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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: September 11th, 2023

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  • Its not that they don’t have pitch, per se, it’s that the nature of the sound they produce makes the concept of “pitch” kind of meaningless.

    Except for a pure sine wave, every tone is going to have multiple harmonics over the fundamental which is what actually gives an instrument, even the human voice, its timbre.

    Percussion instruments like cymbals and the snare drum create broad-spectrum noise. There’s essentially so many frequencies that it’s difficult for our brains to nail it down the fundamental pitch. It’s also what helps us hear them over the rest of the ensemble.

    Drums in general produce very short pulses of sound, which also makes it harder for the brain to tell what pitch it is. In harmonic analysis, any very short sound is actually broad-spectrum because it takes a ton of harmonics to produce a single sharp spike with rapid decay.

    I highly recommend downloading a spectrum analyzer app on your phone to get an intuition for this. If you’re on Android, I recommend Spectroid.

    Just run it and watch the screen while you make different sounds, approach various sound sources, play music, or just talk or sing. If you can whistle, that also produces an interesting result. You can actually see the frequency of the power grid in the harmonics produced by electric motors and transformer coils which is personally really fucking cool.


  • It’s a troll toll. It’ll get you a software engineering job with a roman numeral in the title at a company you’ve actually heard of. But if you’re almost done then there’s no reason not to stick with it.

    The early years of my career were quite a slog, having taught myself to program. I started out on freelancing websites, competing with devs from the third world who worked for pennies a day. I lucked into my first salaried job, got hired through my cousin.

    I will say, having some theory knowledge does come in handy occasionally. You might never have to write your own hashtable, but being able to understand the implementation of the structures you’re using helps a lot to make informed decisions about how you organize and access data, especially when you’re trying to optimize for performance or memory usage.

    One piece of unsolicited advice you might have heard before is to not discount the power of networking. The best written cover letter in the world can’t hold a candle to knowing someone who can put in a good word. Make friends with your professors and classmates, you never know who might think to look you up one day when their company is hiring. My old boss still offers me a job occasionally, more than five years later.


  • I’d tell myself not to waste the time, money or energy on college.

    I’m not against it in general, but going for a compsci degree when you’ve already gotten software dev work is definitely a waste of time unless your employer is paying for it. I just let my dad talk me into it after getting out of a bad job. Thankfully I only wasted one semester on it and got out because I found another job.

    Still, that turned out to be $4k in loans for just 6 units because I couldn’t file my FAFSA in time to qualify for any grants, thanks to my fucking undiagnosed ADHD father who couldn’t be bothered to file his taxes or even give me an accurate income required by the form. That was $4k I could have put into savings or invested instead.







  • It was actually her obsession with the afterlife and the coming of the end times that led to me cutting off contact with my mother in 2014 and me renouncing my faith.

    My mom was a devout Christian my whole life, but she went full-on fire-and-brimstone Bible thumper during her divorce from my dad. My dad had cheated on her multiple times and she’d finally had enough of it.

    She hated my dad for walking out, but vehemently denied that fact and instead projected her hatred onto God himself. She would always say my dad (and anyone who supported him on his side of the family) would be judged harshly for his actions in the next life. By the way, she said this about basically anyone she didn’t like, including people she disagreed with politically or morally; it might not surprise you to learn that she was quite a bigot as well.

    In the last few years I knew her, she started to obsess over the prophecies in Revelations. She’d constantly send me chain emails about how the various conflicts in the middle east were a sign that Jesus Christ was about to return, or a misquoted article about the US government looking into identity microchips was Obama (the Antichrist, obviously) giving his followers the Mark of the Beast. The last time I spoke to her was in 2014 so I never got to ask her what she thought of Trump and his MAGA hats, but I have a strong feeling the irony would have been lost on her; I once had to explain to her that an article she showed me from The Onion was satire and her response was, “they shouldn’t be allowed to say those things.”

    She died in 2020, but not from COVID. Two years earlier, she had let a kidney stone get infected which then progressed to full-on sepsis. It responded to the treatment at the time but the infection damaged her heart, which ended up killing her. For the life of me, I couldn’t imagine why she didn’t see a doctor because a kidney stone would have hurt like hell, but then I realized she probably felt that it was just God calling her home.

    So yes, anecdotally speaking there are religious people out there who are obsessed with the afterlife. I think people are still inherently afraid of death, though, so they’re not exactly in a hurry to die. But for a religious person who’s ready to die, it’s likely nearly all they can think about.