Absolute joy to read as a guitarist of 22 years, and having a degree in applied mathematics and a fondness for old calculators.
As an aside, I love the simplicity of the interactive elements in TFA. Something I desperately wish I could have done with the side-by-side Galilean and modern guitars was instead of strumming at the actual fret on a given string to get the note to which that fret corresponded, be able to place "fret holders" by clicking at the intersection of the string and the fret that held the string down at that fret for you and then simply strumming the open strings so that you could compare how chords sound between the two guitars.
Gorgeous site. ODEs, PDEs, and computational physics were some of my favorite courses in college and I really regret not pursuing a master's degree. Unfortunately, I graduated in spring 2020 during the shutdown. I had been hemming and hawing all senior year about grad school but the pandemic really threw a wrench in the works. I had spent a lot of free time in my last year of school creating visualizations in Python for fun and this is the kind of resource I imagined I'd someday work towards making myself.
> Spotify is, without doubt, the worst piece of software that I still use on a daily basis. It's incredibly buggy, incredibly slow, and the UI has so many "usability inconsistencies".
I left Spotify about a year ago and have tried Tidal, Deezer, Qobuz, and Youtube Music. They all have equally worse UI/UX. The Tidal and Deezer apps on Windows were absolute dogshit and would constantly bug out, randomly stop playing, freeze, take ages to load, etc. YTM's UI is awful, and it does not use your liked/saved songs and albums for its recommendations if your Youtube history is turned off, which isn't explained anywhere that I could find. Just absolutely baffling product design decisions all over the place.
I'm blown away by how much all the big music streaming apps suck. Music player UIs were a solved problem 20 years ago.
More and more now I'm using Bandcamp, Subvert, local music enthusiast Discord servers, and even Reddit to discover new music. It's a giant pain in the ass, but it's still less unpleasant than the apps.
The vast support for Tidal in these discussions is pretty baffling. The whole thing is just an abandoned Jack Dorsey side hustle. Basic things like gapless playback don't work. Playback on dodgy connections is spotty. I have my own fair share complaints of Spotify UX but it actually works as a music player anywhere and everywhere.
My bad, I mean the interstitial. Like it should stay for at least a second to not make it jarring. People believe computers need to think so you can't make things too fast either. Not the interstitial and not the app either, to the point you sometimes have to deliberately slow down the app, add latency to make people trust it because it "gives the computer time to think"
Power users absolutely hate this mindset. It’s resulted in Apple animations taking seconds for something that was done before the animation even started.
The delay in filing email in iOS is incredible. Selecting and moving a single message can take over a second, even with animations disabled. Maddening for what should be an instantaneous action.
As an aside, I love the simplicity of the interactive elements in TFA. Something I desperately wish I could have done with the side-by-side Galilean and modern guitars was instead of strumming at the actual fret on a given string to get the note to which that fret corresponded, be able to place "fret holders" by clicking at the intersection of the string and the fret that held the string down at that fret for you and then simply strumming the open strings so that you could compare how chords sound between the two guitars.