Bluetooth and specifically BLE is way more capable and versatile than most people understand. We are using it for a connectionless time synchronisation protocol that also contains a rudimentary control plane.
The clients can receive synchronisation data every minute and listen for a year on a coin cell. It’s broadcast, so a single beacon node can service hundreds of clients simultaneously.
BLE also can manage data connections over a kilometer and a half with reasonable (not great) antennas.
It’s not terribly fast, but modern radio protocols are opening up the possibilities. Lora and BLE are bringing the environment alive with communication.
If you have solid domain knowledge, LLMs are a force multiplier for electronic design. You just have to have a spider sense for “this is going off the rails”.
Other than that, it does useful circuit review, part selection (or suggestions for alternative parts you didn’t know existed), and is usually usefully skeptical. It’s also great at quick back of the napkin “can I just use a smt ceramic here?” Type calculations, especially handy for roughing out timings and that kind of thing.
This. LLM's are still not good enough to trust for Vibe-Circuit building - a circuit re-design is a lot more cost and time than a code change - But they can get you over so many hurdles getting you to the right references in forums and datasheets quickly, I suspect it wont be too long before they can make schematics and PCB's that are 90% there, but currently much more useful in the firmware design.
I am now more of a hobbyist than a professional and LLM's allow me to get results quicker, for example over Christmas I replaced my Pioneer stereo with a new custom motherboard, re-using the class AB analog parts and all the switches and the VFD Display. LLM helped me do it a lot quicker and gave me a couple of novel options, write up here => https://rodyne.com/?p=3380
im imagining if you had a couple parts picked, an llm could follow the reference designs quite well and pick relevant parts and lay them out.
maybe not in the best way, but from a post here last week or so, somebody has written an altium mcp, from which i assume a bunch of the timing and capacitor checks could be run.
maybe not anything particularly high tech, but enough to let mechanical engineers put together test boards without needing to get too far into the electrical discipline
The answer to whatever perceived (unfounded) overlap between gun owners to potential ICE agents is not to encourage or condone more prejudice and ostracization of the people who do not fall in both categories via speech that lumps them in with the others anyway.
That's a very disrespectful way to recognize and appreciate them.
I’m sure there is more overlap between gun ownership vs non, but I’d argue the overlap from both groups is vanishingly small. Plenty of liberals own guns, and also a lot of people that would not identify as liberal are extremely anti gestapo. Even most of the original MAGAs are not in support of the current state of affairs.
This is a great example, an object lesson in something that is deeply misunderstood.
Running a company and running a government are fundamentally disparate things to the point of one set of skills being antithetical to the other, even though there is overlap in orthogonal skillsets
A company operates to extract value from employees (labor,automation,process, knowledge ) and concentrate and deliver that value to a minority set of individuals. Debts are costs to be paid. Cash surplus is power to act.
A government operates to -deliver- value to its constituents through redistribution of resources towards goals that are inherently cost centres. Debts are confidence in future economic growth and are not really ever paid in any real sense of the term, the monopoly game set doesn’t get richer or poorer when you move money around or print more bills. It only gets richer or poorer when you add or take away players, burn or draw in more properties or utilities, or melt or 3d print more houses and hotels. Cash surplus is useless and counterproductive.
The idea that business leaders will be effective political leaders is catastrophic. There is no more hopeless place to live than a country operated as an efficient and well planned business. At least in the chaos of Mogadishu or Haiti you can find the fetid seeds of opportunity to make something worthwhile, chaos creates pockets of opportunity and ad-hoc fiefdoms. Chaos is a ladder. A well oiled machine is a stifling factory farm, but for people.
Obviously you don’t want Mogadishu or Bechtel as your governance model, but the sweet spot is closer to Mogadishu, at least insofar as mandatory structures determining your life trajectory goes. Mogadishu is closer to a democracy than Bechtel. At least in Mogadishu it’s not a centralised power that threatens your life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness, just your neighbours. It’s at least conceptually transcendable.
Ah, success through lowered expectations! This has been my mantra for the last 40 years, and it has worked surprisingly well. I started out with a New Year’s resolution to not intentionally consume significant quantities of human flesh, and have worked my way up from there.
It may seem ridiculous, but it’s a form of stoicism adjacent philosophy that presumes nominally more control over one’s circumstances, and it has had excellent outcomes for me. Ratchet forward but expect modest clicks and be delighted when something goes right or someone comes through.
Well you know, probably everyone is constantly swallowing some of their own dead skin cells. Nobody's perfect. So I'm not going to feel too guilty when I cheat and buy a human-balogna sandwich every now and then, especially if they're free range.
Yeah, the phrase "significant quantities of" is really throwing the whole comment for an unfortunate loop. Maybe "I choose not to steal any vehicles" or "I choose not to commit fraud" and work up from _there_ instead of somehow trying to faux-normalize cannibalism. Very strange indeed.
Well, I added that after realizing that it wasn’t uncommon to accidentally eat small parts of your mouth, fingertips, things like that in the course of a year, and I was not about to fail in my quest to reject cannibalism for the year. I mean, for me, that would have been a new low.
It’s surprisingly difficult to not eat a little human flesh. People nibble on loose skin and the insides of thier mouth a little, you end up swallowing blood, and there is often a tiny bit of human biomass in processed food.
Ergo the “significant” qualifier. Imagine the sense of defeat to fail in your New Year’s resolution to not resort to cannibalism by years end… so you have to be careful how you define your test case.
If I were a cannibal, it would have been an ambitious resolution, but the whole point was success through low expectations.
But fair enough, people tend to be touchy about people eating people, and rightly so. No way that ends well as a mainstream practice.
I'm assuming this is referencing "taking a pound of flesh" generally meaning to being cruel in demanding what you're owed (from Shakespeare Merchant of Venice). Presumably they're tired of unloading on people for not following thru or contributing. Doesn't seem like the best use here, particularly so indirectly.
Nope, I meant literally not consuming human flesh as food. After years of unsuccessful New Year’s resolutions, I decided to pick one I was sure I could stick to. Success through lowered expectations.
I mean, it is kind of a bit, in a way, but I really did announce to my social group my resolution, about 40 years ago, and I’ve been ratcheting it up gradually ever since. I have kept my public and official New Year’s resolutions for 37 years running. I’m up to “intentional and senseless acts of violence that end in the injury of innocents“.
You may scoff, but senselessness is highly contextually dependent and can easily apply to something that seemed rational under the fog of circumstance. Thats actually not that easy to promise without forsaking the option of violence altogether, which I am not at liberty to do, since I have a family to protect.
It’s a slow, intentional process. I don’t want to risk overreaching. Still, they are worthwhile goals. Low-hanging fruit is still fruit.
The useful thing to me has been to expect little from people and life in general, but a lot of myself. Then be delighted when things go as they should, or when people come through. It’s a contagious positivity masquerading as cynicism, or maybe the other way around, I’m not sure… but it allows me to focus on my role in things, my choices, my actions, and reactions to the external world. It is stoicism adjacent.
The New Year’s resolutions are mostly an advertising campaign for the overall philosophy, really, by promising people easy success in something that is often a struggle, and illuminating the fact that we choose our successes and failures by how we view external circumstances, not so much by the circumstances themselves.
Mmmm…. Not saying us pilots are universally great, but I have definitely seen a significant regression from the mean in many foreign cohorts. I imagine it’s due to fundamental differences in the concept of training. It’s one of the things besides war that fear based societies seem to do better than shame based societies.
There exists a concept called "regression to the mean". I don't think "regression from the mean" means anything.
There is no way pilots form all over the world could "regress to the mean". They could not have been all, or most, "above the mean". The mean would be higher then.
Civilian pilots have to consider that they are flying in heavily congested airspace with 200 passengers in the back. They are not LARPING Chuck Yaeger in the right stuff.
Well, not with that attitude, they aren't. But I've been on some charters where I'm pretty sure that they were, in fact, larping Chuck Yeager. I've seen a solid 2.5-2.8G turns in a 737, as well as some cornea-peeling rotations to max climb. It's kinda funny how things sometimes change when the plane isn't full of paying passengers.
I mean, those are pretty standard maneuvers, up to 4gs or so, in small aircraft, and I used to fly aerobatic frequently... but it just hits different somehow on an aircraft that weighs 70 tons and flexes visibly.
Ah, whistleblowers. Always and forever committing suicide. Turns out thinking you can stab the gorgon with no consequences is a form of mental illness.
What is odd to me is hearing people talk as if somehow a job is supposed to be intrinsically enjoyable or enriching. Paid labor is and always has been a subservient role that pays exactly the minimum that the market allows for the circumstances.
Labor is the next option above slavery and indenture, and now that slavery and indenture are frowned upon, labor has absorbed that space as well.
If you want to have some control of your environment and destiny, you must be an independent agent, a contractor, entrepreneur, or consultant. A tradesman. You have special skills and expertise, your own tools, and a portfolio of masterpieces at the least.
There is nothing new in this space of human endeavour, it is as it has been, and I suspect will continue to be, for better or for worse. Sacrificing your agency for subservience is going to make you feel at the mercy of your “betters”. If you don’t want that, don’t do that. Labor law and other conventions have made it a little better, but the fundamental relationship is still master and servant.
> Labor is the next option above slavery and indenture, and now that slavery and indenture are frowned upon, labor has absorbed that space as well.
If we go down this path, what can I say that doesn’t get my account banned and my speech suppressed for what what I would suggest doing to people with your opinion?
We don’t have to go down that path, it’s the path we’re already on.
It’s not the way I think it -should be- but it is the way that it is. The incentive alignment keeps it at that local minima, and every attempt to move it to a new one so far has introduced so many perverse incentives that it ultimately causes the regression or even complete failure of the economies it is implemented in.
I don’t know what the answer is that maximises human happiness and minimises human misery, but I suspect it lies well outside of the paradigm of conventional market economics.
Within the dominant paradigm, It’s all a matter of risk management. With employment, you are paying your employer with your surplus value to handle the risks that you feel powerless to manage. Market risks, capital risks.
In exchange, you accept risks that your opinions and comfort won’t be prioritised, and in some cases even your physical well being.
In effect, you are betting against yourself being able to balance those risks against the risks posed by pursuing profitability.
The ability to manage risks is intersectional with your ability to manage discomfort and privation. When you run out of money, the house wins by default.
That’s why the foundational step for anyone should be to do whatever they must to obtain a safe fallback position. A place to be. A safety net. This is what enables risk accommodation. Without taking risk, there will be no advancement. If you don’t have a fallback plan, a safe spawn point, do everything in your power to create one, at least for your children.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised how useful it is for writing low level stuff like peripheral drivers on imbedded platforms. It’s actually-simple- stuff, but exactingly technical and detail oriented. It’s interesting that it can work so well, then go wildly off the rails and be impossible to wrestle back on unless you go way back in the context or even start a completely new context and feed in only what is currently relevant (this has become my main strategy)
Still, it’s amazingly good at wrestling the harmony of a bunch of technical details and applying them to a tried and true design paradigm to create an API for new devices or to handle tricky timing, things like that. Until it isn’t and you have to abort the session and build a new one because it has worked itself into some kind of context corner where it obsesses about something that is just wrong or irrelevant.
Still, it’s a solid 2x on production, and my code is arguably more maintainable because I don’t get tempted to be clever or skip clarifying patterns.
There is a level of wholistic complexity that kills it though. The trick is dividing the structure and tasks into self contained components that contain any relevant state within their confines to the maximum practical extent, even if there is a lot of interdependent state going on inside. It’s sort a mod a meta-functional paradigm working with inherently state-centric modules.
The clients can receive synchronisation data every minute and listen for a year on a coin cell. It’s broadcast, so a single beacon node can service hundreds of clients simultaneously.
BLE also can manage data connections over a kilometer and a half with reasonable (not great) antennas.
It’s not terribly fast, but modern radio protocols are opening up the possibilities. Lora and BLE are bringing the environment alive with communication.
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