[digdugdirk]

I'm sorry, I don't understand the language you're speaking. English please?

(Just kidding - but if you have any recommendations for learning resources to get started being able to understand what you're talking about, I'd greatly appreciate it.)

[uoaei]

Rabbit hole ahoy:

https://surma.dev/things/ditherpunk/

[sbierwagen]

One of the fun things about signals theory is how the same basic concept will show up in apparently unrelated places.

Example from electrical engineering: microprocessors will have a "clock" frequency, say, 16Mhz. But when you haul a wire up to VCC and pull it back down to ground, some amount of the power will be radiated away as radio waves. If your clock is at a constant rate, then you'll have a big spike of radiated noise at 16MHz, and the FCC will be unhappy.

So modern devices cheat it by dithering around the central frequency. If you bounce from 15.9998MHz to 16.001 to 15.998 then the same amount of power will be radiated, but smeared across a bigger frequency, enough to get you lower than the regulatory threshold. Spread spectrum clock generation. https://www.analog.com/en/resources/technical-articles/clock...

If you look in your PC's BIOS settings, spread spectrum is usually an option, and you can disable it if you want your computer to be slightly noisier.

[baq]

in 2024 you paste the dense comment into your favorite LLM (preferably multiple) and ask it to explain on your desired level (whatever that may be). works remarkably well for every topic I tried it with (e.g. jargon-heavy financial tweets.)