this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2025
359 points (90.2% liked)
Technology
76834 readers
1667 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This was bound to happen. Neural networks are inherently analog processes, simulating them digitally is massively expensive in terms of hardware and power.
Digital domain is good for exact computation, analog is better for approximate computation, as required by neural networks.
That's a good point. The model weights could be voltage levels instead of digital representations. Lots of audio tech uses analog for better fidelity.I also read that there's a startup using particle beams for lithography. Exciting times.
At least one Nobel Laureate has exactly the opposite opinion (see the Hinton lecture above)
what audio tech uses analog for better fidelity?
Vinyl records, analog tube amplifiers, a good pair of speakers 🤌
Honestly though digital compression now is so good it probably sounds the same.
speakers are analog devices by nature.
The other two are used for the distortions they introduce, so quite literally lower fidelity. Whether some people like those distortions is irrelevant.
You want high fidelity: lossless digital audio formats.
Yeah, I get very good sound out of class d amplifiers. They're cheap; they're energy efficient, and they usually pack in features for digital formats because it's easy to do.