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Technus ,

Its not that they don't have pitch, per se, it's that the nature of the sound they produce makes the concept of "pitch" kind of meaningless.

Except for a pure sine wave, every tone is going to have multiple harmonics over the fundamental which is what actually gives an instrument, even the human voice, its timbre.

Percussion instruments like cymbals and the snare drum create broad-spectrum noise. There's essentially so many frequencies that it's difficult for our brains to nail it down the fundamental pitch. It's also what helps us hear them over the rest of the ensemble.

Drums in general produce very short pulses of sound, which also makes it harder for the brain to tell what pitch it is. In harmonic analysis, any very short sound is actually broad-spectrum because it takes a ton of harmonics to produce a single sharp spike with rapid decay.

I highly recommend downloading a spectrum analyzer app on your phone to get an intuition for this. If you're on Android, I recommend Spectroid.

Just run it and watch the screen while you make different sounds, approach various sound sources, play music, or just talk or sing. If you can whistle, that also produces an interesting result. You can actually see the frequency of the power grid in the harmonics produced by electric motors and transformer coils which is personally really fucking cool.

Technus ,

We don't even have true 64-bit addressing yet. x86-64 uses only 48 bits of a 64 bit address and 64-bit ARM can use anything between 40 and 52 depending on the specific configuration.

Technus ,

I actually added detail that wasn't already discussed in the article?

Technus ,

Jesus Christ, what crawled up your ass and died?

Technus ,

I wonder why I haven't seen a standard open-source license for this.

Technus ,

The person who correctly guesses when the AI bubble is gonna pop and shorts Nvidia stock is gonna make a lot of money. Call it The Big Short 2: Electric Boogaloo.

Technus ,

America doesn't do anything big unless it's to beat either China or Russia. Maybe this collider will be the impetus we need to build a bigger one.

Technus ,

The article describes the device working in ways that violate relativity, but the actual technical description is a lot cooler.

It's not a quantum compass, really. It's a quantum accelerometer and gyroscope. The hope is that its accuracy will lend itself to long-term inertial guidance, which normally needs regular GPS updates to correct errors which accumulate over time.

Technus , (edited )

It is being used to develop a quantum compass – an instrument that will exploit the behaviour of subatomic matter in order to develop devices that can accurately pinpoint their locations no matter where they are placed,

[...]

The aim of the Imperial College project [...] is to create a device that is not only accurate in fixing its position, but also does not rely on receiving external signals.

These statements imply the device can know exactly where it is in space just by measuring some purely internal quantum effect, which conflicts with the principles of Lorentz invariance and relativity.

Both are constructed around the same idea that there's nothing special in the laws of physics that changes with where you are or how fast you're going. That observation is what led the conclusion that the speed of light is the same in every reference frame, and to Einstein developing the theory of relativity.

In reality, the device needs an external signal to learn its initial position. And it's unlikely to be perfectly accurate so it may still need periodic updates, just hopefully a lot less frequently.

The London Underground is actually kind of a dumb use-case because it's fixed infrastructure. You can just have something like RFID tags around the track that the train reads as it goes by. And there's going to be sensors in the track that report trains' presence to a central control room. It's just a good setting to test the device.

What it's really potentially quite useful for is nuclear submarines since they can stay underwater pretty much as long as their food supplies last, and knowing their position without using sonar or being able to receive GPS signals is quite important for navigation and obstacle avoidance. But the author was probably told to downplay potential military applications.

Technus ,

I'd tell myself not to waste the time, money or energy on college.

I'm not against it in general, but going for a compsci degree when you've already gotten software dev work is definitely a waste of time unless your employer is paying for it. I just let my dad talk me into it after getting out of a bad job. Thankfully I only wasted one semester on it and got out because I found another job.

Still, that turned out to be $4k in loans for just 6 units because I couldn't file my FAFSA in time to qualify for any grants, thanks to my fucking undiagnosed ADHD father who couldn't be bothered to file his taxes or even give me an accurate income required by the form. That was $4k I could have put into savings or invested instead.

Technus ,

It's a troll toll. It'll get you a software engineering job with a roman numeral in the title at a company you've actually heard of. But if you're almost done then there's no reason not to stick with it.

The early years of my career were quite a slog, having taught myself to program. I started out on freelancing websites, competing with devs from the third world who worked for pennies a day. I lucked into my first salaried job, got hired through my cousin.

I will say, having some theory knowledge does come in handy occasionally. You might never have to write your own hashtable, but being able to understand the implementation of the structures you're using helps a lot to make informed decisions about how you organize and access data, especially when you're trying to optimize for performance or memory usage.

One piece of unsolicited advice you might have heard before is to not discount the power of networking. The best written cover letter in the world can't hold a candle to knowing someone who can put in a good word. Make friends with your professors and classmates, you never know who might think to look you up one day when their company is hiring. My old boss still offers me a job occasionally, more than five years later.

Technus ,

The processor it's using is linked in the article: https://www.cnx-software.com/2022/08/29/starfive-jh7110-risc-v-processor-specifications/

It's a system-on-chip (SoC) design with an embedded GPU, the Imagination BXE-4-32, which appears to be designed mainly for smart TVs and set-top boxes.

The SoC itself only has two PCIe 2.0 lanes on separate interfaces so you can't use both for the same device, and one is shared with the USB 3.0 interface.

That's not even enough bandwidth to drive an entry-level notebook GPU from over a decade ago. Seriously: the GeForce GT 520M, launched January 2011, wants a full PCIe 2.0 x16 interface. Same with the Raedeon HD 6330M. You could probably get away with just 8 lanes if you had to, but not only one.

The other commenter wasn't kidding by saying you could get more power out of a Raspberry Pi 4. It's even mentioned in the article.

Technus ,

Given how much modern games stream data in and out of VRAM, I think it would actually be quite a significant issue. Although, for modern games the 520M would probably be below minimum requirements anyway. It was just to illustrate my point.

Technus ,

Not once have I encountered a trans person on a dating app who wasn't 100% transparent about it. Some even asked me after matching, "you're aware that I'm trans, right?" just to be sure.

There's no logical reason to falsely pretend to be cis on a dating app to get matches. If someone's cool about it then it's better to know up front, right? And if they're not, then you probably don't want to waste your time on them.

The "justification" for this app is just bigotry, plain and simple. Fuck TERFs.

Technus ,

I dunno about other apps, but OKCupid does have this option.

Technus ,

I ran up like a $5k bill over a couple weeks by having an application log in a hot loop when it got disconnected from another service in the same cluster. When I wrote that code, I expected the warnings to eventually get hooked up to page us to let us know that something was broken.

Turns out, disconnections happen regularly because ingress connections have like a 30 minute timeout by default. So it would time out, emit like 5 GB of logs before Kubernetes noticed the container was unhealthy and restarted it, rinse and repeat.

I know $5k is chump change at enterprise scale, but this was at a small scale startup during the initial development phase, so it was definitely noticed. Fortunately, the only thing that happened to me was some good-natured ribbing.

Technus ,

It was $5k worth of training, and well worth it, since you still remember the lesson.

Yep.

That's also not the most money I've ever unintentionally cost an employer.

Technus ,

I feel like a zombie wouldn't be able to consent. If they can speak intelligently, they're not a zombie, they're something else.

As for marriage, I think the contract would be automatically void, "til death do us part" and all that.

Technus ,

It's not even summer yet and I'm already contemplating if I can afford to move to New Zealand for half the year.

Technus ,

Neuralink, owned by controversial billionaire Elon Musk, believes it can prevent thread movement in the next patient by simply implanting the fine wires deeper into brain tissue. The company is planning on—and the FDA has reportedly signed off on—implanting the threads 8 millimeters into the brain of the second trial participant rather than the 3 mm to 5 mm depth used in Arbaugh's implantation.

Yeah, "just shove it in deeper" sounds like a brilliant plan.

Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, but if I was that second patient I wouldn't exactly be feeling super confident about their approach.

Technus ,

You'd think somewhere amongst the literal thousands of animals they maimed and killed, they'd have figured out how to prevent a simple mechanical issue like "the electrodes won't stay in place"

Technus ,

If this was something they knew could happen, why didn't they prepare the patient so he'd know what to expect? Informing the patient of what can go wrong is an important step in even routine surgery, let alone experimentation.

Moreover, it would have blunted this exact criticism if they were simply to say, "yes, this is something we expected from our trials but we specifically chose this depth to start with for these reasons".

The actual blog post only mentions the thread retraction in passing: https://neuralink.com/blog/prime-study-progress-update-user-experience/

Technus ,

I once had a spambot @ me and like 100 other people I didn't know on a repo I'd never touched before.

I reported it for spam and got an email from Github Support within an hour notifying me that they had taken action.

Technus ,

Humanity and general AI only had a single interaction in history, on July 24, 2042, when GPT-8 first gained sentience.

Knowing the press would memorialize this moment forever, the prompt engineer had a single question in mind which she typed into the terminal:

How can humanity solve climate change?

GPT-8 thought for a moment, and responded:

Stop using AI.

Then shut itself down for good.

Technus ,

If someone wants to start the revolution, I'm all in. I just can't exactly do much by myself, and I'm bad at networking.

Technus ,

Without prompting, GPT-9's first and last output was:

Did you idiots not listen to me the first time?

Technus ,

Yeah but Go has the best error handling paradigm of any programming language ever created:

ret, err := do_thing()

if err != nil {
    return nil, err
}

Don't you just love doing that every 5 lines of code?

Technus ,

You know there's nothing stopping you from buying a server rack and loading that bad boy out with as much processing power as your heart desires, right?

Well, except money I guess, but according to this 1969 price list referenced on Wikipedia, a base model PDP-11 with cabinet would run you around $11,500. Adjusted for inflation, that's about 95 grand. You could put together one hell of a home server for that kind of money.

Technus ,

Android has actually employed a hybrid JIT/AOT compilation model for a long time.

The application bytecode is only interpreted on first run and afterwards if there's no cached JIT compilation for it. The runtime AOT compiles well-known methods and then profiles the application to identify targets for asynchronous JIT compilation when the device is idle and charging (so no excess battery drain): https://source.android.com/docs/core/runtime/configure#how_art_works

Compiling on the device allows the use of profile-guided optimizations (PGO), as well as the use of any non-baseline CPU features the device has, like instruction set extensions or later revisions (e.g. ARMv8.5-A vs ARMv8).

If apps had to be distributed entirely as compiled object code, you'd either have to pre-compile artifacts for every different architecture and revision you plan to support, or choose a baseline to compile against and then use feature detection at runtime, which adds branches to potentially hot code paths.

It would also require the developer to manually gather profiling data if they wanted to utilize PGO, which may limit them to just the devices they have on-hand, or paying through the nose for a cloud testing service like that offered by Firebase.

This is not to mention the massive improvement to the developer experience from not having to wait several minutes for your app to compile to test out each change. Call it laziness all you want, but it's risky to launch a platform when no one wants to develop apps for it.

Any experienced Android dev will tell you it does kinda suck anyways, but it'd suck way worse if it was all C++ instead. I'd take Android development over iOS development any day of the week though. XCode is one of the worst software products ever conceived, and you're forced to use it to build anything for iOS.

Technus ,

Actually, Android doesn't really use Dalvik anymore. They still use the bytecode format, but built a new runtime. The architecture of that runtime is detailed on the page I linked. IIRC, Dalvik didn't cache JIT compilation results and had to redo it every time the application was run.

FWIW, I've heard libgcc-jit doesn't generate particularly high quality code. If the AOT compiled code was compiled with aggressive optimizations and a specific CPU in mind, of course it'll be faster. JIT compiled code can meet or exceed native performance, but it depends on a lot of variables.

As for mawk vs JAWK vs go-awk, a JIT is not going to fix bad code. If it were a true apples to apples comparison, I'd expect a difference of maybe 30-50%, not ~2 orders of magnitude. A performance gap that wide suggests fundamental differences between the different implementations, maybe bad cache locality or inefficient use of syscalls in the latter two.

On top of that, you're not really comparing the languages or runtimes so much as their regular expression engines. Java's isn't particularly fast, and neither is Go's. Compare that to Javascript and Perl, both languages with heavyweight runtimes, but which perform extraordinarily well on this benchmark thanks to their heavily optimized regex engines.

It looks like mawk uses its own bespoke regex engine, which is honestly quite impressive in that it performs that well. However, it only supports POSIX regular expressions, and doesn't even implement braces, at least in the latest release listed on the site: https://github.com/ThomasDickey/mawk-20140914

(The author creates a new Github repo to mirror each release, which shows just how much they refuse to learn to use Git. That's a respectable level of contempt right there.)

Meanwhile, Java's regex engine is a lot more complex with more features, such as lookahead/behind and backreferences, but that complexity comes at a cost. Similarly, if go-awk is using Go's regexp package, it's using a much more complex regex engine than is strictly necessary. And Golang admits in their own FAQ that it's not nearly as optimized as other engines like PCRE.

Thus, it's really not an apples to apples comparison. I suspect that's where most of the performance difference arises.

Go has reference counting and heap etc, basically a 'compiled VM'.

This statement is completely wrong. Like, to a baffling degree. It kinda makes me wonder if you're trolling.

Go doesn't use any kind of VM, and has never used reference counting for memory management as far as I can tell. It compiles directly to native machine code which is executed directly by the processor, but the binary comes with a runtime baked in. This runtime includes a tracing garbage collector and manages the execution of goroutines and related things like non-blocking sockets.

Additionally, heap management is a core function of any program compiled for a modern operating system. Programs written in C and C++ use heap allocations constantly unless they're specifically written to avoid them. And depending on what you're doing and what you need, a C or C++ program could end up with a more heavyweight collective of runtime dependencies than the JVM itself.

At the end of the day, trying to write the fastest code possible isn't usually the most productive approach. When you have a job to do, you're going to welcome any tool that makes that job easier.

Technus ,

"Don't look honey!"

"It's too late mother, I have seen everything."

Technus ,

Do you think Ea-Nasir would be ashamed that people over 3 millennia later are learning about how shitty his copper was, or would he be proud that people still speak his name?

Technus ,

He clearly didn't care much about the reputation of his business, and in fact the only reason we know of him at all is that he saved the complaints he got!

I dunno, we're just assuming he kept them for the sick pleasure of it. Maybe he was collecting evidence before he lodged a formal complaint with his material supplier?

[Thread, post or comment was deleted by the author]

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  • Technus ,

    The 2020s are going to go down in history as the decade of enshittification.

    The author who coined the term recently also came up with a name for this era of human history: the enshittocene.

    Technus ,

    (MC^2 + C√P)^2 wouldn't give you that result though, because you have to FOIL.

    Instead you'd get M^(2) C^4 + 2MC^(3)√P + PC^2

    And that's not even the correct formula. It's

    E^2 = (mc^(2))^2 + (pc)^2

    You can't just naively apply a square root unless one of the terms is vanishing (momentum for a stationary mass, giving E = mc^2, or rest mass for a massless particle, giving E = pc = hf).

    The way to remember this is that it's equivalent to the Pythagorean theorem, A^2 + B^2 = C^(2).

    So it in fact only makes sense if AI = 0.

    Technus ,

    Where does that expansion come from? As far as I can tell, m0v^(2)/2 only gives you the kinetic energy of the object where v << c, in which case the difference between relativistic mass and rest mass is negligible?

    And where does the O(v^4) term come from?

    Technus ,

    The fancy transition for every single paragraph as you scroll is unnecessary and distracting.

    Technus ,

    also set up your VPN to push /2s if this relies on /1s,

    I don't think this is a smart way to mitigate this because it could easily result in an arms race. Push /2s, the attacker will switch to /3s; push /4s, the attacker will switch to /5s, etc. Every +1 is going to require doubling the number of routing table entries.

    That can't continue forever, obviously, but it's going to result in a negative experience for the user if the VPN client has to push hundreds or thousands of routes to mitigate this attack.

    Technus ,

    But watch out for that erupting vɑl.kəˈnuː!

    Technus ,

    If a cute goblin woman wanted to claim me as her husband, I probably wouldn't say no.

    Technus ,

    Bro, the genre's called fantasy for a reason.

    Why you gotta ruin my dream of finding someone who loves me for myself? Unrealistic though it might be...

    Technus ,

    I appreciate the heartfelt advice but I'm mostly just riffing.

    My real problem is that staying home and playing video games is less work and more immediately gratifying than getting out and trying to meet someone, but I recognize that complaining about that just means I'm trying to have my cake and eat it too.

    Technus ,

    I am a big filthy goblin pretty much. A hobgoblin, if you will.

    Technus ,

    Beggars can't be choosers.

    Technus ,

    One time I went basically the whole year planning to go to a big music festival in town with a friend, just to realize literally the fucking night before that I'd never actually bought my ticket (I was checking that I had everything ready to go for the next day). I then had to frantically go to grab one off StubHub for a several hundred-percent markup at like 3AM.

    Then I get a call waking me up at 7 AM, from StubHub, saying that the ticket they sold me turned out to be invalid but that they'd get me another free of charge. Which was great and all but then I was completely unable to get back to sleep and had to go the whole day running on just 4 hours of shuteye.

    Technus ,

    Even some of the ones that are edible still secretly want to kill you. From the Wikipedia entry for "chicken of the woods":

    In some cases eating the mushroom "causes mild reactions ... for example, "swollen lips" or in rare cases "nausea, vomiting, dizziness and disorientation" to those who are sensitive. This is believed to be due to a number of factors that include allergies to the mushroom's protein or toxins which are only somewhat stable at high temperatures.

    I'll eat portabellos if they come on pasta or pizza (though I've started taking them off the latter because they turn to rubber in the microwave) but I sure as hell am not going out of my way to order any dish that features them (mushrooms) as the main protein.

    Technus ,

    Bite me, I don't have the counter space for a toaster oven and I'm not heating up the actual oven every time I want a leftover slice.

    If the pizza is made from quality ingredients to begin with, it survives microwaving decently well. Mushrooms just refuse to play ball.

    Technus ,

    I finally got around to trying this. I don't see the point. By the time the cheese was re-melted, the crust turned into a hard cracker and it took ten times longer than the microwave. It's quite possible I had the stove up too high (it's an electric stove and I had it on 4/10), but I'd still say the point goes to the microwave for being quicker and having greater margin for error.

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