gozz

@gozz@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yes, you can store data on a bird — enthusiast converts PNG to bird-shaped waveform, teaches young starling to recall file at up to 2MB/s⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Exactly. Digital logic, when implemented in analogue, generally have to have forbidden zones where a signal in that range is considerer invalid. Regardless of implementation, digital is about the discretized logic of the system. That is explicitly the whole point of digital: Minor analogue distortion does not change the information content of the signal unless it is so bad as to flip a bit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yes, you can store data on a bird — enthusiast converts PNG to bird-shaped waveform, teaches young starling to recall file at up to 2MB/s⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  The whole sequence is:

  • Digitally synthesized spectrogram (lossless)
  • Played through a DAC and speaker to produce an analogue signal (lossy)
  • Heard by the bird (analogue, lossy)
  • Reproduced by the bird (analogue, lossy)
  • Captured by an ADC as a digital audio signal (lossy)
  • Spectrum-analysed to observe a similar (but corrupted) reproduction of the shape in the PNG

  To be transferring digital information, we would instead need to modulate and demodulate the digital signal (exactly like an old modem) so that the analogue corruption does not affect the digital signal:

  • Image file (lossless)
  • Bit stream (lossless)
  • Analogue modulation of bit stream played through DAC (lossy)
  • Heard by the bird (lossy)
  • Reproduced by the bird (lossy)
  • Demodulated to recover exact bit stream despite distortion (lossless,)
  • Decode bit stream to recover original image file, bit-for-bit perfect

  I extremely doubt that this bird is capable of 2MB/s. For reference that would make it 280+ times fast than dialup, and barely slower than ADSL. This setup is basically just using the bird instead of a telephone line.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yes, you can store data on a bird — enthusiast converts PNG to bird-shaped waveform, teaches young starling to recall file at up to 2MB/s⁩ ⁨⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Not to be a wet blanket, but every time this comes up I get annoyed by some factual inaccuracies in the articles about this. It is not digital! He drew an image on a computer, but converted it to an analogue spectrogram to store on the bird. That’s neat as hell, but it’s not digital. The image that he got back was slightly corrupted.

  Now I would be fascinated to see a follow-up seeing if you can actually modulate a digital signal and have is survive a round trip through the bird bit-for-bit accurate. I suspect in reality it would be much lower data rate, but definitely not nothing!

• Use FIDO2 key as SSH host key?
  Submitted ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩ | ⁨0⁩ ⁨comments⁩