MeetMeAtTheMovies [they/them]

I wrote an app for my wife and it was really sad watching her just fumble past bugs instead of pointing them out when I was literally watching over her shoulder to get feedback on what needed fixed. I had to tell her several times, “No, don’t just keep reloading. What’s wrong?” Like we’ve all been trained so hard to accept shitty software that even when I could fix stuff easily I know people are just passively accepting the bugs.

The SOTA changes every couple weeks, but Claude’s been very dominant for a while, yeah. There’s currently a lot of hype around GPT-5.4, but even then there’s a caveat that Claude is still better at UI.

I just personally find Cursor to be pretty buggy. But I think the Replit mention is more of a tell that someone vibe codes but doesn’t actually code. It’s been advertised to people as a way to build end to end apps without any coding experience. And to be fair, they’ve done a good job of building on the past decade of work in the Typescript community to make an entire app end to end type safe and therefore checkable by the compiler. Convex has done something similar in a way that I prefer and in my experience LLMs are very good at working in Convex projects as well.

Really at the end of the day I was just being pithy. Kind of poking fun at how much of a moving target SOTA is.

SOTA vibe coding

but…

you have to use Replit and Cursor

Middle manager ass setup

does not cause gonorrhea

[citation needed]

Isn’t there a difference between “the most squares fit into a square” and “a collection of squares optimized for maximum small-square area inside of a larger square”? If there’s a difference in solutions, what would the solution for the latter actually be?

Mathematicians halp plz

The most competent white collar workers I know use exclamation points to the near exclusion of all other pronunciation. This is wild

According to the APA website, it’s more about accessibility and the cost of printing color vs grayscale

https://apastyle.apa.org/style-grammar-guidelines/tables-figures/colors

God forbid women have hobbies.

Tall back pain person here. Gonna try this

Warning: unused variable

Just add it to the pile I guess

Okay so sounds can be broken down into individual tones called sine waves. The math that lets us do this doesn’t care about how tonal or noisy the sound is. It takes arbitrary input. However, human brains and ears (as well as those of many other creatures) seem to optimize for tonality of some type.

The simplified explanation is that we like when the frequencies of the tones that make up a sound are in whole number ratios (the harmonic series). However, there’s a tolerance for frequencies which are close to those ratios but not perfect. And when harmonics don’t fall perfectly within the harmonic series, we can instead prefer intervals between notes which are slightly “out of tune” compared to what the harmonic series would dictate. For instruments like strings and woodwinds where the vibration of the air happens along a more or less straight line, the harmonics tend to be close enough to the harmonic series for this not to matter a ton. But for instruments with different resonant features (bells are a common example), the effects of this are more pronounced.

There is also some math which makes tuning instruments solely to the harmonic series impractical. This combined with the tolerance for consonance I mentioned before has led to a rich sea of different traditions which play around with tuning in different ways. The western tradition alone has a long history with how a twelve note chromatic scale ought to be tuned. It turns out that equally diving the octave into twelve notes just so happens to be a good approximation of a lot of harmonic series intervals, but some intervals are less perfect than others. It’s all a series of compromises.