My disconnect is I can't read sheet music. So I can hear it, then memorize where it is on the piano/keyboard... but that just teaches you play piano by ear. It doesn't teach you how to play music in the traditional sense.

I guess this showing you the sheet music as you find the notes can help with that, but as others noted - I'd like a "mess around" mode, before a "test" mode.

I think it depends on your end goal.

I have a great ear and am terrible at reading sheet music. Fine if you aspire to be a rock guitarist. Not so fine if you aspire to be a classical pianist.

Funny, but I'm final tired of my poor sight reading and have set a goal for 2025 to average one hour of piano playing from sheet music per day.

And I agree...a "mess around" mode on the app would be great. Feels almost punitive when I make a mistake.

Hey RyanOD,

If you're looking to improve your sight-reading and don’t mind playing church music, I highly recommend picking up a second-hand copy of an old Episcopal Church hymnal (I like the 1940 edition). All the pieces are four-voice and the rhythms are relatively simple, so you can concentrate on sight reading. Good luck!

https://hymnary.org/hymnal/HPEC1940

Sounds like a good idea. Right now, I'm splitting my time between drill based content (Bartok, Gurlitt, Kunz, etc), beginner classical pieces, and the occasional blues.

Funny, but in church, I spend more time than maybe I should sight reading hymns during the sermon. :)

Any tips or resources on how to get started? I drew a lot of comics as a kid/teen, and I've done 3d modeling as a hobbyist. But using physical media for sculpting has always seemed daunting.

I started by buying some Sculpey clay, some armature wire, and a 6-inch wooden base. This and an assortment of tools. Then I found an online 3d model I could turn in all directions. And then, I just tried to sculpt it. It wasn't great, but it wasn't bad. From there I looked for video instruction on YouTube. There are a ton of sculpting videos out there. Books: there is a great book by the Shiflett Brothers that was very helpful to me (Clay Sculpting with the Shiflett Brothers). They also have a great sculpting forum on Facebook. Eventually I signed up for the Stan Winston School of Character Arts. This has been incredibly helpful for the direction I am going.

So, I started small, and then built from there. I only bought materials and tools when my journey necessitated them so I could refrain from getting ahead of myself. I think this is valuable, as it is easy for me to get carried away in the beginning of anything new, and go whole-hog only to find later that my interest lay elsewhere. I wanted to prove to myself that my purchases were for a reason and meaningful to where I was at, at that moment.

I have kept a blog of my learning experiences, trying to give back as I can. I don't want to break the forum rules, but if you want I can send you links to my site. It has my work and the blog has outlines of what I have done, steps, resources, etc. I hope it is helpful to someone out there going along this path.

  manage.py makemigrations myapp --empty --name add_some_view

(in the migration file)

  operations=[migrations.RunSQL("Create View some_view AS ....", "DROP VIEW IF EXISTS...."]

(in your models.py)

  class SomeView(models.Model):
       class Meta:
           db_table = 'some_view'
           managed = False

  manage.py makemigrations myapp --name add_some_view_model

An extremely common thing to do. Also great with materialized views. I bet it's documented somewhere in Django's docs.

So you're openly saying you're fine with quantity over quality.... in software engineering? That's fine for a MVP, maybe, but nothing beyond on that IMHO unless they're throw away scripts.

"Houston, we have a problem."

"Yeah, but we did it in a 10th of the time"

Of course it's fine for any project.

There is exactly one "best" programmer in the world, and at this moment he/she is working on at most one project. Every other project in the world is accepting less than the "best" possible quality. Yes... in software engineering.

As soon as you sat down at the keyboard this morning, your employer accepted a sacrifice in quality for the sake of quantity. So did mine. Because neither one of us is the best. They could have hired someone better but they hired you and they're fine with that. They'd rather have the code you produce today than not have it.

It's the same for an AI. It could produce some code for you, right now, for nearly free. Would you rather have that code or not have it? It depends on the situation, yeah not always but sometimes it's worth having.

I didn't intend to imply "best" even in the scope of a team, let alone every software engineer in the world. But, I understand your point and it's fair.

Here is the thing, most software engineers are not designing rockets, they are making basic CRUD apps. If there is a minor defect it can be caught and corrected without much issue. Our jobs are a lot less "critical infrastructure" than a lot of software engineers will allow their egos to accept.

Sure if you are making some medical surgery robot do it right, but if you are making a website the recommends wine pairings who cares if one of the buttons has a weird animation bug that doesn't even get noticed for a couple of years.

I think I'm "most" engineers and I haven't ever worked on something that was "just" a CRUD app. Having a DB behind your web app doesn't make it "just" a CRUD.

It's really overestimated how many simple apps exist.

What kind of apps do you work on?

Regular SaaS products of different kinds, cloud software, hosting software, etc. Really representative of most of the Web-enabled software out there.

For every one of them there has been an almost negligible amount of CRUD code, the meat of every one of those apps was very specific business logic. Some were also heavy on the frontend with equal amount of complexity on the backend. As a senior/staff level engineer you also have dive into other things like platform enablement, internal tooling, background jobs and data wrangling, distributed architectures, etc. which are even farther from CRUD.

A fancy CRUD app is still a CRUD app.

Yes, like a guided missile is a fancy firecracker.

Not to call you out but this is exactly what I meant when I said software engineers have egos that will not let them accept that they are not designing critical stuff.

Comparing your cloud based CRUD app to a missile is a perfect illustration. There is no dishonor in admitting that our stuff isn't going to kill anyone if there is a bug. Don't write bad code, but also sometimes just getting something out the door is much better than perfect quality (bird in the hand and all that).

> software engineers have egos that will not let them accept that they are not designing critical stuff

> Don't write bad code, but also sometimes just getting something out the door is much better than perfect quality (bird in the hand and all that).

Your bank account can be represented as a CR app, it's two letters short of CRUD, but it doesn't make it simple or simpler in any sense of the words.

Now the question: how much are you tolerant to bugs in your bank account? How often can they happen before you complain?

Banking software is critical, but guess what, most software engineers are not writing banking software. I never said no software engineers write critical code. Heck I'd argue most at some point in their career will write something that needs to be as bug free as possible... at some point in their careers.

My point is that for most software engineering getting a product out is more important that a super high quality bar that slows everything down.

If you are writing banking software or flight control systems please do it with care, if you are making some React based recipe website or something I don't really care (99% of software engineering falls into this latter category in my opinion).

Software engineers need to get over themselves a bit, AI really exposed how many were just getting by making repetitive junk and thinking they were special.

> most software engineers are not writing banking software

Many software engineers write software for people who won't like the idea that their request/case can be ignored/failed/lost, when expressed openly on the front page of your business offering. Are bookings important enough? Are gifts for significant events important? Maybe you're okay with losing my code commits every once in a while, I don't know. And I'm not sure why you think it's okay to spread this bad management idea of "not valuable or critical enough" among engineers who should know better and who should keep sources of bad ideas at bay when it comes to software quality in general.

Not to call you out either but it seems you have really no idea what a basic CRUD app is. Which is fine, I guess not everyone likes to reads the base definitions of these things. It's clear I replied to the wrong person as we don't have a shared understanding of complexity.

That is just CRUD with buzzword soup around it.

> quantity over quality

Yes? Making quality concessions for more code or features is part of the job.

Not to pick apart your analogy, but asserting that atheists haven't tried religion is misinformed.

Brain-rot can be associated with heavy LLM usage.

What languages and frameworks? What is the domain space you're operating in? I use Cursor to help with some tasks, but mainly only use the autocomplete. It's great; no complaints. I just don't ever see being able to turn over anywhere close to 90% with the stuff we work on.

My stack is React/Express/Drizzle/Postgres/Node/Tailwind. It's built on Hetzner/AWS, which I terraformed with AI.

You can see my site here, if you'd like: https://chipscompo.com/

I know it's just a google away, but I use Arc and I'm not in the loop on them poo-pooing on their users. Can you elaborate?

They shut down development on Arc and then started a new browser focused on AI features… then sold to Atlassian

There are worse outcomes for startups.

Good on them then! But it's still poopooing on the users.

It goes beyond that though. There are games and in-game content that aren't being reviewed. There are claims of player skins where the characters are wearing a t-shirt with an actual photo of Charlie Kirk's death (the shot to the neck).

Anyone can make a Roblox game and publish it, and there doesn't seem to be a lot of moderations or verification going on. And you don't need to "talk", voice or text. You can emote, type on signs, and communicate in other ways.

> And you don't need to "talk", voice or text. You can emote, type on signs, and communicate in other ways

I had blocked chat on my kid's account and thought I was ok. Then I see her playing one game and ask her what she's doing. She says she's updating her character status (description etc) to talk to other players.

Apparently, for all the "free speech requires us all to tolerate nazi" logic I hear here all the the time, a mere rumor of maybe someone being jerk toward fascist is enough to go all the other way.

Roblox do actually takes down violent content, in reality. But that is never the important part.

> There are claims of player skins where the characters are wearing a t-shirt with an actual photo of Charlie Kirk's death (the shot to the neck).

Gambling and facilitating sexual predation is probably worth regulating, but I don't find tasteless jokes a sufficient cause for intervention.

Nor is this even a remotely new phenomenon. I was on Newgrounds as a pre-teenager when people were making wacky flash games about school shootings and 9/11.

That is where content rating should come in, and games should be reviewed by Roblox staff before being approved. Then, Roblox age restrictions could play a role in keeping a 7-year old from a seeing photos of a murder.

I would add that there is psychology at play as well. Someone might scoff at a $200 ticket, thinking it's ridiculous to pay that much, even if you could then eat at the venue for $20.

But they'll pay $100 for a ticket, feeling it's reasonable, and then end spending $120 on concessions and beer anyway. The smells, sights, atmosphere and wanting to "just enjoy it" are compelling forces to reach for your wallet IMHO.

Definitely. There's almost always a strong incentive to move charges as far back into the flow as possible. Knock $5 off your ISP package price, then hit them with a $5 "infrastructure fee" at the credit card screen. For consumers, just because you picked a higher upfront price for a service doesn't mean you'll you won't be nickle-and-dimed later in addition, so it is not trivial to avoid. I guess you can view the "free with ads" model as the most popular implementation: get people in the door and then charge them with their time at crazy rates.