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Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer

spectrum.ieee.org

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Re: Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer

#11

Post by alephnerd »

This is why I feel the recentish (last 10-15 years) shift in decoupling CS curricula from EE and CE fundamentals in the US is doing a massive disservice to newer students entering the industry.

DSP, Control Engineering, Circuit Design, understanding pipelining and caching, and other fundamentals are important for people to understand higher levels of the abstraction layers (eg. much of deep learning is built on top of Optimization Theory principles which are introduced in a DSP class).

The value of Computer Science isn't the ability to whiteboard a Leetcode hard question or glue together PyTorch commands - it's the ability to reason across multiple abstraction layers.

And newer grads are significantly deskilled due to these curriculum changes. If I as a VC know more about Nagle's Algorithm (hi Animats!) than some of the potential technical founders for network security or MLOps companies, we are in trouble.

Re: Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer

#12

Post by 0x1ch »

post-it wrote: post #9
yayitswei wrote: post #8

This is one of the few articles where I noticed a bunch of LLM-isms and still read to the end because it was interesting.

It's because there's clearly a near-1:1 ratio of input to output. I also noticed some LLMisms, and I suspect the author may have ran the text (perhaps in the form of a large number of bullet points) through an LLM. But because he's using the LLM to clean instead of multiply, it's still worth reading.

Probably similar to what I do with my papers and resumes, I write them myself then throw them through LLMs for suggestions and corrections, manually reviewing the output.

Re: Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer

#13

Post by btown »

themafia wrote: post #6

The original title: "Jimi Hendrix's Analog Wizardy Explained." > and the component was the Octavia guitar pedal, created for Hendrix by sound engineer Roger Mayer. So, Roger was the engineer. And, Jimi was the artist.

Art and engineering are both constrained optimization problems - at their core, both involve transforming a loosely defined aesthetic desire into a repeatable methodology!

And if we can call ourselves software engineers, where our day-to-day (mostly) involves less calculus and more creative interpretation of loose ideas, in the context of a corpus of historical texts that we literally call "libraries" - are we not artists and art historians?

We're far closer to Jimi than Roger, in many ways. Pots and kettles :)

Re: Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer

#14

Post by jmalicki »

alephnerd wrote: post #11

This is why I feel the recentish (last 10-15 years) shift in decoupling CS curricula from EE and CE fundamentals in the US is doing a massive disservice to newer students entering the industry. DSP, Control Engineering, Circuit Design, understanding pipelining and caching, and other fundamentals are important for people to understand higher levels of the abstraction layers (eg. much of deep learning is built on top o…

I came into a CS and math background without CE or EE, and took two dedicated optimization courses (one happened to be in a EE department, but had no EE prereqs), as well as the optimization introduced in machine learning classes. To be honest a lot of the older school optimization is barely even useful, second-order methods are a bit passe for large scale ML, largely because they don't work, not because people aren't aware (Adam and Muon can be seen as approximations to second-order methods, though, so it is useful to be aware of that structure).

Isn't Nagle usually introduced in a networking class typically taken by CS (non-CE/EE) undergrads?

Just because EEs are exposed to some mathematical concepts during their training doesn't mean that non-EEs are not exposed through a different path.

Re: Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer

#15

Post by dajt »

btown wrote: post #13
themafia wrote: post #6

The original title: "Jimi Hendrix's Analog Wizardy Explained." > and the component was the Octavia guitar pedal, created for Hendrix by sound engineer Roger Mayer. So, Roger was the engineer. And, Jimi was the artist.

Art and engineering are both constrained optimization problems - at their core, both involve transforming a loosely defined aesthetic desire into a repeatable methodology! And if we can call ourselves software engineers, where our day-to-day (mostly) involves less calculus and more creative interpretation of loose ideas, in the context of a corpus of historical texts that we literally call "libraries" - are we not ar…

We should not call ourselves engineers - it's a massive insult to actual professional engineers.

Re: Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer

#16

Post by nerdsniper »

yayitswei wrote: post #8

This is one of the few articles where I noticed a bunch of LLM-isms and still read to the end because it was interesting.

LLM-isms are tolerably bad. LLM's narrative ability is intolerably terrible. As others said, because a human actually wrote the overall narration for this, it was still compelling to read. The mistake would be skipping a well-narrated and thoughtful article just because of a few bad LLMisms.

I think LLM's lack of "theory of mind" leads to them severely underperforming on narration and humor.

Re: Jimi Hendrix was a systems engineer

#20

Post by BrokenCogs »

This is a terrible article. In the first subplot, there is no explanation of what v(b1) and v(c2) are. The -8 on the on y axis (amplitude) looks like an upside down 8.

Further down there is a sentence: "First, the Fuzz Face is a two-transistor feedback amplifier that turns a gentle sinusoid signal into an almost binary “fuzzy” output." But the figure does not match this - there is no "gentle sinusoid" wave shown on the first fuzz face plot.

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