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Comment by edent | Hacker News Reader

It's interesting to apply this at various levels of abstraction.

Almost all raster image editors work on a grid of RGB(A) pixels. Whether it's PNG, JPG, WebP or whatever - they're all deflated to a pixel grid.

Wireless technology strikes me as the opposite of the narrow waist. Sure, it is all just variants of basic radio tech. But Bluetooth audio and WiFi are fundamentally incompatible - despite using more-or-less the same spectrum. 2G phones can't send or receive 5G.

What a great article. Good food for thought.

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Actually wireless is the classic example of the narrow waist as suggested by the sibling comments but it's not because of GNU Radio but I/Q signal.

All wireless communication are based on EM waves and can be reduced to I/Q or quadrature signal [1]. But rather than design by human as IP or text mentioned by the OP it is found in nature similar to our chromosomes pair. Using this wonderful I/Q signal concept you can even digitally create and control not only digital modulations but all the conventional analog modulations for examples AM, FM and SSB. If you want you can even control the EM signal impedance itself by using the I/Q signals and in microwave measurement world this modern technique is known as digital load-pull or source-pull.

The interoperability problems that you've observed is due to the Bluetooth and WiFi are using different modulation techniques. Bluetooth is using the Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS) and WiFi is using OFDM. The former is good for low power and the latter is good for bandwidth. Initially WiFi standard also support FHSS but due to its bandwidth limitation the later WiFi standards (and also 4G/5G) are based entirely on OFDM.

[1]I/Q Data for Dummies:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25134698

Glad you liked the article! From a user perspective, bluetooth does seem to be a outlier ... it would be interesting to unpack the reasons.

This post linked by skybrian is good, and discusses a sort of narrow waist for image transformations (and animation library linked at the end)

https://acko.net/blog/on-variance-and-extensibility/

My comments say where I disagree, but it's a good article obviously based on a lot of experience.

Most wireless transmission protocols use generic modulation techniques that in theory can be put together using a software package like GNU Radio.

In theory GNU Radio could be the narrow waist for all wireless transmission protocols. It isn’t practical yet but it’s a possibility. Instead of rewriting a new wireless stack each time we just use GNU radio and specify our specific signal blocks.

The analogy is similar to IR being the compiler’s narrow waist.

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