I don't know how widely known this is among the HN crowd, but: Sennheiser did professional audio equipment for many decades before they entered the consumer market. To me, it sounds like they're returning to their core business.
i've had a lot trouble with analog simulations in SPICE. they often fail to converge or run incredibly slowly. i do a lot of audio circuitry. the speedups addressed here could potentially make it possible to simulate audio circuits in real time. suppose you feed a signal in via an audio interface, pass it through your analog processing circuitry and play it back in real time. the design cycle would be so much faster.
We are working on improvements to the baseline simulator also (or rather we basically get them for free because they are part of our core simulation engine), so hopefully that should address some of the first order usability issues in SPICE simulations. For these kinds of design applications, the ML-based speed up may or may not work, since you do have to spend time training the surrogate. You can often re-use pieces of if, but depending on what kind of manipulations you're doing to the model you're surrogatizing, it may or may not help if you're changing the circuit after every simulation.
Sorry if you've already clarified, but is this meant to replace or augment traditional SPICE simulators? I remember Ken Kundert mentioned that, even with the improvements of Spectre over SPICE-based simulators, it took things like SpectreRF's oscillator phase noise modeling to get analog designers to consider changing their ways. Their steadfast use of SPICE is "a form of Stockholm Syndrome," in his own words.
Our plan is to build both some extremely sophisticated analog design tooling that improves the state of the art (by leveraging our existing investments in modeling & simulation from other domains to build a clean simulator implementation) and then have the ML acceleration be an optional "one more thing" that can be used where applicable. Of course the first part is a major undertaking, so we're talking to potential customers to see what particular thing to start with that would really get them to consider using our system. That is independent of the DARPA-funded work though, which is particularly on the ML side (closely aligned of course).
many sims use some variety of SPICE and some convergence algorithm a-la Newton's method to discover the voltages and currents at the nodes. simulating a system where every single component runs in parallel with every other component isn't easy.
speaker frequency response simulations will sometimes use an equivalent electronic circuit. it could help design better speakers. any time you interface digital circuitry with the real world, hybrid circuitry is used. also, with this increased processing capacity, you could be looking at simulating the parasitic properties of components, not just ideal versions of them.
the article seems to skip over the entire field of colour science. there is a colour space for the human eye. it's called LMS. there is also a colour space, derived from it, called CIEXYZ. it's the colour space that all ICC profiles are specified in. they are RGB-like in nature and correspond to the three types of cone cells in the human eye. there are other colour spaces that derive from it, such as CIELab and CIELuv, which are luma-chroma versions of XYZ.
More like cabins in the wild than country cottages, some of them not accessible by car. Calling them country cottages makes them seem like they’re houses, but they’re more like cabins, often without water and electricity, because they’re not near population centres, so the infrastructure doesn’t exist. The entire point of a Norwegian cabin is to escape the urban life for a little while and go back to basics.
It helps to use linear gamma when manipulating RGB values. Linear gamma fixes most issues with interpolating and mixing RGB values and that’s also why most modern CG pipelines use it. It produces the most natural results.
Yes linear gamma generates the most natural results, because that's the way physical light combines. Gamma was a great invention for display and transmission but it sure wrecked our ability to mix colors.
This is what futures contracts are for. They are settled with a physical delivery or in cash, depending on the contract.
Futures trading is a prediction market. If you produce a commodity, you could, for example, place a sell order that is settled on a certain date in the future, and if you’re lucky, the market price will be below that of the price set in the order.
The buyer of the future will then purchase the commodity from you at the agreed price, or for cash settled futures, he’ll pay you the difference.
If the market price is higher, the difference is paid to the buyer, if the future is cash settled.
