[HN Gopher] Show HN: I used AI to recreate a $4000 piece of audi...
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Show HN: I used AI to recreate a $4000 piece of audio hardware as a
plugin
Hi Hacker News, This is definitely out of my comfort zone. I've
never programmed DSP before. But I was able to use Claude code and
have it help me build this using CMajor. I just wanted to show you
guys because I'm super proud of it. It's a 100% faithful recreation
based off of the schematics, patents, and ROMs that were found
online. So please watch the video and tell me what you think
https://youtu.be/auOlZXI1VxA The reason why I think this is
relevant is because I've been a programmer for 25 years and AI
scares the shit out of me. I'm not a programmer anymore. I'm
something else now. I don't know what it is but it's multi-
disciplinary, and it doesn't involve writing code myself--for
better or worse! Thanks!
Author : johnwheeler
Score : 126 points
Date : 2026-01-03 01:08 UTC (1 days ago)
| gus_massa wrote:
| Did you recreate the UI only or also the internal circuits? Does
| it produce a similar distorsion?
| johnwheeler wrote:
| I created the UI and the internal circuits but it's a hundred
| percent DSP. The SST206 is a recreation of the SST282 (in DSP)
| and he expanded the bandwidth from 7 kHz to 22 kHz, so it
| doesn't produce distortion but it can get dark like the
| original. But yeah so the SST206 it's not grungy like the
| original so it lacks some of the character. It makes up for it
| in delay time.
| tomhow wrote:
| [under-the-rug stub]
|
| [see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45988611 for
| explanation]
| ndgold wrote:
| Instant ROI
| RiverStone wrote:
| Nicely done!!
| johnwheeler wrote:
| Thank you!
| BenjaminHas wrote:
| This is really impressive! I love how you combined AI
| assistance with schematics, patents, and ROMs to recreate it.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| Thank you so much. Yeah it's really cool. I also bought
| myself a copy of Max MSP and I'm recreating it visually so I
| can tweak all the parameters and really understand what's
| going on because the AI did all of the theory for me but I
| have all the numbers. When you tweak the numbers it makes it
| sound totally different. So yeah I'm excited. This is what I
| want to do with my life. I want to build electronic music
| gear. I'm not saying AI is not going to be able to do that
| one day but I just can't do web programming anymore. I don't
| know. I've been doing it too long and I just don't like it
| anymore.
| chunkmonke99 wrote:
| Wait you used Claude Code to recreate patents and
| schematics? Are the schematics for this easily available
| somewhere? Was Claude just able to one-shot this?
| johnwheeler wrote:
| I use Claude more as a learning tool in this context.
| It's kind of funny actually got the idea because I heard
| that in China they're basically replacing teachers with
| AI, where we're trying to get AI out of our school
| systems in the United States. So I went into it with that
| mindset instead of trying to have Claude do the whole
| thing to teach me how to do it so I understand it and I'm
| still learning, trying to recreate things with Max so I
| can have a lot more control and really play with it. I'm
| learning that reverb creation is a real craft.
|
| It's not able to one-shot it yet but I'm sure that's
| coming this year sometime. I did the UI a hundred percent
| by myself and I went in there and tweaked it and tried to
| rebuild it and just try to understand how reverb works
| etc. I also did a lot of the software licensing just
| because I have experience with that.
| deaux wrote:
| 18 days late, but we needed one of those here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46290617
| atentaten wrote:
| Nice! Which DAW are you using in the video?
| bjelkeman-again wrote:
| Apple Logic
| 6581 wrote:
| Looks like Logic Pro.
| drcongo wrote:
| Cmajor, for anyone wondering: https://github.com/cmajor-
| lang/cmajor
| reactordev wrote:
| All I've ever known was JUCE. This looks nice!
|
| *edit* well duh, it's the same guy!
| johnwheeler wrote:
| It's incredible
| LatencyKills wrote:
| This is fantastic. I'm currently building a combustion engine
| simulator doing exactly what you did. In fact, I found a number
| of research papers, had Claude implement the included algorithms,
| and then incorporated them into the project.
|
| What I have now is similar to
| https://youtu.be/nXrEX6j-Mws?si=XdPA48jymWcapQ-8 but I haven't
| implemented a cohesive UI yet.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| Right on that's awesome! I think I'm doing more what you did
| vs. the other way around. Looks like you're pretty established.
| How long did it take to build your YouTube to what it is?
| What's that process been like?
| franky47 wrote:
| I used to do that exact job 10 years ago (without AI, obviously).
| I figure that career would be very different now.
|
| There was something exciting about sleuthing out how those old
| machines worked: we used a black box approach, sending in test
| samples, recording the output, and comparing against the digital
| algorithm's output. Trial and error, slowly building a sense of
| what sort of filter or harmonics could bend a waveform one way or
| another.
|
| I feel like some of this is going to be lost to prompting, the
| same way hand-tool woodworking has been lost to power tools.
| rmnclmnt wrote:
| I wonder if we could then have released the *stressor in a few
| months then...
| franky47 wrote:
| I'd love to see someone try.
|
| Though using AI to build the devtools we used for signal
| analysis would have been helpful.
| mycall wrote:
| It will be the future for sure, software as a tool for
| everyone.
|
| While there is something lost in prompting, people will always
| seek out first-principles so they can understand what they are
| commanding and controlling, especially as old machines become
| new machines with new capabilities not even imaginable before
| due to the old software complexity wall.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| It's exactly as you say: software as a tool for everyone and
| it's hard for programmers like me to accept that because I've
| spent so much time, read so many books, and work so hard
| perfecting my craft.
|
| But smart programmers will realize the world doesn't care
| about any of that at all.
| mycall wrote:
| We will remain to be programmers but at a higher
| abstraction where code is just the glue to our means and
| imagination.
| AstroBen wrote:
| As a hobby I suppose. There's a very real chance there
| won't be enough paid work available for that
| Bombthecat wrote:
| Exactly! There isn't enough woodworking jobs for
| thousands of thousands of workers. Of course you have
| people handcrafting things and people demanding
| handcrafted things. Programming will be the same.
|
| Way way way less developers.
| moregrist wrote:
| This doesn't seem right to me. Carpentry still seems like
| a pretty solid line of work with a lot of jobs. I know at
| least one guy who moved from EE work to contracting
| because he could make a lot more money that way.
|
| Given, a lot of it is framing houses and remodeling. And
| there are fewer jobs in hardwood furniture these days.
| But a lot of that is because US furniture manufacturing
| was moved to China 20 years ago, not because of power
| tools.
|
| If anything, the advent of power tools in the 40s/50s
| made single family homes more affordable and increased
| construction demand.
| airspresso wrote:
| You're ignoring Jevons paradox. Everyone, both people and
| companies, will be making exponentially more software
| with these tools. Software that both needs to get
| created, debugged and updated to realize the intention of
| it. That's what our time will be spent on as programmers.
| AstroBen wrote:
| Do you have any evidence that the demand for developers
| is largely price elastic?
|
| People are _already_ struggling to find work from
| oversupply of talent and not enough demand
| ceva wrote:
| I think you will like this talk
| https://youtu.be/XM_q5T7wTpQ?si=Nyb4lZEZjsjCCGBg
| dubeye wrote:
| awesome, in 2025 I made a few apps for my small business that I
| have spent hours trawling the web looking for, and I have little
| coding skills.
|
| Sometimes it feels like I'm living in a different world, reading
| the scepticism on here about AI.
|
| I'm sure there enterprise cases where it doesn't make sense, but
| for the your everyday business owner it's amazing what can be
| done.
|
| maybe it's a failure of imagination but I can't imagine a world
| where this doesn't impact enterprise in short order
| hatefulheart wrote:
| With all due respect you _are_ living in a different world. Not
| in a bad way, it's just you haven't experienced what
| maintenance on a large complicated code base is like.
| kaffekaka wrote:
| Different worlds yes, but they both exist.
| hatefulheart wrote:
| Sure, where one is ignorant of the other. That's not a pro.
| kaffekaka wrote:
| Small business owners not being aware of maintenance hell
| in large org codebases, yes, is that a problem?
|
| I work for a large org and maintenance hell is my job, so
| I see both sides I think.
| hatefulheart wrote:
| I'm a small business owner and solo developer on that
| business. Let's just say I'd rather know the costs of my
| choices upfront. I'm sure there is not one small business
| owner in tech who would turn their nose up at that.
| dubeye wrote:
| Good points. Works both ways though, you are splitting
| your time between two worlds, and don't have a fully
| clear view on the costs of bad choices on a small
| business
|
| to know this you need to know what processes these
| businesses have been using for the past decade to run
| real full time business with full time staff. for
| example, you don't know just how bad the prior systems
| were, that the self built systems replaced.
|
| with all due respect you don't have all the info to make
| the calculation on my world. just as I don't have it for
| yours.
|
| the same tool that helped me build our systems, is not
| going to be the same tool that helps you maintain your
| large code base. But my point is, that I'm on the front
| line of change, and my guess is it's not going to be
| limited to my size of business. I don't know what your
| tool will look like, but I'd bet it's coming
| kaffekaka wrote:
| Fair enough, that is a good point.
| cyberge99 wrote:
| A pro is someone who makes money doing their profession.
| hatefulheart wrote:
| Pro as in pros and cons, not as in professional.
| HPsquared wrote:
| I think there will be a transition period.
| mirsadm wrote:
| The worst part of the new wave of vibe coders is their
| confidence.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| No you're absolutely right. One of the things I'm starting to
| see and I wrote another Hacker News post about this is that
| more people are starting to come out talking about all the
| mistakes AI is making even as it gets better. Then You've got
| people like Karpathy talking about how drastic the landscape is
| shifting
|
| I've been doing this for 25 years and I can tell you that the
| AI is a better coder than me, but I know how to use it. I
| reviewed the code that it puts out and it's better. I'm
| assuming the developers that are having a hard time with it are
| just not as experienced with it.
|
| If you think your job is going to stay programmer, I just don't
| see it. I think you need to start providing value and using
| coding as just a means to do that, more so than coding being
| valuable in itself. It's just not as valuable anymore.
| pengaru wrote:
| > you're absolutely right.
| Blackthorn wrote:
| How can you say it's a 100% faithful recreation if you've never
| programmed DSP before?
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Dude it's AI just trust him
| bigfishrunning wrote:
| He included "100% faithful" in the prompt!
| steveBK123 wrote:
| "You are an elite DSP programmer who never makes
| mistakes.."
| glimshe wrote:
| Perhaps a subjective evaluation based on how it sounds.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| It's bold to call it 100% faithful without some rigorous test
| harness though, isn't it?
| utopiah wrote:
| Indeed, same questions few days ago when somebody shared a
| "generated" NES emulator. We have to make this answered when
| sharing otherwise we can't compare.
| le-mark wrote:
| At some point the llm ingested a few open source NES
| emulators and many articles on their architecture. So i
| question the llm creativity involved with these types
| examples. Probably also for dsps.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Right, the amount of hallucinated response data I see at
| work using any of these leading models is pretty
| staggering. So anytime I see one of these "AI created a
| 100% faithful ___" type posts that does not have detailed
| testing information, I laugh. Without that, this is v0 and
| only about 5% of the effort.
| utopiah wrote:
| > i question the llm creativity involved with these types
| examples.
|
| Indeed but to be fair I'm not sure anybody claimed much
| "creativity" only that it worked... but that itself is
| still problematic. What does it mean to claim it even
| manage to implement an alternative if we don't have an easy
| way to verify?
| Xmd5a wrote:
| I'm not claiming a 100% faithful physical recreation in the
| strict scientific sense.
|
| If you look at my other comment in this thread, my project is
| about designing proprioceptive touch sensors (robot skin)
| using a soft-body simulator largely built with the help of an
| AI. At this stage, absolute physical accuracy isn't really
| the point. By design, the system already includes a neural
| model in the loop (via EIT), so the notion of "accuracy" is
| ultimately evaluated through that learned representation
| rather than against raw physical equations alone.
|
| What I need instead is a model that is faithful to my
| constraints: very cheap, easily accessible materials, with
| properties that are usually considered undesirable for
| sensing: instability, high hysteresis, low gauge factor. My
| bet is that these constraints can be compensated for by a
| more circular system design, where the geometry of the sensor
| is optimized to work with them.
|
| Bridging the gap to reality is intentionally simple: 3D-print
| whatever geometry the simulator converges to, run the same
| strain/stress tests on the physical samples, and use that
| data to fine-tune the sensor model.
|
| Since everything is ultimately interpreted through a neural
| network, some physical imprecision upstream may actually be
| acceptable, or even beneficial, if it makes the eventual
| transfer and fine-tuning on real-world data easier.
| utopiah wrote:
| Well I'm glad you find new ways to progress on whatever you
| find interesting.
|
| This honestly though does not help me to estimate if what
| you claim to be is what it is. I'm not necessarily the
| audience for either project but my point remains :
|
| - when somebody claims to recreate something, regardless of
| why and how, it helps to understand how close they actually
| got.
|
| It's not negative criticism by the way. I'm not implying
| you did not faithfully enough recreate the DSP (or the
| other person the NES). I'm only saying that for outlookers,
| people like me who could be potentially interested, who do
| NOT have a good understanding of the process nor the
| initial object recreated, it is impossible to evaluate.
| Xmd5a wrote:
| Oh. just to be clear first, I'm not the OP. Sorry for the
| confusion.
|
| I do understand your point, and I think it's a fair one:
| when someone claims to "recreate" something, it really
| helps readers to know how close the result is to the
| original, especially for people who don't already
| understand the domain.
|
| I was mostly reacting to the idea that faithfulness
| always has to be the primary axis of evaluation. In
| practice, only a subset of users actually care about 100%
| fidelity. For example with DSP plugins or NES emulators,
| many people ultimately judge them by how they sound or
| feel, especially when the original artifact is aesthetic
| in nature.
|
| My own case is a bit different, but related. Even though
| I'm working on a sensor, having a perfectly accurate
| physical model of the material is secondary to my actual
| goal. What I'm trying to produce is an end result
| composed of a printable geometry, a neural model to
| interpret it, and calibration procedures. The physics
| simulator is merely a tool, not a claim.
|
| In fact, if I want the design to transfer well from
| simulation to reality, it probably makes more sense to
| intentionally train the model across multiple variations
| of the physics rather than betting everything on a single
| "accurate" simulator. That way, when confronted with the
| real world, adaptation becomes easier rather than harder.
|
| So I fully agree that clarity about "how close" matters
| when that's the claim. I'm just suggesting that in some
| projects, closeness to the original isn't always the most
| informative metric.
|
| One reason I find my case illuminating is that it makes
| the "what metric are we optimizing?" question very
| explicit.
|
| Sure, I can report proxy metrics (e.g. prediction error
| between simulated vs measured deformation fields, contact
| localization error, force/pressure estimation error,
| sensitivity/resolution, robustness across
| hysteresis/creep and repeated cycles). Those are useful
| for debugging.
|
| But the real metric is functional: can this cheap,
| printable sensor + model enable dexterous manipulation
| without vision - tasks where humans rely heavily on
| touch/proprioception, like closing a zipper or handling
| thin, finicky objects - without needing $500/sq-inch
| "microscope-like" tactile sensors (GelSight being the
| canonical example)?
|
| If it gets anywhere close to that capability with
| commodity materials, then the project is a success, even
| if no single simulator configuration is "the" ground
| truth.
|
| What could OP's next move be? Designing and building
| their own circuit. Likewise, someone who built a NES
| emulator might eventually try designing their own
| console. It doesn't feel that far-fetched.
| utopiah wrote:
| Ah that makes more sense, I couldn't make the connection!
|
| So on "So I fully agree that clarity about "how close"
| matters when that's the claim. I'm just suggesting that
| in some projects, closeness to the original isn't always
| the most informative metric." reminds me of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
|
| That being said as OP titled " I used AI to recreate X"
| then I expect I would still argue that the audience has
| now expectation that whatever OP created, regardless of
| why and how, should be relatively close to X. If people
| are expert on X then they can probably figure out quite
| quickly if it is for them "close enough" but for others
| it's very hard.
| utopiah wrote:
| Ah that makes more sense, I couldn't make the connection!
|
| So on "So I fully agree that clarity about "how close"
| matters when that's the claim. I'm just suggesting that
| in some projects, closeness to the original isn't always
| the most informative metric." reminds me of
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
|
| That being said as OP titled " I used AI to recreate X"
| then I would still argue that the audience has now
| expectation that whatever OP created, regardless of why
| and how, should be relatively close to X. If people are
| expert on X then they can probably figure out quite
| quickly if it is for them "close enough" but for others
| it's very hard.
| baq wrote:
| Maybe the OP has the hardware and can compare the sound both
| subjectively and objectively? Does it have to be 100% exact
| copy to be called the same? (Individual electronic components
| are never the same btw)
| Blackthorn wrote:
| The OP didn't clarify. But if there's a claim of 100%
| faithful recreation, I'd expect something to back it up, like
| time- and frequency-domain comparisons of input and output
| with different test signals. Or at least _something_. But
| there isn 't anything.
|
| The video claims: "It utilizes the actual DSP characteristics
| of the original to bring that specific sound back to life."
| The author admits they have never programmed DSP. So how are
| they verifying this claim?
| johnwheeler wrote:
| Well it's a new project so give it some time. I feel
| confident that I'm not lying so I can make that claim.
|
| Also its target market is not a technical crowd but people
| who make music. I'm optimizing more for what they want to
| see (which are sound demos) rather than what a programmer
| would want to see.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| That might make it 100% faithful for OPs use cases, but not
| necessarily anyone else's.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| I had the hardware for both units and use them extensively so
| 100% familiar with how they sound.
|
| And I'm not doing it based off of my ears. I know the
| algorithm, have the exact coefficients, and there was no
| guesswork except for the potentiometer curves and parts of the
| room algorithm that I'm still working out, which is a
| completely separate component of the reverb.
|
| But when I put it up for sale, I'll make sure to go into detail
| about all that so people who buy it know what they're getting.
| vunderba wrote:
| Can you sell it, or would you have to do some renaming in
| order to get around trademark/etc ?
|
| Consider reaching out to Audiority - I know they have some
| virtual recreations of Space Station hardware.
|
| https://www.audiority.com/shop/space-station-um282
| johnwheeler wrote:
| Luckily the trademark is public domain!
| psobot wrote:
| Are the ROMs, though? (Not trying to be combative; I've
| had to deal with this a lot when developing emulation-
| based plugins.)
| wrl wrote:
| Are you also going to go into detail about the use of AI to
| generate the code?
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Sell it?
| johnwheeler wrote:
| Wat?
| gbraad wrote:
| Standard AI response. Similar to " production-ready",
| "according to industry standards" or "common practices" to
| justify and action or indicating it is done, without even
| compiling or running code, let alone understand the output. An
| AI can't hear, and even worse, relate this. Ask it to create a
| diode ladder filter, and it will boost it created a "physically
| correct analog representation" while output ting clean and pure
| signals...
| Archit3ch wrote:
| For context, I'm working on a proper SPICE component-level
| Diode Ladder.
|
| I tried this for laughs with Gemini 3 Pro. It spit out the
| same ZDF implementation that is on countless GitHub repos,
| originating from the 2nd Pirkle FX book (2019).
| KellyCriterion wrote:
| Great achievement!
|
| Regarding your own titleing: you are now some type of "platform
| operator/manager" of this agents :-))
| hebejebelus wrote:
| I was hoping that the video was a walkthrough of your process -
| do you think you might share that at some point?
|
| > I'm not a programmer anymore. I'm something else now. I don't
| know what it is but it's multi-disciplinary, and it doesn't
| involve writing code myself--for better or worse!
|
| Yes, I agree. I think the role of software developer is going to
| evolve into much more of an administrative, managerial role,
| dealing more with working with whatever organisation you're in
| than actually typing code. Honestly I think it probably was
| always heading in this direction but it's definitely quite a step
| change. Wrote about it a little incoherently on my blog just this
| morning: https://redfloatplane.lol/blog/11-2025-the-year-i-didnt-
| writ...
| askonomm wrote:
| As someone who works at a place where we do a lot of code
| analysis and also research AI's effect on code quality, if you
| do not even so much as look at your code anymore, I do not
| believe you are creating maintainable, quality software. Maybe
| you don't need to, or care to, but it's definitely not what's
| sustainable in long-term product companies.
|
| AI is a force multiplier - it makes bad worse, it _can_ make
| good better. You need even more engineering disciplines than
| before to make sure it's the latter and not the former. Even
| with chaining code quality MCP's and a whole bunch of
| instructions in AGENTS.md, there's often a need to intervene
| and course adjust, because AI can either ignore AGENTS.md, or
| because whatever can pass code quality checks does not always
| mean the architecture is something that's solid.
|
| That being said, I do agree our job is changing from merely
| writing code, to more of a managerial title, like you've said.
| But, there's a new limit - your ability to review the output,
| and you most definitely should review the output if you care
| about long-term sustainable, quality software.
| hebejebelus wrote:
| Yes, I didn't do a great job of managing my language in that
| post (I blame flu-brain). In the case where _someone_ is
| going to be reading the code I output, I do review it and act
| more as the pilot-not-flying rather than as a passenger. For
| personal code (as opposed to code for a client), which is the
| majority of stuff that I've written since Opus 4.5 released,
| that's not been the case.
|
| I'll update the post to reflect the reality, thanks for
| calling it out.
|
| I completely agree with your comment. I think the ability to
| review code, architecture, abstractions matters more than the
| actual writing of the code - in fact this has really always
| been the case, it's just clearer now that everyone has a
| lackey to do the typing for them.
| agentifysh wrote:
| 6 months ago I agreed with your statement
|
| but AI being solely a force multiplier is not accurate, it is
| a intelligence multiplier. There are significantly better
| ways now to apply skills and taste with less worry about
| technical debt. AI coding agents have gotten to the point
| that it virtually removes ALL effort barrierrs even paying
| off technical debt.
|
| While it is still important to pay attention to the direction
| your code is being generated, the old fears and caution we
| attributed to previous iteration of AI codegen is largely
| being eroded and this trend will continue to the point where
| our "specialty" will no longer matter.
|
| I'm already seeing small businesses that laid off their teams
| and the business owner is generating code themselves. The
| ability to defend the thinning moat of not only software but
| virtually all white collar jobs is getting tougher.
| lifetimerubyist wrote:
| Instead of becoming a people manager you're just a bot manager.
| Same roles, different underlings.
| utopiah wrote:
| I'm not in the domain, even though I did dabble with DAW and
| tinker with a PGB-1 and its open source firmware, but how far
| would you say CMajor helped? I feel like solely picking the right
| tool, being framework, paradigm, etc can make or break a project.
|
| Consequently here for me to better understand how special this is
| I'd appreciate how (especially since I don't see a link to code
| itself) how does one go to e.g.
| https://cmajor.dev/docs/GettingStarted#creating-your-first-p...
| to a working DSP.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| On your "Scares the shit out of me" comment.
|
| Use AI like a CNC machinist uses a mill. You're still in the
| loop, but break it into manageable "passes" with testing
| touchpoints. These touchpoints allow you to understand what's
| going on. Nothing wrong with letting AI oneshot something, but
| it's more fun and less ennui to jump in and look around and
| exercise some control here and there. And, on larger systems,
| this is basically required. (for now, perhaps).
|
| This is how I do it now: https://jodavaho.io/posts/ai-
| useage-2025.html
| vardalab wrote:
| Exactly this! I am a retired EE just messing around with AI in
| my homelab datacenter and that has been my approach as well.
| Amazing force multiplier, I can finally create more or less
| what I want with sw based on first principles and basic systems
| engineering approaches by just guiding AI. I have used golang
| and ansible and terraform and typescript, languages I never had
| time to learn and now I can create a working tools/solutions to
| whatever is my need at the moment. Other day my STT
| subscription app became too laggy so I asked Claude to spin up
| an endpoint on one of my GPU boxes, create a proxy server,
| intercept transcript cleanup calls and create traces in
| langfuse, setup a prompt eval framework, etc. We make a plan,
| iterate on it, I usually get Codex or Gemini in on the call as
| well and in a couple of hours I have a good enough solutions
| for my personal needs. This would have been probably a weekend
| or more project before. Skepticism here does remind me a bit of
| when I learned how to use handtools for woodworking. Ultimately
| it was nice to be able to make mortises by hand with chisel but
| damn if using festool dominoes is not that much more
| productive.
| Xmd5a wrote:
| Very nice work. I'm curious: what kinds of projects are you guys
| currently working on that genuinely push you out of your comfort
| zone?
|
| I had a small epiphany a couple of weeks ago while thinking about
| robot skin design: using conductive 3D-printed structures whose
| electrical properties change under strain, combined with
| electrical impulses, a handful of electrodes, a machine-learning
| model to interpret the measurements, and computational design to
| optimize the printed geometry.
|
| While digging into the literature, I realized that what I was
| trying to do already has a name: proprioception via electrical
| impedance tomography. It turns out the field is very active right
| now.
|
| https://www.cam.ac.uk/stories/robotic-skin
|
| That realization led me to build a Bergstrom-Boyce nonlinear
| viscoelastic parallel rheological simulator using Taichi. This is
| far outside my comfort zone. I'm just a regular programmer with
| no formal background in physics (apart from some past exposure to
| Newton-Raphson).
|
| Interestingly, my main contribution hasn't been the math. It's
| been providing basic, common-sense guidance to my LLM. For
| example, I had to explicitly tell it which parameters were fixed
| by experimental data and which ones were meant to be inferred. In
| another case, the agent assumed that all the red curves in the
| paper I'm working with referred to the same sample, when they
| actually correspond to different conducting NinjaFlex specimens
| under strain.
|
| Correcting those kinds of assumptions, rather than fixing
| equations, was what allowed me to reproduce the results I was
| seeking. I now have an analytical, physics-grounded model that
| fits the published data. Mullins effect: modeled. Next up: creep.
|
| We'll see how far this goes. I'll probably never produce anything
| publishable, patentable, or industrial-grade. But I might end up
| building a very cheap (and hopefully not that inaccurate),
| printable proprioceptive sensor, with a structure optimized so it
| can be interpreted by much smaller neural networks than those
| used in the Cambridge paper.
|
| If that works, the gesture will have been worth it.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| I would put more effort into algotrading to make $$$ for
| yourself
| newyankee wrote:
| A similar approach might actually help build cheap, and decent
| hearing aids too
| gbraad wrote:
| Isn't that like the Ursa Major Stargate 323 Reverb? Greybox audio
| released code for this about a year ago:
| https://github.com/greyboxaudio/SG-323
| pera wrote:
| Thanks for mentioning this project, I have been looking for a
| good reverb plugin for Linux for a while now and this sounds
| great.
| gbraad wrote:
| There might be a plugin based on freeverb, which is also a
| good sounding one. I ohave it as a logue unit, so can't
| recommend one immediately. At least I know greybox based on
| actual device comparison, as he owns one and has been doing
| this for 5 years sans AI.
| agentifysh wrote:
| We are all glorified QA testers with software architect title
| now. Sure we set the structure of what we want but everything
| else the AI does and most of our time is now spent testing and
| complaining to the AI.
|
| Pretty soon AI will do the QA portion as well. It will generate
| any piece of software, even games for a cool $200/month from a
| vendor of choice: Microsoft (OpenAI) or Google
|
| Companies will stop paying for SaaS or complex ERP software, they
| will just generate their own that only the AI knows how to
| maintain, run, and add features.
|
| It's ironic that software developers are the most enthusiastic
| about automating their jobs out of existence. No union, no laws
| that interfere with free market forces.
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