fxj

But isnt this where PureData, Max and Supercollider shine? It is possible to create very exotic interfaces with them and many people use it for that purpose. The user communities of the 3 tools is small but very knowledgable.

Just to be correct:

The VZ-1 takes a hybrid approach to its sound generation. Where the CZ line used Phase Distortion Synthesis and the Yamaha DX line used Phase Modulation (incorrectly advertised as FM), the VZ-1 uses Phase Distortion for ring modulation and waveform generation but true Frequency Modulation Synthesis to generate harmonics.

https://www.vintagesynth.com/casio/vz-1

also see the former blogpost of the OP:

Casio is lying to us

Is my VZ-1 broken? Have I discovered an implementation quirk that nobody on the internet has ever complained about? No and no. My VZ-1 is not broken and on closer inspection at least 1 person on the internet is aware of this problem, and they figured it out for me! Digital synthesis expert acreil got roped into a Gearspace thread about the VZ-1 back in 2021. The discussion starts off not being very interesting until acreil shows up, who then repeatedly gets contradicted by someone who loudly says things that are wrong, and then to put that all to rest acreil finds the relevant Casio patent for the VZ series and drops the bomb that the VZ's don't do phase modulation at all. They do wave shaping.

Excuse me what now? Yes, pedantically wave shaping is phase modulation with a carrier frequency of 0Hz, but why would you call that phase modulation?

https://blog.jacobvosmaer.nl/0028-mysterious-vz-1/

What do you think about Behringer who announced a re/issue of the CZ-1 as a small module. I personally have many of the replicas that Behringer made of old synthesizers and I love them dearly. Finally I can aford the synths of the 70s and 80s that were unreachable for me at that time. Of course a lot of them are monophonic analog machines which have a rich UI with one knob per function, but I also like the digital ones like the Brains or Victor which are much harder to program, but still have a very easy to use UI. Same is true for Korg with their volca line. The Volce FM is just great, even though I have to program the DX7 sound on a PC.

These is a digital replica of the original synthesizer Casio CZ-1 from the 1980s by Arturia. It has a very distinct sound. Some demos are here to show how it sounds like:

https://www.arturia.com/products/software-instruments/cz-v/o...

Just out of curiosity: Have you tried perplexity? When I paste your prompt it gives me a list of

2 researchgate papers (Overlapping sound event recognition using local spectrogram features with the Generalised Hough Transform July 2013 Pattern Recognition Letters)

and one ieee publication (Generalized Hough Transform for Speech Pattern Classification, in IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing, vol. 23, no. 11, pp. 1963-1972, Nov. 2015)

When I am looking for real web results chatgpt is not very good, but perplexity very often shines for me

and for python programming have a look at withpretzel.com which does the job for me.

just my 2 ct

They already work. AlphaFold is just transforming an industry. And runway will be a game changer for Hollywood. Udio and Suno are disrupting the music industry. And this are only some of the innovations that came up in the last 2 years. We live in interesting times.

btw. yesterday I came across withpretzel.com, this is a revolution for working interactively with supercomputers and jupyer.

When you are 65 then you already have done a lot for the economy of the country. The probelm at hand is that 30% of the workforce will retire in 2030 because of the baby boom in 60s. In the 2030s there will be many open jobs for young people to show their talent and AI will help them to be even more productive. There is no need to bother old frail people into social service. Very often people in their 60s are burnt out and will not be very helpful for the society anymore.

just my 2 ct

Yes the proposal is quite interesting. But do you really think a 60 year old software developer will want to work in a social service job? He was working his ass off for 40 years in daily scrums or so and then he should be doing social work in a retirement home or hospital? Retirement is done of a special reason, because people want to stop working and not because they want to change into a social service.

My suggestion: Let people start part time retirement with 55 and train and consult the next generation that comes after them. Then the loss of knowledge is avoided and when they are 65 just leave them alone in their retirement. They have deserved it well. If someone wants still to work, good for him, but a mandatory social service sounds to me like slave labour and the votes at the next elections will come in. There is a reason why the ultra right are so strong in the east of germany.

So when I pay an intern to do a google search and make a short report of the facts that he was finding and giving it back to me, this is not a problem, but when I ask an AI to do the same it suddenly is problem. Well I dont get it.

just my 2 ct

I started with the free plan but after a while I realized that this is the news app that I use almost exclusively so I got the pro plan.

I highly recommend inoreader.com. It is like the old google reader on steroids. It is the first app I open in the morning to get my news and my personal feed consists of some 4000 single feeds from everything that I gathered on the internet. All nicely organized with filters and folders. It is a bessing for keeping up with youtube content, because all channels appear as single feeds that you can organize. You can put several single RSS feeds into a folder which presents itself again as a feed.

For legacy hardware (synths, samplers) there are not many options when the company who produced them is out of business like E-mu or Ensoniq. I have 2 of these old keyboards and now I am trying to replace the floppy und SCSI drives with something more modern. For floppys there is the Gotek FlashFloppy which replaces the floppy drive with a USB adapter. But it is a mess to install it. Also it does not work with all legacy synths. For SCSI there exists the RaSCSI solution which is a Raspi nano or pico which emulates a SCSI drive.

https://studio-services.de/produkt/gotek-flashfloppy-extra-g...

https://studio-services.de/produkt/zuluscsi-rp2040-mini/

ok I bite. I have a Go, a Quest1, a Quest2, several adaptors for mobile phones, even an old kickstarter model of a VR headset with an intel atom cpu and stock android. I have a stereo/360 camera (Vuze VR) and I love all these gadgets.

What do I use them for? 360/stereo movies are incredibly cool. It is just another way of experiencing your personal history. Also there is Oculus Labs where they have some indi games and software which does not show up in the official Oculus Store. There are some gems, like some really cool games and some scientific applications, like a protein modeller.

I have also written VR programs by myself for scientific purposes (mainly biophysics) but also data mining and 3d CFD simulations. The 3rd dimension makes so much difference when you look at objects and you have a real feeling for the objects.

What I miss: Easily exporting 3d Models to VR (e.g. Blender), a good VR web browser. No Chrome is just the 2D version on a virtual screen. Not very impressive. Firefox VR is aready dead. And a good standard fiel format is still missing. VRML was quite nice in the 90s but hey that was 30 years ago.

just my 2 ct

You can also get a lilygo t-deck with an ESP32

https://www.lilygo.cc/en-pl/products/t-deck

or a M5Stack cardputer (fully assembled and ready for extensions)

https://shop.m5stack.com/products/m5stack-cardputer-kit-w-m5...

it even has a rust kernel:

https://github.com/Kezii/Rust-M5Stack-Cardputer

and runs (of course) micro python:

https://circuitpython.org/board/m5stack_cardputer/

for the t-deck I just saw the discussion here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38862848

As I said in another comment down below. Currying is great for rapid prototyping because you dont have to define a new function. eg. add1 and add(1) which you then can use for map/reduce or pointfree programming. In production code it often makes more sense to be a bit more detailed and verbose to make it readable for devs who are not familiar with currying. But abstraction in general is not something that is "bad".

high level abstraction can make you very productive, but it can also be rather unreadable. e.g. two code snippets in python (yes this is valid python code with some operator overloading):

# compute pi by drawing random numbers in a circle

  1000000 >> ψ( ψ(χ>>op("(x**2+y**2)**0.5<1")@rlµ<<χ)>>Σ*4>> _/_)

or this:

  # 10 fibonacci numbers

  [x:=[1,1]] + [x := [x[1], sum(x)] for i in range(10)]

I would of course not use that in production code, but for a rapid prototype it is priceless to do something like this in python.

just my 2 ct

In my experience, functional programming really shines in rapid prototyping. However, in production code I would try to avoid it, because it can confuse developers that are not used to it and also sometimes I struggle myself when decoding the short "clever" one-liner that I wrote 5 years ago. But if you want to write very powerful code withing a single line it is really great and makes you very productive for finding solutions fast. It is a bit like the Perl throw-away code we were writing in the 1990s. ;-)

just my 2 ct

Currying is only a part of the functional programming stack. It can make your life easier when you combine it with other functional programming techniques like tacit programming. e.g. you have a function with a very long arguments list and dont want to write the arguments over and over again, but still dont want to define an additional function.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_programming

https://medium.com/@jesterxl/real-world-uses-of-tacit-progra...

when you use tacit programming and currying together you can write code in a "bash-like" pipe style which not only makes the program more readable but also is less error prone.

https://wiki.haskell.org/Pointfree

When I did my PhD in the late 80s we were simulating Kelvin-Helmholtz Instabilities on supercomputers with application to solar dynamics. It is very nice to see that they exist and behave like predicted. There are plenty of other plasma instabilities that were predicted at that time and have now been confimed by space probes.

This! GPT is not an "intelligence" by itself, but more an extension to the human brain, like an "exocortex" holding information that we cannot or dont want to keep in our neocortex. Google search was the first of these "exocortex" extensions to the brain that was popular among many people. So the same seems to happens now with LLMs. Maybe we will not end up with an AGI but more with a human/machine hybrid which has the "superhuman" capabilities.

just my 2 ct

There are already multiline lambda functions available by using the walrus operator:

foo = lambda x: ( z:=x+1, zz:=z*2, zz+7 )[-1]

it defines a tuple and returns the last element. List comprehensions, walrus operator and lambda make a functional language out of python.

It has its own programming language CSL

https://www.cerebras.net/blog/whats-new-in-r0.6-of-the-cereb...

"CSL allows for compile time execution of code blocks that take compile-time constant objects as input, a powerful feature it inherits from Zig, on which CSL is based. CSL will be largely familiar to anyone who is comfortable with C/C++, but there are some new capabilities on top of the C-derived basics."

https://github.com/Cerebras/csl-examples

Did you read the article?

Both whales were male, which was clear from identifying marks on the tail flukes of the skinnier whale. “At first they thought they had found two humpback whales mating,” Stack says. “It was already an exciting discovery—and then there was this whole other level to the story.”

isnt it more like:

RNA: asm text file

Protein: compiled binary

also: t-RNA is a hybrid of RNA and amino acids, which is like a hash table

When we look at LLMs and stable diffusion which mimic intelligence we see that random seeds are crucial for the inference process to produce an output. Maybe there is some random number generator also in the human brain which is necessary for the brain to function properly and to escape from local minima.

Maybe the behaviour of LLMs can shed some light into this discussion. Does a LLM have free will? Obviously not because it is just a software running on a computer. But even when you ask an LLM exactly the same questions you will get totally different results. Sometimes it makes up things and sometimes you can push it to state that 1+1=3. It depends on the surroundings but also on some "magical free" will of the LLM to answer differently each time. Of course it is because of the random seeds that are needed to start the inference. Even though the human brain is not a LLM, we learn that there are systems that behave like having "free will".

just my 2 ct

Can you also compensate against decoherence? I thought this is the magic limit when the QC breaks.

See also: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/decoherenc...

What puzzles me with IBMs roadmap is their scaling:

2025 156 qubits, 5000 gates

2028 156 qubits, 15K gates

2029 200 qubits, 100M gates

2033 2000 qubits, 1B gates

The jump from 15K to 100M gates looks fishy to me. Maybe I am wrong but I doubt that will work that way.

The big unsolved problem in QC is the lifetime of the QC itself until decoherence. Imagine a computer where you can execute a maximum of 1800 commands (IBM Heron) and then it is broken. That is the status of QC at the moment. A QC might store TB of data and do searches with O(1), but there is no way (at the moment) to upload a TB database to the QC. What we need is a quantum processor that lives for hours or days in a coherent state, but what we have is milli seconds.

Just my 2 ct.

edit: IBMs Roadmap shows a QC with 1 Billion commands (gates) after 2033. With that machine they could (in principle) upload a 100MB database and do searches.

source: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/quantum-computing...

The inventor of APL, Ken Iverson, also made the language J which is very much influenced by APL but does not use the special characters of APL. Think of it as ASCII-APL. It is a very nice language to program in and they have a decent user community. It is open source and is incredibly fast and looks at the first glance as cryptic as APL.

https://www.jsoftware.com

In non-standard analysis a whole set of infinitesinal numbers is introduced which are essentially zero. But you can do math with them (including division) and they are very useful for an alternative version of calculus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonstandard_analysis

and

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonstandard_calculus