ericwood

I have a hard time being sold on “yea it’s wrong a lot, also you have to spend more time than you already do on code review.”

Getting to sit down and write the code is the most enjoyable part of the job, why would I deprive myself of that? By the time the problem has been defined well enough to explain it to an LLM sitting down and writing the code is typically very simple.

I love all of the little tricks they employ! The two pole filter on the Rat was really eye opening to me; it makes perfect sense once you sit down and think through it, and the implementation is very elegant in its simplicity.

One of my favorites in this genre are using CMOS inverters as inverting op amps with a very pleasing and smooth distortion sound.

Articulation is everything! Distortion is compression, and simple things like the I-V curves of a clipping diode or slew limiting from a crappier op amp make a huge difference in the "feel" of distortion, especially with guitar. I love how Boss pedals in the 80s started using a fairly simple discrete op amp design to have greater control over this, as well as stacking on more and more active filtering stages for pre and post emphasis on the distortion.

Designing dirt pedals for guitar is a very humbling exercise in that many seemingly innocuous decisions can have large impacts on the end result. Often times you're bucking what would normally be EE best-practices and exploiting the edges of behavior in components to coax out pleasing nonlinearities. Equal parts engineering and what can feel like sorcery (but usually has a reasonable explanation).

Global mutable state is difficult to handle correctly and Rust forces you to think through the consequences. There's no shortage of patterns for safely working with it, but you can't take the easy (and unsafe!) way out.

I've had a 20' monster cable for at least 15 years now that is showing no signs of slowing down, even after a period of regular practice/shows. If only I was actually able to cash in on the warranty! Other cables from reputable brands haven't lasted this long in less demanding conditions.

When it was screened to critics it was shown as the full season. I get why now; the latest episodes show so much while conjuring up more questions. The most recent one especially; the cinematography stands on its own. It's very rewarding to continue watching!

I'm not sure. When you use their PCBA services you choose from a large list that gets fairly granular as the last step in the ordering process.

I'm not aware of a way to do this in the US, or else I'd absolutely take this on myself. For JLC the classification code is chosen by me at checkout, and I use the industry standard code for the product I sell.

I understand it takes more on their end but I hate that it's not baked in the the base shipping fee. They know they're going to have to do the extra work, why not take that into account on the base price?

JLCPCB recently started offering them as a shipping option, and they tend to be $5-10 under DHL's quote. The DHL price takes the additional processing fees into account and I'm not left with a nasty surprise in addition to the tariffs/customs fees.

I had a $300 order (ordered late January, arrived last week) and was hit with the tariffs via UPS along with their bogus processing fee as another commenter mentioned. They wait for it to reach the US before holding it hostage. Would recommend using DHL if at all possible, as they make dealing with it a lot less painful.

Or the person you're replying to is overly generalizing a very large diverse community after extrapolating a few bad experiences.

We accidentally discovered the max number of assets circa 2011 in a very large Rails app in development mode (which loaded CSS/JS files individually without concatenation). I forgot what it was but it was much lower than you'd anticipate.

These days it's really not bad, and it's even easier than shipping a normal web app, where there's a potentially unbounded number of browsers consuming it. Knowing exactly which clients to develop for is a luxury.

Deprecating it if your site had much traffic was like pulling teeth! I worked at a company that had IT professionals as its main demographic in 2011 and it was a constant struggle. Lots of corporations were locked into IE6 because they had developed internal applications that relied on ActiveX controls or other non-standard APIs. IE7 was still pretty terrible, and it took even longer to drop support.

CSS was pretty bad but at least well-documented; debugging JS was a whole other hell. There was no such thing as dev tooling, and you got a small alert in the status bar when the page had errors, which opened a pop up that gave you the line number and very little other information. Supposedly you could connect it to VisualStudio and get a full debugging experience, but I never had the luxury. Lots of guessing and checking. Firebug was a huge deal when it launched.

I see so many ideological arguments around "X is the new IE" that neglect one of the worst pieces of IE 6's reign of terror: the stagnation. Working around all of its quirks and non-standard behavior had an extremely long half-life; the venn diagram of things that worked correctly across all major browsers at the time was very complex and messy. Even with the release of IE7 it took many years for people to adopt it, and IE7 was hardly a saint either.

There's a part of my brain I'll never get back devoted to all of these workarounds. So many hours lost to weird corporate networks that had quirks mode enabled, different box models (before the advent of the `box-sizing` CSS attribute), random omissions of standards (no `:hover` on elements besides `a`), etc.

Highly recommend it! The chips themselves aren't the cheapest but xvive and coolaudio are still cranking them out so you don't have to resort to tracking down NOS parts. Complimentary PWM from a microcontroller and a gate driver for the clock pins (the MN3205 has 2800pF input capacitance) and you're in business!

I'm always on the lookout for a deal on a space echo or echorec! Keeping them in working condition is not the easiest unfortunately, and it's tough to justify the real thing when incredible emulations exist (I highly recommend the Strymon Volante for scratching that itch)

I really appreciate you sharing your story. Getting to the point of accepting the pain of the loss is a huge milestone, even when so many days feel like one step forward, two steps back. I’m deeply sorry for your loss.

A few days ago I completely broke down hearing “Daughter” by Four Tet. The triggers that don’t even make sense are the hardest. It’s really tough to hear other people having felt similar pain (nobody should have to endure it), but it’s comforting to not feel completely alone in it. Wishing the best for you and your family.

It’s worth noting that in addition to the sample rate, the companding to improve SNR and filtering techniques for anti-aliasing and reconstruction usually employed to (attempt to) retain signal integrity play a large part in the character. A lot of people think of them as “dark” but that voicing can vary a lot between delays depending on how the designer chose to bandwidth limit it; therein lies the real art of analog delay!

I’ve been working on an MN3205 with digital controls and pushing it well past its reasonable specs is very fun; 4096 stages really starts to fall apart past 300ms, and when you clock it down to more than a single second you get a wet robot fart out of the other end!

Hearing other people's stories helps so much, even though it can be a reminder of the long road ahead dealing with grief. I'm so sorry for your loss.

Thank you for linking this. I read bits and pieces of this as it was happening but it never fully registered for me at 24. I'm sitting here 10 years later at 34 having lost our son at 23 weeks. His due date was this past week. It's affected me in ways that still surprise, befuddle, and sometimes scare me. I cannot even begin to fathom what he's been through; the most recent blog post has me in tears.

I have really strong memories of learning HTML, CSS, and javascript in high school, and spending time in the school library picking apart css/edge. It felt like the dawn of a new era, I was in awe of the things I saw there. I built more than a few sites trying to get my head around the complexispiral demo, and spent countless hours diving into resources I found there (like A List Apart! I will never forget the suckerfish drop-downs). This is one of the few moments I have such vivid memories of that were directly responsible me for pursuing computer engineering and ultimately going so far into UI/UX and the web. I've never written it out this explicitly but: thank you for everything, Eric.

I've never understood why this was chosen as the default experience. Most users don't enjoy having every form element yelling at them for actions they haven't even had a chance to take! You can script around this, but at that point the feature isn't doing much. I'd argue this is the biggest reason you don't see more widespread adoption.

In the contexts I was talking about (hobbyist DIY guitar pedal forums) motorboating is often used as a catch-all for many types of oscillation, probably because the symptoms you describe are a very common error. Sometimes you get lucky and can tune the resulting oscillator by turning the guitar's volume knob!

I wasn't trying to assert anything about the article, just responding to a comment about desired op amp imperfections in guitar effects. It's fairly common practice to bandwidth limit high gain op amp stages to avoid the issues discussed in the article, amongst other things.

I'm not sure what you mean by "strawman version of op amp oscillation"; for many it's the colloquial term for oscillation. You can accomplish it very easily with many classic distortion circuits, especially on a breadboard. Guitar pedals are almost always run off a unipolar 9V supply. Large bypass caps are the normal (usually cargo culted over as a 100u at the input).

There's a lot of constraints that either remain due to the restrictive power supply requirements on top of tradition or people building off designs from the 90s that were hand assembled and took BOM golf to the next level.

Those op amp characteristics aren't really coming into play for that delay sound, it's just vanilla digital delay. Most of the "vibe" of the DD-3 is coming from the companding and filtering scheme it uses to work around the limitations of the digital pieces.

You will hear the effects of this in many hard clipping distortion circuits, though, where the amplifier gain factor will far exceed the voltage rails and be pushed into undefined clipping territory. Behaviors in this range can be an important part of the sound, e.g. the Proco Rat and the infamous LM308 op amp with its slow slew rate. Some like the TL072 exhibit a really nasty phase inversion that results in a pretty horrific (usually undesired) distortion.

It's a balancing act, though; search "op amp motorboating" in any DIY stompbox forum and you'll find thread after thread of people trying to keep op amp gain stages from oscillating. I know more than a few noisier artists who enjoy when designs can be tortured into doing that, though :)

I've always wondered about the "most advanced ____ we've ever made" phrase, it seems like almost like a silly tongue in cheek inside joke at this point. Does it date back to Jobs? They've used that exact turn of phrase for every product iteration as long as I can remember but I can't find any info on its origin. Maybe I'm hallucinating this?

It’s more in the Rust ecosystem but AccessKit looks really promising from this standpoint. I’m not sure if it could work in the context of a TUI but it might be a great starting point! https://github.com/AccessKit/accesskit

It’s been a decade at least since I heavily used Pandora but I remember it being even worse than Spotify at this. The algorithm seemed to latch on to one or two tracks from any given artist and they’d continue popping up no matter how I trained it. Great as a discovery tool for artists I guess, but as endless radio Spotify does a way better job at least trying to reach into back catalogs and including more than one or two songs. There’s still a lot of room for improvement, and it does seem to get hung up in similar ways.

Maybe Pandora has improved since.

The area defaults to zero, and recalculates when you change any of the parameters, resulting in a divide by zero and NaN being displayed

The recommendation algorithm is pretty awful and needs a lot of intervention to start surfacing great content. Life got a lot better once I started clicking "hide" on particularly egregious posts and avoiding interaction. It seems to disproportionately weight "click to view" interactions so avoiding morbid curiosity when seeing a bad take helps.

If there weren't pressure to use it for my small side business I'd have given up on it almost immediately.

I was doing this pre-pandemic and it was the happiest I've ever been in a work situation. Most meetings would wait for the in-person time and my WFH days as a result were usually heads down. We were able to lean into the best parts of both work styles, and the people who preferred to work in an office would be there every day.

It depends on the team and work but I definitely feel a lot more disconnected being fully remote these days. Seeing my team (and broader org) every quarter was a nice compromise that combatted this somewhat but I miss the energy of the hybrid model.