Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Analog computing may be coming back

bellmar.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 89 posts

Re: Analog computing may be coming back

#71

Post by tabtab »

zozbot234 wrote: post #22

Analog computing sucks. It's inherently sensitive to noise and random variation in your devices that's basically ubiquitous with modern chip-making processes. Digital electronics actively reject noise at every step in a computation, albeit at the cost of wasting energy in the process. With analog, a more complex computation becomes exponentially harder.

> It's inherently sensitive to noise and random variation

Musicians often like old analog equipment because it creates unexpected sounds and sparks ideas (pun partially intended), and may have a nostalgic feel that's hard to emulate in digital. Maybe digital equipment can have randomness algorithms, but they probably have a learning curve.

Re: Analog computing may be coming back

#72

Post by rideontime »

nanna wrote: post #29
silvestrov wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Analog computers are like LP records: only good for nostalgia.

Depth of sound, long term storage, ease of navigation, there are lots of reasons people prefer vinyl that aren't based in nostalgia.

Hope you aren't playing those records on un-conditioned cables.

Re: Analog computing may be coming back

#73

Post by nathan_compton »

krisoft wrote: post #62
pjerem wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are far from having a model of how the brain really works. Furthermore, i know it's a really common analogy but the brain is not really comparable to a computer. The brain is not programmable, it only have a single function which is "given x input, what output is more likely to keep the organism alive and well". It's a complex task, for sure. But that's not a computer. A computer is a machine on which you can run…

> The brain is not programmable But that is not true, is it? You take a person and train him/her the right way and you will get a fighter pilot, or an equestrian or a poet. The difference between your fingers and the fingers of the finest goldsmith or cellist is thousands of hours of practice. And that didn't change their fingers, it reprogrammed their brain. So yeah, you can't upload a new program to it with a USB p…

This feels a little bit like a rhetorical trick. You're right that there is _something_ similar about training a person and programming a computer, but I'd hardly call the two things directly analogous. It strains the definition of the word train to say you trained a computer with a python script and it strains the definition of the word programmed to say you programmed a person to play the cello.

Tech people see everything as essentially similar to tech, but its come to be my understanding that biological systems are a fundamentally different kind of thing than technological ones.

Re: Analog computing may be coming back

#74

Post by pjerem »

krisoft wrote: post #62
pjerem wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are far from having a model of how the brain really works. Furthermore, i know it's a really common analogy but the brain is not really comparable to a computer. The brain is not programmable, it only have a single function which is "given x input, what output is more likely to keep the organism alive and well". It's a complex task, for sure. But that's not a computer. A computer is a machine on which you can run…

> The brain is not programmable But that is not true, is it? You take a person and train him/her the right way and you will get a fighter pilot, or an equestrian or a poet. The difference between your fingers and the fingers of the finest goldsmith or cellist is thousands of hours of practice. And that didn't change their fingers, it reprogrammed their brain. So yeah, you can't upload a new program to it with a USB p…

No, training is not programming.

Training is feeding the "complex electrical circuit" some input data, repeating it as nauseam in hope that somehow, the machine manages to store and interpret enough of this knowledge to do something with it.

Programming is just throwing data somewhere into some memory and instructing the processor to interpret this data as instructions to follow.

There is no such thing as a processor in the brain that somehow would read some memory somewhere and execute a set of actions.

It’s just « eyes see cake. I know that grabbing it and eating it releases dopamine so I’ll send the required signals to get this into mouth » it’s not ./eat_cake -f --ignore-consequences

I doubt that computers would be as useful as they are if some coach had to train brain-based computers what is Excel and how it should work.

Re: Analog computing may be coming back

#75

Post by foobarbecue »

Our_Benefactors wrote: post #70
Pet_Ant wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh, this frustrates me. You are just saying that the _mix_ put on vinyl is better than the mix put on CD. That same mix put on CD would be even better due to higher fidelity of the format. Vinyl is a strictly worse format... unfortunately it's also an easier source of better mixes.

Not a vinyl purist, but the argument is that the same mix sounds different pressed into vinyl vs burned to disc because they reproduce the frequencies differently when read. You would have to engineer the CD mix differently to match the sound of the vinyl.

I mean... So you can't record high frequencies on vinyl... if you WANTED the CD to sound like vinyl you could intentionally alias the high frequencies. But why would you want to do that?

It's not really a case of them "producing different frequencies when read." It's that CDs are capable of recording and reproducing a broader range of frequencies than vinyl.

Re: Analog computing may be coming back

#77

Post by alar44 »

noduerme wrote: post #27
chongli wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as the circuits are concerned, there’s no such thing as digital. For human engineers, digital is a convention. Well, technically, there are numerous digital logic conventions based on different voltage standards. For example, you might decide that 0 volts is a logical 0 and 5 volts is a logical 1. If you get everyone to agree to this convention then you can build components that talk to each other. Unfortunate…

so .. the only thing I could imagine making a system "analog" would be if each voltage were treated differently, rather than segregated into 0 or 1 as you just described. If a whole range of signal between 0 and 5 volts were directly output to something like a speaker system, that would be analog. I guess I'm wondering how this optical computer would get around the bottleneck of reducing everything to binary as you d…

You'd use an ADC.

Re: Analog computing may be coming back

#78

Post by alar44 »

jefurii wrote: post #65

Analog computing has been used by musicians for awhile now. Synthesizers are basically analog computers. Bob Moog was an engineer whose genius was figuring out how to connect keyboards to lab equipment and how to hide enough of the guts to make the gear approachable to musicians. West Coast synthesists like Buchla took the opposite approach of appreciating the sound of analog computing for what it is. Synthesizers tr…

No, synthesizers and guitar pedals are as much computers as a trumpet. "It translates the lip movement through the horn and amplifies the sound, thusly it's multiplying and therefore a computer!"

That is stretching the definition of a computer to absurdity, sorry.

Re: Analog computing may be coming back

#79

Post by alar44 »

nanna wrote: post #29
silvestrov wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Analog computers are like LP records: only good for nostalgia.

Depth of sound, long term storage, ease of navigation, there are lots of reasons people prefer vinyl that aren't based in nostalgia.

Fuck no. Vinyl is inferior to modern digital media in every single measurable way. I cannot believe this myth won't fucking die! You literally have to roll off the low end in a vinyl master so the needle doesn't pop off the track ffs. Not to mention the vinyl literally wears down every time you play the record.

Re: Analog computing may be coming back

#80

Post by alar44 »

foobarbecue wrote: post #38
nanna wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depth of sound, long term storage, ease of navigation, there are lots of reasons people prefer vinyl that aren't based in nostalgia.

Depth? You mean like a large range in available amplitudes (loud vs soft)?

Probably, and they're wrong.
Post reply on HN