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Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?

#411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nature, almost completely analog, has been around a thousand times longer than humans. How many times has 'evolution' used digital methods to accomplish something? Perhaps we've chosen to switch to digital because we're in a hurry and its easier ... in hopes of, some day, asymptotically approaching the advantages of analog.

DNA is digital. I think crucial digital feature is ability to have exact result from imperfect components, especially important for self-replicating systems. Instead of having calculation that is always off by 1%, you can have perfect result 99% of the time. And you can improve MTBF by stacking error correction on top of it, without necessarily having to improve manufacturing tolerances.

DNA copying always introduces errors. Organisms have quite a few error correcting mechanisms to mitigate damage from bad copies.

Most DNA errors turn out to be inconsequential to the individual. If a cell suffers catastrophic errors during reproduction, it typically just dies. Same for embryos, they fail to develop and get reabsorbed. Errors during normal RNA transcription tend to encode an impossible or useless protein that usually does nothing. Malformed RNA can also get permanently stuck in the cellular machinery meant to decode it, but this also has no real effect. That transcriptase floats around uselessly until it's broken down and replaced. You've got a nearly infinite number of them.

DNA and all the machinery around it is surprisingly messy and imprecise. But it all keeps working anyway because organisms have billions or trillions of redundant copies of their DNA.

*take with a grain of salt, I last studied this stuff many years ago.

Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main reason is that digital computers are so incredibly, overwhelmingly more flexible than analog. Analog computers are (generally) bespoke single-purpose devices. It really isn't too far off to imagine analog computers as code made physical, with all that entails. Imagine writing a program if every time you wanted to change something you had to cut a new gear, or design a new mechanism, or build a new circuit. I…

Yeah but ChatGPT is using $700k per day in compute (or was in April). Someone's going to make an analog machine that uses mirrors and light interference or something to do self attention and become very, very wealthy.

Yes, this is an active area of research.

Neural networks are a very good application for analog computing (imo). You have a ton of floating point operations that all need to happen more or less simultaneously. And what are floating point numbers if not digital approximations of analog values? :)

This can be implemented as a network of transistors on a chip, but driven in the linear region instead of trying to switch them on as hard as possible as fast as possible. Which is, I believe, what researchers are trying to do.

There are also some interesting ideas about photonic computing, but I'm not sure if that's going anywhere.

A few months back, someone on YouTube attempted to design a mechanical neural network as a single 3D printed mechanism. It ended up not working, but the concept was pretty solid.

Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about docusaurus and tinasaurus? The latter is based on TinaCMS. [1] Docusaurus: https://docusaurus.io/ [2] Tinasaurus: https://github.com/tinacms/tinasaurus

This arent wikis..?

Yes, while technically speaking they are not wiki in traditional sense, they are based on Git thus collaborative editing is feasible and combined with friendly interface of TinaCMS in which Tinasaurus is based on, it can be a modern Wiki version on steroid i.e lean and fast wiki

Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some... surprising and relatively easy ways to feel the magic of analog computation?

Slide rules, for a start. This Wikipedia page contains a lot of magic as well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Differential_analyser As for something you can easily get your hands on, micrometers are incredible. A simple screw and graduated markings on the shaft and nut give you incredibly precise measurements. You can also find mechanical calculators (adding machines) on eBay. But those really aren't very sexy examp…

I like synthesizers and modular synths. So maybe I play with music analog computers. No idea how to make them do useful computation though!

Re: Ask HN: What are some unpopular technologies you wish people knew more about?

#417

Not sure if you're looking for things as "trifling" as programming languages, but I do wish more people knew about Nim. It's fast, statically typed, reads more or less like Python, has a great effect system, etc. It's a joy to use. I've been working through writing an interpreter in it: https://youtu.be/48CsjEFzyXQ

Just so you know, the call for speakers for the 2024 Carolina Code Conference (polyglot) will open January 1. A Nim talk would be a great fit for the event.

> 2024 Carolina Code Conference (polyglot)

Thanks for mentioning this! I work remote in SC and its nice to hear about a nearby convention.

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