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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: September 11th, 2023

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  • Its not that they don’t have pitch, per se, it’s that the nature of the sound they produce makes the concept of “pitch” kind of meaningless.

    Except for a pure sine wave, every tone is going to have multiple harmonics over the fundamental which is what actually gives an instrument, even the human voice, its timbre.

    Percussion instruments like cymbals and the snare drum create broad-spectrum noise. There’s essentially so many frequencies that it’s difficult for our brains to nail it down the fundamental pitch. It’s also what helps us hear them over the rest of the ensemble.

    Drums in general produce very short pulses of sound, which also makes it harder for the brain to tell what pitch it is. In harmonic analysis, any very short sound is actually broad-spectrum because it takes a ton of harmonics to produce a single sharp spike with rapid decay.

    I highly recommend downloading a spectrum analyzer app on your phone to get an intuition for this. If you’re on Android, I recommend Spectroid.

    Just run it and watch the screen while you make different sounds, approach various sound sources, play music, or just talk or sing. If you can whistle, that also produces an interesting result. You can actually see the frequency of the power grid in the harmonics produced by electric motors and transformer coils which is personally really fucking cool.



  • It’s a troll toll. It’ll get you a software engineering job with a roman numeral in the title at a company you’ve actually heard of. But if you’re almost done then there’s no reason not to stick with it.

    The early years of my career were quite a slog, having taught myself to program. I started out on freelancing websites, competing with devs from the third world who worked for pennies a day. I lucked into my first salaried job, got hired through my cousin.

    I will say, having some theory knowledge does come in handy occasionally. You might never have to write your own hashtable, but being able to understand the implementation of the structures you’re using helps a lot to make informed decisions about how you organize and access data, especially when you’re trying to optimize for performance or memory usage.

    One piece of unsolicited advice you might have heard before is to not discount the power of networking. The best written cover letter in the world can’t hold a candle to knowing someone who can put in a good word. Make friends with your professors and classmates, you never know who might think to look you up one day when their company is hiring. My old boss still offers me a job occasionally, more than five years later.













  • What baffles me is I’ve yet to see another handheld with touchpads that can even begin to rival the Steam Deck’s.

    AYANEO has them on the Retro Mini PC but they’re smaller and way too far down to be comfortable to use regularly.

    The touchpads are one of the Steam Deck’s greatest features. They actually make it enjoyable to play games designed for use with a mouse. Why are none of the other manufacturers getting that?


  • Technus@lemmy.ziptoScience Memes@mander.xyzIt's a mess in here
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    2 months ago

    I have a theory hypothesis notion that the concept of hallucination in artificial neural networks is not a failure mode that is unique to ANNs but is an inherent property of any neural network, artificial or biological.

    Essentially, I posit that a neural network by itself is incapable of maintaining coherence without a rigid external framework, such as consistent feedback in training an ANN, or the laws of physics for biologicals.

    This would explain why people start tripping balls in sensory deprivation chambers. And it provides a counterargument to any thought experiment or philosophy that involves a disembodied brain vividly hallucinating reality.