eat and refresh while putting your car on the charger. Maybe there was a long line or you needed a long bathroom stop, so your car sits at the charger "too long" and you get a nice penalty.
It's almost all by the kWh here, but perusing PlugShare I've seen a few level 2 chargers here and there that charge by the minute. Usually that's a sign of a charger that was set up a while ago and is owned by someone who hasn't checked on it since.
I think fast chargers in rush hour times will also bill for time to discourage long/slow charges on them. Naturally that'll vary on whoever sets the costs, but it does exist in EU as well.
In some states, like Georgia, you are considered an electric company if you bill in kWhs. So some DCFC companies simply billed in the time equivalent. $0.30/min-$0.50/min.
Time based billing is almost completely eliminated. It was always state-by-state, due to local laws not being setup for dispensing of electricity as a business model.
nope, some places in Belgium and Austria are per minute. I guessimate that the charge speed is frickin’ fast, no way to be sure and I would rather see kW number go up in the dasboard
Mowt states have changed the laws in the past 10 years. When nobody (other that lead acid convestions done at home) had an ev it did't matter that the law didn't allow for charging by kwh as nobody other than a utility wanted to do that anyway. When evs changed to mainstream laws changed. There are still some free public chargers near me from before the law change (at 6kw max charge rate they not often used and so don't cost them much to keep it.
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