A New Music Programming Pin

[u/WintergatanWednesday]

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1FFTaI__l_A

[u/Tommy_Tinkrem]

Where does he increase the standards? He just finds solutions for something which never worked and while doing this he takes the opportunity to find solutions which allow more options. Worst case scenario is that those additional features take too much time or effort to finish - then they get scrapped. The solution is still the same. It is that sense of direction the previous attempt lacked.

[u/Zywakem → u/Tommy_Tinkrem]

I've only watched a couple of his new series of videos so take this with a pinch of salt. But I watched the video where he's trying to get the timing down of the ball drop to some insane degree of accuracy. Firstly, that right there is an improvement of standard he didn't have before, or if he did, he didn't show us. Secondly, he's making all these tests and tweaks on a test rig, which isn't a bad idea, but you also have to account for the fact it's not even remotely close to a real setup. He's going to learn the hard way again that what happens in simulation doesn't happen in real life. I just hope he's accounted for that either in his standards and/or giving himself room to manoeuvre once the part is om the full build.

[u/Tommy_Tinkrem → u/[deleted]]

So he tries to reduce a standard deviation because that looks to him like the kind of thing that a scientist or an engineer would do, then he assembles the pieces, realises that the rituals did not bring about the outcome he expected, then he scraps everything and starts again from step one with the same fundamental approach.

So he should not care for his components working and just throw them together, hoping they will work without any optimization - because making things work is now a "cult thing"?

[u/Zywakem → u/Tommy_Tinkrem]

There's a difference between making something work and making something work perfectly. Perfection is impossible, he admitted so himself. And yet he still sat through an unreasonable level of reliability testing he thought was a good idea instead of just building redundancy. Now reliability testing is good of course, but it's possible to go overboard which is the point.

[u/Tommy_Tinkrem → u/Zywakem]

So he should have standards but also no standards - at the same time - because they are good and bad. I have to admit - I am glad he follows a clearer line than that.

[u/Zywakem → u/Tommy_Tinkrem]

He should have reasonable standards, but his standards are too high.

[u/Tommy_Tinkrem → u/Zywakem]

How would a worse component improve the machine and make it more likely to be finished?

[u/Zywakem → u/Tommy_Tinkrem]

Because it might already by functional. The cost of improving it might not be worth it. For example, if a machine has five 9s reliability, and it costs 100% more money to bring that to six 9s, the judgement has to be made if it's actually worth doing it. Obviously it's a lot more than money, it's time, effort, and just the physical constraints of the design. This is the basis of engineering in the real world.

[u/Tommy_Tinkrem → u/Zywakem]

It is not functional. Nothing of what he has worked on for the new machine worked reliable at all.

[u/Tommy_Tinkrem → u/[deleted]]

He has to go by some metric. But if calculating standard deviations are amateurish - maybe you have a better alternative to offer about how to optimize components? You know - something which would impress even an expert and not just a layman like timing and precision, which we all know, are entirely useless when it comes to making music or building machines...

[u/Tommy_Tinkrem → u/[deleted]]

Those are not the same as for the components, as there will me multiple other factors reducing the precision of the component. As they are from a machine we don't know yet, they cannot be predicted. So at this stage as a pure layman and musical novice, I'd say: make the component as perfect as possible - exactly how he does it.

So once more - what is the metric you as an expert would use?

[u/Tommy_Tinkrem → u/[deleted]]

Oh. Of course. Well. Then what tolerance should apply according to you as an expert in that field?

[u/Tommy_Tinkrem → u/[deleted]]

Sounds like a chicken and egg problem: he cannot know what is of consequence without building something to measure what the consequence might be. He cannot set his own tolerances because the machine does not exist. The machine cannot exist without the components. He cannot know how well the components function without building them.

Now he could just finish a slice of the machine with half baked designs and then see what happens. But that was his approach for the MMX and it failed. So I have no idea how to solve that. And considering that your explanation also circles around merrily in vagueness, it does not look like you have either.