What Does the Event Loop Sound Like?

https://medium.com/att-israel/what-does-the-event-loop-sound-like-b571abaa3562

by ronenlh • 5 years ago

49 21 5 years ago

medium.com

killingtime74• 5 years ago

Very cool and new way of thinking

henearkr• 5 years ago

Could be very useful for effortless diagnostics.

KineticLensman2• 5 years ago

Warning: when tinkering with sound, it’s very important to output things at safe levels to avoid damaging one’s hearing or worse: one’s headphones.

As someone who needs to wear hearing aids, it's somewhat depressing to see hearing loss treated as a joke. Hearing all the little noises of the world as you interact with it is more precious than many people realise.

ronenlh2• 5 years ago

I really apologize. I'm fixing it now.

KineticLensman2• 5 years ago

Thank you, and sorry if I came across as too negative about what is actually a great article, from which I learned a lot.

On the theme of the article, sound is a great way to understand what is going on, and I really like how you've used it here. I think some people believe that hearing mainly applies to obvious sounds such as speech and music, but it is, as you demonstrate here, an excellent diagnostic tool. I've personally learned that all of the little sounds contribute significantly to ones mental map / model of the world to the extent that I'm prepared to believe that total deafness would be as devastating, in the long term, as total sight loss.

emerongi• 5 years ago

It's good to raise that point, but it's clearly just a light joke.

If you would have phrased this comment as a PSA (I have hearing loss and it's not great, please take care of your ears everyone!), it would have come better off. Your current comment just feels like it's critizing the author for a very minor joke.

yesenadam• 5 years ago

What is a PSA? (Google didn't help.)

artemonster• 5 years ago

That is just wave debugging with extra steps. Really, I wait when software industry "reinvents" event tracing used in HW simulations (RTL or mixed signal) :) At least then GTKWave would get proper support :)

howaboutnope2• 5 years ago

I once had a computer where if I attached my headphones to the output of the sound chip on the main board, I would get all sorts of weird squelchy noises that somehow were linked to what the machine was doing. The machine being idle sound a certain way, starting program A had a certain signature, starting program B had a different one... it reminded my of the olden times, of knowing certain things just from the sounds from the disk drive.

lloydatkinson• 5 years ago

I like the the noise of HDD's, I can tell what my NAS's are up to without even needing to check.

rasz2• 5 years ago

That would be almost every PC up until ~2000-2005 unless you got a very expensive high end sound card.

You can still get that today with bad power design or user error https://youtu.be/KQTt-7F3MYw?t=317

howaboutnope2• 5 years ago

Yeah, it was similar, though I could even hear the mouse coursor move. Very faintly though, it was pretty much unnoticeable when the computer was playing sound. It also didn't sound as much as static like in the video, it was really high-pitched (probably a lot of it was beyond my hearing threshold). All in all I would love to have it as an option.

breakingcups• 5 years ago

Yep, me too, I still remember most of the distinct sound patterns of everyday use.

zarzavat• 5 years ago

This would be great in gamedev to consume various performance numbers when optimizing. I have the problem that if I'm looking at the framerate then I'm not looking at the frame and vice versa, so I end up repeating the same actions over and over again. Experiencing performance as audio rather than a visual indicator is a great idea.

axihack• 5 years ago

Diffie-Hellman sounds very spooky, love it!

ColinWright• 5 years ago

Back in 1979 I wrote a Z80 machine language program on a TRS-80 Model I[0] to implement the Pollard Rho algorithm[1] and explore factoring repunits[2]. To monitor it I would put an AM radio next to the machine and listen to the noise.

The "Run around the loop" phase made a Chuntering[3] noise, and then the GCD[4] phase, implemented via Euclid's Algorithm[5] made a wonderfully ascending whoosh!

It was fairly straight-forward to know where the code was, and what it was doing, and it was great to fall asleep to of an evening.

================

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRS-80

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pollard%27s_rho_algorithm

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repunit

[3] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/chunteri...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greatest_common_divisor

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greatest_common_divisor#Euclid...

IshKebab• 5 years ago

Wow Soundcloud only lets you listen to three of the sounds before it tries to force you to download their app. You might want to host the sounds elsewhere.

rubicks• 5 years ago

Possibly related:

"Peep (The Network Auralizer): Monitoring Your Network With Sound"

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...

What Does the Event Loop Sound Like?

Related Stories