Alan Kay: Shannon gave us a way of dealing with noisy channels [video]
The following explanation is taken from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49622607:Alan Kay performs an improvisational avant garde layered audio feedback loop about Claude Shannon, live online during Kristen Nygaard's 100-year birthday celebration.Alan was scheduled to talk about how encountering Simula sparked his early thoughts about objects. During setup, somebody had the live stream playing out loud near an open Zoom mic, so his own voice kept arriving back in his ears about 21 seconds late, over and over.What he said was not random: "Shannon gave us a way of dealing with noisy channels." And: "I think about that almost every day. I realize what the fuck is going on and it's just so amazing." Shannon's noisy channel coding theorem is the math for exactly the kind of channel that was garbling him as he praised it.Alan joked it was "being rerouted to Mars and back." At the speed of light, a 21 second round trip is about 3 million km one way -- eight trips to the Moon and back, not even a twentieth of the way to Mars at closest approach.This is an accidental Zoom performance of Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting in a Room" (1969), where Lucier re-recorded his own voice in a room until only the room's resonance remained. Here what remains is the network: delay, compression, dropouts.Bonus noise: YouTube's auto-transcript bleeps Alan's enthusiasm into [ __ ]. So the full chain is: Alan's voice, Zoom, stream, room, Zoom again times three, my screen recording, YouTube's speech recognizer, a censored transcript.The fix: "Just turn off the audio at your end on Zoom."This is an accidental Zoom performance of Alvin Lucier's "I Am Sitting in a Room" (1969), where Lucier re-recorded his own voice in a room until only the room's resonance remained. Here what remains is the network: delay, compression, dropouts.Bonus noise: YouTube's auto-transcript bleeps Alan's enthusiasm into [ __ ]. So the full chain is: Alan's voice, Zoom, stream, room, Zoom again times three, my screen recording, YouTube's speech recognizer, a censored transcript.The fix: "Just turn off the audio at your end on Zoom."I Am Sitting in a Room: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Sitting_in_a_RoomAlvin Lucier on "I am sitting in a room": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9XJWBZBzq4
84 points by behoove - 14 comments
Calculating the limit is easy with Shannon's theorem. Approaching it in practice is hard.
Many modern modulations already operate basically on Shannon's limit for a given band/SNR. Well, on raw data, the encoding almost always use some kind of error correction so the decoded bitrate is few % lower than the wire one
Shannon's theory is foundational to modern communication systems. You can expect to have WiFi remain functional even as other devices use the same medium. Up to a point, the Shannon limit in other words.
Hopefully Don won't mind!
<https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22shallowly+interesting%22>
* hard to read this characterization and see it as anything other than the product of unvarnished, I-want-to-believe (that emperor is wearing magnificent robes) hero worship
Even then, we'd also have an OOP language to be really really fast. Otherwise people will just use C.
Java itself is too verbose and has a rather boring OOP model.
Interestingly, the OO model that Wirth and Gutknecht implemented in the Oberon system corresponds quite well to the message-based approach.
Java implemented the Simula 67 object model according to a 2017 Gosling lecture (as did early C++ and Smalltalk-80 to a significant degree).
https://crystal-lang.org/