trane_project

It's related to this https://trane-project.github.io/generated_courses/transcript... which generates all the individual lessons for each stage in the guide. It has nothing to do with generative AI. The software is not really needed if you just want to jam along your own songs, I just didn't have a better place to put the guide.

We would be a much more musically proficient society if we stopped this obsession with teaching music through written notation and just taught music aurally from the beginning, and notation only later for those who need it. It made sense at a time where recordings were not easily available, but that is not the case now.

Western notation makes sense once you know the circles of fifths, but the specifics of the notation is not really what is holding people musically.

I highly advice anyone against taking up this type of ear training practice if what they want is just to play music recreationally. I did it for a while, stressed out about it, and I saw very little improvement in what really mattered to me, which was just to be able to play music freely.

If that is also your goal, you would be better served by learning how to play along recordings and use them to improvise along them. Your ear is already good, given that you can hear music, and this relies on using those existing abilities. There is no existing ability to label random sounds out of a musical context. I am still unsure how mastering all of these puzzles turns into actual musicianship, but some people swear by it, so I guess it eventually happens if you do it for long enough.

I wrote a guide on how to do this: https://trane-project.github.io/generated_courses/transcript...

Honestly I have stopped doing anything else and I have seen my actual musicianship skyrocket and I am having 1000x more fun than I did before. It's not that different from how music was taught before notation was widespread with the advantage of now having recordings and easy ways to loop them, slow them down, and change their pitch.

I am hoping to eventually make a product in this space based on this pedagogy once I finish the one I am currently working on. But honestly it's not really needed if you are fine with just doing it with the songs you like without a full curriculum and fancy scheduling.

The only religious argument is materialism. It's real because enough people have convinced themselves that it's "scientific". Even though there is no proof whatsoever, no solid hypothesis, no experiments to prove how matter acquires subjective experience, it's incoherent to the very foundations of its position (that matter is dead), and has not made any progress in answering the "hard problem" (which is just someone pointing out the incoherence). It also makes people argue that they don't have a mind, that asserting they have a mind is a religious statement, or that they have some trouble understanding what a mind is.

How can a pile of sand and rocks smushed together real close play back video? How can it produce a process that understands natural language?

The laws of physics are enough to explain this because no one is arguing that computers are experiencing anything when they play a video or generate a set of numbers that are displayed as natural language.

At no point did I ever intend to argue any such thing. I suggest you put away the strawman and actually engage with what I'm saying.

Sorry, I phrased that badly by using "you" when I did not mean that. I meant to say that if someone (not you) wanted to argue that simple matter has some sort of experience, then at least the position would make some sense. But materialism assumes that simple matter does not have any subjective experience of any kind.

Anyway, I won't be able to convince you that you have a mind, so I'll peace out.

I can't read minds. I know I have one and you know you have one. That's enough for both of us to know that mind is a real phenomenon.

As for why any materialist explanations are unsatisfactory is that even if you managed to map every physical interaction in a sentient being, you are only mapping physical phenomena. Maybe that is enough to account for how that maps into the contents of the experience.

I am not arguing about how the contents are generated though. I am arguing about the "field" of subjective experiencing, which I called a mind. How is that generated from a set of aggregates that has no subjective experience of any kind? The simplest answer is that it is not, even if those material aggregates are deeply involved in how the contents presented to this field are generated.

Maybe you want to argue that salt "tastes" something when it is dissolved in water, but materialism assumes that simple matter does not have any experience of mental events.

What is there to explain about psychedelics? There is nothing special to them. They affect the bodily aggregates of a being and cause the contents of the experience to change. So does eating a donut. There is no contradiction with what I said because I already conceded that mind and matter are closely interlinked and that changes in the body affect the contents experienced by the mind.

But the "hard" problem of consciousness has nothing to do with the contents of the experience, but with explaining how experiencing of any kind is produced by aggregates that themselves do not have any such experiences. The simple answer is that mind (experience, consciousness, whatever you wanna call it) is not produced by matter and is a completely different realm of reality.

Maybe if science simply assumed that mind and matter are different things instead they would have made some progress. For once, the "hard" problem of consciousness would be revealed to not be problem at all. As for non-scientific proof that you have a mind, you can just observe that for yourself in every instant of your own personal experience. No magic involved. If people want to deny their own minds that is up to them.

There is no hard problem of consciousness not because of the baffling arguments against it in this article, but because materialism is not true. This article and the entire description around the hard problem just shows the amount of mental gymnastics needed to deny what is front of everyone in every instant of their lives.

Matter and mind are not the same and mind is not produced from matter. That there are correlates between the body of a sentient being and the content of their experience is common sense but not proof that their body is causing the very ability to experience anything.

You would think that absolutely no progress being made on how dead matter somehow produces experience would make people question their assumptions. Instead you get people denying that they have a mind or just coping by thinking that if they map yet another correlation they will finally crack the code.

I pasted a blog that I wrote myself and flagged hundreds of patterns. Granted, the article is 15,000 words so some are expected but there are simply too many false positives to make this and any similar tool have any usefulness beyond flagging the most obvious offenders.

And looking at its suggestions, they are not very good. People are better developing their own writing style than trusting generic advice meant for common-denominator writing.

No need. You just find someone that has a proper transmission, meaning that they were taught by a teacher that also had transmission, and so on. It's sort of like medical school. Your doctor was trained by doctors that trained under other doctors and so on.

People are free to take whatever they want from Buddhism and practice and teach it, even if completely unqualified. There is no dharma police to call. I was just making the point that calling teachings that reject core tenants of Buddhism by the same name is often just done to help them associate with whatever "clout" the word Buddhism has in the popular imagination.

Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction is an example of how to properly go about this process without overstating what it really is.

If it's any consolation, they are full of shit. In the second jhana and above, the factors of initial and sustained attention disappear. In practical terms, this means you cannot direct your thoughts away from the object of concentration once you enter such state. You have to decide beforehand how long you will be in that state and give yourself a mental timer. See Dipa Ma's biography for a case of someone actually entering higher jhanas that way.

This is the reason that anything beyond the first dhyana is not encouraged in Mahayana, as it is impossible to apply vipasyana in a state of concentration so deep that you cannot direct your mind.

The teachers popular in the SF scene are inflating their own achievements and the ones of their students by using very lightweight criteria. I had that experience when I attended a TWIM retreat before their founder died. According to them, I reached the fourth or fifth jhana. I can assure you I did not.

There is plenty of proof, just not the type of proof likely to be accepted by people looking for a measurement from an external device, which precludes scientific proof until consciousness can be measured. Given that science cannot identify consciousness in live organisms at this time, you are going to have to wait a long time.

In general, there are three commonly accepted methods in Buddhist epistemology to know if something is true: perception, inference, and testimony. For the specific case of rebirth, common proofs use either perception, or inference.

- Perception: You train in states of concentration and use those to gain direct knowledge of past lives. Maybe some people would find this unconvincing even if they had the experience. Certainly not something likely to be accepted as scientific as Ian Stevenson's research has shown, even if the case presented was iron-clad.

- Inference: This uses Buddhist logic and an understanding of dependent origination. This specific argument comes from Dharmakīrti.

- Every moment of consciousness must have a substantial cause.

- Physical matter can serve as a cooperative condition for consciousness, but it cannot be consciousness's substantial cause, because matter and mind are fundamentally different in nature. Matter is extended, non-luminous, non-aware and consciousness is luminous and aware. If you are a scientific materialist, you will not accept this, but it must be noted that there is no scientific evidence of any kind for dead matter gaining awareness.

- Therefore, each moment of consciousness must arise from a preceding moment of consciousness of similar type.

- Then you trace this chain to the first moment of your present life. The chain must have been preceded by a moment of consciousness of similar type. The same logic applies to the last moment of your present life.

- Therefore, consciousness must be a stream that transcends physical birth and death.

Again, I am aware many people won't find this convincing, but to say that Buddhism does not attempt to prove rebirth and karma is not true.

"But the cost of the mindfulness revolution has been Buddhism’s lost monopoly on many of its core concepts. Very few of those using Buddhist practices will ever become Buddhists in a religious sense. California Buddhism is one of the most successful cultural syntheses of the last century; but as far as conversion goes, it seems that it is Buddhism that has embraced California rather than the other way around."

Pretty much. Sad state of affairs. I don't care if people find something positive in Buddhism and offer their own takes, but too many people call their offerings "Buddhism" for the clout. Finding a qualified teacher becomes very difficult if you are actually interested in Buddhism.

On the positive side, I don't actually agree with the first sentence. You still have to find a proper Buddhist teacher if you want to be taught the good stuff. Even if you found the instructions somehow, it either requires proper motivation (at which point you are a buddhist) or a transmission for those methods to actually work.

I mostly work with existing codebases so I didn't really want to vibecode for real.

The only vibecoded thing was an iOS app and I didn't follow this process because I don't know iOS programming nor do I want to learn it. This only works if you know at least how to define functions and data structures in the language, but I think most PMs could learn that if they set their minds to it.

It's mostly rust projects so error handling is writing `?` and defining the signatures as either Option or Result for the most part.

I've been trying codex and claude code for the past month or so. Here's the workflow that I've ended up with for making significant changes.

- Define the data structures in the code yourself. Add comments on what each struct/enum/field does.

- Write the definitions of any classes/traits/functions/interfaces that you will add or change. Either leave the implementations empty or write them yourself if they end up being small or important enough to write by hand (or with AI/IDE autocompletion).

- Write the signatures of the tests with a comment on what it's verifying. Ideally you would write the tests yourself, specially if they are short, but you can leave them empty.

- Then at this point you involve the agent and tell it to plan how to complete the changes without barely having to specify anything in the prompt. Then execute the plan and ask the agent to iterate until all tests and lints are green.

- Go through the agent's changes and perform clean up. Usually it's just nitpicks and changes to conform to my specific style.

If the change is small enough, I find that I can complete this with just copilot in about the same amount of time it would take to write an ambiguous prompt. If the change is bigger, I can either have the agent do it all or do the fun stuff myself and task the agent with finishing the boring stuff.

So I would agree with the title and the gist of the post but for different reasons.

Example of a large change using that strategy: https://github.com/trane-project/trane/commit/d5d95cfd331c30...

I think full literate programming is overkill but I've been doing a lighter version of this:

- Module level comments with explanations of the purpose of the module and how it fits into the whole codebase.

- Document all methods, constants, and variables, public and private. A single terse sentence is enough, no need to go crazy.

- Document each block of code. Again, a single sentence is enough. The goal is to be able to know what that block does in plain English without having to "read" code. Reading code is a misnomer because it is a different ability from reading human language.

Example from one of my open-source projects: https://github.com/trane-project/trane/blob/master/src/sched...

Tried to use Show HN for my new project a couple months ago with almost no traction. It's a software literacy tutor, so I guess it's not the right audience, but my intuition aligns with this. For reference, an earlier post showing the practice engine that powers the literacy tutor did pretty well back in 2023 and it was my first post. I've had more success getting sign ups trying to do just the tiniest bit of SEO.

Trane (good post): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31980069

Pictures Are For Babies (lame post): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45290805

This is completely incorrect. The process of Tukdam has nothing to do with diet.

I can’t say what the actual process involves with too many details because it’s not appropriate to share with outsiders, but it involves meditating through sleep, which is considered a similar process to death.

The people doing this are good enough to practice through the night that they recognize a certain part of the death process and temporarily abide in it. When they stop, they die for real and their body decomposes.

For the past three years, I have been working on Trane (https://github.com/trane-project/trane/), a deliberate practice engine that helps users master complex skills. I showed it in a previous Show HN post. I wanted to build something on top of it that would be useful to a wider audience and showcase its full potential.

I learned about the literacy crisis and figured creating a literacy program would be cost-effective and impactful. After researching the science of reading and writing acquisition, I created Pictures Are For Babies, a literacy program that integrates Trane with a full curriculum to teach literacy to the college level and best-in-class pedagogy.

Two products are being released today. A Lite version available for free with no time limits and no payment required. And a Full version that aims to develop true mastery of literacy at the college level and beyond. The Full version is available via a $1000 one-time payment or a $20/month subscription with lifetime software and content updates included.

The first release of the Full version is the first step to accomplishing the ambitious goal of developing literacy to the highest level. It includes the completed curriculum for reading and writing at the symbol, word, and sentence levels. Upcoming releases will add the remaining tracks of the curriculum, focused on reading comprehension of a variety of text types and explicit writing instruction at the sentence and paragraph levels.

The Lite version includes the first levels of the curriculum. The value of the Lite version goes well beyond its content. By integrating the correct pedagogy from the ground up, it serves as a complete and professional tool for detection, prevention, and remediation of reading difficulties in early readers.

From its very first version, Pictures Are For Babies goes beyond all other literacy programs in its scope, depth, and ambition across multiple dimensions:

- By integrating Trane, the student receives a personalized learning experience that enables them to practice at the edge of their current abilities, all at the click of a button. It enables the student to learn more efficiently and the tutor to focus on delivering instruction and support instead of managing scheduling.

- It is one of the few programs that incorporates the concept of orthographic mapping from the ground up. Orthographic mapping is the process by which words are stored in long-term memory for instant retrieval. Programs that incorporate these findings develop true fluency, fix most reading difficulties, and deliver effect sizes that are multiples of those delivered by phonics-only programs.

- It includes a comprehensive and systematic curriculum that covers the entire journey from learning letter names and sounds to reading and writing sentences of college-level complexity. The initial curriculum contains over 1,200 lessons and teaches over 18,000 unique words.

- It includes no pictures, and does not engage in any form of gamification or other distractions. The choice is not arbitrary. Orthographic mapping research shows that reading and writing acquisition are at their core phonological processes. By removing these distractions and focusing on fostering the conditions for deliberate practice, Pictures Are For Babies shows respect for the science and for students as capable learners who can rise to the challenges and learn to love literacy for its own sake.

Let me know what you think! I am happy to answer any questions about the product and about the science behind it. For screenshots of the software, please visit the user interface page at https://picturesareforbabies.com/manual/user-interface/.

Projects seem broken as well. Does not follow instructions, talks in Spanish, completely ignores my questions, and sometimes appears to be having a conversation with itself while ignoring everything I say. I even typed random key presses and it just kept on giving me the same unwanted answer, sometimes in Spanish.

Finally got access to it. It's so awful. I asked it something, answered in Spanish with something completely different. In another conversation, it kept giving me completely different answers to something I didn't even ask. Telling it to stop doesn't do anything. It ignores it and continues a conversation with itself.

Sure, no problem in pointing it out. I did not hide the fact and I invite anyone to do their own research. The comments mostly draw from David Kilpatrick’s book “Essentials of Assessing, Preventing, and Overcoming Reading Difficulties”.

It’s a very academic book and I didn’t see anyone in the comments aware of orthographic mapping. The critique of direct instruction can also be found there. No intervention that does not train phonemic awareness to the advanced level had the massive results of those which do. That also applies to OG, which was mentioned in the thread.

Not selling anything yet, that page is a placeholder. But I will have a free and untimed version that should be enough to fix most reading difficulties caused by phonemic deficits.

Which I can do without worrying about cannibalizing my own business because I am not selling a reading app, but a complete path to mastery of reading and writing to college level and beyond. That hopefully helps clarify the difference in price.

So the reason some kids seem to read with some instruction, even if it's not formal and super explicit, is that they have a good phonemic system. That is, they quickly understand that words are made up of smaller units (e.g. cat is /k/ + /a/ + /t/) and can manipulate them without much trouble. That ability is essential to map words efficiently in long term memory for effortlessly retrieval, which in turns creates a sight vocabulary (a large bank of words that are instantly recognized).

Kids with phonemic deficits, on the other hand, cannot efficiently develop a sight vocabulary. Even if they are taught phonics and can decode, that decoding is effortful and leaves little room for more complex tasks.

So direct instruction (the philosophy behind this book) has been shown to only have modest gains compared to the best interventions, which have more than double the effect size.

It works fine (not the best) for kids with no reading difficulties, but it completely lacks the understanding and the tasks that fix phonemic deficits, the actual source of most reading difficulties.

It's not entirely a bad book, but won't be of too much use for kids with reading difficulties. Since it's only a few bucks, it's not a bad investment. Just be aware of its limitations. If your kid is not developing fluent and effortless reading (not just decoding), you will need to use a method that is aware of how to fix phonemic deficits.

See my other comments in this page for more.

See my other, more detailed, comment on this thread, but the reason for this is that phonics is part of the solution, but it's not what creates fluent readers.

Most phonics programs do not treat automaticity as the goal, so kids with effortful and slow decoding count as "reading". The science is very clear on what causes this lack of automaticity and what exercises best correct it, but most programs ignore it.

So kids with no deficits will develop mostly fine, but those with them will look to be "reading" but will have trouble once the material requires too much of them.

I'll keep the self-promotion to a minimum, but I have been spending lots of time reading on the science consensus on how children actually become fluent readers as part of my upcoming product Pictures Are For Babies (https://picturesareforbabies.com), a literacy program that uses a deliberate practice engine I created to teach literacy from A-B-C to post-secondary level.

Phonics is all the rage, and I was planning to make it central to my pedagogy, but it turns out the answer is a bit more complicated, especially if you want to work with children with reading difficulties.

Phonics is part of the answer, but it's only the first step. Introducing children to the explicit mapping of graphemes to phonemes (letter to sounds) teaches decoding, but skilled reading is not decoding.

Actual reading is developed through a process called orthographic mapping. The result of this process is storing the grapheme to phoneme mappings in long-term memory for immediate retrieval. The words stored in this way form a sight vocabulary that spans tens of thousands of words in fluent readers.

When taught only phonics, kids run the risk of plateauing in later grades. It's not evident at first because the material they are given is simple and deals with concrete subjects (e.g. "Mike got a bunny for his birthday"). Later material uses many more words that don't follow phonics "rules" and deal with abstract material. Under these circumstances, decoding is too slow and effortful and leaves little remaining capacity to deal with harder tasks like comprehension.

The main cause of issues in developing this sight vocabulary is phonological deficits, not IQ, motivation, intelligence, visual processing, or attention like one might imagine. Kids with these deficits have trouble understanding that words are made up of smaller sound units and cannot work with them. Because of that, they cannot store the mapping efficiently and their vocabulary and fluency is limited.

Thankfully, the best interventions that fix these deficits are not too complicated and can correct the issues with as little as a dozen of hours of correct instruction. The main drawback is that finding and targeting those deficits is time-consuming for the instructors, but my program deals with that through the practice engine, which automates all that work.

The bad news is that most teachers are not aware of this and are simply being moved to phonics, which will not work for all children unless those phonemics deficits are identified and remediated. Worse news is that most commercial products that claim to be evidence-based or backed by the "science of reading" still use phonics and make no mention of orthographic mapping, the actual process that produces fluent readers. Again, phonics instruction is part of the answer, but nowhere near the entire story.

You can look at my pedagogy document for more info. Although it's meant to be about my product, it still contains a primer of the actual research on how full literacy (not just reading, but writing as well) is developed: https://picturesareforbabies.com/home/pedagogy/

Nonetheless, Bloom was on to something: Tutoring and mastery learning do have a degree of experimental support, and fortunately it seems that carefully designed software systems can completely replace the instructional side of traditional teaching, achieving better results, on par with one to one tutoring. However, designing them is a hard endeavour, and there is a motivational component of teachers that may not be as easily replicable purely by software.

I've been working on an implementation of mastery learning and other related techniques called Trane (https://github.com/trane-project/trane/) for the past three years or so. Mastery learning is the main one, but it also integrates spaced repetition, interleaving, mixing difficulties, and reward propagation (doing well or bad in an exercise affects how related exercises are scheduled).

I think it works pretty well, but you need to pair it with proper pedagogy of the skill you want to learn and the proper curriculum. The latter is the hardest part, so it's being my main limitation. I've used some external resources to build courses, and they work well, but obviously it would work much better with a full curriculum built from the ground up.

Currently working on Pictures Are For Babies (https://picturesareforbabies.com/), which is meant to do just that for literacy. I am hoping to do a first release soon. As for the motivation angle, the solution in this particular instance is fairly simple. Use the software to enforce scheduling andpedagogy,y and a human tutor to provide emotional and social support. This division allows any literate person to become an effective tutor with a few hours of training.

I am hoping that the average student can complete the whole curriculum in five years. That would mean that (assuming they start at between 4 and 5 years old), the average student would have college-level reading and writing skills by the time they are nine or ten.

Most complete explanation so far is in the pedagogy page: https://picturesareforbabies.com/home/pedagogy/

I've never had an Intel laptop work well in the efficiency and thermal department, Apple or not. I used to blame Apple too, but seeing the difference, it's hard to argue who the main culprit was. Can't design around a bad foundation.

The thermals were all Intel’s fault. My 2019 MacBook from work is an oven. I can’t tell whether my smaller m4 max is turned on by touching it.

I have been mostly working on a set of courses based around backing tracks I got from a course called “improvise for real”. So I only had to make the structure of those backing tracks explicit, which only required knowing the circle of fifths.