Totally. Also, an attenuator is easier and cheaper to implement, because it just requires normalizing V+ into the jack plug. An offset requires an adder.
My preference is: attenuator < offset < attenuator + offset. I see no benefit of having to remove the knob to get to the jack as proposed in the article.
I love old, well-written technical books, like these. There is something about the language, directness, innocence (for lack of a better term) and careful arguments that I find incredibly satisfying. They are not afraid to go technical and deep, when needed. They have humor and feel personal.
Somehow, I rarely find this in modern technical books, but it is hard for me to figure out why. Maybe something is lost in the "pedagogy" of many modern textbooks.
I'll read such books about pretty much any topic just for pleasure. An all-time favorite is "Stick and Rudder" by Wolfgang Langewiesche, although a very different topic, obviously.
I share the same feeling. Heck, even some books from the 70s and 80s are similar with this respect.
I believe those of us who can should try to do our best so that this art is not forgotten. It's extremely difficult to do today as the incentives are mostly opposite, but I believe the long term benefit to humanity is higher.
I agree entirely. I have two wonderful daughters, and stories like this hit hard.
There is a fiction short-story called CHICXULUB By T. Coraghessan Boyle. It is one of the hardest hitting stories I have read as a parent. Still brings tears to my eyes. Recommended.
The outcomes of public policy throughout the 1900s, particularly pre-Reagan and post-FDR. Quite expansionary, but nearly all of the bedrock institutions most people have come to rely on and take for granted materialized in this period.
- The GI Bill
- Medicare / Medicaid
- Social Security
- Unemployment Insurance
- Regulatory institutions / policies like the SEC, FDIC, OSHA, and the EPA.
- The Civil Rights Act
None of this stuff just happens by accident, and these kinds of things definitely don't magically fall out of unregulated free-markets. And they DEFINITELY don't fall out of markets where the participants are massive corporate interests.
You need institutions whose focus is solely on social / economic wellbeing and who have the power and authority to provide it.
There are also plenty of modern academics, making things up themselves, who articulate similar points.
Perhaps Friedman's most widely known saying is that "inflation is a monetary phenomenon". In the last 30 years the correlation between money supply expansion and inflation has been low. OTOH the correlation between supply shocks and inflation has been high.
A real science would update in the face of contradictory evidence. Some economists have, but most haven't.
We did see massive inflation in subsectors of the broader economy, though, and there were a lot more monetary policy levers moving than just supply expansion.
I agree entirely. As a professional scientist who routinely uses Bayesian methods to solve complex computational and statistical problems, with actual real world applications, I cannot stress enough how irrelevant such philosophical musings about the foundations of Bayesian Statistics are for getting actual science work done.
That's missing the point--philosophy as a whole is not required for science. Invertebrates were adjusting their beliefs to observations (science) long before the first philosopher. I'm not confusing Bayesian models with Bayesian epistemology.
What this is at its essence is that science has allowed us to evolve, learn to kill lions and bears, create agriculture, build ships, cure diseases, travel to the moon, build AI, etc. And all this time while science has been empowering humans and saving lives, science has been under attack by philosophy. You have a scientist saying, "I observe that solar and lunar patterns are more consistent with the earth revolving around the sun" and a philosopher saying "ackchyually the bible says the sun revolves around the earth". When evidence (collected through scientific methods) for a hypothesis becomes overwhelming, the last refuge of ignorance is the philosopher saying, "ackchyually, you don't know that because nothing is truly knowable".
Epistemology is an attempt to understand how we know things, and Bayesian epistemology is probably the best description of how we know things based on science. It's a description, based on observation of how scientists practice science, of how science works.
So when philosophers come in and say Bayesian epistemology doesn't work, they're saying science doesn't work. It's yet another attack on science by philosophers.
And as I said in my other post, Popper's criticism of Bayesian epistemology is actually smart: he does understand what he's talking about, it just doesn't, ultimately, matter much, because the practice of science de facto works, in practice, even if the philosophical model says it doesn't. If all the nuance of Bayesian epistemology and Popper's ideas isn't captured, it's easy for it just to become a straw man argument for philosophers to say that science doesn't work. When it comes down to it, the way people talk about Popper and Bayesian epistemology is just a more sophisticated version of "ackchyually, you don't know that because nothing is truly knowable".
I'm not defending Bayesian epistemology, per se. I'm defending science, as it's practiced, because as I said, science is fucking important. Now, more than ever, in the era of anti-vaxxers and climate change denial, we desperately need people to believe in science.
> Invertebrates were adjusting their beliefs to observations (science) long before the first philosopher.
To underscore the bad science you are led to in terms of assumed truth, let alone hypothesis: there is very little evidence or justification or explanation that any of the processes used by the invertebrate here execute calculation that obeys the very specific axioms of probability and updates to a state in accordance with Bayes' theorem. Stimulus response is not Bayes' theorem. Updating a state from new inputs is not Bayes' theorem.
Learning from observation is the basis of science, and invertebrates certainly do that.
A lot has changed since invertebrates started doing that. Not only have we evolved more senses than the first invertebrates, we've also developed methods such as Bayesian inference to combine the results of multiple observations, as well as numerous methods for removing confounding variables such as control groups and regression analysis. Unsurprisingly this has led us to discover a lot more with science, with a lot more accuracy, than invertebrates.
And yes, updating a state from new inputs is not literally Bayes theorem, which is why nobody said it was. However, the process of updating a belief confidence from new inputs as it is done today can be modeled today using Bayesian inference. No, invertebrates don't do that--which is again, why I never said they did.
It's a bit tiresome to be corrected by people who clearly don't seem to understand that Bayes theorem, Bayesian inference, and Bayesian epistemology are all named after the same guy because they're all built on each other in that order. Yes, they aren't all the same thing, but if you're jumping in with that as if it's a correction, you certainly don't understand the concepts.
Could you give an example of where a philosopher has impeded science in the way you describe? Where it has been not just irrelevant, but obstructive? Irrelevant is fine - science and the philosophy of science have different goals. You might as well say that chemistry is irrelevant to mathematics.
> Bayesian epistemology is probably the best description of how we know things based on science.
This is wrong, and it's a bit ironic you are so adamant on a point that is bad philosophy and leads to bad science as a way of insisting that philosophy has no relevance for science.
You're grossly misrepresenting both science and philosophy. Science is a conscious and self referential effort, it has nothing to do with animals learning how to survive in their environment. Philosophy is definitely not bible thumping.
> For trains, you would be hard pressed to find a route that is not significantly slower today than 60 years ago.
It took 64 years (until 1997) to again reach the 1933 speed of the Flying Hamburger [0] - 138 minutes from Hamburg to Berlin. Trains today need about 115 minutes.
If you want to go by top speeds, for the 787 (entered service 2011) it's Mach 0.9, for the A-350 (2015) it's 0.89, while for the 707-120 (1958) it's Mach 0.91. The 747 (1970) can go Mach 0.94.
Modern jets are built to fly slightly slower than early jetliners, both in normal operation and at top speed. The reason is fuel economy, but the difference is real.
You're saying planes have a top speed faster than their cruise speed; I'm saying it doesn't matter which of the two metrics you compare on, older jets are faster on both.
A specific Mach number is what airliner airframes are designed to fly at; it's absolutely the correct unit to talk about in this context. If airplane A is designed to cruise at 0.94 mach, it is faster than airplane B that cruises at 0.89 mach.
I don't understand the need for all the smoke and din in this argument thread. Old passenger jets flew a little faster than modern ones and that's okay!
They're not faster in any absolute sense, look at the wing sweep angle of new vs old jets or the fact that early low bypass ratio jets have a much higher exhaust velocity, the old jets are marginally faster by every metric.
Modern airplanes can exceed their cruising speed in a relative sense but older planes have a higher absolute maximum speed, as well as cruising speed.
Why is everyone trying to ackshewally this? The stat's are publicly available. Aircraft are optimized for a particular speed range and that impacts the designed cruising speed as well as Vs and VNE.
But corporate computing is also suffering from the deteriorating user experience.
I have access to large amounts of harware and software through my employer. And while Microsoft Office is unavoidable, I hate it everytime I open Word or Excel (daily), even if it is on my company machine.
The privacy concerns are arguable even more concerning on a company machine. I wish there was a feasible alternative.
I know there is a bunch of new DX7 implementations on more modern hardware, i.e., the Raspberry Pi.
When implemented on modern hardware, wouldn't it be possible to run the algorithm at a higher CPU processing speed, to reduce the aliasing at the higher notes, and avoid the need for keyboard scaling and thus preserve the timbre of the higher pitched notes?
You mean, would it be possible to oversample the algorithm, run it effectively at a much higher sample rate and reduce the audibility of the aliases? Yes, it'll definitely help, but no, it's not possible to eliminate this effect, even with monstrous levels of oversampling.
The problem is that, say, a piano keyboard runs from 30Hz to 4Khz, so to get an even tone, at the top of the keyboard, you are only hearing 4 harmonics of the fundamental, whilst at the bottom, you potentially have roughly 1,000 harmonics in the audible spectrum.
Without fiddling with the voice with keyboard scaling, that same tone with 1,000 harmonics played at the top of the keyboard will generate a 4Mhz frequency, so you'd need a 2Mhz sample rate to avoid the aliases reflecting into the audible spectrum.
So that's 45x oversampling, which is a scary amount of effort to throw at the problem, to resolve the issue for this one contrived sound.
Now if you modify the above sound, and double the modulating frequency (the operator pitch) then you'll double the oversampling required, and you have basically limitless control to create higher and higher levels of harmonics to tame, so you can always fiddle with the setting to produce aliasing if you try hard enough :)
Alasdair posted this clip on bluesky, where I saw it. In the comments, Art UK had posted this article as a reply. Once I clicked through, I knew it would be exactly what HN would appreciate, and here we are.
My preference is: attenuator < offset < attenuator + offset. I see no benefit of having to remove the knob to get to the jack as proposed in the article.