What are you Watching? (Educational)

Interesting interview with John Chowning

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He’s Channel is great!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XcWZJCQGPVE

Not a video, but this is the best place I could find to drop this. Apparently this is the schematic for a Roland TR-808 Bass Drum:

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Mike Engelhardt, author of LTSpice, has recently released QSpice beta.

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Rack possibilities are obvious…

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But this out of context quote is often mishandled (even to mean that we do not care about software being slow)

Full passage is

Programmers waste enormous amounts of time thinking about, or worrying about, the speed of noncritical parts of their programs, and these attempts at efficiency actually have a strong negative impact when debugging and maintenance are considered. We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil. Yet we should not pass up our opportunities in that critical 3%.

https://wiki.c2.com/?PrematureOptimization

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I disagree. My comment was entirely in the correct context. They are both about programmers wasting time by optimizing code that is not on the critical path. Many people liked my ancient paper that mentions this it’s here

@cmuratori style of delivery might be annoying, but I found his points valid, his angle on ā€œclean codeā€, not in general sense, but certain Clean Code from book by @unclebobmartin where Bob advocates to write code in certain styles, completely disregarding performance outcomes and not even mentioning in book, while this book is one of the first that is recommended to novices. Here is followup discussion between them where they agree on that and other things.

Some insights into Steven Wilson’s process creating his latest track

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Tony Banks’ touring synth

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I’m currently in the process of converting a hardware module’s schematic into a software emulation for VCV Rack. The original schematic consists of op-amps, resistors, and capacitors with some interesting feedback loops. I was thrilled to find this video, which shows how to translate exactly this kind of schematic into differential equations. Once you have the differential equations, it is easy to approximate them as finite difference equations that can be updated on each audio sample.

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Looks like working at billion dollar company with 8500 employees does not prevents one from making same old awful UX/UI with toolkit from early 200x if one really wants to or clueless in these regards.

Sure, the widgets are old Windows standard, but what impressed me from a UI perspective is what’s going on inside the canvas. Did you get to ~5m in the video? IMO the interface is a lot more modern than it looks (essentially a popup CLI instead of endless dialogs).

On a technical level (said as a non-specialist) I find this pretty amazing–thanks @Jens.Peter.Nielsen !

Yeah, it is nice that all simulation parameters are right there on canvas, wysiwig style I actually like it, but that’s it, afaik you can not even embed interactive graph in there, and everything else except canvas is not great. It’s more like iteration over awful LTspice, and still by modern computers capabilities and interactive media design knowledge, with examples even from this community; it looks not great not to mention with resources available to them.

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