Making PyPy's GC and JIT produce a sound [video]

This reminds me of one of the tweets that live inside my head and makes itself known every once in a while, about the Lion King movie: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;glowcoil&#x2F;status&#x2F;1204511618769588225" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;glowcoil&#x2F;status&#x2F;1204511618769588225</a> (&quot;when the gc sounds warmer&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fxguide.com&#x2F;fxfeatured&#x2F;how-virtual-production-worked-on-set-of-the-lion-king&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.fxguide.com&#x2F;fxfeatured&#x2F;how-virtual-production-wo...</a> )

There&#x27;s a blog post from 6-8 years ago I can no longer find anywhere, where someone made node.js create similar ambient sounds and compared it to listening to hard drives doing mechanical work to understand what the computer was doing. Apparently it was actually useful to audibly hear when, for example, a request failed due to an authentication problem which had its distinct sound emerging from the pattern of code execution on that branch.<p>Does anyone have a link to what I&#x27;m talking about?

Unrelated, but GPU coil whine can give unintentional ambience to LLM inference.<p>In some llama.cpp versions on my home inference rig it would manifest as a sort of squelchy sound that would match the generation of characters on the screen, reminiscent of the effect often used during dialog in 8-bit era video games.<p>I found it quite comfy.

Many related relevant thoughts:<p>• This sounds very similar to what Calm Technology¹ is trying to achieve. Their first example was a freely dangling string tied to a motor, directly connected to the Ethernet. The string then spun soothingly in a corner with some auditory and visual indication of network activity.<p>• I seem to recall that the developers of the new computer in <i>The Birth of a New Machine</i> connected (old, analogue) oscilloscopes to the CPU pins for register content, directly driving the X and Y coordinates of the oscilloscope beam, and thereby got a <i>visual image</i> of how the execution usually looked in different situations, and when they looked “wrong”, it was time to slow down and analyze step-by-step.<p>• Many older machines were not very well shielded against RF interference, so in olden times hackers used to turn on a radio to the most interfered channels to <i>listen</i> to the CPU executing their program, which helped with debugging. (Later, many home computers were similarly not very good at compositing a TV signal, so the computer’s activities would partly bleed into the sound and&#x2F;or video output. This also similarly aided debugging.)<p>I was somewhat disappointed that the artificial sounds in the video were actually old game machine sound effects tied to events, not the actual sounds of the high-frequency events turned into audio.<p>1. &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;w&#x2F;index.php?title=Calm_technology&amp;oldid=1237704042" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;w&#x2F;index.php?title=Calm_technology&amp;o...</a>&gt;

This happens in nature too, even for weirdly specific things. I was very surprised that my work laptop makes a high pitched hissing noise when updating graphics in a remote x11 program. Nothing else seems to trigger it...

This is super-interesting!<p>You might be able to get even more information with a stereo signal, use the pan field for something.

This is wonderful and I&#x27;d like to see more examples of multi-sensory experiences for working with computers or algorithms. Are brains, especially the subconscious are powerful at finding and learning patterns - so being able to utilize that seems so useful!

This reminds me of WOPR from War Games

Can we make it a Maserati V8 sound instead? :D

&gt; - the two different coin sounds are played when the JIT produced a new chunk of machine code.<p>... as a thing for a human to listen to, it sounds like a lot is going on. But as an indicator of what&#x27;s happening inside a VM in 2024, is this surprisingly slow? Especially at the intro, if you were paying close attention, you could manually count these events.

would be useful for malloc too... Or for the kernel to beep on a page fault.

Well that was jarring.