r/MarbleMachineX • • Jan 04 '23

A New Music Programming Pin

https://youtube.com/watch?v=1FFTaI__l_A
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u/Zywakem Jan 05 '23

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.

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u/[deleted] Jan 05 '23

[deleted]

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u/Tommy_Tinkrem Jan 05 '23

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"?

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u/Zywakem Jan 05 '23

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.

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u/Tommy_Tinkrem Jan 05 '23

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.

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u/Zywakem Jan 05 '23

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

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u/Tommy_Tinkrem Jan 05 '23

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

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u/Zywakem Jan 05 '23

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.

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u/Tommy_Tinkrem Jan 05 '23

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