mk_stjames

I think the presentation of the whole situation was just a bit jarring to me because it is a wild combination of topic (the hearing implant) coupled with the fact you had to translate (can always be difficult with such a technical topic) while using AI to summarize and edit your entire investigation, published as a Claude artifact - we're really seeing a new kind of blogging here, and that for sure caught me off guard.

I see your situation more clearly after re-reading and also seeing your new responses here in these threads.

I think if you write more on this topic, especially more about your history of hearing and what you can in fact perceive, and publish more on the internet, you will find people who are very interested in this kind of topic - it is something that will 'nerd snipe' many tech minded people - and I am sure you could absolutely make friends in Korea who are interested to help. Having someone with an audiology background, or even a student in neurology who knows their way around audio signals processing / has a DSP / EE background etc. sit in with you for some experiments as you use the line input for you device - someone who also hears what the input is, and can talk with you about it - would be invaluable and could also be a fun social connection- maybe university students, etc. If I spoke Korean and lived in your city I would definitely find it fascinating to try and help out.

I re-read it and looking more at the tests and... I think you're right but also maybe OP is confused about how the audio spectrum works in general then, because they themselves talk about this 70hz shelf in the same breath as human vocal ranges etc -- that isn't amplitude modulation frequency. But maybe there is just something here that is lost in translation or I'm just not getting the real purpose of these test measurements.

If I'm a bit more imaginative on this 2nd read of their 'experience' of these tests it seems that maybe yes, they hear 'something' at higher frequencies but it just just broadband noise- broadband noise mind you, is, all frequencies... so I was confused at how someone could say they 'don't hear anything above 70hz' and yet can somehow hear 'noise' at '2000 hz'. But it is dawning on me that the implant / associated driver hardware may simply be 'saturating' when the spectral content of audio is too large at all those frequencies, and OP can actually 'hear' something, but it just blurs into white noise when the spectral power is too high - kinda like there is a massive amount of reverb being applied to everything over 70hz.

But again they talk about their struggles with understanding voices and whatnot but if they are hearing parts of music at all then they could be hearing people' voices shifted into bands and toned down to amplitudes that helps them. Like, clinicians with experience here should be helping with this and it is kinda insane that this person is attempting to discern anything themselves.

The exposition is strange and again that could just be the translation and writing style but some of those little bits and just the way I've seen some people literally start spiraling when they start to pair-autodiadict with AI - coupled with the fact this is a medical condition and a life-altering disability - along with a few other small oddities in this post - make me kinda worried there is a lot more to this than posted and OP may need other kinds of help with their situation.

I didn't mention just pitch shifting alone without speed change as depending on how that is done it can introduce artifacts. So just slowing things down like an oldschool tape player is the most 'pure'.

Any computer sound card will high-pass anything over about 16-18 hz and thus new lower stuff won't swamp, and it seems like his implant amplifier does indeed deal with low frequencies because he mentions using an 18hz tone to keep the device key'ed on.

Another thing then to mention would be 'binning' audio that has been pitch shifted own using notch filters / comb filters. Because it is possible that however the implant is wired could use some band gaps to help his brain 'decode' things more clearly and less muddy.

Again, all this is simple shit and I find it really surprising that there isn't someone to help run these tests on hardware with this person, and their blog post here has this very strange rabbit hole feel to it and I can't tell if it is because there is a lot lost in translation, or if there is a lot more to this that is coming across in translation... or if this person in being led down some near-AI-psycosis and is struggling because they simply don't have someone to sit with that can help.

It all comes off to me as very, very strange.

This is interesting and I'm going to write out my thoughts for you here. Just some impressions.

Right off the bat after skimming this I'm caught up with a detail that you confirm multiple times - that you can tell literally nothing apart given any input over 70 hz. You have had this measured a few times and you definitely say that nothing is coming across above 70 hz.

Yet you are trying to hear all sorts of things that have most all of their information content above 70hz.

The Hatsune Miku music? You're hearing the bass and the kick drums and maybe some subharmonics generated in the reverberation of the higher stuff. But that is a tiny fraction of the music, and, I hate to tell you this, but that computer girl singing is all way, waaay up higher than 70hz. The beautiful sounds you are getting across are the cool synth basses of all that music. It's very modern, punchy music and the bass of that type of electronic music is very different from other classical music so whatever modulation your implants are doing to it from 70 hz down likely sounds very cool compared to a lot of other music, for sure.

But, stop- you're getting nothing by noise and wind sounds with no information differentiation over 70hz because your brain isn't demodulating that information, maybe due to something about how the implant was... implanted... or just your specific condition, who knows, but what you can do is work in the band you have.

You mention not getting human voices because the fundamentals of human voices are more than 2x where your cutoff is.

Have you tried using a program like Audacity - or - Get claude to write a script for you that takes in MP3's of modern music and slows them down 300-400 %. The music will be very slow, but it will shift instruments from higher up (pianos, horns, people's signing) down into the 20-70 hz range, and you will maybe hear patterns that are new. Did no one in the study post-op sit with you and go thru this kind of thing? You have all these external trials listed but most all of it is moot if everything above 70hz is missing and you aren't able to modify the modulator hardware.

Note that the type of rhythms in the bass of the bass synthesizers of that Hatsune Miku tracks are different that the more complex rhythms and melodies played by instruments higher up (like pianos and lead synths). (This is true for most all music genres...) Shifting those higher up things down in frequency, even if that means they play back slower, may give you an different musical experience.

Continuously pegging your implant modulation hardware with frequency content above 70hz attempting to discover something about how it interacts with your brain when you continuously get nothing but broadband noise over 70hz seems like a dead end exercise.

I mean hell, have you tried putting a low pass filter to block out on everything in the music/microphone input above 70hz just to make sure that information isn't somehow overloading the way the implant works with your brain, and maybe just causing confusion.

Lastly it sounds like you could benefit from talking with someone with a real audio / digital signals processing / electrical engineering background that can inspect your hardware directly and make suggestions because educating yourself with just GPT runs might be spinning you in circles.

For instance... you mention things like " The logic of my test apps, which generate the test sounds and move the staircases, was checked with the Lean 4 formal verifier,"

Man... this has nothing to do with needing a 'Lean 4 formal verifier' to check your app or whatever. You need someone to sit with you and your damn hardware and work with some audio input. You need the someone that setup the original implant modular to explain the hardware mapping and filtering options to you and see if you can go back and change how that works, to get more options. You're getting some wildly mixed signals (bad pun) about how all this works, I think.

When meta released their EnCodec neural net audio compression codec I thought about how the 48khz stereo examples, compressed down to 6 kbps, sounded better than I remember streaming Internet Radio sounded like circa 2003, and would have been able to be streamed realtime, no buffering, on a 14.4 kbps dial up modem (what I was rocking at the time) with a bit of bandwidth to spare for browsin' teh warez sites and .... based on some napkin calcs and assuming a little MMX instruction magic I think completely possible to run the neural net decoder fully real-time on a period-correct AMD Athlon XP 2500+ Barton (overclocked to a 3200+ of course, as all did!).

Man that would have felt like magic...

Yes! The interactive demo of simple orbital mechanics is there and works, just like I remember it. The last time I saw this... was actually 1995.

You goto the article for "Orbit" and under "Laws of Motion", click "Orbit Interactivity" and then click the large graphic that appears to launch the interactive applet.

As a young person I sat and went through every article looking for these little interactive applets. This was my favorite for some reason.

Another fun tidbit is, in the '95 version, if you send the moon into the Earth, it just bounces off. In, I believe, the 1996 version, they updated it- to I think a generic red colored planet and gray moon (if my memory after 30 years is correct) and if you send the moon into the planet, it would explode!

Yeah. I spent a lot of time with these CD-rom's.

I'm trying to figure out the video part, there is a demo screen that is showing pretty high res in color, and this says 1024x600 and 256 colours- that is mighty impressive for a 6502, that is driving way more pixels that I ever saw in that era, so I was expecting there was some other chip being used as a screen buffer and graphics chip...

but it looks like the LCD has to be bit banged by the CPU data bus directly? I see the 8 bit data bus is going straight to the LCD thru a buffer IC.

I don't see where in the memory map there would even be enough space for a screen buffer that large to be located, so I take it you have to write you own graphics handling yourself and pick a spot in memory for it all?

Hah, I just went thru this identification problem with another Harris IC. They use their 'H' logo like it's part of the chip name.

In my case I was trying to find a 'D1-15531-9' when the actual part number is 'HD1-15531-9'

Someone in their marketing thought they were being cool back then, but it's just confusing.

Theres a scene there that's one of my favorite comedy bits in any film, the breakfast scene where you see a buzzer and light going off repeatedly, like they have some sort of computer system to indicate it is breakfast time... but then it cuts to Wallace in bed and he is just repeatedly pressing a button next the the bed, with the same specific cadence, to make the buzzer sound. I don't know why I find that so hilarious.

In singular online communities (like this website) I've seen this referred to as the 'Goomba fallacy' [0].

But I can't help but wonder if it isn't some socially apparent phenomenon stemming from Simpson's Reversal [1] as applied to group sentiment analysis / polling of opinions.

[0] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-goomba-fallacy [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson's_paradox

Even if perfectly held still in a sealed box with perfect conditions, hard disk drives need controllers; they need the chipset to drive them, which has ROM and other stored microcode that is susceptible to bit flips due to cosmic ray impingement. I've traced faults in a few 20+ year old HDD's due to failed controllers likely due to such loss (either in the main controller fail, a ROM/BIOS chip fail, or less likely but still possible the cache IC, or motor controller). The data is there on the spinning rust, you just won't have a way to access it.

The failure of SSD's you warn of and the way the HDD's fail due to a dead controller aren't that different.

This won't happen with a physically written media like a CD, DVD, or Blu Ray disc. With physical media, you're separating out the media from the reader (the drive). If your disc reader dies or you cant find it, etc, you can go find any another one on ebay even decades from now, very likely.

Doing surgery on an HDD controller PCB to replace a dead controller, while possible, sucks, and may be incredibly difficult if not impossible to source parts for in the future.

"sarcastic meme posting channels on russian Telegram"

That phrase. I think these people and how they are using tech and memes are part of the current problem of this world. A large part of the problem, in my opinion. It's may be just coping, dark humor for most but it is deep psychosis for others and it's giving them ideas and power over the rest of us. I'd strive to be better than falling into such meme sharing sociopathy.

I'll keep the rest of my words to myself.

Travel to Spain and they will not give you a room key until they can take your passport and make a scan of it, often times on an old flatbed print/scanner combo, that they print out a copy on paper to staple to their copy of the invoice and put god knows where. It's been like that for about 6-8 years. No more showing up and paying cash for a hotel room.

You can try to say no, but I don't think you can anymore. I go through this a dozen times a year on my travels there.

This is Spain.

OP is Undoubtedly referring to "In Tune And On Time"

Live at the Brixton Academy, 2004.

I have it on a DVD. I think it's all on youtube, but split into parts.

One of my favorite live performance recordings out of many, many, many...

For the interested; the saying I believe you are referencing in regards to writing code / debugging is from Brian Kernighan, specifically:

  Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

(from, 'The Elements of Programming Style')

It's prescient.

It's like a type of floating bog island that grows from piled up downed trees and other biomass and then breaks off from the main land.

Happens on lakes in Wisconsin. See [0] for a very interesting example of what happens when one gets real big and floats away.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2AG6LAOBYo

The approach noted in this article is similar to an experience I just had.

I recently had some old hardware manuals I wanted to digitize, which were pages in 3-ring binders. I started thinking about scanning them but did not have an auto-loading, xerox style scanner at home. I looked around for free software that could do this 'google books style' as they did here in this article - take a photo of each page and automatically find the corners, dewarp, white balance, etc. and export to PDF.

I actually didn't find a premade solution that looked like what I wanted. So I wrote my own, with Python an a simple tk GUI.

I tried a lot Open CV messing about to do automatic page corner detection and whatnot, but found everything I tried unreliable. Sure, the corners may autodetect about 95% of the time, but if 5% of the pages fail and get cropped wrong or dewarped weird, I noted the time it took to go back and fix those errors eclipsed the time saved by the entire rest of the automatic process.

The fastest method I found was a human in the loop semi-auto program: it loaded in all the images from SD card, and had the user manually click the 4-corners of the page as shown in the image. Upon the 4th point being clicked, the page would auto-de-perspective and apply the last saved default white balance curve, thresholding, and posterizing (color binning) / grayscaling / scaling to fixed width. For subsequent images in the camera roll this meant settings didn't have to usually be changed on a per-image basis. Then just a spacebar to add the image to the saved temp queue and at the end an export to PDF.

This approach had me digitizing about 600 pages in an hour I estimate. Yes, it was a lot of clicking for the manual part.... but it allowed me to proof every page as it flew by and this caught a few photographic errors that I wouldn't have caught if it was fully automated, and not a single page was left mis-shapen or unreadable.

I noticed that resellers on ebay of used server equipment that I keep an eye on in Germany pulled all their DDR4 from surplus and used server racks and now list it separately for sale, at jacked up prices. Where you used to be able to see a used Gigabyte server listed with "128GB" "256GB" etc listed in the title, they now all say "0GB". They took extra effort, to pull used ram from older servers, and list it separate, just out of the greed of potentially capitalizing on this market.

The problem is... now for anyone looking to pickup a slightly older used/surplus server rack - you have the go and buy the (now marked up) RAM separate.

So... did they list the "0GB" racks with removed ram cheaper you ask? Nope. Many of them seem to be basically the same price as they were or even higher than they were, except now you're paying for RAM separate.

I bought a surplus Gigabyte server about 2 years ago off ebay for a home project, and I just went and the same seller still has some for sale, even older now than they were when I grabbed one, but they are 2x the price, and they don't come with any RAM, whereas I got one already populated as they were from the factory. Once you add that back in literally looking at 150-200% markup in the last 2 years on what was just surplus computer equipment that is 5+ years old.

The prices of these boards have gone up it seems since the knowledge on how to bring them up and effectively utilize them has proliferated.

After the crypto miners dumped them (that was, what, 2 years ago?), I saw one of the entire rack systems on eBay- I think they held 12 of these in one rack on a common backplane - for $800. (or maybe less?)

That's $66 per BC-250.

Cheers- I guess I'll add, the turbofans that all modern airliners use are almost always referred to by their 'thrust' and you ofter see a lot of published numbers of takeoff thrust and such - it is harder to find numbers at cruising seed and altitude, and then in reality what you need to know is the actual power needed to generate that thrust.... there is some complexities there but in general the turbines generate what is known as 'shaft horsepower' which is a good stand in number we're looking for to compare.

The real takeaway is that power is power and energy is energy and regardless of how it gets to do the 'pushing' of the air, if you want to use solar energy (power, at any given moment, not integrating over time) those are the numbers you are comparing. It's all just unit conversions, at least when you're attempting such napkin math. Anything more - taking into account the actual systems, losses, efficiencies, etc.. just makes it all worse, not better.

A cool exercise is - given the 777 wingspan I esitmate and the power output from solar of said size... what kind of current aircraft use piston-driven engines with similar horsepower? Assuming we had motor inverter electronics and an electric motor that was 100% efficient, you could imagine trying to build a similar weight aircraft of that size that has such a wingspan.

This is why you wind up with the only solar powered aircraft out there being superlight, high altitude craft with super high aspect wing surfaces- maximizing wing area to weight / lift capability such as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AeroVironment_Helios_Prototype (note the largest of those prototypes and the tiny amount of power output they were making. All that wing area and it would have barely been able to carry a single passenger as payload and cruise a day without battery power)

Man this is a middle-schooler level napkin math question.

Take a Boeing 777, it has a wingspan of about 60 meters, and I'll ballpark an average upper wing chord of about 7 meters, for a total upper flat area of about 420 square meters.

High quality modern but standard single sided solar panels can do about 220 watts per square meter is full sunlight (around 22% efficiency tested at a 1000w/m^2 irradiance).

So that is 92,400 watts at full power.

92kW is less than the peak power of a Nissan Leaf. 92kW is 123 horsepower.

The two GE turbofans of a 777 are generating something like 40-50 MW of shaft power during cruise. MW.... megawatts. 50-60,000 horsepower.

Plastering the wing surface of a commercial plane with solar panels would make up less than a quarter of a percent of the total power it uses to produce thrust at cruise, at best case with them fully-lit.

Fully solar sailplanes do exist (NASA's Helios prototypes are an example) but that isn't anything close to a 'normal' aircraft with any appreciable payload/passengers.

So, no need to wonder.

Yes, just tried this, and my little exe ran on a Windows 10 64 bit machine just fine.

Which means I just built a demo of a tiny 16 bit windows GUI applet, using emulated VB in Win 3.1 in a browser and got it to run on modern Windows in a shorter amount of time than it would have likely taken me to get the same type of demo up and running natively in Windows 10 today.

Actually, yes, this was the experience I was recalling... it was 1995, not 1993, and it was the 'Turbo' version of Journeyman Project, which came in a CD pack bundled with Windows 95 by Packard Bell (a surprisingly large compilation of software to bundle with such a computer at the time. Man, it was a golden age of progress in the PC world back then). Since it wasn't the retail version of the game, it did not come with the original instructions; instead they buried the door access code and some other numerical codes you needed during the game in a bundled instruction book for the CD box set. [0](the little teal booklet in this photo) No one ever knew to look in there, because it doesn't appear to be branded to have anything to do with the game.

There are entire sects of people on the internet that share this incredibly frustrating memory from their childhood. [1]

[0] https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/1995-packard-bell-sof...

[1] https://steamcommunity.com/app/359420/discussions/0/13550947...

I just did something neat- I tried out the install of Windows 3.1, which has a version of Visual Basic installed. I created a small program in Visual Basic, with a window and some buttons to press, and then saved the program as an .exe (remember how easy this used to be! you could make your program and then just... save the executable out of VB! No compiler knowledge needed!)

I then saved this .exe to a disk image, and then saved that disk image back to my modern mac that I'm doing this on via downloading that in the browser.

I then took that .exe and the only dependency - vbrun100.dll - and put it on a floppy (a real one) and then took that floppy over to a vintage computer I have that has Windows 3.1 on it still (an old 25 MHz Intel486 DX industrial computer I have sitting in a closet with no real use for). Popped in the floppy, copied the .exe and .dll.

And ran the program, no problem! A real GUI windows program, made in VB running in Windows 3.1, inside an entire emulated machine in Javascript in a browser window running on an Apple Silicon macbook in 2026....

Exported and saved to disk and then ran without issue on a piece of hardware made in *1992*!

Now I need to do the reverse... make some software with a copy of VB installed on this old machine of mine and run it on my mac inside the browser.

Nothing was worse however than getting a game used and not getting the manual included, when the manual contained very necessary information to progress through the game, and in an era where 'The Web' still wasn't really a thing....

I'm looking at you, 1993's Journeyman Project....

This is cool, I had some questions because I was trying to understand this more - not the diffusion model training part, because that I've actually seen before- but the actual way you bundled this into a web application and the choices made...

Did you publish the actual trained model anywhere? I see how in the code there is python for how individual samples can be generated, but the model checkpoint pulldown comes from a directory that... I don't see.

I then went through the code of how this runs on the web and- I'm not a web dev guy- so I'm pretty confused at all the bits bolted together to make this into a web app. It seems like there is a WASM bit that is compiled from a typical C++ audio plugin that is doing the stuff like conv reverb and limiting and distortion in the web app - all that is oldschool, non-generative AI, DSP being applied to the samples. Then the samples are just... a few default generated samples, to start- where are they pulled from, physically? And you have a login requirement to spool up the actual generative AI part to generate new samples to run into the DSP (because that needs a GPU on the backend to do, so, a login to help rate limit this)

How big is the actual generative model? Did you ever think about building the generation engine into the WASM bundle, using maybe WebGPU in the WASM to accelerate in a platform agnostic way, so that the entire app would run offline in someone's browser window?

I'm having fun just playing with the kick program without a login, which, again, am I right in saying in that mode there is no gen AI of sampled happening server side, it is just playing starting with some pre-made samples?

Neat. My only critique of the script is that I would have added a

  sleep 0.1 

in the loop so that as this prints in a terminal it is actually readable; any modern terminal will scroll so fast you can't see the message in flight.

Slowing it to a 10hz refresh makes it look great.

Interestingly the author shows a photo of a spot in Cape Town where there are two distinct structures in use - close up, in the photo, are actually Tetrapods - as pointed out in other comments, these are an earlier invention from France and also used quite extensively throughout many parts of the world (including... right here where the Dolosse were invented).

Further down that jetty are structures with the actual Dolos geometry. It would be interesting to know if, specifically, those geometries were chosen specifically to be placed in those two parts of the wall as they are for specific properties, or if came down to having certain quantities made on hand and their distributions matched the shape of the wall required, or what.

You can see what I mean, this distinction in the exact location where that photo is taken on google maps, here:

https://maps.app.goo.gl/Vn3tGhM81oMqPVpm9

-33.899126, 18.412751 Mouille Point, Cape Town, 8005, South Africa

That's not 'malicious compliance'...

it's 'Jevonsian insanity'.

In addition I'll give one more criticism:

Above that reads this bit:

  >Its driver door panel consolidates mirror adjustment, mirror fold, door locks, all four window controls, and child locks into a single networked module. That consolidation exemplifies BYD's vertical integration favoring fewer subassemblies, each designed in-house and dropped into place, with firmware determining how any of it behaves.

Integrated door switch modules have been more common than not on cars for easily the last 15 years now, and I don't think this in any way exemplifies BYD's "Vertical Integration" or "favoring fewer subassemblies" (these two things actually don't even necessarily imply each other!!). There are plenty of cars that use such assemblies and the companies outsource to tier 2's for the actual manufacturing - Mercedes and Valeo, for example. Because they don't actually take apart the module and look for, say, a logo on the silkscreen of the PCB, I don't think the author actually confirmed if BYD 'designs' (let alone manufactures) the complete switch unit in-house. They could. I'm not saying they can't. But...

But this whole article is written from a weird authoritative viewpoint when really I think it should back down a bit and just describe what the damn CT scans show.