For a programmer, deriving intervals and chords and then hearing the code produce them is a pretty effective bridge

I don't think the article needs to get you all the way from A to S to be useful. A Fourier transform doesn't tell you why a song is good either, but understanding harmonics can still improve your mental model of sound. Same with temperament, intervals or why a keyboard is laid out the way it is.

Yeah, this is the advice I wish showed up more often in "learn music theory" discussions

I'm sort of the opposite - when I can name something, then play it, then I can hear it. E.g., going from minor third to major third to root. I can't "unhear" that in blues-based music now. But before it had a "name" it was just an interesting sounding "thing" that didn't pop out to me in any specific way.

I think there's still a pedagogical niche for what the article is doing. For someone coming from programming, "here's why these conventions aren't completely arbitrary" can be the thing that gets them interested enough to later learn harmony properly

I like this less as "music theory from first principles" and more as "why some of the machinery of Western music looks the way it does"

There’s a night-and-day difference between frontier and budget models, no question. But the issue isn't the tooling at all : if you put someone who doesn't know the rules of the road on a $15k carbon road bike, they're just gonna slam into a telephone pole at 30 mph instead of 6 mph

Just let him take down prod on a friday night once and leave him to deal with the PagerDuty alerts solo. Cures the urge to vibe-code infrastructure real fast

People like that are usually pretty good at deflecting onto other people. Likely you will end up being blamed in some way.

Two wires and two C cells? Careful, someone is going to put a subscription layer in front of that

"Only works with Juicero brand C cells."

I can squeeze off-brand C cells by hand.

Every individual product is "easy", but the moment you want two ecosystems to talk to each other you become a part-time distributed systems engineer

Truly a flawless strategy: convince every government and large company on earth that depending on US-hosted AI is a geopolitical risk.