• plyth@feddit.org
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    10 hours ago

    People bake and learn basic chemistry. The baseline of general programming knowledge could be more than zero. It’s a fundamental part of our society.

    • merc@sh.itjust.works
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      8 hours ago

      Baking is not chemical engineering. Chemical engineering doesn’t even have much to do with chemistry. It’s mostly about temperatures and flow rates, pressure, etc.

      Saying “the baseline of programming knowledge could be more than zero” is meaningless. The baseline of chemical engineering knowledge could also be more than zero. It’s also a fundamental part of our society. But, the average person doesn’t need to know how to program, just like the average person doesn’t need to know how to design a refinery.

      People do learn some basic computer skills. They should learn more. They should know about files. They should know how to back up their data. And, more importantly, they should learn how to restore data from a backup after something goes wrong. They should know how to properly update their devices, how to tell if their devices are infected, and the basics of managing a home network. They sometimes learn how to do basic functions in excel spreadsheets. That’s about as far as they do, or should need to go in programming / IT. Beyond that, why should the average person need to know how to do recursion, or how loops work?

    • alternategait@lemmy.world
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      9 hours ago

      If you look at “I didn’t have eggs” you’ll quickly figure out that very few people are learning chemistry from baking/cooking.

      I memorized by rote the chord progressions in my favorite style of music. This does not mean I understand music theory at all.

        • alternategait@lemmy.world
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          8 hours ago

          You nailed it ok.

          Worse than that, I don’t even really know how they relate to each other, I just know “key of C” means C, F, G. I actually even went so far as to write each major key progression down with my cheater chord pics.

          • merc@sh.itjust.works
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            2 hours ago

            So, I can tell you what I know from a bassist’s PoV.

            What I posted was the 12 bar blues chord progression in Roman Numeral notation. What it tells you is that if you start in the key of C, the other bars are 4 and 5 notes up from C. In addition, since the notation is in uppercase, the chords / arpeggios you can play in that bar are major not minor. So, if a bassist is playing a walking bass line for 12 bar blues, they’ll probably start those bars with C, F and G. But, since they’re C major, F major and G major, the bassist can play major arpeggios in that key in those bars and it will sound good.

            For other kinds of blues progressions, if you know Radiohead’s “Creep”, you can see that as being an 8 bar blues with the following progression:

            1 2 3 4
            I III IV iv
            I vi ii V7

            So if the root is C, the 2nd bar is E major, third bar is F major, 4th bar is F minor, and so on. Because the 3rd and 4th bars are both rooted at F the bassist can just play an F there and it sounds good (which is what I think Radiohead’s bassist does), but if the bassist chooses to play more notes in an apeggio, they have to play notes from the F-minor scale in that 4th bar or it doesn’t match.

            As for why those various chord progressions happen to work, that I don’t know. I don’t know if anybody does. But, I do know there’s some math / physics behind it. A perfect fifth is one of the most pleasant sounding intervals, and those notes are at a frequency ratio of 2:3. The only better sounding thing is an octave at 1:2. And, the inverse of a perfect fifth is a perfect fourth. So, songs being made from 4ths, 5ths and octaves makes sense.