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sonorous_sub

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tech wannabe & beginner maker. I registered so I can hide both the posts I've read and those I don't intend to read.

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Those godawful ads on youtube though. I pay goog to suspend them, but I forgot to login on my phone and now I’ll be haunted the rest of today by the snippet of a mouth-breathing honey vendor who popped up on screen before I could scroll away.

I use ChatGPT sometimes, but only after I've exhausted google's results for my search and not found the answer I was looking for, or when the query is so obscure that the enhanced problem solving ability of ChatGPT warrants going to it first. I like ChatGPT for solving mundane math problems because I can check its work, and getting the answers I need that way are quicker than doing it myself manually. I still don't trust ChatGPT for anything subjective, because I get spurious results from it anytime the answer to my question is not cut and dry. But what it can do, it does well.

I don't have a circle of friends, so I have no idea what other people are doing, outside of what I read online.

The anti-Nixon one, where his face is plastered on a falling bombshell and he's shooting lightning bolts out of his eyes at women and children, I think that's my favorite.

I wish I knew more about the "hide" function for tucking away threads. It used to be I could hide every single thread I had reviewed until I had a completely blank page, enabling me to dismiss every thread I had already reviewed. But within the past few months, only about 50% of the threads respond to a "hide" button press. I wonder if this issue is related to my browser (Mozilla).

I think you could make the piece more interesting to the casual reader by grounding the subject in its history. It's been suggested by the book below that the dominance of equal temperament in western music is a relatively recent innovation, something like 120 years old, and is perhaps a consequence of the industrial revolution and the demand for mass manufacture of musical instruments having uniform qualities it produced.

Further reading: How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care), by Ross W. Duffin (2008).

My layman's takeaway from the book: Equal Temperament is a compromise tuning that allows a piano to access all major and minor modes, at the cost of the keys on the outer ring of the circle of fifths to be somewhat out of tune. An ET "C Major" "sounds best", and the further you move away from it in either direction, the worse the key sounds. Also, the fact that Beethoven and Mozart were aiming for just intonation and/or meantone in productions of their works seems to be sort of an inside secret among music maestros, with rigid adherence to equal temperament slyly pushed on competing rookies to keep them trapped in the lower ranks by virtue of their resulting weaker performances. But the subject is highly contentious in western music for sure.