> Maybe the motherboard? Could that have a speaker built into it? That must be terrible for acoustics, but maybe useful for a little beep when something is wrong?
It was standard equipment through the (mid?) 90s, and completely independent of the (optional) PCM sound card.
Now PCM sound is built in to motherboards and the PC Speaker long ago faded into irrelevance. Modern motherboards don't even have headers to connect a PC Speaker. Some motherboards will emulate the PC Speaker over the built in sound output, but of course you need speakers plugged in and on to hear those beeps.
Anyone else noticing a considerable uptick in personal blog posts hitting Hn? I'm not necessarily complaining, I enjoy organic content, but sometimes they feel like conversations you'd have near the water cooler.
Not sure if you've been keeping an eye on the front page of HN, but me thinks the AI agents are starting to post. I haven't figured it out yet but it has been getting odd around here. Might be nothing.
Cute story. But slightly misleading headline: it led me to expect that the guy did some rubber-duck debugging talking to his cat. Turned out it was "I can't figure out where the beeping is coming from, but my cat, who is smaller than me and can fit into tighter spaces, found it for me".
> Maybe the motherboard? Could that have a speaker built into it? That must be terrible for acoustics, but maybe useful for a little beep when something is wrong?
Yes, it was called the PC Speaker, and that's pretty much exactly what it was used for. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_speaker
It was standard equipment through the (mid?) 90s, and completely independent of the (optional) PCM sound card.
Now PCM sound is built in to motherboards and the PC Speaker long ago faded into irrelevance. Modern motherboards don't even have headers to connect a PC Speaker. Some motherboards will emulate the PC Speaker over the built in sound output, but of course you need speakers plugged in and on to hear those beeps.
A ton of motherboards have a small built-in speaker to beep.
Anyone else noticing a considerable uptick in personal blog posts hitting Hn? I'm not necessarily complaining, I enjoy organic content, but sometimes they feel like conversations you'd have near the water cooler.
Not sure if you've been keeping an eye on the front page of HN, but me thinks the AI agents are starting to post. I haven't figured it out yet but it has been getting odd around here. Might be nothing.
Cute story. But slightly misleading headline: it led me to expect that the guy did some rubber-duck debugging talking to his cat. Turned out it was "I can't figure out where the beeping is coming from, but my cat, who is smaller than me and can fit into tighter spaces, found it for me".
That's only misleading because you were expecting it to be more of an exaggeration than it was.
If it's misleading, it's because the cat debugged the computer's power supply issue, not stable diffusion per se.
"I can't locate source of noise but my cat does".
Correct title.