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1. Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Sunday, 12-Mar-2023 04:47:14 JST Adrian Cochrane

   Over the past week or so I've been tooting about how computer graphics works. Characterising it as require large amounts of data needing to be computed 30+ times a second in a way we're used to making sense of.

   I hope you're getting the impression that the most computationally-involved task we set for computers is to communicate their computations with us! So how does this apply to other mediums?

   Like say sound or text?

   1/2?

   • Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Sunday, 12-Mar-2023 04:55:08 JST Adrian Cochrane

     in reply to

     Audio generally requires a couple 16bit numbers to be computed precisely 44,100 (technically 40,000, we give ourselves a bit of wiggle-room lining up to analog storage capabilities) times a second. This covers the entire range of human hearing according to Nyquist-Shannon Theorem, & that timing is crucial. Miss it & we hear inadvertant pops.

     So what characterizes audio isn't so much data quantity (though it was a lot for the 1980s) but precise timing! Often fullfilled using ringbuffers.

     2/3

   • Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Sunday, 12-Mar-2023 05:02:35 JST Adrian Cochrane

     in reply to

     As for text, there's essentially 2 levels we deal with it at. At lower-levels we deal largely in terms of iterating over characters & concatenating arrays of them. Maybe some lookuptables. Then if we want to do some serious processing we need to parse it into something else.

     At higher, internationalized, levels we tend to largely rely on string-lookups & domain-specific languages to match the user's cultural customs.

     3/3.5!

   • Adrian Cochrane (alcinnz@floss.social)'s status on Sunday, 12-Mar-2023 05:08:33 JST Adrian Cochrane

     in reply to

     Computers used to directly output text, but now we emulate that going to great length to better serving a much wider breadth of people. It is still reasonably popular to near-directly receive textual input from hardware buttons since that gives tactile feedback, however reduced it often is now.

     Text is a very information dense medium to communicate with computers over!

     3.5/3.5 Fin!

   • 💉Eliot B (bigblen@mastodon.nzoss.nz)'s status on Sunday, 12-Mar-2023 07:25:46 JST 💉Eliot B

     in reply to

     @alcinnz yes our ears are much more sensitive to a single lost sample or bad data causing a discontinuity than our eyes are.
     Having worked on audio DSP I'm painfully aware of this