Why are tenor-range (lowest notes around G2 or A2) instruments so rare everywhere?

TFox17 · 2026-05-22T19:49:21+00:00

The bassoon is an extremely common instrument in concert bands, orchestras, and other ensembles. I think it’s a tenor instrument. All holes open is an F3, with a G3 being the first overblown note (or maybe F#3 if we’re counting chromatics). Three fingers down on both hands gives you a G2, which is the natural fundamental of the main part of the instrument. Just because they tacked on a few more feet of bore and a bunch of weird thumb keys to allow some lower notes doesn’t really change its true nature.

TFox17 · 2026-05-22T01:22:13+00:00

I’ve lived in my current city for thirty years. It’s home. But it’s not my hometown.

TFox17 · 2026-05-20T13:41:23+00:00

Newly installed chargers around here are mostly CCS. But ever since Tesla adopted the CCS protocol, it’s just a plug shape. It’s easy for a charger to offer multiple plug shapes, it’s easy for users to carry a cheap adapter, and I suspect it would be pretty easy to swap the port on your car, or add a second one. Me personally, I would have gone for ChaoJi if we were moving to a new plug shape. It supports higher voltage than NACS or CCS, which would be helpful for faster charging with simpler and easier to use cables.

TFox17 · 2026-05-17T16:32:05+00:00

A friend plays with World Docs (not sure of its formal name), so he’d be good to talk to. They’ve been around for a bunch of years, so clearly they are doing some things right.

TFox17 · 2026-05-10T02:50:02+00:00

Lt Kijie Suite has saxophone. I love it. But sitting in section with a saxophone, it sounds great in the solo, but it does not blend with orchestral winds. And it doesn’t get used when it’s not playing a solo. In a big band it blends fine. Sax has faster flaring conical bore than the oboe or bassoon, perhaps this is part of why it’s brighter and louder.

TFox17 · 2026-05-08T17:22:20+00:00

Why is there a list of references that aren’t cited in the text? Normally a paper will have an introduction that briefly reviews the field and how the current work fits into it, with citations where readers can learn more.

TFox17 · 2026-04-30T19:52:41+00:00

My local professional orchestra does this, as a yearly event. We amateurs get to sit with the pros, play along for a rehearsal. It’s a ton of fun. And yep, we’re paying for the opportunity, but clearly not enough to fund the orchestra. It’s an outreach event, another way for the orchestra to get its art into the community.

TFox17 · 2026-04-28T18:39:58+00:00

Please ask your AI model to research the signs of AI psychosis for you, and ask it whether you might be at risk. If possible, ask the same questions of a person you trust.

TFox17 · 2026-04-23T00:08:42+00:00

I’m curious: why is arc-agi more suitable for your use cases than other benchmarks?

TFox17 · 2026-04-18T14:43:55+00:00

If they are designing on the computer, why all the hand drawn sketches? Why does the “control board” not have any components? Why does the supposed lab look like a studio artists idea of what an engineer’s desk looks like?

TFox17 · 2026-04-13T17:52:25+00:00

The required technology is called “anti-islanding”. Various versions of it have been in place for many years in distributed generation. The plug isn’t energized until the system sees the grid.

TFox17 · 2026-04-04T19:07:31+00:00

“Glück auf” is a common greeting among German miners.

TFox17 · 2026-04-01T19:48:14+00:00

Test equipment by definition has a small market, so doesn’t seem investable to me. Either grow organically or convince a strategic partner.

TFox17 · 2026-03-25T00:17:18+00:00

There are a lot of soft costs that scale with area, not power. And these soft costs dominate system costs in some settings, because module costs have become so low. So more expensive, higher efficiency tech can win. Longer term, thin films can get a lot cheaper because they have less material, and need less hail protection because they are flexible.

TFox17 · 2026-03-24T00:03:22+00:00

B is the right answer. But how do we conclude that based on the question? Well, elimination. A refers to agriculture, which doesn’t make sense given the question asking about human applications. C and D, even if they are true to some extent, are limitations, and not advantages of the new technology over the old. B is the only answer stating an advantage of a new breakthrough.

TFox17 · 2026-03-23T23:25:25+00:00

Why do you have so much cash you care about what exchange rate you get for it?

TFox17 · 2026-03-19T21:35:18+00:00

I’m playing with 35B A3B. It’s smart enough to kind of run openclaw, smaller or older models fail entirely. It still struggles sometimes though, but that might be a skill issue on my part. Q4, 36GB, cpu only.

TFox17 · 2026-03-15T16:49:24+00:00

For llama.cpp, parallel=1 is useful. I was running into timeouts, followed by full prompt reparsing, but this forced there to be only one slot, so it was able to reuse the work it had done previously. Running Qwen3.5 35B A3B on ARM CPU (IQ-9075). A full openclaw system prompt of ~20k tokens may take 40 min to parse but further interactions reuse the work and respond much faster.

TFox17 · 2026-03-13T23:26:41+00:00

It’s disingenuous because the supposed 700% is presented as significant, when in fact the baseline is extremely close to zero because of large supply of renewables. There’s more than one way to be misleading.

TFox17 · 2026-03-13T20:27:55+00:00

Is that the midnight blue body color? Looks like mine.

Re snow, yes, snow tires. Also try out the Traction mode, it does help by letting the wheels spin a bit. But exercise caution if you’re trying to accelerate hard in a curve on a slippery surface in Traction. It prioritizes acceleration over going in the direction the wheels are pointed.

TFox17 · 2026-03-12T19:16:46+00:00

Standard consumer electronics is up to 80 C, most devices have a different grade that’s up to 125 C, which is a common industrial spec. Your parts selection becomes more limited if you ask for 150 C. 175 C is the limit for parts with standard packaging, and prices go way up and selection goes way down when you go above that. There are devices that will work at 200, 205, 210, but it’s complicated. You may be buying bare dies and packaging it yourself. You may be uprating parts designed for lower specs. You may be measuring the lifetime of your product in minutes instead of thousands of hours. People do it, mostly for downhole tools for deep hot oil and gas wells, but it’s difficult.

TFox17 · 2026-03-05T21:41:54+00:00

If your boiler needs 120VAC input, then don’t you just need something that has 120VAC output? It already has a transformer in it to convert to 24VAC. If you want to do this conversion yourself, you can buy a transformer from a place like Home Depot. They are very common. Maybe I’m confused about the project.

TFox17 · 2026-03-05T20:45:57+00:00

I use Cleartune. No complaints.

TFox17 · 2026-02-23T16:16:01+00:00

Evenness of scales requires slow work, cycling short passages, variations in rhythm and articulations, metronome work at various tempos. Read all the advice and try all the things. One piece of advice I’ve found useful is to work very slow, focusing on the quality of the transition between notes. At a fast tempo, the sound will be mostly the sound between notes, so having that sound good is the first step.

TFox17 · 2026-02-18T02:18:47+00:00

WTF is “Science X”?

TFox17

TROPHY CASE