This HN post fits into the category of "Pithy blog title with casually anecdotal content."
Software companies will never earnestly attempt to protect children because that action ("acknowledging children are in danger by using our product") acknowledges risk and introduces liability. (VCs hate that shit, especially Silicon Valley VCs.) In the United States, decades ago, laws were introduced to induce accountability of online platforms in regard to IP and child protection laws in the context of user generated content (forums, markets, chatrooms). Basically, these websites/corporations bulked at the weight of accountability ("how are we to monitor every user's action all the time?", "We'll be sued immediately by trolls.", etc.). The parties involved eventually came to a resolution that there's a "notice period" that organizations use to enforce this behavior on its communities.
If I were to write a blog titled "Parent Controls Aren't for Parents", my opening salvo would be "They are minimal-effort guardrails to protect corporations from being sued by negligent parents for post-incident harm."
I know about these but they require a lot more technical know-how to set up and getting ROMs is legally questionable. Your kid's friends are probably not playing those games either. They aren't a good option for most people.
With due respect, this comment conveys a position of privilege and surviver's bias. I, like you, eschewed online rules as a minor and I luckily benefitted from this time in my expertise. I was lucky. I didn't run into predators when using TF2, Runescape, or MySpace, but that doesn't mean the threat wasn't validated on with persons (children at the time) that fell through the cracks.
The story outlined, one of a child prodigy solo-navigating the gritty online world of pre-2000's, is old and tired. An active parent can support a child at all ages safely in these "hacker" moments that are described without giving them un-reined access to tools. A parent should be able to ask "how was your day today?" and get a truthful answer about online activity, just like the same question being asked at the end of the school day. It's out of curiosity and protection, and from a nurtured relationship.
I was one of those kids. I got a 300 baud modem the year after Wargames came out. It was a whole different world.
My wife and I disagreed about letting my son have my old desktop replacement laptop at a young age. Of course I said yes, based on my own experience, but my wife turned out to be right in the end. He got into some pretty dark places and the toxic relationships he developed with other people his age were bad enough and the trouble he got into was real and not hypothetical.
He's turned it around and is getting the support to do well relative to his Gen Z peers, but it took some harrowing experiences to get there.
My wife was right too. My kids ended up being unable to manage their device use at all, they developed seriously bad habits, lied and deceived extensively to gain access to devices, and repeatedly sacrificed relationships and trust for more screen time. There were years there where I thought surely they'd click with it and develop better habits, make better choices (with our guidance), and so on. Abstinence could be worse, right? Some exposure would be helpful and lead to useful conversations and so on.
The Internet, Internet access, and apps have changed since I was a kid. Despite their time on digital devices along with my efforts to teach them, my kids have no idea how computers work or how to use them very effectively. The skills they have developed to gain access to them were largely social engineering and lying. They exclusively waste time and brain cells when they're on screens.
One of my kids essentially can't have access to devices because he'll burn hours into the night playing really, really stupid games and watching porn. This is ALL he wants to do on phones or computers. Sometimes he will window shop.
You might think this is largely due to my failure to have insight into what my kids are doing and limiting access correctly, but that isn't the case. At first we were somewhat lenient and figured if they accessed things they shouldn't, we'd see it and have conversations. That was very early on. The conversations did nothing. I began putting severe restrictions on devices quite quickly because problems became evident quickly. I was a bit naive about it at first, my wife was not. We clashed a bit, but then device theft and social engineering started and I quickly aligned with her. Since then, many years ago, very little access has been on account of us not protecting devices properly. He is extremely good at gaining access when he's not supposed to, and extremely good at hiding it. It's like having an addict in the house.
He has no future in computers. He doesn't care about computers at all. He is incredibly compulsive, self-harming, and freely harms his relationships to get what he wants. This has been going on for about 5 years; he's 16 now, and I'm pretty scared for when he's out on his own and doesn't have anyone to protect him from himself. I think there will be some brutal lessons. Lost jobs, lost relationships, lost confidence and self esteem. I'm not looking forward to it.
I have no idea why I turned sneaking onto computers into a career rather than rotted away like they do. I wanted to learn to program. I was curious. My kids want to play NBA 2k and watch porn. That's about it.
Heroin is addictive. Physical compulsion is addiction. What you are talking about is not addiction. It shares some elements, but no one is breaking into cars so they can scroll Instagram.
Exactly. And what worries me is that they are essentially greasing the groove for these synapses, growing the neural network around deception and dishonesty. If they get into gambling in 5 years or so and happen to have a partner, they will already be somewhat adapted and practiced in hiding this activity quite effectively rather than seeking and accepting help. It's worrying. It's all foundational to very self-destructive habits from my perspective.
If your kid lies you might not get a truthful answer to that question in person or online.
You are actually expecting a lot from devices that you never had in the real world in the first place in order to mitigate a risk that is very scary but less likely to kill them than drugs and alcohol, swimming, bad driving, biking, getting hit by a car whilst walking, getting shot, or suicide.
People are freaking out over stranger danger not because it is by the numbers prevalent but because they feel like they can control it then find out the controls suck.
What if I started Bikesafe an always online dash cam / coach for your rider where AI would identify unsafe behaviour and coach your kid and virtually eliminate bike deaths. Would you feel more safe?
What if you read again and again that it didn't work because of how many accidents are caused by drivers or momentary mistakes.
First, I'm responding the more (politely) trivial remarks.
> drugs and alcohol, swimming, bad driving, biking, getting hit by a car whilst walking, getting shot, or suicide.
These are false equivalences-- when has a pool try to groom a child over the span of 3 years?
> What if I started Bikesafe an always online dash cam / coach for your rider where AI would identify unsafe behaviour and coach your kid and virtually eliminate bike deaths. Would you feel more safe?
This is wholesale the wrong approach. This is the parent absconding responsibility, which is my driving point of the problem.
Now to the main point:
> You are actually expecting a lot from devices that you never had in the real world in the first place ...
I'm not expecting anything from my devices because machines cannot be held accountable for human choices; a gun cannot be held accountable for being misused. The internet is a powerful tool and users should understand the ramifications of certain actions.
> If your kid lies you might not get a truthful answer to that question in person or online.
That's a parenting moment that one should relish retrospectively. To teach them good morals and values, to remind them that you love them, and that lying about safety processes can be very dangerous.
In reality, the whole "stranger danger" is way overblown and always has been. Most of the time, sexual predators are going to be either family or friends.
Sure there's 7% thats not, but a significant supermajority is family/friends. 59% were acquaintances, and 34% are family.
Edit: seriously, -1 cause I link to actual facts, rather than shitty emotional outbursts? Family and friends of family have always been the major list of suspects for child sex abuse. They're the ones who have time and access.
But somehow linking to cited facts is -1 central. Sigh.
I agree. Parents in the 21st century need to realize the call is coming from inside the house: it's their obligation to protect their child. Unsupervised usage without full due-diligence will lead to incidents like what the blog author describes.
The dilemma of online protection is a false crisis because parents would rather let their children play with fire than nurture their babies.
No, we've always had effective societal gatekeeping on what kids can access.
Cigarettes, liquor, porn, R-rated movies, all had general barriers to access for kids in the pre-internet world. Parents could rely on most store clerks not selling alcohol, tobacco, or adult magazines to a child. Parents did not have to hover over everything their child did. Was it perfect, of course not, but it worked fairly well and didn't require constant monitoring. You could let your kids go to the mall and be fairly sure that they would not be let in to an R-rated movie. They could ride their bikes to a convenience store and the worst thing they could buy was candy.
With online accounts and apps, everything needs review and permission. Every. Single. Thing. That is the main complaint in TFA. He wants a single device level setting so that he doesn't have to constantly vet everything.
This is precisely why many parents support age verification laws for social media and adult sites. Tech companies could have solved this on their terms but they just punted it to "parents" with an insane level of complexity, and the parents don't like it.
> Parents did not have to hover over everything their child did. Was it perfect, of course not, but it worked fairly well and didn't require constant monitoring.
Except kids from families without respectable parents would always be the ones to find access to alcohol, cigarettes, and porn. There were always a few kids in every class that had an older brother, uncle, or friend who would give them access to stuff they shouldn’t have.
It really wasn’t that different in the 80s in terms of parental responsibility.
> You could let your kids go to the mall and be fairly sure that they would not be let in to an R-rated movie. They could ride their bikes to a convenience store and the worst thing they could buy was candy.
Sure the old social there was the kid with porn mags and cigs in his treehouse, but you were never at his house 24/7 and that limited exposure almost inoculated against long term addictions and you experienced it with peer input. Parents would eventually isolate you from those bad elements due to neighbors gossiping and the like.
The new social is your neighbors don’t even know you have kids much less who they are talking too because they are on their phones and kids don’t have peer interactions because you don’t let them outdoors fearing people will report you are exposing them to a dangerous world.
Tech should absolutely have filled that void with a simple age appropriate pediatrician approved on/off with advanced controls available for those that want to tighten or loosen the reins.
I do not have kids, but would envision something like under 5 have no advertising and no network connection without a manual unlock, under 9 should only have access to content with heavy moderation and manual review of advertisements with only approved social contacts and parental alerts for potentially problem content, under 12 restrict unapproved contacts within local school district with problem content blocked with a manual unlock for a set duration, and for under 18 just do an machine learning scan on content and the kid can choose themselves if they want to reveal it with on device warnings about adult content, bullying, scams, and grooming with suggestions to discuss with parents.
> Parents would eventually isolate you from those bad elements due to neighbors gossiping and the like.
That’s my point. Some Parents now expect technology to do their parenting for them in ways they were expecting to do themselves previously.
> I do not have kids,
I do have kids. So my opinions are based on what I’ve personally seen work with my kinds and my peers.
Parental controls shouldn’t be seen as a way to absolve the parents of their responsibility to monitor what their kids consume.
Yeah there will be occasions when things slip through, but that’s always been a risk even before smartphones and the web. What matters is you’re there, as a parent, to ensure leaks are not tidal waves, and to ensure children develop responsible use of technology.
This has always been something parents have had to manage. Both in the 80s and equally so now. Blaming technology is just another way of saying “I’m too lazy to keep tabs on my children”
> No, we've always had effective societal gatekeeping on what kids can access.
Isn't there still a very simple one, hardware access. If the child doesn't have a smart phone of their own or computer in their bedroom then they cannot use them to get online unsupervised. This is about as simple on/off as you can get and very easy to moderate.
In my analogy that would be like forbidding your child from having a bike because they might go somewhere that would sell them beer, rather than simply a general, mostly-reliable prohibition on selling beer to kids.
Or, if you do let them have a bike, it requires you to follow them around everywhere to be sure they don't go to a liquor store.
It's a completely over the top level of control. Yes it would work but also do as much harm as good.
The bike analogy depends a lot on where you live. There are places where you would not let your kids ride anywhere they wanted without supervision and there are places where the opposite is true. The internet is one "place" and you'd need to adapt your bike analogy to that place.
It's the parents obligation to educate their child.
It's the child's obligation to use that education wisely.
There were no trackers on cars when I started driving at 15 so my parents drove with me for a few months and after that I was on my own. There were no gun laws against kids having guns when I was 7 so my dad showed me how to use one safely and after that I was set loose upon the countryside armed on my own. There were no ridiculous negligent standards/laws on the book when I was young about it being wrong for a kid to spend all day going up/down a creek so my dad showed me what all the venomous snakes looked like and how to use a compass and after that I was on my own.
I find disagreement with this new standard on parents. No, it's not the parents obligation to keep their child from ever making a horrible mistake. It's their obligation to educate them well and then set them loose with very few safeguards so they can actually slowly learn to be an adult. I am very much for showing kids how to use the internet responsibly, but I'm not of the opinion that parental controls are particularly desirable beyond an initial learning period.
Well written, and I agree with you on everything you wrote.
That said, "the internet" is a large place, and I think parents would find more clarity thinking of it the way they think of a physical place. In my mind, letting my son loose on the internet is not like letting him run around the woods unsupervised (which he does). It is more like dropping him off in a large city every night.
As you said, guidance is imperative, and in the real world we would not give only verbal guidance. We would, if we lived in the city, walk our kid to the library, the museum, the coffee shop, the park. We would talk about what parts of town to avoid. We would talk about what "free" means and about not trusting strangers and not just going into any door.
That last part is tricky. On the internet, every link is a door into a neighborhood, and there are a lot of neighborhoods even adults are not well prepared for.
I would add that it's society's responsibility to handle a child's transgressions with grace and humility, and to try to remember what it means to be "tried as an adult." Forgiveness isn't easy.
There is a survivor bias here. It ignores cases where parents or kids failed to be 100% wise. When we are talking about a whole population, we are gonna have unwise or unluck cases when we "set kids loose".
Which may be fine, I don't know whether the tightened control of both parenting and kids nowadays is better. But we have to recognise the cost that comes with doing something like that. There is less risk-taking right now, and bad consequences seem to be taken harder, in a way human life is valued more, which imo part of the reason of the shift. The mentality "let kids make their own mistakes" can be fine, but that comes with accepting the possibilities of negative consequences these mistakes may cause, and I feel that the main issue is that we frown upon these consequences as society much more.
> It's the child's obligation to use that education wisely.
I disagree because children, despite how precocious and "old-soul"ed, are not wise compared to online predators.
I appreciate your POV on allowing children to make their own mistakes; life is the best teacher. Yet, to make an analogy, a gun owner keeps their collection locked up not just for their protection but for their family's protection. Some lessons in life have steep prices and are one-way doors, and we should pass that hard-earned wisdom to the next generation without those costs.
Children are not wise compared to online predators, but they will notice when things are getting fishy. Maybe that's after they've made their first few silly mistakes (maybe they've given the predator their home address, several photographs, all their friends' contact details, and the one password they use for everything), but they will notice before anything seriously bad happens. But just because they'll notice, that doesn't mean they'll take an appropriate action; and it doesn't mean they won't be convinced that actually, it's fine. The child needs to know that they can come to you for advice, and that there will be no repercussions if the situation is benign, even if they've broken the rules: the concrete threat of (even mild) parental punishment for rule-breaking will be more salient than a mild situational suspicion.
"These are the rules, you are to follow the rules, breaking them would be foolish and breaking them in secret would be even more foolish, but they are always up for discussion, and if you do break them you can still come to me for advice without getting in trouble, and I'd much rather you tell me than that I find out on my own" is a principle that can be imparted to a child. You do actually have to tell it to them, though, in several different ways over a period of time, and you have to be consistent about it. Children aren't wise, but they are clever, they can spot patterns, and they'll tend to believe your actions over your words if the two conflict.
You do not want to set up a situation where a predator can blackmail a child using the threat of your punishment. Parent, yes, but parent consistently enough and well enough that such threats are an obvious bluff that the child knows to ignore (and report to you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46465829), and going online can be as safe for your child as playing in the local neighbourhood.
The rules for young children safely using the internet unsupervised would be extremely absurd for an adult: they include things like "do not use any search engines (ask me if you want a new website)" and "do not create accounts on services (without permission)". Young children must also be kept away from content aggregators, or anything with an automatic recommendation system (e.g. Pinterest, YouTube, modern news sites, Reddit, HN). But hyperlinks on proper webpages are perfectly safe: a child isn't going to end up anywhere they shouldn't by clicking on hyperlinks if they check the URLs first and avoid the places they aren't allowed, just like a child isn't going to end up anywhere they shouldn't, wandering the high street, if they know to avoid roads and building sites. You don't need to tell a 6-year-old "stay away from porn sites", just like you don't need to tell them "don't go in that sex shop", because (a) they won't find it; and (b) even if they do, there are more general rules ("never tell a computer system that you're over 13 if you're not, and ideally not even if you are") that'll prevent any harm from occurring.
And just as you'd have conversations with a child about "where have you been?", and have them show you their favourite spots occasionally, you should also do so with unsupervised internet activity. Unsupervised does not mean ignored, after all.
Laws disagree. Parents are at least in some cases legally and financially responsible for their children doings. Parental controls are necessary for children who don't want to or cannot control themselves regardless of the level of education they receive.
One of my uncles was asked to stop bringing his rifle to highschool because him and one of the teachers kept talking about hunting in the parking lot and getting to class late. The principle felt they were likely to at least make it in the building on time if they weren't chatting in the parking lot about their rifles/hunts/etc.
People used to have an insane amount of freedom and things generally went better.
I was in Cub Scouts in the early 90s and got a Swiss Army knife. I thought it would be cool to show it off to the kids on the bus. It got confiscated by the principal and I was suspended for one day. I think I got off light. I can’t imagine what would happen these days.
Absolutely, I would also walk down the public roads also to get from one field to another, nobody said anything. It was quite normal in the rural Midwest. You'll probably find lots of true stories online as well about kids arriving to school and checking their rifle with the principal at the beginning of class and then getting them back at the end of the day.
Check the gun with the principal?! No, you leave it on the gun rack in the back of the pickup, and lock the truck door like normal people at my high school. :-)
Dang, seems like a completely different world than the one I live in. Honestly I would prefer it if we were able to teach our kids personal responsibility to this level, I actually believe people can be that mature by age 7 and you know whether a kid is a rule breaker or not by that point.
> It's the parents obligation to educate their child.
> It's the child's obligation to use that education wisely.
In the real world, it’s the parents obligation to make an effort to protect their children. In extreme cases, parents can be found negligent if they don’t demonstrate that they’re taking reasonable steps to protect children and something bad happens as a result.
This doesn’t mean that extreme, draconian parenting is mandatory. It does, however, mean that some level of parental control is necessary on an age-adjusted basis. It’s not enough to say “I told them not to do that” and then wash your hands of the consequences when we’re talking about a pre-teen like in this article.
There is important truth in your post, yet you seem to miss the really important pieces that make this hard.
> It's the parents obligation to educate their child.
> It's the child's obligation to use that education wisely.
Two obvious things complicate this:
- You weren't taught how to use a real gun at 6 months old, right?
- Would it not follow from what you said above that if you had accidentally shot and killed yourself at age 7, then it would be your own fault and nobody else's? That seems (to me, at least) like an absurd conclusion.
I think about it like this: as a parent, my jobs include identifying when my child is capable of learning about something new, providing the guidance they need to learn it (which is probably not all up front, but involves some supervision, since it's usually an iterative process), allowing them to make mistakes, accepting some acceptable risks of injury, and preventing catastrophe. I'll use cooking as an example. My kids got a "toddler knife" very young (basically a wooden wedge that's not very sharp). We showed them how to cut up avocados (already split) and other soft things. As they get older, we give them sharper knives and trickier tasks. We watch to see if they're understanding what we've told them. We give more guidance as needed. It's okay if they nick themselves along the way. But we haven't given them a sharpened chef's knife yet! And if they'd taken that toddler knife and repeatedly tried to jam it into their sibling's eye despite "educating" them several times, while I wouldn't regret having made the choice to see if they were ready, I would certainly conclude that they weren't yet ready. That's on me, not them.
You allude to this when you say:
> I am very much for showing kids how to use the internet responsibly, but I'm not of the opinion that parental controls are particularly desirable beyond an initial learning period.
Yes, the goal should be to teach kids how to operate safely, not keep them from all the dangerous things. But I'd say that devices and the internet are more like "the kitchen". There are lots of different risks there and it's going to take many years to become competent (or even safe). Giving them an ordinary device would be like teaching my 2-year-old their first knife skills next to a hot stove in a restaurant kitchen with chefs flying around with sharp knives and hot pots. By contrast, without doing any particular child-proofing, our home kitchen is a much more controlled environment where I can decide which risks they're exposed to when. This allows me to supervise without watching every moment to see if they're about to stab themselves -- which also gives them the autonomy they need to really learn. The OP, like other parents, wants something similar from their device and the internet: to gradually expose elements of these things as the parents are able to usefully guide the children, all while avoiding catastrophe.
I suspect they also hope developer choice gets reframed from "Unity or Unreal" to "Godot or Unreal." In other words: Unity gets bumped out of the picture since Godot can do what it does and is open source, while Unreal stays comfortably in the hyperrealism/high-end perch.
Unity is Unreal Engine's biggest competitor by far. Godot competes with Unity (mostly for 2D games) but is at least a decade off being any threat to Unreal.
So yes, funding Godot is A Nice Thing To Do but it also conveniently puts a bit of pressure on Unity, their biggest competitor, without impacting their own business.
Also, if you believe Matthew Ball's take[0] then Epic is all-in on fostering as many gamedev-ish creators as it can so that it can loop them all into making content for its metaverse later. As you alluded to, in the long term funding a FOSS game engine which is focused on ease of use helps that too.
It expands their empire like Microsoft pledging to "support" Open Source: it's disingenuous, self-serving, and develops a "claim" of authority over the sector. It allows them, the makers of Unreal Engine, to develop a business relationship with their competition and influence the trajectory on one of only major alternatives in order to control the market more.
If Epic Games really cared about Godot, they would align more with their values in-house. Their M&A drives the organization like a propeller.
It's all hypothetical for a transaction 5 years in the past. The future you propose is one where Epic is not actually the same: they have more liquid capital towards the mission their stakeholders decide, and less influence on Godot.
However, their stakeholders decided circa 2019/2020 that they want to influence the development of Godot and spent their money that way. Corporate donations aren't at a whim like us individuals who spend $3/mo on Wikipedia or a food pantry, it's considered by the executive team, calculated and green-lit by their accounting team.
Ostensibly what u/skibidithink replied. We should have a healthy distrust of international corporations giving for unapparent reasons beyond being in the same sector. We can gesture about how a gift has no obligations, but no one gets into business to not make money, and true charity is without obligation.
ConcernedApe donated to give back to the foundation he came from, while Epic is out for global domination in the virtual entertainment sector.
Epic - like every other company in the world right now, particularly tech companies - was built on open-source software. Just because they may or may not have used those specific tools does not mean their desire to give back to that community is evil.
I'm really still just trying to see the whole "Epic is donating money to take over the world!" argument here. What obligation do they get from these donations, exactly?
Sure, and maybe he does. I think there's a difference between Epic doing it as a company, for which they would likely expect to extract some value from the contribution, and Sweeney doing it as an individual.
Stardew seems to make choices consistent with the gaming community's interest, such as continued free updates and DLC along with reasonable pricing, messaging, and scope.
Epic values exclusive titles, walled gardens, poor support, and a scumbag CEO who will stomp over every market he can to get his next 8 Billion.
They ruined Rocket League, a game I purchased on steam while supporting Psyonix, which is now unusable until I agree to give them my PID and create an account. It's so egregious you can't even play bots offline. Every goal will move focus to a popped up browser window requesting account creation.
Everyone can decide where to draw the line on personal support, but to act like Epic is just being given shade because it's a corporation (as the comments below implied), is inaccurate.
Why is Valve's behavior relevant? I mention charity because that's what donations are. It's no secret Epic Games follows Microsoft's patterns for control of the industry.
There are some good nuggets of wisdom here, and I think the author should be less crass about "startup suicide"-- it's just an organization and it failed. If someone outside of the founder team is calling it a suicide, they need to go touch grass. SV VC's are so dramatic.
I try to separate the art from the artist when critiquing, so no bones to pick :)
As a topic or metaphor, I'm not advocating for suicide to be avoided, but your post struck on the toxic bravado that VCs have, especially Silicon Valley VCs with their Drama, and why I am much much more selective on fundraising for my projects.
People talk about "finding the right founder" but really it's finding the right environment to perform and excel in. The culture from SV is almost Swiftian in how it tries to devour its young. And yet creatives get "oh it's my fault for picking the wrong copilot" from the experience.
Absolutisms like this are challenging to strike right because an establishment of context is needed. This post's sentiment sounds like regret and resentment over past events (there is trauma), and the author knows to not put their hand on the stove.
Sometimes not speaking up is the best thing for future situations. Other times, it's too costly to not speak up, and what should follow is the speaker making right by their words: action.
First, the fact we have moved this far with LLMs is incredible.
Second, I think the PhD paper example is a disingenuous example of capability. It's a cherry-picked iteration on a crude analysis of some papers that have done the work already with no peer-review. I can hear "but it developed novel metrics", etc. comments: no, it took patterns from its training data and applied the pattern to the prompt data without peer-review.
I think the fact the author had to prompt it with "make it better" is a failure of these LLMs, not a success, in that it has no actual understanding of what it takes to make a genuinely good paper. It's cargo-cult behavior: rolling a magic 8 ball until we are satisfied with the answer. That's not good practice, it's wishful thinking. This application of LLMs to research papers is causing a massive mess in the academic world because, unsurprisingly, the AI-practitioners have no-risk high-reward for uncorrected behavior:
For what it is worth it’s not wrong to say that the triad where E is the root would be Em#5. The inversions you point out still have the same root (C) even if the bass is different.
But I agree you’ve identified the fundamental problem: we cannot infer the root note and, therefore the name (enharmonics aside), from just a set of notes and attempting to is a fool’s errand. Even with a root note, it's going to be difficult many times to have a sensible answer
The key problem with this implementation in addition to not simply taking the root note as input (or a key or scale), appears to be the chord database is pretty spartan, since it doesn't appear it would identify C-E-G as anything other than CMaj. If you want figured bass/slash notation then you'll need to specify that as well (bass note).
A number of chord namers take these as additional inputs.
You're absolutely right about enharmonic equivalents and I could/should have been more precise. However of course the given task of "keys" or pitches -> chords we don't have any information about this, enharmonic equivalents are equivalent. The point is, if the C/B# note (we don't know which one), G and E are given to you and I tell you to root is "E", then the chord could be Em#5. If it really were unambiguously C then it would be a Em♭6(no 5). Point in any case is you need more to go on (at the very least a scale).
I think the point that root and bass should not be conflated is also valid.
Chords in isolation are an academic exercise. In the context of an overall chord progression, this “enharmonic ambiguity” normally disappears completely, at least for mainstream jazz, pop, rock, folk, most classical, etc. - you know, the music that people who weren’t music majors actually like.
Sure, but I certainly haven't been proposing that naming chords based on identifying pitches on a standard keyboard with no other context is suitable, quite the opposite (fool's errand in my original comment).
In the confines of the problem statement, it's all enharmonic ambiguity, and that's the point. The Em#5 example was based off the one in the original article, but a much more down to earth one would be F♯ and G♭. Not exactly obscure chords and illustrative of the fundamental issue with this method.
Unpopular opinion: if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then dude, it's a duck.
Inverted chords have, in my ears, never sounded anything like the chords they are supposedly an inversion of. It's like saying "10 is just really 3+7". It's true, and it's also useless. Let 10 be 10. Let 3 be 3. Etc.
Most composers don't even use this system as they compose, it's just for after the fact analysis. Composers hear a tune in their head and then transcribe it. Unless they're writing cookie cutter shit without inspiration, then they might synthesize some soulless crap that intentionally follows some well known chord progression as picked by a dart thrown at a poster of the circle of fifths.
E-G is a 3 semitone interval and G-C is 5 semitones so it's an E+3+5 chord. If you wanna play it on piano, that means leave a gap of 2 keys and then a gap of 4 keys.
Known in western classical harmonization theory as "Em+" (E chord with minor third, augmented 5th). C first inv is actually Gsus4add6no5 or as I like to call it G+5+4. It has an incredibly warm and rich tone, nothing like C+4+3 (C major triad).
It works in C because all of its notes are also present in the C major scale, but that's just a coincidence. Calling it a C inverted chord is like making astrological or numerological conclusions.
And no, shifting up or down by octaves is not the same sound. It's close but not equal. You can probably get away with octave substitutions in a busy song but you can not say it sounds exactly the same. A 9th is not a 2nd. 11 not 4, 13 not 6. When you play La Campanella, is that your excuse for skipping those octave jumps? :)
It would make jazz lead sheets impossible to read and play. The whole point of a jazz lead sheet is that a chord symbol can be played in a huge variety of different ways depending on how the jam is going. If you followed the chord symbols literally and only played them all in root closed position then depending on the stage you might get a cymbal thrown at you.
Right. This is where math-oriented people get stuck on counting half-steps and forget that the assigned names carry information. E-B# is a different thing from E-C which is different from abominations like E-Dbb.
Software companies will never earnestly attempt to protect children because that action ("acknowledging children are in danger by using our product") acknowledges risk and introduces liability. (VCs hate that shit, especially Silicon Valley VCs.) In the United States, decades ago, laws were introduced to induce accountability of online platforms in regard to IP and child protection laws in the context of user generated content (forums, markets, chatrooms). Basically, these websites/corporations bulked at the weight of accountability ("how are we to monitor every user's action all the time?", "We'll be sued immediately by trolls.", etc.). The parties involved eventually came to a resolution that there's a "notice period" that organizations use to enforce this behavior on its communities.
If I were to write a blog titled "Parent Controls Aren't for Parents", my opening salvo would be "They are minimal-effort guardrails to protect corporations from being sued by negligent parents for post-incident harm."
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