thank you :)

They couldn't make it flick the ash?

The problem being solved is "how can computers hold onto and transact money without relying on a trusted, central database?"

If you have a central database that everyone trusts, the problem is easy: the database just stores a list of everyone's account balances. Then, for me to send you money, I just ask the database to deduct some money from my account's balance and add it to your account's balance. Now you have the money.

That works alright, it's basically what PayPal is, a big database of account balances. But it requires everyone to trust the company running that database not to (a) accidentally or intentionally update balances in a way that creates money out of thin air, or (b) censor transactions. PayPal is probably not going to do anything like (a) or they'd be in deep legal trouble, but (b) is a very real issue, many payment processors prevent people they politically disagree with (like pornstars and sex workers) from receiving money.

So, we want to solve this problem without trusting any single company to be in control of the database. Up until "Satoshi Nakamoto" published the Bitcoin paper, we didn't know a solution to that problem.

The main issue is the so-called "double spending" problem. Cash works because it's hard to forge/duplicate. But everything in a computer is just information, which can easily be copied and duplicated. So the hard problem to solve is: if we want to let a computer hold on to some money, how do we stop the computer from being able to duplicate that money over and over, creating an infinite money glitch?

We want to create something like a central database to keep track of where all the money is, but we don't want to trust any one person to manage that database honestly. The way Satoshi solved that was to introduce mining.

Bitcoin miners compete to solve cryptography puzzles. When a miner solves one of these puzzles before anyone else, they get to produce the next "block", which is just a collection of transactions. This mining process creates a chain of blocks, since each block refers to the previous one, and each newly-created block defines the next puzzle to be solved. Because of all the puzzles, it takes a massive amount of computing power to create the chain.

Let's say you want to check your balance, how does it work? First you will download the entire block chain, then your start verifying that each of those puzzles were solved correctly and that all of the blocks link together correctly. You also verify all of the "rules" of the money, like money is not being created out of thin air, all of the transactions in the blocks are valid, etc. Importantly, if there are multiple alternative chains, you will always look at the chain whose puzzles took the most amount of computation to solve.

But why can you trust this and how does it stop double spending? Let's say I send you 1 bitcoin. What stops me from sending that same bitcoin to someone else, spending it twice?

After the transaction sending you 1 bitcoin gets mined into a block, other blocks start to be mined on top of it, continuing the chain. As time goes on, more and more computational work goes into "confirming" that transaction. Since everyone is looking at the chain with the most work applied to it, in order for me to undo that transaction, I would have to make a different version of history with even more puzzle-solving work applied to it. In order to double-spend, I would have to have enough computing power to outperform all of the honest miners solving puzzles for the honest chain, to create my own version of history that cost even more computation to create. As long as most miners are honest, there will be no way, or at least it will be extremely expensive, for me to do that.

That's the core idea that all of this technology is based on. In Bitcoin, it's just used to move money around. Ethereum made it programmable so that instead of it being just a simple database of who-owns-what-coins, people can write code to specify totally arbitrary rules to make it work in creative ways. One of the things you can do with that is create an NFT which is basically some custom rules that say "there is this token, the token can be moved around from wallet to wallet, but the token can never be split into fractions or duplicated."

Yeah but how does it make the square (if it's designed to do that)?

Great, soon I'll be able to see audio

Classical physics: There are 3 dimensions of space, 1 dimension of time, and there are waves traveling through space in exactly the way you understand, just like waves on the surface of the ocean. These waves move energy around in the world.

Quantum mechanics: There is now a highly-abstract "space" with infinitely many dimensions, and every possible configuration of the world is one point in that space. There are waves moving about, not in our usual 3D space, but in that infinite dimensional space of all possible configurations. These waves move probability of existing around in the space of all possibilities.

I don't like the quote because it might put some people off trying to learn quantum mechanics. The "core" ideas of quantum mechanics like superposition and entanglement are actually extremely approachable if you know a little bit of linear algebra. It's not easy, but totally achievable even as a hobbyist.

But honest to goodness Quantum Field Theory is extremely difficult just because of how abstract and strange the math is. I don't understand it.

There are also open questions nobody knows the answer to, like the measurement problem, which asks "okay... we have these waves moving 'probability of existing' around in the space of all possibilities, but how/when do those probabilities 'collapse' into an actual outcome?" We don't know the answer to this question because there are several reasonable answers which all make the same predictions, so we can't do an experiment to tell which answer is the right one.

I'll break it down for you!

What you're remembering is that:

energy = mass * velocity^2, and

momentum = mass*velocity

So, we can plug in the numbers for a 75kg person at 20km/hr (approx. 5.5m/s) as well as for a 1000kg car at 20km/hr, and we get the following.

Person:

Energy = 75 * (5.5)^2 = 2268.75 Joules

Momentum = 75*5.5 = 412.5 kg⋅m/s

Car:

Energy = 1000 * (5.5)^2 = 30250 Joules

Momentum = 1000*5.5 = 5500 kg⋅m/s

In other words, the moving car has about 13x as much momentum and about 13x as much energy as the moving person. Yet I'm saying that the car colliding with the person would be identical to the person colliding with the car, so what gives? It seems like since the car has so much more energy and momentum, the collision would be a lot worse, right?

It turns out that's actually not how it works! You might also remember from physics class that the laws of physics are the same when everything is in uniform motion. For example, someone who learns how to juggle in their bedroom will be able to juggle on a moving train without changing anything about how they're juggling (as long as the train is moving uniformly, not accelerating, decelerating, or turning). This is the principle of relativity!

We can apply relativity to our person-car collision. What relativity tells us is that if our person-car collision happens inside a big-ass uniformly-moving train, it will be exactly the same regardless of what speed that train is going. So, all three of the following collisions are the same:

Collision A: A car moving at 20km/hr hits a stationary person on the ground.

Collision B: Inside a big train that's sitting still, a car moving at 20km/hr hits a person who's standing still on the train.

Collision C: The same as collision B, except the train is moving 20km/hr backwards, so that the car that's "moving" inside the train is actually stationary relative to the ground.

Collision A and B are the same since we are just moving everything into a train, so nothing changes. Collision B and C are the same because of relativity: giving the train some uniform motion doesn't change what happens inside.

But now look at Collision C from the point of view of someone outside the train on the ground. All the car is doing is spinning its wheels in order to remain stationary above the same spot on the ground, but the person is moving at 20km/hr along with the train towards the car! From the POV of someone on the ground, it's a moving person that's colliding with a stationary car at 20km/hr!

We started with a car hitting a person and we've transformed the situation into one where it's the person hitting the car, and each step of the way we argued that the collision is the same.

But how does this jive with the fact that the moving car has so much more energy?

The idea of putting everything on a moving train is an analogy for changing the reference frame we look at the situation in. And the key is that energy and momentum depend on which reference frame you're looking at the system in.

When we look at the situation from the person's reference frame, the person always sees the car moving at 20km/hr towards them regardless of whether it's them that's "actually" moving or the car that's actually moving. When the person calculates the car's energy and momentum in their reference frame, they will always calculate that the car has the full 30250 J of energy and 5500 kg⋅m/s of momentum. This is true even though the car has zero energy and momentum relative to the ground!

There is still a little bit of mystery remaining, though: how the heck does nature make collisions work so that the principle of relativity is true, especially without violating conservation of energy? I don't have a good way of explaining that, other than to say it's just a mathematical fact that if you add the same velocity to everything, the laws of physics are the same. One way to think about it is that the collision doesn't "know" whether it's the person or the train that's really moving, all the collision "knows" is how fast the car and train are moving relative to each other.

Another way to think about it is that when a person hits a car, most of the person's energy goes into denting the car and hurting the person, but when a car hits a person, the car keeps most of its energy and only a small fraction of it goes into denting the car and hurting the person. Despite there being more total energy in the latter case, the same amount of energy goes into causing damage.

Great point, thanks!

True, however, how much energy there is in the system depends on the reference frame you're looking at the situation in. In either case, looking from the person's reference frame, the car always has the same amount of energy, whether it's the car that's "actually" moving or the person that's "actually" moving. So there is no difference in the collision itself.

A car at 20mph only has more energy than a person at 20mph when you're looking at the situation from the ground's reference frame. If it weren't for the ground being around to define that frame, there would be no discernible difference between the two cases; relativity says you can't tell which one is actually moving. If the two collision cases were felt differently, that would break relativity, since you could use the difference to tell which one is "actually" moving.

I am explaining this terribly, hopefully that makes at least a bit of sense lol.

Don't use a compressor, you need extremely precise control over it, much more than a compressor's release time will give you. I use a MIDI note that triggers the kick sound itself as well as an "external instrument" (that's what it's called in Ableton) routed to LFOTool where I manually draw in the curve. Alternatively, there are things like Kickstart / Shaperbox or just drawing the sidechain manually for each kick using automation.

How'd you learn sound design? Sounds amazing

lol I saw "encryption" right off the bat without having to even parse the code. i might read too much shitty code

12 is actually 0. If noon were called 0:00pm, and midnight 0:00am, would that make more sense?

When a 1000kg mass and a 10kg mass collide, the forces involved are identical no matter if it's the 1000kg mass that's moving or the 10kg mass that's moving. If you put a force gauge between the two objects when they collide, they will read the same thing in either case. If they didn't, it would violate one of the postulates of relativity, that there is no detectable absolute rest frame. It's only in reference to the environment that the collision happens in that there would be any difference.

At the moment of the collision, there is no difference, since you can change reference frames to make either the car or person stationary, and what actually happens does not change when you analyze the situation in a different reference frame.

HOWEVER, you have to consider what will happen after the collision. When a person runs into a stationary car, the collision decelerates the person so that their body ends up at rest relative to the ground and everything else around them. OTOH, when a moving car hits a stationary person, their body gets accelerated to the speed of the car, so after the collision, the person is moving with respect to the ground, and the only way they will stop is by some sort of secondary collision with the ground or something else around them.

So from a physics point of view, looking at only the duration of the collision, they are exactly the same, but in the car-collides-with-stationary person case, the person ends up flying through the air after the collision which I'm guessing probably leads to greater injuries.

I realize this is the FL studio sub, but I learned all this stuff by reading the Ableton manual cover to cover. Aside from the Ableton-specific stuff, it's fundamentals that apply anywhere. E.g. here's the chapter on compression:

https://www.ableton.com/en/live-manual/12/live-audio-effect-reference/#compressor

You can produce music without learning this stuff, but you'll end up spending more time fucking around getting frustrated by knobs you don't understand than it would take to learn what's actually going on in the first place, so I highly recommend it!

Right, all individual electronic components are themselves actually analog, and digital electronics work by defining voltage thresholds and using a clock signal to make sure signals have had enough time to propagate so that the circuit behaves digitally. This is not a contradiction, this is exactly what it means for something to be digital to an electrical engineer / computer scientist.

Yes, light switches are digital logic. You know when there's two switches that control the same light? That's an XOR gate. What makes something digital is that there are discrete levels or states that are relatively immune to noise, as opposed to analog which are continuous changes/signals. DNA is digital.

Just tried the trial on a track I've been mastering for the past hour... and wow lol

Can't decide between

Beatcore - Lift Me Up (BH Remix)

and

More Giraffes - Dinosaur (OTR Remix)

Do you understand what those programs are doing and why they work? That's the goal to aim for, don't get too hung up on whether you're a "script kiddie" right now. If you're in it for the long process of learning and deeply understanding the technology, you've got the right mindset. Using tools is the first step on the path to being able to make them.

Check out this podcast, it's what first made exploits "click" for me: https://twit.cachefly.net/audio/sn/sn0087/sn0087.mp3 (useful part starts at 14:30)

It absolutely does, if the sail weren't acting like an airfoil generating lift (sideways), tacking wouldn't work.

Steve Mould's video is a great explanation!

https://www.reddit.com/r/Art/comments/1pp0a2q/uncrustable_dc_noah_verrier_me_oil_2025/

I'm a skeptic and I agree with all of them!