corethree

>I’m not sure what you’re trying to say here. When you multiply two fp32 values, and the result is rounded, the answer is not exact, even if the inputs were.

I'm not talking about two fp32 values. I'm not talking about multiplying. I'm talking about repeating a value. If a wire was once 2.1234 volts, I turn it off, can i replicate the 2.1234 volts again exactly? No. There's noise. Repeating is NOT multiplying.

>If you repeat the process and produce the same rounded number, it’s still not exact and never will be. I didn’t claim analog circuits produce exact numbers, you’re not understanding me and constructing straw men.

Dude, you wrote this verbatim: "Oh my, no. Exact number is a term that makes a statement about precision and error, and repeatable is not." You said that "exact" has nothing to do with repeatable. I am Responding to an INCORRECT statement you made. Stay on topic.

>Disagree.

Sure find me an alternative example. I don't mean what I said "exactly", I mean in it in the sense that the overwhelming majority of cases analog isn't practical. I'm sure there's some obscure niche examples where it's preferrable but the case against it is so overwhelming you're going to having a hard time finding one.

Either way you haven't given me a legit example of an analog computer in a legit practical application.

No but if choosing one or the other E2E is the far better choice. Ideally you have both.

>Oh my, no. Exact number is a term that makes a statement about precision and error, and repeatable is not. They are orthogonal terms.

Oh my yes. The action of "repeating" 100 percent requires the ability to create an exact number. Why don't you try it repeating a 1v value in a circuit where exact numbers can't be made. Your claim simply isn't in line with reality.

>Wait is analog compute practical and useful or not? Make up your mind

I "made up my mind" in literally the first statement in this thread. I'll quote it:

   "No there are no practical uses other than speed and energy efficiency"

Every response your making is essentially a response to this very first sentence that spawned this entire thread. What's going on here is you "forgot" the point. You're trying to come up with counter examples on how analog computing is useful and all your examples involve speed and energy because you forgot that I caveated my first sentence with speed and energy efficiency. Hopefully you remember now.

Additionally as I said earlier you're also mistaken on what digital and analog computing is. I won't repeat myself. Just reread what I wrote earlier.

>Those are the primary advantages for all computing hardware developments.

No it's not. Memory, robustness, versatility and more all avenues of optimization trade offs that can be made. Analog chips can only be faster and energy efficient. Versatility is where they lose as they have almost none.

>"analog chip startup” and see how many companies you can find releasing new analog chips in the last 2 years alone.

I use analog chips for my job man. Accelerometers and other mems sensors are things I deal with on the daily. They are everywhere. We are talking about analog computing. For computing neural networks is really the only thing where it can sort of work and it's only done for as I stated before speed and efficiency.

A regular GPU is plenty fast in doing most applications right now anyway.

Your cherry picking definitions. We are talking about digital computers not some colloquial usage of the word digital like in the term digital watches. This is about digital computers and analog computers and when people talk about these things in those terms they exactly mean the britannica definition I gave you.

>If you slowed down a little instead of making so many assumptions and attacking

You are the one that needs to slow down bro. I never made a single attack. I simply only remarked on your statements stating if they are wrong or their right or if you don't understand. I never made an attack on your personal character. This accusation out of nowhere, if anything this statement is the one closest to crossing the line. You need to take a chill pill and relax. There are no attacks here.

>You’re misunderstanding me and stating things in binary terms it comes to analog or digital, and still not acknowledging or understanding that there is a lot of space between fully analog and fully digital, and a spectrum of cross-over points and hybrids.

There is a lot of space but this is where you are completely wrong because we aren't just talking about digital and analog. We are talking about digital and analog computing. Key word: computing. I'm not being pedantic here. The colloquial usage of the term "digital computing" and "analog computing" exactly means the definition on britannica. Most people who know what they are talking about will use it this way and I'm informing you that you are out of the loop and you don't get it.

Then you misinterpret that as an attack when it's anything but.

>https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.09481

This paper isn't about what the analog vs. Digital computing debate we are having. It doesn't define what they are doing as digital or analog so it doesn't lend support in either direction. It's simply optimizing an analog process by digitizing analog values in another number system. Rns is a mathematical concept it is not the name of the overall technique they are utilizing here.

This is a hybrid, which I also talked about earlier. But you are wrong to call this new thing an "analog computer". The benefits are inline with what I stated originally. Only for speed and energy. Remember your earlier claim was about analog computing but here they are literally feeding that analog line into an ADC. Which again supports my point: the only way to increase precision of multiple analog signals is to digitize it. This is not a purely analog computation.

Obviously prescience doesn't exist. I just used the term to illustrate his instinctive ability to predict things beyond the typical data driven way we worship nowadays.

It's not science either. Science requires data and the data overwhelming showed that consumers preferred physical keyboards.

Puahing the iPhone requires one to actually go against the science and against the consumer data. It's unlikely any internal marketing or design team led the way here as their approach would likely be science based. Jobs most likely led the way by intuiting how consumers would change based off of his own experience with the prototypes.

Certainly not super human, but a bit more smarter than your average consumer research scientist to be able to make an analysis that not only goes above science, but against it.

People worship science as the one and only infallible method to answer questions. That's not true. Science needs data and many questions just don't have data available to build an answer. For this kind of thing you need to use induction.

Relax man. He's not right about everything but he's right about keyboards.

There's no cherry picking data here because Im not using the data to support some point about Steve Jobs being some sort of god like prophet. I didn't even make a point. I just said that it made me think about this.

My thoughts on consumer data is that some data is valid some isn't. It's like asking a woman for dating advice. Sometimes she gets it but a lot of the time it's better to ask for advice from a man who fucked a lot of women.

Just to spell it out. Consumers are women. Steve jobs is the man who fucked a lot of women.

Yeah that's one perspective of the tradeoff. I'm neutral on this actually. I think both perspectives are correct depending on your angle.

The mouse and keyboard still haven't been replaced by a touch screen.

> Depends on how you define “digital”. Digital is typically defined as being based on logic gates, not necessarily anything to do with your representation of numbers.

This is 100% false. You are categorically wrong here. https://www.britannica.com/technology/digital-computer

It is not based off of logic gates. It is computing based off of discretized data and discretized steps. Given that computing is usually about numbers, the numbers and the steps to process those numbers in digital computing become discretized.

In analog computing nothing is discretized. The numbers and the processing of numbers is continuous.

You're very very much misinformed here.

> what we call “analog” in computing usually turns into digital eventually.

uh no. This isn't strictly a rule that's true. It depends on the device whether it's an analog device or a digital device. Not all devices are digital. A DC motor is an analog component, a light bulb, a CRT oscilloscope display, an analog meter or gauge, an H-bridge. All these devices can live on the output side of an analog computer, or even a digital one with the right ADCs or DACs. You're wrong here.

>Digital fp8 might be repeatable where analog isn’t, but that doesn’t necessarily make it more accurate, nor is it something we characterize as “exact” like @corethree was claiming.

Why are you replying to my statements in a comment to another person? Makes no sense. Anyway, repeatable and exact are sort of similar concepts. If I can repeat a number that means I can replicate it, exactly. Hence the term exact.

I also never said digital fp8 is more accurate or exact. There's no such thing as "digital fp8" or "analog fp8" it makes no sense. Digital and analog are orthogonal concepts to floating point. I said electrical analog devices cannot precisely represent a ONE. Simply because you cannot remove all the noise from an analog signal to make it a perfect ONE. To help you understand, instead of floating point, think of an INT8. An an analog computer cannot represent the exact instance of an INT8 in the same way a digital one can.

>@corethree said there’s no practical use because analog can be simulated with digital. I’m sure as an audiophile, you’re aware that claim isn’t true.

This is probably the only area where you might be sort of right. Sounds like banging on a drum or the sound of plucking a string have origins from analog components. Even though these sounds can be replicated digitally the creation of unique sounds via analog synthesis is better suited to be done by an actual person banging on the actual thing and making the sound he wants. But I wouldn't call this analog computing.

> It’s true that analog can be simulated with digital but that has no bearing on whether analog components are useful.

Analog components are useful. Analog is what powers everyones home. Analog computing is the thing where analog has virtually no practical usage. Almost 100% of signal processing is now DSP. I'm sure there are really really niche areas where analog is still used, but in general it's not practical. I never said analog components are not useful.

Let me just add to this. Your comment wasn't just about the usefulness of analog computing. It was about a "reinvention" of a digital computer that used a base-10 numeral system and parallel data lines with one line for each digit. You misinterpreted that "invention" as a "analog computer." Your responses are more about you not understanding things then it is about analog computers and their practical usefulness.

>Another one is quantum computers, they’re quite analog, and definitely different from ‘digital’.

No. Quantum computers are not analog. They have qbits, so an aspect of it is discretized into symbols. They aren't digital either.

>One of the analog computing applications I had in mind when I replied was the new Photonic chips. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06558-8

This is Literally the area where I said analog could be better. Speed and energy. Read the paper that's where the improvements are. They reimplemented a Feed forward neural network (something usually done in digital computers) in an analog photonic chip and the main improvements were: Speed and energy. Literally.

Steve was prescient. He's so knowledgeable about consumers he knew that consumers would willingly take UI/UX design and back pedal by several decades just to accept the novelty of a dynamic touch screen.

As much as you as a consumer hate the touch screen... consumers as a whole are the ones who chose to go this direction.

Whenever I see stuff like this I think of Steve jobs:

In 2007, right before the first iPhone launched, Steve Jobs was asked the obvious question: The design of the iPhone was based on discarding every physical interface element consumers were used to except for a touchscreen. Would consumers be willing to give up the then-dominant physical keypads with tactile feedback for a more clumsy experience with a touch screen keyboard?

His answer was brusque: “They’ll learn.”

>Depends on how you define “digital”

Dude, I don't define "digital"... the ENGLISH language defines the word. Read my other reply. You're confusing your made up definition of digital with the one defined by English.

You're just reinventing a digital computer with parallel data lines and not using binary. It's not even getting around to the "fuzzy" part of what it means to be an "analog computer." It's just a misunderstanding on your part.

>This is true of digital floating point too, chained compositions lose precision.

No. You're thinking in terms of like f64 as maximum precision and how precision is lost in software as you add stuff up. That's a property of the mathematics behind floating point. The mathematical model of floating point is MODELED to lose precision this way, we chose to use this model so we chose this trade off.

The problem I'm talking about is INTRINSIC to the device itself. We cannot get rid of noise in the voltage and it will add up as we compose devices together. This does not happen with electrical gates. You chain a million NOT gates together the output will be correct and clean voltage number equivalent to a HIGH or a Low.

>I’m not sure what you mean here exactly. Most real numbers cannot be represented exactly, and the idea of an exact number in digital integers and/or floating point still comes with a tolerance range. It’s only possible to have an exact number by construction or a-priori knowledge, but not in general and especially not when processing input data. It is possible to have an “exact” analog number, within a tolerance range.

That's probably because you don't understand what it means to be digital vs. analog. In digital TTL you choose ANY voltage between 2-5V to represent 1 and any voltage between 0.8-0V to represent 0. Thus there's an entire RANGE of voltages that symbolize a 1 or 0. The representation is exact because we CHOSE it to be exact.

In analog computing we choose the EXACT voltage value to represent some multiple of EXACT number. Thus 3.49394239045 volts equals some number: C * 3.49394239045. Unless we can exactly ALWAYS get the voltage to be 1V flat we can never really represent the number exact number 1. We can't do this, thus it's practically impossible.

> If you used, say, one analog signal per decimal digit,

Doing this is a form of digital computing. You are essentially setting thresholds to the voltage. Each digit has values 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9. You are choosing a range of voltages to represent each digit. Modern computing DOES the SAME thing, but instead of 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 it uses just 1 and 0. We use binary to represent all numbers but it doesn't have to be that way. Digital computers are not necessarily binary.

Reread my reply. I mentioned this, you just didn't get it.

>It is possible with analog circuitry to quantize a signal and/or interpret and have an analog ‘repeater’ that will rectify the signal into the interpreted value, correcting for line noise.

You're not understanding the meaning of a digital computer. Read the first sentence: https://www.britannica.com/technology/digital-computer

The minute you "quantize" your signal you're no longer doing analog computing. The number is no longer continuous as you discretized it.

The "precision" you're talking about with your "multiple signal" technique is achievable not just with multiple signals but with multiple bits. Digital computers can do the EXACT same thing with just 1s and 0s.

A function call is indeed a software abstraction. Outside of software nobody "calls" functions at all. That was my entire point.

In mathematics you have function application which is close to the idea of the function call. And this idea also doesn't exist in analog computing. Ironically, Mathematics does model what's going on in an analog computer on a field called signal processing. In signal processing it's called a transform.

>It’s true that analog has limited precision, though no reason you can’t represent higher precision via multiple analog signals,

You can't. The only way to do this with multiple signals is to make each signal represent a digit or a portion of digits of the final value. But if you did this you'd be going digital. You likely won't be doing binary but it's still digital.

>I think it’s possible to do this with analog machines as well by factoring in threshold in and precision tolerances.

With enough compositions even the smallest tolerances will add up. This presents a scaling problem in analog electronics. With the miniaturization of electronics into nano scale components this noise is even more prevalent.

Additionally the way a transistor works it's just easier to use these things in saturation mode.

And one more thing. Yes precision can be "equivalent" but exactness is not. An analog computer cannot represent the value 1 consistently. It essentially can never be precise. There will always be noise on the voltage. A digital computer has finite precision but it has exact finite precision.. so it can represent the exact integer 1. And you can increase precision arbitrarily by using more bytes up to the point where you use up all available bytes in memory. You don't technically have to use the default floating point values which have limited size. With an analog computer you cannot do this at all.

That gestalt can easily be smoothed out. You simply need to prompt LLM to do so in your query. Tell the LLM to depart from its default style. Say make your response more brief, well written and add a witty conclusion at the end

Then you say rewrite the final paragraph to be slightly shorter and incorporate a certain example. Yada yada.

Likely you can even do this "write your response in a style that is not typical for an LLM"

Oh didn't know this.

> That sounds like the answer summary is “Yes”. ;)

Practically speaking digital computers are so fast that the simulation of analog is more or less the same. In gaming we run entire physics simulations and they are so fast they appear as analog. And these are for real time simulations. We can run simulations slower and at resolution beyond what's possible with analog.

First analog would be limited by noise. So there's a limit with resolution here. Digital offers virtually unlimited resolution by using symbols to represent numbers. The advantage of analog here is that at the highest resolution of simulation possible with analog it will be faster than digital. That's all.

>We definitely do know how to build analog computers that have function calls.

No. A function call involves a stack and saving context onto that stack. An analog computer is a function in itself. There is no "call". I neglected to mention the "delay" from input to output as one replyer mentioned but that's just details. That would be the closest thing to memory since the delay means your accessing a result from the past.

The cost for one unit looks less then 100. Way less than 50 even. Is it truly non profit?

No there are no practical uses other than speed and energy efficiency as analog computers can be fully simulated by digital computers today. There's no clock speed in analog computation. You feed in raw voltage into the inputs and you get the resulting voltage from the outputs. So it's literally the fastest possible result achievable with our current electrical technology.

Analog computation is essentially functional programming.

You have inputs and outputs and for your results have to think in terms of piping analog data through different compositions of functional primitives to achieve your desired output.

There's no concept of "calling a function either" thus recursion is replaced with what we term as "feedback loops".

Additionally all forms of computational state (aka memory) other then initial values will essentially be replaced by feedback loops. There's no discrete step to access a computational result in an analog computer thus in order to access a previous computational result the only way is to literally feed output back into the input. At least in typical functional programming you have a stack where you can store and access previous state. With analog computing the "purity" goes to the next level.

Likely from this description you will see the obvious solution to this problem is some sort of hybrid machine that executes procedures but also stores and produces analog results. It doesn't exist yet but I feel it will look like an fpga. Maybe be call it an fpoa. Field programmable op amps.

How safe is this? If I link two nodes that are wrong can I short something?

From my experience with circuits you can break shit fast and I'm curious how easy it is to tinker without being careful like you can when programming.

Quantum computing isn't an analog computer. It's not digital either but it's definitely not analog. It has this thing called qubits.

I highly disagree. There's a huge amount of material out there for advanced software engineering. The problem is this material is exponentially harder and most programmers aren't interested in this stuff.

What OP is talking about is essentially learning a new language which is sort of trivial and not advanced. It's sort of a parallel track and he likely wants something that doesn't start at the very beginning. Something called: "Learning elixir for experienced programmers". This kind of thing isn't "advanced". It's more like "convenient". Most programmers spend there entire careers in this zone just learning new languages and new technologies. They are sort of moving horizontally through the field rather then upwards.

True advanced stuff is hard af, and the more advanced you get the less and less relevant it is to your job.

Because at one point in time the US played the dominant role here, with output comparable to entire continents. Now with globalization that dominance has shifted to Asia.

So in essence if there is a place that will convert to majority nuclear power it's most likely going to be Asia that still has the capability to do this. I don't think it's likely for the US.

It's not the GUI itself. A console application in a window is still a gui rendering console text. It's the fact that Vscode and jetbrains use a high level language/engine that makes it slow.

For jetbrains it's java and for vscode it's an html rendering engine. An IDE built from vulkan or some other low level graphics API can likely be even faster then vim depending on the console it's running within.

Yeah, the problem is when one of these faults comes from a 3rd party library and doesn't include stack trace info.

>VSCode Remote Development

VSCode does this feature the best. No other IDE comes close. I'm a jetbrains guy and I would've given up on vscode completely if it were not for this feature. This thing is extremely important for embedded systems and development on the edge and only vscode really does it well enough to be useable.

Glad to see Lapce has it to. Going to try it out.

I'm not talking about China alone. I'm talking about Asia. Which is China + Taiwan + Korea + Japan + Singapore, plus every major asian country.

Additionally the rivalry between the US and China is off topic I'm not talking about that.

My statement is, Asia is superior to the US in terms of Manufacturing/infrastructure. I can add more to that as well. In terms of ICs, Asia also dominates. The US is behind Asia on all three of these fronts. As a general statement this is still true. You didn't invalidate anything with your off topic comment here.

That being said, the united states is the dominant spender in terms of defense. They are number one on this front and in terms of technology. I don't think the world has ever seen a military industrial complex as massive and as advanced as the one the US has built. What you say here is true and it's major. It's not included in "manufacturing" but it's intimately connected and thus worth mentioning.

>It's a little strange that you dug your heels in on the gemstones because I was trying to be gracious and steelmanning your point by conceding that portion.

It's False gracious-ism lol. You obviously believe you can win the argument without that so you gave it up. It was a deceptive gesture. Anyway. I'm not in this to win. I'm in it because I, in totality believe I'm right. So what does it matter if I use gemstones given that you already conceded that point? And like I said it was a false concession. You pretended to concede that point and I correctly responded as if you didn't concede.

>The rest of your post seems like a deflection because you can't seem to adequately illuminate your point.

I can't adequately illuminate my point. I concede to that. The statement "Asia is superior to the US in manufacturing and infrastructure" is a statement with so many fuzzy words I can't satisfy your pedantry. What is "manufacturing"? What is "superiority"? What is "Asia"? Am I referring to North Korea?

There is no study, no science on the face of this earth that can prove either side of this debate correct.

The most we can do is throw a bunch of random facts and tidbits at each other and never ultimately agree. Take your side foray into gemstones... Does diamonds represent all of gemstones? Also what about the proportional value of artificial diamonds vs. Mined diamonds? What about the amount of value involved in beauty vs. Manufacturing? You failed to acknowledge here that diamonds used in manufacturing are mostly manufactured themselves. How much of manufacturing does gemstones represent? We could dive deep into this useless pedantic branch of the debate and ultimately go nowhere.

But despite all of this, we both know what gemstones usually refers to a mined rock for beauty purposes. That was the industry referred to through the colloquial usage of the term gemstones. But there's an underlying strategy here where you can subtly switch definitions and use the pedantic definition without the other party realizing it. Anyway let's move off of gemstones like you originally conceded.

I value the human ability to know things and communicate vague and general concepts and things without fuzzy boundaries without the need to reference data or research. If you don't have the intellectual ability to do this then the only logical conclusion for you is to not even engage in this debate or any debate for that matter because no definitive conclusion is possible for most things of this nature.

I also concede that despite all of this fuzziness you are smart enough to know what I'm talking about and deep down you know I'm right.

Call it diatribe or whatever you want. The outcome of this conversation had a predictable end of going to a pedantic nowhere. I just took it to a different end here.

>If you look at the actual data, there is still a fairly robust manufacturing base in America, especially for a service-oriented economy.

So? You can make this statement and the following can still be true: Asia is far superior to the US when it comes to manufacturing and infrastructure.

Additionally the following statement can still be true: the past several decades American manufacturing and infrastructure has been in decline.

And this as well: America does not have the will or the manufacturing capability to replace it's energy infrastructure with nuclear.

Do we need to get into a overly detailed debate about this or is it just self evident that these statements are true? I think it's self evident. Again it's not really matter of truth, but more about accepting the truth.

Nah. The experience in Japan is especially jarring.