Could someone please saw down this rifle barrel for me?
not only does it convert back losslessly it also has the noise removed
— moderate rock (@lookoutitsbbear) May 27, 2024
I am not an electrical or comp sci engineer but I have had some experience on the electrical side of things lately and have started becoming familiar with signal processing, so bear with me for minor mistakes if you are one of the nerds familiar with it. For those of you who are too 
or not deep enough on the 
spectrum to understand signal processing, all you need to know is this: noise is not data. It is never data. A good signals engineer must attempt to minimize noise as much as possible.
Neuralink put out some request recently asking for some insane level of compression on a file (wanting 200x compression) with a transmitted signal, and that this must be lossless (meaning the original file data can be perfectly recovered from the compressed file data). Neurodivergents online immediately set out working on this to determine what the max amount of compression is. Enter our king and hero, moderate rock (user @ lookoutitsbbear).
MR states that so far he's found a way to compress the initial data file by a factor of 4.1, the most seen so far.
Curious as to how, people start asking how well this actually works.
https://x.com/lookoutitsbbear/status/1794962035714785570
And this is where all heck breaks loose. See, Neuralink had technically asked for the original file to be compressed without any data lost. To the average midwit and/or software engineer, this means taking the original file and just making it smaller. But MR did what any good signal engineer would do, and worked on filtering the signal to get rid of unwanted and unnecessary information (the noise) so that he could do a better job of compressing the data. Midwits do not understand that noise is not relevant for a signal's information. And because of this, MR has sinned and for this, he must be dunked on. So the beatings commence.
"Heh kid, just google it. You idiot. You moron."
There are multiple midwits continuing to repeat the "noise is data" line, as though repeating it makes it true.
Once again, noise is not a relevant part of a signal.
The midwit bonanza continues, once again acting as though if noise is an important part of a signal.
Quote tweets even gain major traction dunking on him even though they're all wrong.
MR makes a quote tweet that at least gains traction with people who understand him, and the semantics argument becomes a bit more present.
Yes, on a technical level it is not lossless, as MR removed "information." But the "information" he removed is not relevant. The original signal present in the original file is recoverable after the compression. So he has done it correctly. MR also points out that the Neuralink engineers are being stupid because they should be working on getting rid of the noise before working on the compression.
Of course, the midwits can't admit they're wrong and continue to argue the semantics.
Someone who actually makes a decent enough analogy to understand what he's getting at.
There is a lot of continued insults and attempts at dunks here (too many for me to add at this point) and midwits continue try to dunk on him and he continues to shrug it off.
Adding to the hilarity, a PhD looks at the Neuralink thing and comes to the same conclusion on his own, that removing noise from the signal will help compression.
https://x.com/CJHandmer/status/1795486204185682315
https://x.com/kindgracekind/status/1795577979952845220
(some cope in the replies of this one that MR was "wrong" because of how he stated it, even though he wasn't)
Finally, our king decides to take a rest, having survived his beatings and coming out stronger 
So remember dramatards: your average midwit has no clue what they're talking about, software engineers should stick to learning to code, and you should always listen to the neurodivergent savants 
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Genius wheel-reinventors strike again?Remember when Uber made a bus?
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I bet you the first person to reinvent the wheel was a woman.
!foidmoment !fellas !misc !chuds
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I'm upmarseying
@JimieWhales just to protest your ping spam
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I usually upmarsey Jimbo just because I like her comments, but in this case I'm upmarseying in solidarity with this sentiment.
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lol this is my first comment in like 5 weeks that I include a ping of any kind, and I get accused of ping spam. thats cute
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I know enough about signal processing to know what noise /is/, and that in very specific contexts it is used kinda-sorta-in-the-same-way-as-data-but-not-really, but not in the context that Neuralink is specifying lol; the haters are trying to argue neuralink is relying on the noise for some esoteric purpose that they most certainly aren't
Edit: basically this lol
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The vast chasm between the abilities of your average electrical engineer and your average software "engineer" cannot be overstated.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have some Python scripts to write.
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I feel this is deeper than ability.
This is a fundamental lack of brainpower. Reaching adulthood and not being able to understand that words mean different things in different contexts, and that some people might know better than them, shows that these "people" are legitimately below 5 years old kids in their perception of the world.
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Peak brainpower is realizing the words that mean different things in different context don't change their meaning. I don't know exactly how to describe it but most of the times words even when seemingly apply differently in different contexts actually have the SAME meaning but they fit in both context
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he falls back on his actual point (the noise is useless) whenever someone tells him his r-slurred point (removing noise is lossless compression) is r-slurred.
ur r-slurred for blindly agreeing with him
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Yeah tbf it's not TeChNiCaLlY lossless, but the real point is that doesn't matter in this context
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"in this context" how do you know? Are you the one who put up the challenge? If so, why did you specify lossless and that it would be evaluated by a program which COMPARES IT TO THE ORIGINAL DATA
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This just goes back to what we're defining as data; if you're considering the noise to be data then you basically can't compress it and it's a trick question.
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yes you can, even in the absolute worst case where it is pure Gaussian noise (which is not what is happening here)
https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/260869/can-white-noise-be-losslessly-compressed
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i dont think thats right. Because audio has a temporal component, any sound that has moments where the information is exactly the same over a period longer than the length of whatever your sample rate is can be compressed even if you retain all your noise from like, super-nyquist frequencies.
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Yes but my decimal precision is higher than yours so your "exactly the same" is a .0003 variance to me.
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That sounds correct. Idk all that much about this stuff, but I stand by my point that noise is not data.
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this is idiotic. "noise" is relative in the first place but when any professional broadcaster records they record up to 5-10 minutes of silence in the room for what's called "presence" or "room tone."
I'm not even gonna get into the math and engineering parts but Jesus Christ people are stupid
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The difference is that 5 minutes of silence and all the noise that comes with it is the signal.
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ok, you've been picking on me robot
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No, this guy is definitely wrong, some of the "noise" he's filtering is actual data. If you could just FFT this shit, it wouldn't be a challenge to compress it and an r-slur (like this guy) would have done it already.
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For sound and radio signals isn't noise pretty easy to pick out, because the real signal should be a sum of waves?
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What is so data about the noise?
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Of course anyone who thinks this 'challenge' is worth paying attention to is brain damaged including the employees at neuralink who dont know how to format an audio file in the first place.
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Reminds me of my PhD, a colleague was showing me his EEG generative algorithm and telling me how it perfectly captured even the high frequency features at 60Hz: line noise.
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done king
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Classic internet drama. R-slurs arguing with each other not realizing they're both talking about completely different things.
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Biological noise is different from statistical noise. Biological noise is like I am comparing the expression of mRNA between two cell lines and in these cell lines some cells may be at different points in the cell cycle or slightly different environmental conditions (touching another cell, touching a surface, free floating ect) which we cannot expirementally control. For instance, at different points in mitosis a cell will have double the DNA and will be expressing different RNA compared to a cell at rest. We cannot reasonably control this in a living cell line without adding more uncertainty, and if we aren't interested in mitosis, you have to find ways to mitigate the noise and just get the signal. On a biological level this will never be perfect as biology has no reason to conform to our ideas about stats and any cutoff you do may always be removing some biological information at the margins (ofc you can do stuff like power series to exponentially expand the gulf between significant and insignificant data).
Anyway, this is just me saying that if the end goal of this is to be integrated into Neuralink this will inevitably become a biological problem rather than just a programming or engineering problem. As soon as biology gets involved, everything gets a lot more uncertain and annoying.
!codecels Dicussion on how the inclusion of biology makes the concept of noise and randomness more difficult
EDIT: I assume this is something where Neurallink is trying to compress neural signals since theyve reached a processing plateau and I am not a neurologist or bio psychologist I am a geneticist and microbiologist who does data analysis, so feel free to roast me if I'm off base
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In biology noise is solved by sampling large numbers of cells per condition and averaging. You can also safely ignore anything irrelevant to the pathway you're interested in. For Neuralink a neuron firing/not firing is a very obvious and easy to detect state which makes things much simpler than the average gene expression study.
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I used that example but say gene set enrichment analysis is an example of information being lost at the edges if significance. Its why there is now push back against thresholded cowtools vs those which use power scaling for pathway enrichment
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How bout you enrich THIS
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I wish i could never think about silence and just goon all day but sadly having a top of the line vr goon rig costs alot of money
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I've never put much stock in enrichment analysis, a typical "data scientist" can usually find a way to get whatever result they want by fiddling with the cleaning parameters.
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Enrichment analysis is fine if you use it as a jumping off point for lab work
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Yeah, we both know nobody bothers to do that.
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Would the concepts of signal and noise in radio transmission be closer to biology or statistics based on how you've distinguished them?
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I'm not sure if you're cuter or smarter but you're definitely a smart cutie.
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Aw thank you
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You're welcome!
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The biggest fallacy is these nerds think a human being could be basically drag and dropped like a skyrim furry porn modlist.
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Neuralink's fault for saying "lossless" when they mean "without losing any relevant information."
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They compare directly to the original file. Everything is relevant information.
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lossless compression of noise by a factor 200x is absurd. even 4x seems impossible.
since neuralink asked for 200x, they clearly didn't actually mean truly lossless compression.
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The actual issue is that without knowledge of the experimental setup itself it's impossible to know what "noise" would truly mean.
Midwits who can only conceive noise as high frequencies and think a low pass filter is a panacea should just stop talking forever.
"Wow there's a high spectral peak at 60Hz that's surely my signal"
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Letter of the law vs Spirit of the law
They don't want to lose any of the sick tunes; they don't give af if you filter out the dude breathing behind the microphone
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Even if you believe this, there's no objective way to tell the difference
Anything subjective obviously doesn't meet the request
I'm honestly not sure if you're baiting or not, so well done for that
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If you know the performance of the ADC used you can determine a noise floor. In this case, a 10 bit adc has a noise floor of ~60 dB. By extension, all the high frequency data below 60 dB can't be from the original signal.
Imagine you task someone with reading an analog thermometer that has markings per ones digit. They return to you a notebook with measurements to the one billionth and complain that it will take too long to transcribe to an excel sheet. Obviously, you can disregard the data after the first decimal point because reading 1/100th of a digit on an analog thermometer only marked to one digit is impossible to do accurately. This analogy is not great (ignores that the input signal is very low and clipped) but I hope you understand why, objectively, some noise can't be signal data.
This entire "problem" is a complete waste of time when the problem is incorrectly stated. It isn't a software issue, it is a signal processing issue.
See: https://x.com/lookoutitsbbear/status/1795562684462624806
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it isn't either of these. the whole question is a non-starter. might as well be asking about the chicken or the egg
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The noise is not the data. Objectively.
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In the context of the challenge, everything in the file is data, there's no
noise
there.
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proof?
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You can't perfectly recover the original file if you remove
noise
. Do you often have difficulty understanding the things you read?
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you can perfectly recover the original. more than perfect actually since you got rid of noise.
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No, you can't perfectly recover the original. The new file will be different from the old.
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No it won't, it'll be compressed and better than the old file perfectly capturing the original signal
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No one cares about the
signal
, you sperg.
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No not objectively. Objectively (from a physics standpoint) it is all vibrations in a medium. I know electrical engineers have a different perspective but then that goes back to it not being objective dont it?
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From a physics standpoint if you capture data beyond the precision of your measurement device it is noise. Introducing noise in the signal path doesn't magically make it data from the original measurement.
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How is the tool of measure capable of capturing data beyond it's own ability? Or if your tool of measure measures/records/picks up data and you don't like the result, does that make the data noise? There still has to be an element of discrimination to label certain data sets as either "noise" or "information" don't it?
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But it is objective,
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What is?
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the noise not being the data
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Well there is no objective difference between the two, unless you consider yourself objective?
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maybe you just lack understanding
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how about you tell me what you are actually thinking instead of all this vague shit?
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Noise is data. It's not the data they're interested in, but it's data
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noise is not data, is noise, should never have been there in the first place.
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Should we get the movie nerds in here to argue about film grain
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Of course there is. Noise is normal distributed, data is not.
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I hate overly confident
midwits so much. Shut up, a black 
woman 
(neurodivergent) is speaking.
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fact: no one here is wrong. everyone gets a trophy
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Didn't read
Upmarseyed
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This is why geniuses and r-slurs have their places in society, and why midwits must be indiscriminately removed from the population. Midwits will continue to pursue decisions inherently terrible in the first place, and will make enough progress in their bone-headed conception to start triggering sunk-cost fallacy.
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The real question is would you let this guy process your brain signals?
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He's no neurobiologist but he can tell what's noise and cut it off from your brainwaves just by looking at the waveform and from having seen quite a few waveforms in his time... Heck no.
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Very interesting.
Hey OP, so what exactly is "noise" in its audio recording definition? Hiss from electronic devices, and background studio noises like echos?
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It can also include insignificant digits or statistical randomness or biological randomness, depending on the circumstance.
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In 1982, after decades of looking for a type of engineering that r-slurs could do, top American researchers discovered software engineering
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I also keep coming back to the metaphor that Reddit is a great deal like Gormenghast: an ancient, stony fortification of cobbled-together structures, housing a gaggle of idiosyncratic personas whose lives are filled with the performances of abstruse rituals and obligations, the mandatory detritus of a former glory β insular and in a state of glacial decadence, and which nevertheless has a secondary community plastered on its boundary, with which it perfunctorily yet regularly interacts AND YET all of which exists within a much wider world that has largely diverged from it.
I think about the Tower of Flints.
Snapshots:
https://x.com/lookoutitsbbear/status/1794962035714785570:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
https://x.com/CJHandmer/status/1795486204185682315:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
https://x.com/kindgracekind/status/1795577979952845220:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
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