dewster

6 ms·

1.
by dewster 1y ago
That's me actually! :-)
2.
by dewster 1y ago
AFAIK Carolina only uses the D-Lev pitch circle for coming in on pitch, not for active playing. That's pretty typical for players who have learned on an analog Theremin, where they have necessarily been guided only by fingering techni
3.
by dewster 1y ago
There are 50 or so kits spread out all over the world, some in the hands of the world's best Thereminists, which has been quite gratifying. But the project has been in a bit of a hiatus while I do more R&D, and the current tariff
4.
by dewster 1y ago
The D-Lev has a fairly extensive MIDI implementation, and you can control any CC with the volume hand (7 or 14 bits), so perhaps something like this would be possible if the synth it's driving is flexible enough. Manual: https:/&
5.
by dewster 1y ago
Here's Carolina playing the D-Lev: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vjJ2SG5cVA She's a super sweet person, and a consummate musician!
6.
by dewster 1y ago
The "digital one" Carolina refers to is my open source D-Lev design: https://d-lev.com/
7.
by dewster 6y ago
The problem with trivial ops like stack manipulations is that they don't really do anything useful, but they can take as long as multiply in the pipeline. Stack machines made more sense when memory was limited (small opcodes) and there
8.
by dewster 6y ago
A stack processor will always be less efficient than a two or three operand register-based processor. This is because all of the the registers can be used directly without any stack manipulations to access them, and the two or three operan
9.
by dewster 7y ago
"...and given each chip has 144 entire computers on it..." Entire computers? What decade is it again?
10.
by dewster 7y ago
I meant that he's a genius at the whole stack machine / language shaman thing. 32 bits are unnecessary?!? I suppose a 18 bit machine would run a lot "faster" than a 32 bit machine given certain data sets and loads, but
11.
by dewster 7y ago
Multi-core F18A technology, each of which is a simple 18 bit processor. IMO, anything less than 32 bits (with internal 33 x 33 = 65 bit multiply) falls into the primitive category abyss. Moore is an incredible salesman, I'll give him
12.
by dewster 7y ago
I briefly skimmed [1] and their more sophisticated translation to a register VM yielded a 25% increase in code size, and not the 45% you stated? Regardless, VM to VM really isn't my point. I still don't get the positives of why t
13.
by dewster 7y ago
The Forth success stories tend to be really, really ancient, and therefore almost irrelevant. Much like Chuck's arguments for the merits of stack languages / machines. Processor pipelines have to be at least deep enough to do a
14.
by dewster 7y ago
I would argue that a language targeting bare metal type applications should at least be minimally aware of that underlying hardware. A single stack "virtual machine" type language is generally a terrible fit for the 2 and 3 opera
15.
by dewster 7y ago
If you actually look at the way Forth works you'll see that every stack manipulation wastes code space and real-time. Since there is only one data stack there are a lot of stack manipulations going on. Forth programmers are aware of
16.
by dewster 9y ago
Developing on the target is just so last century. Now that programmers have developed the IDE you'll have to pull them from their cold dead hands.
17.
by dewster 9y ago
Both. And under the hood, Forth implements a virtual stack machine on top of a non-stack machine, which is inefficient. I guess I'm just trying to counter all the mythos and happy talk surrounding Forth and stack processing in general
18.
by dewster 9y ago
It's called factoring with subroutines, and Forth hasn't cornered the market on anything by calling them words.
19.
by dewster 9y ago
I don't think the stack in a traditional languages is the same as stacks in stack machines and languages. It's a lump of memory that gets allocated to a thread for stuff, and the allocation is indeed done in LIFO fashion, but I b
20.
by dewster 9y ago
Pure stack machines don't have local variables. They have at most two stacks and that's it.
21.
by dewster 9y ago
THE central problem with pure stack machines and stack languages: The programmer knows in their heart that moves, swaps, dupes, drops, etc. - any stack manipulation that doesn't involve a functional change to the data itself - is an in
22.
by dewster 10y ago
I agree. Not trying to be racist, but I find that British authors are quite often unnecessarily verbose, so I'm somewhat gun shy when picking up their books. One notable exception to this observation is Douglas Self, who writes thick,
23.
by dewster 10y ago
Again, I'm most likely an idiot, but I'm just not seeing it in any of the examples I've encountered. Not trying to be dense, I realize the onus is mostly on me here, and I really am interested in fundamentals. Just wonderin
24.
by dewster 10y ago
Your initial words were "Here is how you can use the lambda calculus to compute factorials in non-geological time" which led me to believe you were claiming LC was a very (the most?) efficient route to factorial calculation. Whic
25.
by dewster 10y ago
If we were playing the Hot and Cold game you would be getting colder. Are you telling me that the most efficient means of generating factorials is via LC? That no other method can touch it in terms of real time?
26.
by dewster 10y ago
Thank you for expressing that better than I could ever do. Outside of JS sucking but being saved by extensibility, and academic interests, I've never heard a concrete reason why LC is important in a practical sense to most programmers
27.
by dewster 10y ago
OMG, that's insane (in a bad way). Stacks exploding, hours of optimization, all for a simple factorial (toy problem). Exciting I suppose for a few souls in academia who spend their lives writing papers about theoretical stuff (not th
28.
by dewster 10y ago
I'm probably showing my profound ignorance, but what has lambda calculus done for me lately? It seems to be an abstract formalism of some sort, but I've yet to see any real use of it, the examples are baby step type stuff with ob
29.
by dewster 10y ago
Altera Quartus has supported SV (SystemVerilog) quite well for some time now. I tend to work in 9.1sp2 as that was the last version of Quartus with integrated simulator (waaa!). Xilinx requires you to use their newer tooling in order to wr
30.
by dewster 10y ago
From the article: “Caches and virtual memory as they are currently implemented are some of the worst design decisions that have ever been made,” Sohmers boldly told a room of HPC-focused attendees at the Open Compute Summit this week. As a

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