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This is why I feel the recentish (last 10-15 years) shift in decoupling CS curricula from EE and CE fundamentals in the US is doing a massive disservice to newer students entering the industry.
DSP, Control Engineering, Circuit Design, understanding pipelining and caching, and other fundamentals are important for people to understand higher levels of the abstraction layers (eg. much of deep learning is built on top of Optimization Theory principles which are introduced in a DSP class).
The value of Computer Science isn't the ability to whiteboard a Leetcode hard question or glue together PyTorch commands - it's the ability to reason across multiple abstraction layers.
And newer grads are significantly deskilled due to these curriculum changes. If I as a VC know more about Nagle's Algorithm (hi Animats!) than some of the potential technical founders for network security or MLOps companies, we are in trouble.
I've often marveled at the success many guitar players had with experimental electronics - Hendrix, EVH, Les Paul, Brian May, Jack White, and Tom Scholz (special case, of course) are just a few examples.
This is a terrible article. In the first subplot, there is no explanation of what v(b1) and v(c2) are. The -8 on the on y axis (amplitude) looks like an upside down 8.
Further down there is a sentence: "First, the Fuzz Face is a two-transistor feedback amplifier that turns a gentle sinusoid signal into an almost binary “fuzzy” output." But the figure does not match this - there is no "gentle sinusoid" wave shown on the first fuzz face plot.
I strongly believe that if you set aside genre preferences the solid body electric guitar coupled to a tube amplifier is objectively the greatest electronic instrument ever created.
All other electronic instruments, with the one exception being the Theramin, have a fundamental problem with human expression. There is an unsolvable disconnect between what the performer's actions and their audience.
With an electric guitar you get the physicality and dynamism of an acoustic instrument with the complex timbres and extended technique possibilities of an electric/electronic instrument.
There are complex and musically significant feedback loops occurring across many dimensions that lead to extremely complex transformations of timbre via both traditional music theoretical techniques and the physics of a tube amplifier combined with an inductive load (the guitar pickup).
Its really crazy how much more dynamic and complex this can be then even a highly sophisticated modular synthesizer or whatever. Even the way you over load the power supply in a tube amplifier can be manipulated on the fly to enhance and transform timbre.
Then on top of all that it is so incredibly physical that a performer like Jimi Hendrix can manipulate these systems and have the audience intuitively understand what he is doing. Never in a million years would THAT be possible with any other electronic instrument.
Hendrix reportedly discovered feedback by walking away from a cranked amp. The guitar just kept sustaining on its own. What followed was years of empirical system identification: learning how body position, pickup selection, and guitar-to-amp distance affected feedback character. No transfer function, just iteration. That's a valid engineering methodology.
Crazy example of when everything is AI generated, even the code referenced in git repo (refer to commit 3d733ca), and actually interesting and "new" in a way...
Nice article for engineers to understand something that most guitar players will intuitively know.
One of the great things about a hi-gain setup like Hendrix's is how the feedback loop will inject an element of controlled chaos into the sound. It allows for emergent fluctuations in timbre that Hendrix can wrangle, but never fully control. It's the squealing, chaotic element in something like his 'Star Spangled Banner'. It's a positive feedback loop that can run away from the player and create all kinds of unexpected elements.
The art of Hendrix's playing, then, is partly in how he harnessed that sound and integrated it into his voice. And of course, he's a force of nature when he does so.
A great place to hear artful feedback would be the intro to Prince's 'Computer Blue'. It's the squealing "birdsong" at the beginning and ending of the record. You can hear it particularly well if you search for 'Computer Blue - Hallway Speech Version' with the extended intro.
In a sluggish economy
Inflation, recession
Hits the land of the free
Standing in unemployment lines
Blame the government for hard time
We just get by
However we can
We all gotta duck
When the shit hits the fan
It's because there's clearly a near-1:1 ratio of input to output. I also noticed some LLMisms, and I suspect the author may have ran the text (perhaps in the form of a large number of bullet points) through an LLM. But because he's using the LLM to clean instead of multiply, it's still worth reading.
Art and engineering are both constrained optimization problems - at their core, both involve transforming a loosely defined aesthetic desire into a repeatable methodology!
And if we can call ourselves software engineers, where our day-to-day (mostly) involves less calculus and more creative interpretation of loose ideas, in the context of a corpus of historical texts that we literally call "libraries" - are we not artists and art historians?
We're far closer to Jimi than Roger, in many ways. Pots and kettles :)
I came into a CS and math background without CE or EE, and took two dedicated optimization courses (one happened to be in a EE department, but had no EE prereqs), as well as the optimization introduced in machine learning classes. To be honest a lot of the older school optimization is barely even useful, second-order methods are a bit passe for large scale ML, largely because they don't work, not because people aren't aware (Adam and Muon can be seen as approximations to second-order methods, though, so it is useful to be aware of that structure).
Isn't Nagle usually introduced in a networking class typically taken by CS (non-CE/EE) undergrads?
Just because EEs are exposed to some mathematical concepts during their training doesn't mean that non-EEs are not exposed through a different path.
LLM-isms are tolerably bad. LLM's narrative ability is intolerably terrible. As others said, because a human actually wrote the overall narration for this, it was still compelling to read. The mistake would be skipping a well-narrated and thoughtful article just because of a few bad LLMisms.
I think LLM's lack of "theory of mind" leads to them severely underperforming on narration and humor.
Hi! I work at IEEE Spectrum and there's no way an LLM wrote this. We have a pretty strict Generative AI use policy (bottom of this page https://spectrum.ieee.org/about). I'm guessing this is from writers using actual writing techniques that Gen AI stole from...
There have been some interesting keyboard input devices coming out which allow for more expression than normal piano keys, using a sort of hack to the MIDI system called MPE - MIDI Polyphonic Expression. For example the Seaboard Rise or the Osmose. Depending on the instrument it's possible to do per-note pitch bends, change pressure while holding notes, perform vibrato etc. Visually the physical movement is not as interesting as electric guitar though, so yours probably still wins.
The podcast "History of Rock in 500 Songs" (full disclosure: I am a devout, slavering fan) provides these on the regular. I was actually smiling when I heard a fairly new song that attempts a really flat, fuzzed out sound because it made me think, "Buddy Holly invented that by accident with a broken speaker". One of the episodes on The Who goes into the Marshall behind Marshall amps in similar detail.
I suppose if I were going to recommend a single episode to Hacker News though, it would be https://500songs.com/podcast/episode-146-good-vibrations-by-... which begins with at least a half hour on the amazing (if not happy) life of the guy who invented the Theremin, Lev Sergeyevich Termen.
> There is an unsolvable disconnect between what the performer's actions and their audience
Is that really true though? If I watch a cellist play I can pretty clearly see all the things they are doing and it will correlate neatly to the timbre of the sound.
Secondly I think it's important to note the tube amp and the guitar are seperable, and I don't think that their connection is particularly magical. I can reamp a sound from my synthesizer (or maybe a keytar?) into a guitar chain, and if I manipulate the mic and other controls in the same way I might manipulate the pickup, I can also get all manner of interesting feedback effects. My inputs will have different harmonic characteristics of course, and the tube amp's effects are mostly transformations of harmonics; you'll still get some cool tones and they will be subject to a lot of the same rules as if a guitar was being played.
The reverse example of this is musicians who play techno with analog instruments, like Pipe Guy, Basstong, and Meute[0][1][2].
There are always some people who get extremely defensive whenever I say that techno didn't click for me until I heard this kind of "techlow" music. Specifically about the part where I think that the reason is also a human expression problem, because of limitations imposed by the electronic media used.
EDIT: having said that, I don't think I would agree with your premise, because it is colored by a subtle form of survivor bias. None of us remember what it's like to not know electronic guitars or what they sound like, so claiming "the audience intuitively understands what Jimmy Hendrix is doing" is like saying everyone "intuitively understands" their native language. On top of that there's nothing about the workings of an electronic guitar that wouldn't in principle work for something like an electronic violin or whatever.
Great argument -- but I'd also counter that "the turntable" (i.e. in the hands of experts like Q-Bert, Craze, Rob Swift, Jazzy Jeff and others) fits this quite well -- especially re your "have the audience understand what he is doing argument"
I graduated in 2020 and I took a circuit design class and was taught Nagles algorithm. I guess I could have learned more but I thought the degree was packed enough with enough when you consider all the different parts of it, from the math to systems programming to ML stuff.
I’m curious because to tell you the truth the novelty struck me as similar to comparisons I’ve toyed with using LLMs on my own. The AI-generated logic between comparing two dissimilar things is too sterile for my liking.
I understand that this is appearing in technical publication, but for some reason that invites even further scrutiny on my behalf.
That's stretching the term to the breaking point, for me. Is there some evidence of systematic analysis of component parts? attempts to model elements of the problem? data gathering and data analysis? simulation? Intentional application of principles of physics or some other pure domain to a real world problem?
Artistic endeavors come from lots of places, not just people with an analytical mindset. Historically those two are seen as opposing tendencies, which I think is unfair, but it points to the importance of intuition and navigating perception and emotion for artists.
> All other electronic instruments, with the one exception being the Theramin, have a fundamental problem with human expression. There is an unsolvable disconnect between what the performer's actions and their audience.
Electric bass? Heck, even in synthesizers, you have the EWI or the Haken Continuum.
Any guitarist in a 1940s big band would have a big hollowbody guitar and an amp. That combination is incredibly prone to feedback. Everyone worked to reduce feedback and avoid it. That's what I do with my hollowbody when I play with a big band. It's the first thing that happens when you turn up.
Hendrix did not "discover" feedback, and in fact he did not discover the musical uses of feedback - you can hear it in BB King records that predate Hendrix, where feedback makes his notes "sing."
What Hendrix did was turn feedback into an intentional musical creation that he treated as a melodic voice.
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build 1ad9551+j7zs · deployed 2026-03-02 09:09 UTC · evaluated 2026-03-02 10:41:39 UTC
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