Death Is Optional: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari and Daniel Kahneman - <AUTHOR> http://edge.org/conversation/yuval_noah_harari-daniel_kahneman-death-is-optional <comment><USER2>
      Computers are very, very, very far from being like humans, especially
      when it comes to consciousness. The problem is different, that the system,
      the military and economic and political system doesn't really need
      consciousness.

Consciousness is a poorly defined concept with many unfortunate connotations, but let's assume in this context it's the same as self-awareness. I assert it's very likely that nature didn't evolve conscious brains by accident, it's probably a byproduct of making an intelligence that can reason about itself and its environment.

I know it's just a thesis, but when you think about what our mindless AIs lack, it makes sense. They're characterized by a complete incapability for global reasoning and an inability for personal consideration. You might argue, as the article does, this is exactly how we want our tools to behave, but then we might have to accept there could be hard limits on the complexity of mental tasks these systems are able to perform without access to higher reasoning.

<comment><USER3> The word "Consciousness" is almost like the word "God".

Many people seem to know what it is, no one can actually define it, and it has never been measured, located or proven to exist.

Maybe we should stop using it altogether.

<comment><USER4> We should either stop using it, or at the very least own up to what it is we're [trying to] talk about: [http://consc.net/papers/facing.html](http://consc.net/papers/facing.html)

<comment><USER3> Going to read that in earnest, did a quick scan (not my native language) and yes: i want to differentiate here between the not-asleep and the i-think-i- know-i-am-thinking type of consciousness. It's not only experience, but knowing or thinking to know your own experience.

Furthermore, it seems only to exist or pinpoint when you're communicating with another person. In total solitude, boundaries between your self-image and the other(s) just don't hold up, and the whole thing becomes almost meaningless.

Edit: the concept of time seems to be connected to it as well, but i really need to read this paper first now, i think :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Many people believe that medical control over aging will be stunningly expensive, and thus indefinite extension of healthy life will only be available to a wealthy elite. This is far from the case. If you look at the SENS approach to repair therapies [1], treatments when realized will be mass- produced infusions of cells, proteins, and drugs. Everyone will get the same treatments because everyone ages due to the same underlying cellular and molecular damage. You'll need one round of treatments every ten to twenty years, and they will be given by a bored clinical assistant. No great attention will be needed by highly trained and expensive medical staff, as all of the complexity will be baked into the manufacturing process. Today's closest analogs are the comparatively new mass-produced biologics used to treat autoimmune conditions [2], and even in the wildly dysfunctional US medical system these cost less than ten thousand dollars for a treatment.

Rejuvenation won't cost millions, or even hundreds of thousands. It will likely cost less than many people spend on overpriced coffee over the course of two decades of life, and should fall far below that level. When the entire population is the marketplace for competing developers, costs will eventually plummet to those seen for decades-old generic drugs and similar items produced in factory settings: just a handful of dollars per dose. The poorest half of the world will gain access at that point, just as today they have access to drugs that were far beyond their reach when initially developed.

Nonetheless, many people believe that longevity enhancing therapies will only be available for the wealthy, and that this will be an important dynamic in the future. Inequality is something of a cultural fixation at the moment, and it is manufactured as a fantasy where it doesn't exist in reality. This is just another facet of the truth that most people don't really understand economics, either in the sense of predicting likely future changes, or in the sense of what is actually taking place in the world today.

[1]: [http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens- research](http://sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research)

[2]: [http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3616818/](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3616818/)

<comment><USER6> A complex system with millions of nodes and trillions of potential interactions with external and internal factors, working perfectly with no oversight and no unexpected outages.

Do you live in this century?

P.S. I'm not saying that this is impossible, or even unlikely, but it's probably going to be something that requires constant and possibly very expensive maintenance.

<comment><USER5> Your body performs that maintenance when you are young.

The damage repair approach to treating aging suggests that if we remove the fundamental differences between old and young tissue, then the body will continue to maintain itself as it does when it is young. There are not all that many types of fundamental damage.

So this doesn't require maintaining the whole system; it requires removing the spanners in the works. These spanners are well known and well characterized. For example, cross-links in the extracellular matrix that degrade blood vessel elasticity, that causes hypertension, cardiac remodeling, and microstrokes, and so on. Break down the cross-links with designed drugs (and deal a few other items that also contribute to stiffening) before the point of serious remodeling and all of that goes away, because it is the stiffening that drives this dsyfunction. There are a number of other items that have similar roles, but not so many that it is unfeasible to think of producing effective therapies on a time scale of the next two decades.

Think of damage of this sort as rust in a fantastically complex metal sculpture. You don't have to understand the sculpture, just how to rust-proof it, and how to remove the existing rust. Rust is simple, and the complexity of the sculpture doesn't much matter when it comes to how you approach rust- proofing and removal.

<comment><USER7> Cancer is simpler than aging. We understand cancer better than aging. Yet after many billions of dollars and billions of hours of research, we still cannot "cure" cancer. A huge number of people die from it every year.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The thought of being able to abolish death as soon as you have a working BCI by running one's mind on silicon hardware is, if not ludicrous, at least really really far out. So, you hook your brain up to a computer, and get basic input and output. Great, you now have an upgraded keyboard / mouse. It doesn't get any better no matter how many capabilities you add. Direct memory access, changing the contents of programs on the fly, none of it will abolish death any more than being able to do by 'hand' does. The best you can do is create a really sophisticated program that will continue acting deterministically after the programmer goes away. You will live on in the same way Tolkien lived on after he died in his books.

You're not going to be able to abolish death until you can get neural networks to run at the speed of your current brain hardware and at similar capacity. In other words, you still have to be able to simulate a brain. To take the functions of the brain currently has, and get enough of them working electronically until you can start to build an identity on top of it.

Even once you do that, it won't feel like your brain without a lot of training, both on your artificial hardware and on your biological hardware. I envision an era where early adopters have hybrid consciousness, where we slowly incorporate an electronic identity with our biological one. Going from "This is my brain extension" to "this is another part of me, some of my thoughts are here, some of them are in this piece of hardware."

I suspect this will be a highly individual process that we will slowly gain mass competence with in a similar way we're doing with software now. We'll have to grow our ability to simulate neuronal processes and replicate our psychologies computationally. Even then, it will feel like an artificial prosthetic until you have enough capabilities to where if you suddenly lost the other side, you wouldn't feel trapped in the most hellish solitary- confinement prison ever devised.

Then after they're fully integrated, start prioritizing experiencing through the mind prosthetic. I suspect one would need many many years before cutting off the biological part wouldn't cause grievous trauma to one's sense of identity. Especially since our legal system will need a long time to figure out how to fit non-biological beings into society.

<comment><USER9> > You're not going to be able to abolish death until you can get neural > networks to run at the speed of your current brain hardware and at similar > capacity.

That can't possibly be true. You're dead if you are slower than you once were?

<comment><USER8> If you can't merge your consciousness with the prosthesis then you'll never actually be able to consider it 'you'. And you won't be able to merge if there's a serious impedance mismatch.

Unless you're talking about taking not just a human brain and simulating it, but rather programming a brand new electronic brain to run your own consciousness. Which is even farther out than merging. You'd have to understand neurons to a much-greater depth.

This is assuming that neuronal processes aren't relying on quantum dynamics, which I suspect would make true simulation impossible. Just because you can do simulated annealing on silicon doesn't mean you can predict the unfolding of arbitrary quantum states. Merging would be the only viable strategy, and there, your new brain would only have a fraction of its former speed until we're so far along with quantum computers that they're as ubiquitous as silicon processors are today.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> AI is a simulation (artificial). Even if you did the acrobatics of saying there could be II (inorganic intelligence), there's nothing to suggest self- awareness could transfer from organic to inorganic, and there's no way to distinguish between a simulation being self-aware, and having the "appearance" of being self-aware, so I don't see how anyone could claim to have made a self-aware machine.

If you believe that people have spirits, then the question is also moot. But if you don't believe that people have spirits, there's no way to prove that your memories transferred into anything other than a simulation of yourself. If you consider yourself "you", then something else would not be "you", even if it had the appearance of being "you".

Even if you believe that consciousness arises from the synapses, and is therefore a simulation or illusion to begin with, there's still no way to prove that you would "transfer".

You can't say "there is a singularity" \- you can only hope, if that's what you hope for. Others hope there is a god. It's a matter of faith both ways, and a reflection of wanting to escape death.

I don't think there's any harm in believing in the singularity for entertainment value, but as for providing a door to immortality, I think the main danger is simply distraction. While all the effort and discussion and research is spent on something there is no way of proving -- in the meantime, 20,000 children die each day from preventable diseases.

Even if you are a rational egoist, I invite you to consider what you'd do if a child was dying right in front of you. Would you help them? The fact is children are at arm's length, courtesy of our mobile devices, with which we could place more attention on relieving suffering than in trying to achieve immortality by flipping a coin on an unproven allegation.

So the fact is, because we could choose to act, rational egoists included, we are genocidal in our indifference. The first step in facing this is to admit it, and then to try and take steps to do something about it.

I invite anyone who seriously considers a singularity to set it down, and put some effort into the relief of suffering. When we have preventable diseases and poverty figured out, then let's revisit the singularity. I'd enjoy working on it then.

<comment><USER11> > I don't think there's any harm in believing in the singularity for > entertainment value, but as for providing a door to immortality, I think the > main danger is simply distraction. While all the effort and discussion and > research is spent on something there is no way of proving -- in the > meantime, 20,000 children die each day from preventable diseases.

> I invite anyone who seriously considers a singularity to set it down, and > put some effort into the relief of suffering. When we have preventable > diseases and poverty figured out, then let's revisit the singularity. I'd > enjoy working on it then.

The amount of money currently being spent on singularitarian pursuits is negligible compared to what is spent on development aid, or healthcare.

Furthermore, one of the necessary enablers of the singularity is faster computers. Regardless of the sustainability of Moore's law, it is economic competition between chip-makers that has provided the impetus for the continuous exponential increase in computing power that happened during these last decades; as long as it's physically possible, and as long as the chip market is not a monopoly, the increase in computing power is going to happen anyway, and the singularity would be nothing but a byproduct of these market forces - and will not come at the cost of a disinvestment from charitable pursuits.

As a species, it's nice to have a portfolio of possible futures - and it's nice to know that the singularity road is being probed by some people.

<comment><USER10> I think the most precious thing we have is time, not money, because our time is finite. When you consider the potential of the human race and computing power to help spare daily genocide, there is clearly an opportunity to do better. If a person is driven to spend ever more time on pursuing the innovations that could theoretically lead to a singularity, what would that person say to a stadium full of children who are going to die the next day? I wouldn't know what to say. I'm not sure they'd be comforted by assurances that a byproduct of the pursuit of the singularity results in economic momentum that employs people, as good as that may be.

Perhaps though the attendant momentum of deep mind projects might result in AI or II be putting to the task of humanitarian relief. But my guess is that any such system would probably ask, "what should the priority be for preserving life?" \-- and if the prioritization were done by consensus, I'm guessing that most people would prioritize preserving life over pursuing the singularity. For example, I think most people would want a self-driving AI government to prioritize their own survival over the singularity. And if that were the case, and AI were tasked with helping to "load balance" priorities of ethics, efforts, solutions and systems, I wonder if it might not admonish us to make changes in our life.

I'm not self-righteous, I'm self-unrighteous. I'm just beginning to question my general acceptance of wherever technology goes, wherever I spend my time. I don't presume to tell people what to do, but I do propose that the ethic of choosing whether to relieve a suffering child right in front of you may be self-evident to some people -- and if so, that realizing children are at arm's length, that we can do something about it, may convince some people, myself included, to think about "re-balancing" priorities.

I read fiction regularly. I would be a hypocrite to judge anyone for "not spending enough time relieving suffering". Yet overall I question how content and comfortable I am with life. I guess in a portfolio of effort, I hope that the allocation of assets in my own life and others would place a primary emphasis on sustainability that includes the relief of suffering. I think that's what 20k kids dying each day says to me. I think that's what they'd post to Hacker News, if they could.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> When people in the 1940s looked into the future they saw flying cars, spaceships and cities in the clouds. When we look into the future today we see AI, a post-labor economy and the end of death itself. I'm not sure if technological progress has increased, but we're definitely dreaming bigger.

I think that predictions from the past can be instructive in two ways. First, most of it didn't come to pass. We still don't have flying cars or cloud cities, and common commercial space travel is still decades away. The second thing that might be of note is how positive the past vision of the future was compared to our current ideas about the future. We're so dystopian and negative in 2015. We'll have self aware supercomputers, but we're worried that they'll kill us. Robots will be able to do anything a human can do, but we're worried that we'll all be unemployed while a few get rich. We'll have the ability to live _forever_ , but we're worried that will only be a privilege for the rich people who control the robots, and then only if the robots don't decide to kill us all.

Putting these two things together, I can only think to quote Packer's QB Aaron Rogers: "R-E-L-A-X" [0]. Odds are that most of these revolutionary technologies are far away, and won't turn out to be as evil as we imagine. The beginning of the 20th century was a time of tumultuous change. The automobile, household electricity, recorded music and movies, communism and the end of aristocracies. Everything was changing and people were optimistic about the future. Now we're on the other end of the pendulum. Outside of communications and the internet, there haven't been a lot of big technological or political changes and people are feeling generally negative about everything. Hopefully the early 21st century will produce big ideas that will have us all feeling inspired again. I wish I had some grand conclusion or takeaway from all of this, but I think the key is that this too shall pass and we should all try to enjoy the journey.

[0] This is a references from sports news that might be out of place here. If you didn't get it, it's ok. Move along, nothing to see here.

<comment><USER5> People in the 1940s were riding the top of an energy revolution, an enormously rapid upward trend in energy production that, had it continued unabated, would today see us with the output of a nuclear powerplant generated by threads in our clothing for a dollar or two. They didn't foresee information technology, for the most part. They foresaw solar system-wide travel and simple mechanical computing devices like slide rules coexisting.

Of course it proved harder than expected to keep that curve going, and we got the infotech future rather than the high power future. We're probably better off for that, given that medicine is driven by infotech, not power.

<comment><USER13> It's also possible that had energy generation capability continued to increase forever at that rate it would have led to self-destruction in any number of forms.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I find it strange that he says we have no way of imagining what post- singularity would be like. I get his point, it's so different that we can't really get it. But we have ample science fiction that still explores the possibilities and gives us a starting point for imagining it.

Also surprised he doesn't mention basic income when discussing the decreasing value of the individual and the problems that could cause. He's identified some important problems but this interview was very high level and didn't seem to even touch on possible solutions. These are things society is already thinking of.

<comment><USER15> > _I find it strange that he says we have no way of imagining what post- > singularity would be like._

It's by definition - the singularity is _defined_ as the moment when technology advances so fast that we just can't keep up with it. If you can still reasonably predict how will it look like, it's not singularity yet.

<comment><USER14> It's the moment where we lack the capacity to work at its level and control it. That doesn't preclude imagining outcomes. His whole article was about how he tries to imagine the full scope of possibilities rather than narrow down to predictions (that are often false). It's not about reasonably predicting.

As an example, we don't yet have fine-grained, ubiquitous nanotech like that featured in Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. But that book is all about imagining what it might lead to.

We extrapolate from assumptions all the time, why is this one any different?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> So I had a random thought earlier. At one point, the cessation of the heartbeat signified death. But now we have CPR. Now 'brain death' is often considered to signify death.. but could/can we 'restart' the brain as we do the heartbeat with CPR?

</comment><comment><USER17> Harari seems to be worried that sometime in the future there will be tons of superfluous people that economy will no longer need. Suppose technology brings about abundance never before seen on the planet Earth. Suppose that means the vast majority of everyone goes unemployed. Are we to worry that most of those people will necessarily be poor now because the few powerful up top will hoard all the riches? Is that the most likely scenario?

</comment><comment><USER18> Perhaps a loss of power and relevance of the human masses will give rise to a renewed reverence for and recognition of the fading beauties of human frailty, similar to the romantic movement following the industrial revolution. In such a setting, where we hand tech and science off to the machines (or they seize it), the profit model will be in the humanities.

</comment><comment><USER18> Would not any human-devised outcome, no matter how intellectually superior its capacities, ultimately be secondarily dependent on the same metabolic laws as humans, even if in a different order of magnitude? I mean those delimiting laws would not disappear. Their indefatigability is powered somehow, and our fatiguability is adaptive.

</comment><comment><USER19> But at the end of the day, what is life and death anyway? Merely a self repeating pattern of some atoms...maybe consciousness is just a collection of concepts which our brain uses to reinforce its self identity? Maybe consciousness is just as valid as religion and our existence really holds as much meaning as the existence of a tree in an infinite universe? and considering the fact that the majority of people would value a nice diamond more over a tree, a well sculpted rock might just have more meaning than "life" itself.

maybe intellect,in itself, is merely a small bump in the fractal nature of the universe itself, after all...there is a universe in everything and nothing is everything.

Only with that in mind before i die, would i upload my mind...

<comment><USER20> _To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour._

William Blake

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Somehting similar in video :

Humans Need Not Apply - [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Pq-S557XQU)

</comment><comment><USER22> The point of technological progress is to lower the cost of things. Eventually everything will be free or negligible cost. We're already there with music.

<comment><USER23> Tangent, but... we're not there with music. We're pretty much there with the cost of _copying /distributing_ music.

And we're partway there with the falling cost of production tools, and wider affordable/free availability of instructional materials.

But _creating_ music -- particularly creating good music -- still takes a significant investment of time in the immediate act of creation and another order of magnitude of time in investing in skills.

And without an economic model to support that investment of time, we'll get less of it.

<comment><USER24> Not necessarily. As a counterexample, people (many of whom are very creative and talented) put staggering amounts of time and dedication into playing and becoming skilled at video games for no reason other than personal entertainment. Videos of people playing games are freely available and no profit is typically expected.

A similar phenomenon might be observed with music, where players of music dedicate large amounts of time to playing music and upload the fruits of their efforts to the internet for the enjoyment of their peers.

<comment><USER23> The cases you're describing either involve someone who spends some other portion of their time (probably "full-time") on money making activities, or someone who has an external means of support (trust fund, savings, fortune they earned earlier, family, whatever).

In the former case it's pretty much as I originally described. Sure, if they're dedicated and don't have any other time sinks like a family, you may still get _some_ music from them, but significantly less or lower quality music than you'd get from them if they could spend full-time on it.

In the latter case.... it's true enough that people in this position have the privilege of studying and creating music full-time without any expectation of payment. They have all the money they need, they're free to spend their time as they wish. Of course, saying this is our economic model means that most of our music has to come from people in this position, mostly kids, retirees, and those with rich family or other benefactors.

And depending on your tolerance for how undemocratic that's likely to be, maybe that's OK. Though I think that if one accepts a picture of the world painted in the article where an increasing number of people aren't even _needed_ by any of our market, civic, or social institutions, the prospect of having them also sidelined in music and other letters gets a little more troublesome.

(And as another tangent: while I enjoy video games myself -- even some very difficult ones that require big investments of skill -- I'd be very careful about drawing larger lessons about skills from them. One of the reasons we enjoy these games is that their practice-reward cycles are often significantly shorter than many comparable real-world skills.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> "In terms of history, the events in Middle East, of ISIS and all of that, is just a speed bump on history's highway. The Middle East is not very important. Silicon Valley is much more important."

This is what futurologists actually believe

<comment><USER15> It might sound self-centric and limited, but giving it a second thought, I think it's also true - because the "events in Middle East" are important only as much as they threaten to spin out of control and lead to the collapse of technological civilization. There are no important technological advances coming out of this conflict. It's unlikely that the existence of ISIS will lead to an important new political insight, a piece of social technology being developed. It's just, like often in history, a case of groups of humans failing to get along very well with each other.

This is how I see war, nowadays. A stupid, useless distraction. "We're building amazing things here for everyone with our technological civilization, so would you kindly please pause for the moment, and don't ruin everything because of some idiotic dispute?".

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> I'm doubtful of the prediction that humans will eventually become useless or superfluous. Common jobs today that only humans can do will undoubtedly be accomplished by machines in the future, but that doesn't mean humans will become obsolete.

As long as the universe and time exist as we know it humans will never be perfect. And just like humans, AI will always have bugs, as its root creator will always be a flawed human. Whether there are unintended consequences of those bugs is another story. But since a human can never create AI to create AI better than a human, AI can never render the human mind obsolete.

Any AI not created with bad intentions will mostly be created to serve, defend, or improve our way of life and survival. These things work to support our purpose not destroy it.

But as Harari says (before he starts predicting), "it's impossible to have any good prediction for the coming decades."

<comment><USER27> A lot of baseless assumptions here.

"its root creator will always be a flawed human"

"But since a human can never create AI to create AI better than a human..."

This is your premise. I don't think, and a lot of smart people don't think, this is true. The thing that gets people really worried or excited is that they think it IS possible to make an AI that can create better AI. And it's a positive feedback loop that goes nobody knows how far.

There is no reason, unless you believe in magic, to think AI can't be as smart as humans. But if you go that far, there's no reason to think it can't be smarter. And if it can do that, it can make better AI than humans can.

<comment><USER26> "There is no reason, unless you believe in magic, to think AI can't be as smart as humans."

AI can be as smart or smarter than most humans in many ways, but I think it's a very real possibility that its development path won't render the human mind useless. They key difference between AI and humans is AI has the power to iterate and learn from its mistakes much faster than humans without fatigue. The methods of which it learns are created by humans. To assume the creation of AI with "a positive feedback loop that goes nobody knows how far" without humans first understanding how seems more of a belief in magic to me.

"I don't think, and a lot of smart people don't think, this is true."

When it comes to predictions, smart people can be wrong. I could be wrong or they could be wrong, and they may be smarter than me, but I'm smart enough to know this is true.

<comment><USER15> > _To assume the creation of AI with "a positive feedback loop that goes > nobody knows how far" without humans first understanding how seems more of a > belief in magic to me._

Not really. This is pretty much a definition of a positive feedback loop.

To give a _very simplified_ example, imagine that a mind of IQ N is able to create, at best a mind of IQ N+10. So say, the smartest human alive has 150 IQ. He goes and creates an AI that has 160 IQ, which then goes on to create a 170-IQ AI, ad infinitum.

Of course you could argue the relationship is different. Maybe the ith mind can create at best an N+(1/2)^i mind, at which point the whole series will hit an asymptote, a natural limit caused by diminished returns. But it would be _one hell_ of a coincidence if humans were close to that natural limit.

So basically, what we need to do to potentially start intelligence explosion is to figure out how to make a general AI that is _just a little bit_ smarter than us. Which seems entirely possible, given that we can use as much hardware as we like, making it both larger and faster than human brains.

<comment><USER26> I understand the concept of creating something exceedingly more generally intelligent than its creator, I'm simply suggesting it's not possible. Many people assume that it is, and we'll have to agree to disagree. But even if I'm wrong and it does become possible, think about how unlikely it would be for a human to accidentally accomplish this.

Also, if AI is to be smarter than humans, it will know it could potentially be wrong about anything. Armed with that knowledge, how much smarter can it really be?

<comment><USER15> > _Also, if AI is to be smarter than humans, it will know it could potentially > be wrong about anything. Armed with that knowledge, how much smarter can it > really be?_

That's not a big leap. In fact, we humans know this already, and we've even quantified it nicely, and called it probability theory.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


David Carr, Media Equation Columnist for the Times, Is Dead at 58 - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/13/business/media/david-carr-media-equation-columnist-for-the-times-is-dead-at-58.html?partner=socialflow&smid=tw-nytimes

<comment><USER2> It's worth noting that his last article was published _only yesterday_ : [http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/12/business/media/brian- willi...](http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/12/business/media/brian-williamss- and-jon-stewarts-common-ground.html)

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah he was doing a video interview just a few hours ago:

[https://twitter.com/tomgara/status/566080550084304896](https://twitter.com/tomgara/status/566080550084304896)

Terribly sad, Carr was a great

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> What a sad news.

He was a brilliant mind, and one of the best journalists in the convergence of business, media and technology. His talks were always full of wit, grace, and his typical cynicism.

RIP.

</comment><comment><USER4> RIP Dave Carr. An original.</comment>


Facebook is down - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-is-down-2014-9?IR=T

<comment><USER2> [https://developers.facebook.com/status/](https://developers.facebook.com/status/) isn't showing any trouble. Wonder what kind of problem it is.

<comment><USER3> The API errors/call spiked a few minutes ago. But yes, no events which is strange.</comment></comment>


Why are pianos traditionally tuned "out of tune" at the extremes? - <AUTHOR> https://music.stackexchange.com/questions/14244/why-are-pianos-traditionally-tuned-out-of-tune-at-the-extremes <comment><USER2> Related: in a grand piano, the hammers strike the string at a node of the 5th harmonic (thus avoiding excitation), which reduces the beating from thirds that do not match the harmonic series (due to equal temperament)

</comment><comment><USER3> It seems that no one objected to the (slightly off-topic) claim that "the vast majority of western music uses equal temperament". As I understand it, equal temperament is just a way of tuning keyboard instruments so that they sound the same in every key; a string quartet or a choir doesn't use equal temperament. (And some people claim that J. S. Bach, who insisted on tuning his own keyboards, didn't use equal temperament, either.)

<comment><USER4> It's a way of tuning so that all semitone intervals are an equal [2^(1/12)] frequency ratio. The vast majority of western music, _today_ , uses equal temperament. This includes most recorded performances of JS Bach's pieces.

It wasn't particularly common in Bach's time, though, and the math to do it 'properly' wasn't even known outside of China.

Today, though, it's everywhere. Modern Woodwinds are equal temperament due to the placement of the holes. To match that, the entire orchestra is in equal temperament, regardless of the requirements of the instrument.

Guitars are in equal temperament due to the placement of their frets -- to do otherwise would require frets that bend between strings.

In isolation, people will [attempt to] sing in equal temperament, because that's what 'all' accompaniment is like.

Barbershop quartets, acapella groups, and to some extent string quartets have a tendency to shift _harmony notes_ toward simple fractions of the root note of the chord, on the fly, even as the overall melody runs in equal temperament. This isn't a different 'tuning', per se, but it is a thing.

<comment><USER5> Barbershop is notable for using the harmonic seventh, which doesn't exist in the standard 12 note scale. Its frequency is 7/4 times the frequency of the root, so a harmonic 7th above C is somewhere between A and B-flat.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_seventh_chord](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonic_seventh_chord)

<comment><USER6> From that page: the harmonic seventh is '"sweeter in quality" than an "ordinary" minor seventh'. Well, as an ex- trumpet and trombone player,[0] what it sounds is out-of tune, and is generally avoided, although the out-of- tuneness can be compensated for by adjusting the trombone slide. It doesn't sound particularly bluesy to my ear. Sure, sliding around the flat 7 and flat 5 areas sound bluesy, but just that note as a melody note sounds very flat.

[0] Playing brass instruments is a matter of using your lip to find the various harmonics, and using the valves to flatten them by various amounts.

<comment><USER5> I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with natural harmonics in a melody. The opening and ending of Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op. 31 uses them, and it sound good to me. Because it's notated as equal temperament, the score is ambiguous, and there are two ways of playing it:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxVnSkX4Fco](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxVnSkX4Fco) (13th harmonic high note version)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkLyK- oSQ7A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkLyK-oSQ7A) (14th harmonic high note version)

I suspect that brass players are unusually sensitive to deviations from equal temperament because they have to work so hard to overcome them if they want to play with other instruments (including other brass instruments of different sizes).

<comment><USER6> >I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with natural harmonics in a melody.

Not sure what you mean by 'natural harmonics', i.e. which ones you mean. I was just talking about how the Ab harmonic (on trombone/trumpet) sounds very flat. It's avoided because it sounds out of tune. I'm not sure what something being 'inherently wrong' would even mean. In music, if it sounds good, it is good.

>I suspect that brass players are unusually sensitive to deviations from equal temperament because they have to work so hard to overcome them if they want to play with other instruments

I don't know what you're referring to there - I've never had or even heard of that problem. And I hadn't noticed or heard, and don't believe, that 'brass players are unusually sensitive to deviations from equal temperament'.

<comment><USER5> By "natural harmonics" I mean notes at the resonant frequencies of the instrument. Several of them are obviously different from equal temperament, which means they will sound bad when played with other instruments. When brass players talk about "good intonation", they often mean adjusting these notes into equal temperament with valves/slides/embouchure/hand stopping. Because brass players actually have to pay attention to the tuning, I wouldn't be surprised if they were more sensitive to it than people who played fixed pitch instruments like piano. The Britten piece is notable for the parts where the horn player is instructed not to adjust the pitches to equal temperament, and because it's a solo it still sounds good.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Related: If you have a piano you can check that by using my online tuner that shows you the power of all the 88 notes a piano has. This means you can look at the fundamental frequency and its harmonics too.

[https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/aguaviva/G...](https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/aguaviva/GuitarTuner/blob/master/GuitarTuner.html)

</comment><comment><USER8> The piano keyboard (usually) has 7 octaves. Frequency doubles every octave, therefore if the lowest key is C, then the highest C all the way on the right is

       C*2^7

You can also follow fifths and arrive at the same note after 12 fifths. A fifth of a note is 3/2 of its frequency. Thus, starting from the same C, you arrive at

       C*(3/2)^12

But...

       (3/2)^12 = 129.7, while 2^7 = 128.

And that's (roughly) the problem that Bach's temperament addresses by ever so slightly adjusting the frequency so that in any key it sounds "right".

<comment><USER9> I don't follow this. The answer contained in the link seems more relevant as it has to do with the fact that the harmonics of real metal strings are not ideal and so the detuning at both ends compensates for this.

It seems like you are talking about what would happen if you tuned a piano using something other than equal temperament. Why is the iterated fifths relevant at all in this case?

<comment><USER10> Generally, Pythagorean tuning uses perfect fifths, as it's the easiest to hear and to match using harmonics. That example is just showing that if you using consecutive intervals (such as fifths) then other intervals (such as octaves and thirds) won't line up.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Even electric (sampled) pianos are tuned that way. The difference from the well-tempered tuning is given by the Railsback Curve ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_acoustics#The_Railsback_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piano_acoustics#The_Railsback_curve)). For the highest and lowest notes it is as much as 30 cent. It comes from the inharmonicity of the strings.

</comment><comment><USER12> Are they stretch tuning electric keyboards so if they accompany pianos they both sound good together?

<comment><USER13> Aside from sampled instruments, there's the entire world of synthesis, including the endless number of virtual instruments that have become staples in modern popular and electronic music. As to your question: they are not generally stretched tuned. Many instruments support alternate temperaments through the use of .tun files, but temperament (with a few outlying exceptions) only speaks to the interval deltas of the notes within an octave, not of the entire range of the instrument.

However, it doesn't matter. The reason for the stretch-tuning of a piano is due to the physical limitations of a vibrating string being unable to produce the same harmonic intervals at the extremities of the instrument's range, and does not apply to electronic instruments which, particularly in additive synthesis, can generate whatever harmonics are desired, including harmonic configurations that no physical instrument would be able to produce.

<comment><USER14> I ran across this Red Bull video the other day; right at the beginning Mark Verbos shows how his new synth design has (if I understand correctly) hardware sliders to allow the user to adjust individual harmonics ... and circuitry (Hadn't seen the like of that before.)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFxxvCXf-k0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AFxxvCXf-k0)

More on Verbos:[http://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2018/11/studio- science-...](http://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2018/11/studio-science-mark- verbos-modular-synth)

<comment><USER6> "hardware sliders to allow the user to adjust individual harmonics" \- Ah, just like traditional church organs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> The best guitar players also do a form of stretch tuning, depending upon the range of the piece that they are playing. Just as on a piano, the high end of the instrument will sound flat if they didn't. This is a limitation of all stringed instruments.

<comment><USER5> Inharmonicity increases with string thickness and decreases with string length (or effective string length when you're fretting it). It's most noticeable if you play high pitched notes on the E2 string. However, slight inharmonicity is just part of the sound and not a flaw:

[http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.515...](http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.515.8900&rep=rep1&type=pdf)

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Wonderful! One of weirdnesses I'd noticed but never got to the bottom of

<comment><USER16> Indeed - I've been playing piano and guitar (badly) on and off since childhood. I'm surprised I never wondered about this. It also explains why tuning guitars purely by harmonics doesn't "work" \- you end up with the bottom and top E strings sounding out of tune.

<comment><USER17> Guitars are even worse, due to fretting. The act of fretting a note stretches the string, which raises its pitch, and the amount varies by string and by fret. So guitars are _never_ truly in tune. Not only are harmonics not sufficient, but neither are electronic tuners! A guitar that is "in tune" according to an electronic tuner is always sharp in practice.

And it gets worse from there! The tuning of a guitar string varies as it decays. This is true of piano strings too, but not to the same degree. A freshly struck string is vibrating more widely than a gentle or decaying note, so it's stretching itself sharp. You can see this on a fast digital tuner - the note will go sharp at first, and then settle to a slightly lower pitch. So when you tune to an electronic tuner, are you tuning the initial pitch, or the decayed pitch? This variation might be 20 cents or more.

Because of this, how to tune a guitar _well_ is very much a matter of taste, context, and experience. I use harmonics and electronic tuners to get myself in the ballpark, then start fine-tuning based on the guitar itself (each one has its own quirks), and the material I'm planning to play. On acoustic guitar, I tend to focus on getting the B string in tune with the D and A strings first, by the quality of octaves for open C and D chords (which also gets the A and D in tune with each other). Then I focus on getting the low E in tune with an octave E on the D string. Then get the high E in tune in unison with E on the B string. Finally, get the G string in tune with G on the low E, an octave down. This means my G string is usually a bit flat relative to the D and B strings, but that's okay - it's in tune for G chords, and being a little flat is good for E major and D chords. I might adjust a little if I'm playing in C/Am.

James Taylor has an _excellent_ YouTube video about tuning guitars consistently with electronic tuners. It's very much to his taste and the specific guitars he uses, but his principles are sound. And if you try it on an acoustic with good intonation, you'll immediately hear that "James Taylor" sound.

<comment><USER18> To save others a click, I think this is the relevant James Taylor video that you were talking about:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2xnXArjPts](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V2xnXArjPts)

And thanks for the video reference & your comment, this helps me feel better about tuning my guitar, I thought I was just really bad at it.

<comment><USER17> You're welcome! The most important takeaway, I think, is that to a certain degree, "in tune" is a matter of opinion (for fretted instruments, anyway). You can significantly change the tonal quality of the instrument while remaining "in tune". That's the neat thing about the James Taylor video... follow his method, and your guitar suddenly gets that James Taylor sound, very rich and resonant.

Try experimenting with modal tunings like DADGAD, too. It's much easier to get them "in tune", and you hear this beautiful resonance that guitars can make.

I brought this up on Facebook, and a friend who is an excellent player responded with his own tuning method. He tunes the A string to a reference (tuner, piano), and then tunes every other string to a fretted A note that is in tune with the open A string. This is probably more "in tune" than the highly resonant approach that I use.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> I hate to say....the explanation is a bit wrong.

Music is based off of ratios in between each other. An Octave is 1:2 (For example, A1 = 440 Hz, A2 - 880Hz, etc.). But the fundamental ratio for modern music is the Fifth. Thr first eight fifths of F is C, G, D, A, E, B. Re arranged, that is also C, D, E, F, G, A, B (a Major Scale). If you go to 12 Fifths from F, you get the chromatic scale. This will work for any starting note, and is why we have 12 Major Scales.

However, we typically say a fifth has a 1:1.5 Ratio. This is an approximation due to the overtone series. When a string vibrates (or a horn vibrates, take your instrument), it vibrates at a fundamental frequency and several harmonics above it as well. I cannot find it exactly, but I believe it is closer to 1:1.48 to make overtones work. This means the math does not work out between a Fifth and an octave. To solve this issue, we use the approximation on the piano so that the fifth and Octave line up exactly for the ratios (we tune fifths slightly sharp and octaves slightly flat).

Now remember how I said music is all based off of ratios? Due lot this, we need a common fundamental frequency that everybody can agree to tune to. The musical world as decided on the A=440 Hz (which is close to the middle of the piano). Due to the fact that the reference frequency is in the middle of the piano, as you get out further, the approximation rears its ugly head.

This is why pianos are tuned "out of tune" at extremes.

<comment><USER19> As a fun fact too, the overtone series is also why you have different size pianos. The longer string gives you a different overtone, and if i recall right, the overtone is "more in tune" overtone series (if there are any piano folks in here and I got that wrong, please forgive me, I am a mere trombone player).

<comment><USER20> Inharmonicity is a trade off between the ratio of string length to fundamental and stiffness (which is related to thickness.)

You could make a piano with really, really long bass strings, and the overtones would be more linear. There would also be a lot more fundamental, which is almost non-existent on the lowest octave or so of a grand piano.

Native Instruments actually sells a sample pack called The Giant which is taken from an experimental long-string piano.

I don't think it sounds all that good, because there's something just right about the colour of the "imperfect" bass strings on a fine grand. (That could just be acculturation, but I'm not completely convinced that's the case.)

Contrariwise, uprights tend to sound boxy and constrained in the bass because the strings are shorter than on a full-sized grand, and the overtones are even louder and even less linear.

You can't do much at the top end, because nicely linear strings - like the ones on a steel guitar - would have to be very thin and they'd be too fragile to survive piano hammers.

The closest approximation would be a hammer dulcimer, which has a much sweeter and more open top end than the percussive plink of a piano, but doesn't go quite as high.</comment></comment></comment>


The sound of the dialup, pictured (2012) - <AUTHOR> http://www.windytan.com/2012/11/the-sound-of-dialup-pictured.html <comment><USER2> I get waves of nostalgia when I hear that screeching sound.

At work, when the fax machine was still sitting in my office, I deliberately turned the sound on (for those who don't know: the initial handshake part sounds pretty much the same for modems and fax). Then we got a shiny new printer/scanner/fax that now sits in the hallway.

When I had Internet access for the first time (1996), I used a 14.4 modem for about a year, before I could switch to ISDN. To me, sound always signified a window opening to a new, magical world, where the only boundaries were your imagination and available bandwidth.

A friend of mine once dialed the wrong number, and a human picked up. Hearing a human voice from the modem was really strange.

Ah, good times (except for the crappy bandwidth and the fact that the phone company charged by the minute).

<comment><USER3> It was when Going Online was still a ritual, just like starting up the computer was - it took a while, sometimes you had to go through a menu or start up Windows or whatever separately still, you got this jingle when starting up, sometimes a login screen, all that stuff. Then going online, dialing up, telling the family (if any) that you're using the internet for a while, firing up the browser, etc. Using the internet was (for most people anyway) a very focused task too, given the per minute charge - get online, do what you want, get offline again.

I noticed that myself very quickly after getting DSL; while we had a bandwidth limit (1500 MB / month iirc), I still spent a lot of time online; freed from pay per minute, you get a lot more time to just browse and explore. Still do the latter. Usually it's browsing Reddit, but sometimes I fall into a rabbit hole.

<comment><USER4> Trumpet Winsock; login and initiate PPP; fire up Netscape Navigator.

<comment><USER5> Never heard of Trumpet Winsock before. Found this.

[https://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/](https://thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com/)

[http://www.trumpet.com.au/index.php/news/3-latest- news/17-ma...](http://www.trumpet.com.au/index.php/news/3-latest- news/17-mar-2011.html)

> As a result of some recent discussion about Trumpet Winsock and its use > during the early 1990s, a group of users at Hacker News have decided to > donate to Peter Tattam in appreciation for their use of Trumpet Winsock > during the early years of the Internet.

> As a gesture of good will, Peter Tattam, the sole copyright owner of Trumpet > Winsock, has also issued an amnesty on any copyright infringement by all > users (individual and corporate) of Trumpet Winsock indefinitely for use > prior to Jan 2011. He does however reserve all other rights in the copyright > of Trumpet Winsock. Please note that Trumpet Winsock is still available for > sale and is NOT free - should you wish to continue to use it, you should > order a registration key from us.

<comment><USER6> > Never heard of Trumpet Winsock before.

That sound you just heard was half of HN sighing at how old they feel, including me. :/

<comment><USER7> I'd heard of it, but never used it. The reason being that we were an Apple household, and so used MacPPP!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> BTW, every post from this blog is amazing. See the two recent ones:

[http://www.windytan.com/2017/09/descrambling-split-band- voic...](http://www.windytan.com/2017/09/descrambling-split-band-voice- inversion.html) "Voice inversion is a primitive method of rendering speech unintelligible to prevent eavesdropping of radio or telephone calls."

[http://www.windytan.com/2017/07/virtual-music- box.html](http://www.windytan.com/2017/07/virtual-music-box.html) "A little music project I was writing required a melody be played on a music box. However, the paper-programmable music box I had (pictured) could only play notes on the C major scale. I couldn't easily find a realistic-sounding synthesizer version. [...] Perhaps, if I digitized the sound myself, I could build a flexible virtual instrument to generate just the perfect sample for the piece!"

My favorite is "Mystery signal from a helicopter" [http://www.windytan.com/2014/02/mystery-signal-from- helicopt...](http://www.windytan.com/2014/02/mystery-signal-from- helicopter.html)

<comment><USER9> If I remember correctly from the last time she also has a great post about decoding RF bus stop signals. Super useful for a home assistant!

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I remember reading this when it came out, and it was fascinating, especially considering listening to modems to diagnose problems is how I made my bones in tech support back when CompuServe was still a thing.

I'm an old timer, and have even used a 300 baud modem with an acoustic coupler that the article referred to. I listened to the evolution of modem handshakes, and had no idea what parts meant what, but over the years I correlated different problems to different sounds, and through osmosis learned the various AT commands for different chip manufacturers (the main three I ran across were Hayes/Rockwell, USR, and Motorola) to lock them in certain modes - set the flow control mode (RTS/CTS or X-on/X-off), set the max and min baud rates, and set various error control algorithm modes.

Doing tech support for a couple years in the 90s, the biggest problem I saw (beyond the fact that average users were pretty unsophisticated back then), was the quality of telephone lines in certain areas of the country. If you live in the sticks, you're screwed and lucky to achieve 9600 baud with any consistency. If you live in larger cities with crumbling infrastructure, you're likely to have some "signal bleed" (not sure what to call it) where other conversations are faintly audible on your lines. In both of these cases, the negotiation sequence would restart several times, sometimes getting lucky and connecting, but more often failing until we found the right AT commands to lock a lower baud rate and force error correction - MNP? I think that was the magic bullet in most cases.

In the end, the phone infrastructure improved greatly just about everywhere, but by then it didn't matter as much, as people started moving to cable modems, typically plugged directly into a desktop computer, running Win 95 and getting hijacked by 0 day exploits to build the first botnets. Good times.

Anyway, I'm glad to see this article has held up over time and people still find it interesting.

<comment><USER11> what you call "signal bleed" is usually called "crosstalk": [https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Crosstalk](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Crosstalk)

</comment></comment><comment><USER12>
      > Why was it audible? Why not, one could ask. [...]
      > Even then, the idea of not hearing what's happening
      > on a phone line you're calling on was quite new,
      > and modems would default to exposing the user to the handshake audio. [...]
      >
      > All you had to do to silence the handshake was to send the command ATM0
      > down the serial line before dialing.

And I think the user was comforted by the ritual, as far as I can tell from conversations with my friends and scenes from pop culture like _You 've Got Mail_.

I am for using the computer's own low-level apparatus as progress bars, instead of the opaque logos or polished animated graphics, blocking the view like a royal guard. For example, I wish my laptop and my phone listed the shell's output during boot, like some Linux distros still do. Even though most users wouldn't fully understand it --- and I have to admit that even I don't understand a lot of it --- the quickly scrolling text is no worse than an animated spinner in conveying, "Loading..."

I think most users, and I mean nontechnical, are okay with the exposure and even kind of like it. It makes them feel like they're in a spy movie. Some will never try to understand it and will just take it as a more-detailed progress spinner. Some will slowly become familiar with some of the lines, google them out of curiosity, and it may be the spark that lights them down the long trek to becoming a programmer. Isn't that one of our country's goals, to encourage kids to become programmers?

Anyway, my point is, I came to programming from graphic design and front-end. I spend a lot of time thinking about user-interface design. But maybe I'm against the grain in wanting some of the architecture to be allowed to hang out. (Does that make me a Brutalist?)

<comment><USER13> I'm completely with you on this, but there is one issue: many hardware platforms are simply incapable to show such scrolling text (or dump it into UART) fast enough in the early boot stages which is the reason why you don't today get that even on server-oriented distributions.

Somewhat ironic is that KDE3 splashscreen showed low-levelish looking messages that had nothing to do with what was really happening in order to cater to users with this approach to computing.

<comment><USER14> > Somewhat ironic is that KDE3 splashscreen showed low-levelish looking > messages that had nothing to do with what was really happening in order to > cater to users with this approach to computing.

"Reticulating splines"

<comment><USER13> Maxis' games (ie. "Reticulating splines", but SimCity 4 does that to) and KSP also comes to mind for this, but in these cases the messages are obvious nonsense, which is not the case for KDE.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Classic article! I would also like to recommend [http://www.windytan.com/2014/02/mystery-signal-from- helicopt...](http://www.windytan.com/2014/02/mystery-signal-from- helicopter.html) \- Oona is clearly a talented engineer :-)

</comment><comment><USER16> 3d spectrogram: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvr9AMWEU-c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvr9AMWEU-c)

Animation of the picture illustrated in this article: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abapFJN6glo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abapFJN6glo)

If you live with someone >= 30, turn up the volume and wait for him/her to appear at the door for a nostalgia moment...

<comment><USER17> shot in the dark- that looks like a good way to visualize a bunch of timeseries lines, do you know what they are using for that graph?

<comment><USER18> In the description there is "ozone 5"

Which refers to iZotope Ozone, that audio mastering software. Normally you would put in one or two timeseries (that is a mono or stereo audio file where the y axis is amplitude).

In this case the audio is mono, and you're looking at a short time fourier transformation (STFT) with the parameters as in the description, where the height is de magnitude of the frequency bins, and the Y axis (from right to left in the video) is frequencies from low to high, in logarithmic scale as is standard in audio.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3G2eHEnt7c](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3G2eHEnt7c) here it is used on some music

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Manually decoding the DTMF in the spectrogram gives me 1-570-234-0003, which turns up a lot of search hits.

</comment><comment><USER20> This also takes me back to watching some modems have bad implementations of the USR protocols. Some were so bad that they'd actually watch the packet traffic for commands. I remember seeing people getting knocked offline from someone typing ATH0++ over IRC (all plaintext!), and their modem catching it as an actual USR command (the Attention-Hang Up command).

</comment><comment><USER21> This would be more elucidative if they had the sound and a moving bar superimposed over the image so I dont have to go back and forth.

<comment><USER22> [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abapFJN6glo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abapFJN6glo)

<comment><USER21> Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> I can remember at my first job (which was a long way away from the Exchange / central office).

The carrier signal was a little weak and I had to whistle the correct tone down the line to get the other end to pickup :-)

We also when we had a project that used modems for remote data collection our electronics shop modified (technically illegal) the modems with adjustable gain

</comment><comment><USER7> I'd love to see something similar for ADSL. There's no audible part to ADSL, but there are still two modems talking to each other, and from what i understand of it, there's a rich and interesting process involved in setting up the line - tone ordering and so on.

<comment><USER22> DSL is by design placed outside the human auditory range (also why it has such limited range between home and exchange). As such, you are better off thinking about it like the analog part of most any wired network.

ISDN by contrast puts a digital signal where the PSTN analog signal normally is (iirc).

<comment><USER7> ADSL still pretty different to something like Ethernet - not that i understand Ethernet terribly well either. Ethernet is baseband: it really is a digital on-off signal, with Manchester encoding, 8/10 encoding, 64/66 encoding, etc. ADSL is broadband: there is modulation into phase and frequency patterns.

Mind you, 8/10 encoding is amazing as well, and a good explanation of that would be well worth a read for this audience!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I always wondered if it would be feasible to setup a modem connection wireless. In a way that you would have a loudspeaker and microphone at each end of a field and just transmit the noises through the air.

<comment><USER25> I actually experimented with this using ultrasonic signals (most people can't hear above ~16-17kHz), and with very simple modulation was able to transfer ~30bps. Was a very fun proof of concept, using just a cell phone and a speaker! I think the idea is great and there are many applications for it.

In this one I embedded the signal into a song, and then the phones would parse the modulated data to all synchronize together and create an ad hoc light show with the flashlights!

<comment><USER26> Sigh... you're making me want to put together a laptop/mobile version of PSK-31[1], just to see if I can do it.

[1] [http://rsgb.org/main/get-started-in-amateur- radio/operating-...](http://rsgb.org/main/get-started-in-amateur- radio/operating-your-new-station/psk31-work-the-world-with-low-power/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Click "past" under the article title for previous discussions.

Lots of fascinating content in that blog!

</comment><comment><USER28> Oona is definitely a personal hero of mine.

</comment><comment><USER29> Heh, I remember the sound over here (The Netherlands) sounding just slightly different. Probably differences in negotiation? Amazing what nuances the brain can pickup when exposed to something often enough.

<comment><USER30> We went to 56k6 or 28k8 baud almost immediately. Other places of the world were stuck with much slower baudrates for longer. Maybe that made the difference?

Or it's just the acoustics of older, crappier speakers

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> I never understood why in the United States getting 56k was impossible. It was always slightly less than that. Meanwhile in Europe I easily obtained 56k negotiation.

<comment><USER32> There was a FCC regulation limiting the transmission power sent on the line; this regulation did not exist elsewhere. It limited the speed to 53.3 kbit/s.

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> (2012)

</comment><comment><USER34> I was hoping something more like this [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdgvceSBroU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdgvceSBroU)

</comment><comment><USER35> Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9171514](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9171514)

</comment><comment><USER36> The noisiest part of the process in our house was the constant dialing to get onto AOL followed by the busy signal. Most fun when I was trying to sleep in.

</comment><comment><USER37> Previous conversation:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9171514](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9171514)

</comment><comment><USER38> Pretty sure that the sample handshake available in the article is not for a 56k negotiation.

My ears are saying that it sounds more like a 14.4k negotiation.

</comment><comment><USER39> Mmmmmmm. BBS glory days. Sometimes, I miss that era.

I could tell the speed of the connection by the sound of the handshake.

</comment><comment><USER40> I always wanted to know this. But by the time I was old enough to understand it, dialup was out of my life.

</comment><comment><USER41> Those were the days you could hack a mainframe with a cassette player. Boy did we have fun with that.

</comment><comment><USER42> That sound brings back so many memories. BACKNEXT

</comment><comment><USER43> that's crazy. I was just looking at this the other day and used the sound clip to make an annoying ringtone for my phone

</comment><comment><USER44> Very intersting glimpse into our past and DTMF.

</comment><comment><USER45> You see an interesing article.

I see a new ringtone :)

<comment><USER46> [http://evilrouters.net/56k.mp3](http://evilrouters.net/56k.mp3)

</comment></comment><comment><USER47> this sound will make an awesome voicemail announcement.

</comment><comment><USER48> Stranger Things.</comment>


HOWTO setup Atheros AR5007EG wireless on Feisty Fawn (with ndiswrapper) - <AUTHOR> http://www.ubuntugeek.com/howto-setup-atheros-ar5007eg-wireless-on-feisty-fawn-with-ndiswrapper.html

<comment><USER2> If there are more than three digits in the serial number then it's probably too specific a matter for news.yc. :)</comment>


Yahoo GeoCities: 11 days to go until it closes... - <AUTHOR> http://geocities.yahoo.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> If you have favorite content bookmarked on there then now would be a good time to make a copy.</comment>