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torusle commented on Building a TB-303 from Scratch   loopmaster.xyz/tutorials/... · Posted by u/stagas
torusle · 5 days ago
The fun thing was the Roland Sync. You could sync up all the TB-303, TB-909 and all the others with a 5-pole DIN cable. The sync was badly implemented. It lagged, it had latency.

However!

As soon as you cabled all together their imperfections added up and they started to groove like nothing that has been heard before.

Deleted Comment

torusle commented on Can Ozempic Cure Addiction?   newyorker.com/magazine/20... · Posted by u/adrianhon
pixl97 · a month ago
This brings up another interesting question. What is the chemical basis of desire in the brain?
torusle · a month ago
Easy, it is dopamine.
torusle commented on The state of Schleswig-Holstein is consistently relying on open source   heise.de/en/news/Goodbye-... · Posted by u/doener
chaoskanzlerin · 3 months ago
There's a history of German public administrations using Linux and other open-source software. In particular, the City of Munich has pioneered this with their 2006-2019 LiMux [0] project, which was ultimately cancelled in exchange for Microsoft moving their German offices to Munich proper.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux / Discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15661372

torusle · 3 months ago
Back then Microsoft was lobbying as hard as they could to turn that decision to move to linux over.

They knew: If Linux makes it in Munich, it will likely spread over and they loose tons of contracts with other German states.

torusle commented on Functional Quadtrees   lbjgruppen.com/en/posts/f... · Posted by u/lbj
torusle · 3 months ago
"I could only find a couple tutorials/guides and both were imperative"

Aren't Quadtrees covered by almost all basic data-structure books? It is the most simple form of taking the binary tree into the next (2D) dimension.

torusle commented on Viagrid – PCB template for rapid PCB prototyping with factory-made vias [video]   youtube.com/watch?v=A_IUI... · Posted by u/surprisetalk
picture · 4 months ago
QFN packages would not benefit much from this (you cannot make much more than a basic breakout board, whose same purpose is better fulfilled with one of those SMD adapters from aliexpress)

And regarding high-speed digital buses... are we being genuine here? Just the fact that you cannot have meaningful design over ground return paths with this thing makes any moderately fast digital link unfeasible. Best you'll be able to manage is regular speed SPI (which also does not need a board like this), you can forget about RGMII, ULPI, LVDS, MIPI, SLVS-EC, or anything else for that matter.

torusle · 4 months ago
this

For those who don't know: Vias are not only used to get an electrical connection from one side of the PCB to another.

You also need them to keep radiation in check and often to move heat away.

With this technique, good luck getting through EMC testing for anything but trivial circuits.

torusle commented on RoboPianist: Dexterous Piano Playing with Deep Reinforcement Learning (2023)   kzakka.com/robopianist/#d... · Posted by u/bemmu
torusle · a year ago
Honestly,

this is really bad. It might be a breakthrough of what you are doing, but when I listen to the output all of the timing and phrasing is aweful.

torusle commented on Reciprocal Approximation with 1 Subtraction    · Posted by u/mbitsnbites
torusle · a year ago
There are couple of tricks you can do if you fiddle with the bits of a floating point value using integer arithmetic and binary logic.

That was a thing back in the 90th..

I wonder how hard the performance hit from moving values between integer and float pipeline is nowadays.

Last time I looked into that was the Cortex-A8 (first I-Phone area). Doing that kind of trick costed around 26 cycles (back and forth) due to pipeline stalls back then.

torusle commented on Show HN: A1 – Faster, Dynamic, More Reliable NFC Transactions   github.com/overlay-paymen... · Posted by u/AffableSpatula
AffableSpatula · 2 years ago
Hi there, author here! I think you've highlighted a couple of things worth clarifying in the doc:

1. Apple having just announced it is opening up NFC to developers means that both major mobile platforms can now act as responding devices; so widely distributing new NFC protocols to consumer devices has become very fast and inexpensive through an update to the OS or installing a third party app.

2. Mobile consumer hardware is sufficiently fast for the application operations (eg. Cryptographic operations) so that these roundtrip and metadata overheads of APDU do actually make a meaningful contribution to the total time it takes to complete a transaction. Experiencing this in my development efforts here was the motivation for designing this alternative.

3. A1 is interoperable with APDU infrastructure and can therefore be adopted by terminals immediately, since reader terminals can attempt an A1 initiation and any APDU response from a legacy device is considered a failure; at which point the terminal can fall back to its default APDU message exchange.

I will update the doc to clarify these points, what do you think?

Given your experience I'd be interested in your detailed feedback, maybe we could jump on a call soon if you have time?

torusle · 2 years ago
> 1. Apple having just announced it is opening up NFC > to developers means that both major mobile > platforms can now act as responding devices;

> 2. Mobile consumer hardware is sufficiently fast for the application > operations (eg. Cryptographic operations)

You are right here. It is possible to emulate a card using mobile phones. We've been able to shim/emulate any card for much longer.

The thing is: To connect to the payment system you need a certificate. And you simply don't get it unless you can prove that you have all kinds of security measures applied.

For android and apple, the actual payment stuff runs inside a isolated little micro-controller which has been certified and is temper proof/protected. This little thing is fortified so far that it will destruct itself when you try to open it up. There are alarm meshes, light sensors and much more inside the chip to detect any intrusion just to protect the certificate.

If you don't have that security, the payment providers will deny you their certificate, plain and simple.

You can build your own thing using card emulation via apps, but you will take all the risks.

How it works in practice is the following: These temper proof micro-controllers can run java-card code. You can write an applet for them, get it installed (if you have the key from apple/google - not easy). Then install it and you have a two-way communication: Your applet inside the secure world communicating with the payment world, and your ordinary mobile app showing things on the screen.

torusle commented on Show HN: A1 – Faster, Dynamic, More Reliable NFC Transactions   github.com/overlay-paymen... · Posted by u/AffableSpatula
torusle · 2 years ago
I've worked in the payment industry and among other things built a payment terminal, so I know a thing or two about it.

1st: The message overhead during communication is not an issue. It is tiny compared to the time it takes for the credit card to do it's crypto thing.

2nd: This won't be adapted ever. There is simply way to much working infrastructure out there build on the APDU protocol. And there are so many companies and stakeholders involved that doing any change will take years. If they start aligning on a change, it would be something that makes a difference, not something that safes time in the order of 5 to 20 milliseconds. per payment.

u/torusle

KarmaCake day70August 20, 2023View Original