3 ms·
"My Facebook signal-to-noise ratio is somewhere around -5 to -10 dB." I don't know how much you know about audio, but that's pretty freaking high. I guess som
by sho 17y ago
"My Facebook signal-to-noise ratio is somewhere around -5 to -10 dB."
I don't know how much you know about audio, but that's pretty freaking high.
I guess some people are just super-interested in the lives of their friends & associates. That's cool. I'm not, but whatever, diff'rent strokes and all that.
- kragen 17y agoAudio doesn't have anything to do with it. -5 dB is a ratio of roughly 1:3. -10dB is a ratio of exactly 1:10. If my Facebook SNR is -10dB, that means that the power in the noise on Facebook is 10× the power in the signal. (I'm equating power here to post counts, not squared words per post or something.) That means I have to get some signal gain out of somewhere to extract useful information from Facebook. Which is true. I don't know whether by "pretty freaking high" you mean "that's a lot of signal" or "that's a lot of noise" or what. It would be a terrible signal-to-noise ratio for audio equipment. Fortunately my brain is not a tube amp.
- sho 17y ago"Audio doesn't have anything to do with it." Argh, you are the one who made an audio analogy! My point was that you seemed to be saying -10dB was no problem, but that would be an unbearable level of noise if you tried to listen to it. Bah, it was just silly nit-picking, forget it!
- kragen 17y agoI didn't bring up audio; I just used dB. dB are a perfectly good unit to measure a signal-to-noise ratio for any continuous scalar signal: audio, radio, light, voltage on a wire, whatever. I was thinking of the analogy to radio in particular, where you can use spread-spectrum techniques to get useful data out of SNRs much worse than -10dB. It certainly is the case that the article author thought Facebook contained an unbearable amount of noise, and I don't.