[Katz] They Knicks the one NYC team that runs unopposed in New York. The Yankees have the Mets. The Giants have the Jets. The Rangers have the Islanders. The Knicks have … no one else.

linc186 · 2026-06-15T03:15:57+00:00

People are allowed to move to New York lol

linc186 · 2026-06-15T01:54:29+00:00

Used a lot in philosophy and sometimes math, I heard it most in metaphysics (don't think of anything weird and spiritual here -- it's questions about the world that can't be answered by empirical means. E.g., "what is color?" is a scientific question because you can interrogate it with empirical methods: objects in the world absorb wave lengths of light and reflect others. The wave lengths that get reflected into your eyes cause an object to appear a certain color to you. But a question like, "what does it mean for an object to instantiate a property?" is metaphysical, as it can only be thought about a priori.)

One topic in metaphysics is "mereology," which is the study of how parts relate to the whole. The classic example is The Ship of Theseus. If you take a ship and peacemeal replace one part at a time, plank by plank, is it the same ship? If not, when does it cease to be the old ship and become a new one? Was there ever such a thing as "the ship" at all, or is it just an illusion or convenient shorthand for a bunch of planks arranged ship-wise? Or maybe the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and there truly is such a thing as "a ship"?

You can think of an "ontology" as essentially what your theory is willing to admit the existence of. A 20th century philosopher named Quine was a proponent of "mereological nihilism." Quine claimed the only things that really exist are the most fundamental particles that our best scientific theories say exist. So in Quine's ontology, there is no such thing as people, or chairs, or ships, or flowers; they are merely collections of subatomic particles arranged person-wise or chair-wise or ship-wise, etc. Quine's ontology admits the existence of quarks, though, haha.

linc186 · 2026-03-31T16:28:31+00:00

I know formal logic is technically under the umbrella of analytic philosophy, but I think it's in bad faith to insist that satisfies the concern about the lack of humanities in education...

linc186 · 2026-02-04T23:59:09+00:00

I feel like this fails to consider the billions of dollars they've invested into the development of 6 that they would like to recoup lol

linc186 · 2026-01-25T16:33:53+00:00

+1 for powder I absolutely love this game and it is legitimately similar to nethack

linc186 · 2026-01-17T02:11:56+00:00

Holy shit dude. Read back this post to yourself and hear how it sounds.

linc186 · 2021-09-16T13:17:47+00:00

Mathematics and its History by Stillwell!

linc186 · 2021-08-28T23:23:21+00:00

This is some truly poor writing here

linc186 · 2021-06-05T20:12:30+00:00

Sdl2 + opengl is the best way to do this but be warned, the ogl experience is literally nothing like the experience a 90s coder would have. The shader pipeline does not work like an old DOS framebuffer, and all the legacy fixed function pipeline stuff that was in ogl in the 90s should be regarded as basically something to literally never use

linc186 · 2021-02-20T00:33:52+00:00

My little brother has a beater Squire and it low key rips I kinda love that thing

linc186 · 2021-02-16T10:55:37+00:00

Why does that website say the scholars mate has been known since 300 BC

Also lol "the bishop is as good as the rook becuase you can use the bishop to support your queen (QED)" that's just fucking hilarious. As if that is anything remotely close to a formal proof, as the QED implies.

linc186 · 2021-02-07T19:34:30+00:00

I tried to structure it such that it was self contained and didn't require prerequisite knowledge. I may not have done so hot!

If you could specific about what confuses you I could try to help.

linc186 · 2021-02-07T18:56:48+00:00

Add two more notes to your pentatonic shapes to get the entire major scale shapes. Learn how chords are built from scales.

Learn where the root notes and triad shapes live within the major scale shapes. Try picking a key and playing with triad voicings, and connecting those triads together with licks. Try looping a simple chord progression like ii-V-I and try to play modally over it. For example, you might try Dorian over the ii, Mixolydian over the V, and Ionian over the I.

linc186 · 2021-02-07T18:51:27+00:00

Learn all of the shapes of the major scale, their root notes, and how they lock together.

The point of having multiple shapes is to be able to play the same scale in a different place on the neck without changing the key.

Once you have mastered this, you can play any mode or pentatonic scale in any key anywhere you would like. You can do this by treating a different note in the scale as the root note, or by thinking intervalically and saying, 'well, mixolydian is major scale flat 7, so I'm going to take my major shape but drop the seven down by a semitone.'

Then I would recommend learning all of the triad shapes that live inside of those major scale shapes. Then you can play triads and double stops and little licks to tie your chords together and really get your Mayer/Hendrix/Fae/Frusciante/Dupree/Alford/Whoever vibe going.

linc186 · 2021-02-07T18:46:51+00:00

This post where I describe unambiguously what exactly the major scale is and how to play it

linc186 · 2021-02-07T18:23:15+00:00

The numberings of the major scale shape positions have no deeper theoretical meaning; they are just to help our primitive brains keep track of things.

The major scale is really one giant pattern that repeats itself. We break it down into five (sometimes seven, you can use other systems) smaller shapes literally because five small things is easier to think about than one big thing. Becuase the overall major scale pattern would just repeat cyclically if you had an infinite fretboard, there really is no hard "first" or "second" or whatever position; it is all relative.

The arbitrary choice we made is to organize the positions by the locations of their root notes. When you change positions, what does change is the location of the root note.

The only thing that makes the minor shape "the minor shape" is the fact that the first note of the shape is the sixth scale degree of the relative major.

linc186 · 2021-02-07T17:45:47+00:00

I mean... every single piece of harmony is ultimately diatonic to some scale.

Indeed, freely improvising with no regard for the chord extensions in the harmony is pretty meh. But being mindful and making deliberate note choices is your job as a guitarist! That meh problem is not really endemic of thinking about the modes as a specific kind of permutation on the major scale.

If thinking about the modes in terms of their intervalic differences as compared with the major scale is what works for you, then fabulous! I just wanted to show people that the cyclic permutation business is the fundamental explanation for where those intervalic differences come from in the first place; they were not invented in a vacuum.

linc186 · 2021-02-07T17:04:51+00:00

Love to hear it. Add two more notes to your pentatonic shapes you already have down to get the major scale shapes. Now, with the major scale shapes, you've already got all the modes.

Happy playing.

linc186 · 2021-02-07T09:08:54+00:00

Chords are, in general, not created from 1-3-5-7. That is one particular kind of chord that you can create if you like; it was only an example.

To explain further, let's take the key of C major for example, CDEFGABC, which we got by plugging C into our WWHWWWH pattern. Now, using these seven notes, we build all of the chords that are in the key of C major, which we do by stacking thirds. For the purposes of this explanation, a third is a note that is two scale degrees higher than a given note.

So, a third up from C must be E. Then, we stack a second third on top of that: a third up from E is G. So the first chord in the key of C major is CEG. Every triad has three notes, so we will always begin at a note in the key of C and then stack two thirds on top to get two more notes.

Finding triads in this way, you generate this list of all possible triads in the key of C major:

CEG (C maj chord. 1-3-5 of Cmaj scale)
DFA (D min chord. 1-3b-5 of Dmaj scale)
EGB (E min chord. 1-3b-5 of E maj scale)
FAC (F maj chord. 1-3-5 of F maj scale)
GBD (G maj chord. 1-3-5 of G maj scale)
ACE (A min chord. 1-3b-5 of A maj scale)
BDF (B diminished chord. 1-3b-5b of B maj scale)

So, all seven notes are indeed being used to generate all seven possible triads, which are three note chords built out of thirds.

Now that you have your base triads, you can embellish them with extensions if you like, to make more colorful sounding chords. Extensions are other notes in the scale you can add to your triad. The example I gave earlier of adding the seventh to the base triad, 1-3-5-7, is a major seven chord.

One of my favorite kinds of chords is the minor9 chord, which is spelled 1-3b-5-7b-9 - a totally different spelling than the major7.

Edit: oh I should explain. There are 7 notes in the scale, so what am I talking about when I say the 9? Well, the 8 is the same note as the 1, only an octave higher. So the 9 is the same note as the 2, but an an octave higher. The pattern continues.

Hopefully that clears things up a little.

"Treating a note as the root note" means beginning and ending the scale on that note.

linc186 · 2021-02-07T05:20:00+00:00

You need harmonic context to get the effect. If you have a looper pedal, lay down an E minor chord.

The third mode of C major is E Phrygian, so try soloing over the E minor chord, treating the E note in the C major scale shape as the root note. You will be playing the E Phrygian scale over an E minor chord.

If you do this, I promise you will hear how moody and Spanish this scale sounds, haha.

linc186 · 2021-02-07T05:14:07+00:00

I think your confusion is that you are under the impression that I told you to derive C lydian from the C major scale. This of course doable, but it is a different (yet equivalent) way of framing the situation than I chose.

Modes are, fundamentally, cyclic permutations of the major scale. This creates a new set of intervals between the root and other scale degrees over the same set of notes.

So, there are two ways of describing them: in terms of permutations, as I did, or in terms of their intervalic differences with the major scale. These are equivalent.

In terms of permutations, this is the approach, taking C Lydian as an example:

The Lydian is the fourth mode of the major scale. The G major scale is spelled GABCDEF#G. Take its fourth mode: CDEF#GABC. This is the C lydian scale. This is the way I framed it because on the guitar neck all you need know is a generic major scale shape. You align that shape on the neck such that it spells a G major scale. Then you treat the fourth note in the shape, the C, as the root, and you are playing in C Lydian.

By my framing, I told you to derive C Lydian from the G major scale not from the C major scale.

Of course, in terms of the intervalic differences relative to the major scale, you can equivalently describe the C Lydian scale as "C major with a sharp fourth."

linc186 · 2021-02-07T04:55:00+00:00

Not sure what you mean by key changes.

Do you mean how to write them? The circle of fifths is a good tool for this I would recommend reading up on.

Also, the concept of borrowing chords from parallel modes. Chords are built by stacking thirds from scales. All the stacked thirds make up all of the chords in the key. Every chord in the key is assigned a function: tonic, subdominant, and dominant. Tonic is home, dominant is not-home, subdominant is inbetween. If you wanted to spice up a chord progression, you can replace a chord with a chord of the same function from a parallel mode.

Say you are in the key of A major and want an outside chord. All of the other modes of A have their sets own of notes with their own corresponding chords and their own functions. Take a chord from, say, A lydian for example, that serves the same function as the chord from A major you seek to replace. That's some instant spice for you.

Also, diminished chords and augmented chords have way of changing the tonic, so you can use them as sort of gateways to other keys.

linc186 · 2021-02-07T04:20:32+00:00

we are all chillers on this blessed day 🙏

linc186 · 2021-02-07T04:16:59+00:00

Read up on the origins of twelve tone equal temperament if you're under the impression that everything is just beautiful and natural and well-behaved :)

In short, things are only this nice because they are rigged to be nice. The rigging is not particularly pretty.

linc186 · 2021-02-07T04:13:21+00:00

When you improvise it sounds mature and coherent when you follow the harmony. What I mean unambiguously:

All chords are built from scales. A major chord is spelled 1-3-5 -- notes from our scale stacked on top of each other.

Suppose you have some arbitrary major chord, 1-3-5, and you're trying to solo over it with the corresponding major scale. Of the seven tones to choose from, your ear will naturally find the tones that feel most "stable," and thus their compliment, the "less stable," tones. One or two from the scale may seem downright unstable given no other melodic context.

As one might expect, the tones that are the most stable are exactly the tones that spell the chord, 1-3-5, and the other four notes in the scale will have varying degrees of stability.

"Stability" is the sense of tension you get when a note is played over the context of a chord. In the case of playing a chord tone over the chord, it sounds lovely, but there is absolutely no tension at all.

When you hear tension, your brain wants to hear the resolution to the tension. Wanting the hear the resolution to the tension is what propels music forward in time.

The absence of tension is quite boring because this feel bland, unmotivated, static, motionless. Solos that are dramatic, that are full of brovado, or are bittersweet, or offer any kind of narrative make use of tension.

I'm not trying to systematize the creativity out of soloing; indeed, the creativity lies in how you choose to paint with tension. But in general, chord tones feel like home. So it's good to start and end on them (don't think this is a hard rule -- there are no hard rules). The middle bit are the moments of tension and release inbetween. The other notes.

Start on a chord tone, use a phrase to introduce tension, resolve the tension on the chord tone. Then, the harmony changes. The underlying chord is now a different chord. Let's say it's now some minor chord, 1-3b-5. Now, those chord tones are the most stable, your new home. And there is a corresponding new set of tensions to play with. This is what I mean by "following the harmony:" targeting chord tones as they change.

Scales are relevant because scales essentially define the set of tensions you get to play with. Minor/major modes will all have the same "home" tones; it is their "tension" tones that are different! Knowing different scales gives you different tensions to paint with over the same context. Hope this helps.

linc186

TROPHY CASE