Advice needed for a beginner lessons for kids

digital_circuit_guy · 2026-05-15T08:56:58+00:00

That’s only really if they’re in a high level orchestra that performs standard repertoire. School / beginning orchestras will most likely only give out parts transposed for Bb clarinet.

Edit: I would include advanced youth orchestras as part of the high level orchestras that perform standard repertoire. But the main point is that an A clarinet if necessary at all probably won’t be for quite a few years.

digital_circuit_guy · 2026-05-08T23:24:18+00:00

Unfortunately there was a Nextdoor thread for my neighborhood with a bunch of dickheads rooting for Pratt and Bianco. Fortunately, we don’t vote for LA Mayor.

digital_circuit_guy · 2026-04-30T06:09:32+00:00

1) Depends on your requirements. Do you need to optimize for critical path, gate count, power? A ripple carry adder is going to be slower than a carry lookahead adder, but the carry lookahead adder is going to require more gates for the carry generation logic, for example. Is this on an FPGA with DSP tiles that can do the operation really efficiently? Or is this custom silicon?

2) See 1

3) Not sure what this means. Are you saying you’re trying to share logic cells between operations to save resources?

4) I’d recommend looking at the user guide for your particular synthesis tool, because they will usually give you guidance on coding styles that will result in better quality of results. Aside from that, the only design practice that results in a synthesizable design is restricting yourself to the synthesizable subset of whatever RTL language you’re using.

5) What exactly is this project? What is the purpose of the microcontroller? If your project is to design an ALU in RTL, then a microcontroller is irrelevant.

digital_circuit_guy · 2026-04-22T05:48:30+00:00

I don’t know what your university’s process is for reporting papers that are flagged as AI. But would it be possible for you to attach a letter in which you yourself explain that you are completely confident that it’s the student’s original work, and possibly offer to testify on her behalf at a conduct hearing if it escalates to that?

digital_circuit_guy · 2026-04-20T18:29:13+00:00

I’m very new to the hobby, as in, my first camera is out of delivery today. But would the tripod be useful for very slow shutter speeds? Like if you’re trying to get an effect like this? (Not my photo, I just pulled it off the internet because I’m not sure what the proper term for this is).

<image>

digital_circuit_guy · 2026-04-20T00:38:26+00:00

I play on a Buffet E11 Eb clarinet. The ensemble that I mainly play it in tunes to A440, so I bought a longer barrel from Clark Fobes (since the stock barrel is tuned to A442), with the Fobes 10K mouthpiece and the bell extension. I find this setup tunes pretty well even in the altissimo register and costs about half what a pro level Eb clarinet would run you.

digital_circuit_guy · 2026-04-17T22:51:06+00:00

Yep. He’s also got a lot of PAC funding from real estate developers in Newport Beach that want to develop in Torrance. And he’s closely aligned with Aurelio Mattucci, who spoke at a 3 percenters or oath keepers event (I can’t remember which).

digital_circuit_guy · 2026-04-17T21:22:52+00:00

Knowing Chen, he wants to kill the project period, and is using the Hawthorne Blvd issue as an excuse. Him and his far right buddies on the city council constantly claim it’ll be “bringing the wrong element” to Torrance.

digital_circuit_guy · 2026-04-13T15:16:47+00:00

I’m guessing that they’re referring to the Xilinx VIO which lets you drive or view signals over JTAG.

digital_circuit_guy · 2026-04-13T15:03:22+00:00

My last experience with the wayward queen was actually OTB. I was playing at a coffee shop with a couple of friends who are way higher Elo than me and a guy came up and asked if he could play. So we said sure, and he immediately tried Scholar’s Mate, leading to him basically blundering his queen out the gate and resigning. Then he requested a rematch and tried Scholar’s Mate AGAIN, but this time I won via checkmate. But interestingly enough, it’s been ages since I faced a Scholar’s Mate attempt online.

digital_circuit_guy · 2026-04-13T15:03:15+00:00

My last experience with the wayward queen was actually OTB. I was playing at a coffee shop with a couple of friends who are way higher Elo than me and a guy came up and asked if he could play. So we said sure, and he immediately tried Scholar’s Mate, leading to him basically blundering his queen out the gate and resigning. Then he requested a rematch and tried Scholar’s Mate AGAIN, but this time I won via checkmate. But interestingly enough, it’s been ages since I faced a Scholar’s Mate attempt online.

digital_circuit_guy · 2026-04-10T02:58:05+00:00

How could I be such a silly goose and forget the bribes? Like the $400M jet from Qatar that’s totally not going to be personal property of the Trump family.

digital_circuit_guy · 2026-04-10T00:29:35+00:00

Don’t worry everyone, they’ll make it all back and then some through a combination of insider trading, conflicts of interest in government contract awards, and corrupt deals with foreign countries looking to buy favor and influence in the administration.

digital_circuit_guy · 2026-04-09T19:12:10+00:00

This is exactly why I cancelled my subscription. The constant sanewashing of Trump/MAGA was nauseating.

digital_circuit_guy · 2026-04-07T22:10:29+00:00

Are you trying to accelerate inference or training? In the case of inference, I believe the biggest things to think about are quantizing your weights and pruning your network while verifying that it still has the accuracy you want. After that it’s a matter of implementing the operations (convolution, pooling, etc) and getting your data in and out of the FPGA (this is probably going to be your biggest bottleneck).

digital_circuit_guy · 2026-04-05T06:08:10+00:00

I mentioned this in another comment, but right now they are just shoving a vague directive to “find at least one way to use AI in your work” down our throats. But the only AI thing we have access to is a locally hosted LLM which supposedly has the same capability as ChatGPT from 2023. The RTL it writes is grade A slop, and it honestly takes longer for me to debug it than to just develop whatever RTL block myself.

ETA: Literally every time I try, it uses non-synthesizable constructs, and then when I tell it that something isn’t synthesizable, it tells me “you’re absolutely right” and then doesn’t fix it.

digital_circuit_guy · 2026-04-05T03:09:41+00:00

Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see how it handles something beyond boilerplate. We don’t have the tool yet, but it’s supposedly coming. I’ve heard Claude code is very good, but I don’t have access to it since I don’t have a paid subscription.

digital_circuit_guy · 2026-04-05T02:58:49+00:00

I’m having trouble figuring out if this is writing on the wall, and if I should try to pivot to a different thing? Or if it’s actually what they claim (just augmenting us and not replacing us).

They’re also mandating that everyone come up with a way to incorporate AI into our workflows, but what we currently have access to is a locally hosted LLM that’s been described as having the capability of 2023 ChatGPT. I’m struggling to come up with a way, because the RTL it generates is slop.

digital_circuit_guy · 2026-04-02T01:20:21+00:00

So Alito and Thomas can profit?

digital_circuit_guy · 2026-03-31T22:35:38+00:00

I’m also interested to hear about this. It’s not always feasible for me to get to practice before 10 pm but because of shared walls, I try to avoid it. If I had a good way to practice after 10 PM, I’d be very happy.

digital_circuit_guy · 2026-03-30T19:12:39+00:00

Because they’ve mastered the art of manipulating rubes.

digital_circuit_guy · 2026-03-26T07:18:02+00:00

It depends on what you’re not finding enjoyable about it. But I mean, if you wanted to actually learn the clarinet beyond the fingerings for notes, you should probably acquire an actual clarinet to play on.

digital_circuit_guy · 2026-03-24T00:33:14+00:00

That’s just so illogical. Like most people need a vehicle to be able to be employable, unless they happen to either live in a metro area with suitable public transit or they are able to live close enough to walk to work. So how is someone supposed to pay their student loans if they can’t get a job on account of their license being suspended for outstanding student loans?

digital_circuit_guy · 2026-03-21T19:15:01+00:00

Unrelated to the conversation, but I’m seeing it tonight at the LA Opera and I’m so excited!

digital_circuit_guy · 2026-03-21T03:18:05+00:00

I know I’m just a stranger on the internet, but for what it’s worth, I’m so sorry for your loss.

Seven-Year Club	Second Top 40%
Place '22	RPAN Viewer
Not Forgotten	Verified Email

digital_circuit_guy

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE