webdevver

oh come on, who of us didn't go through a power-tripping edge lord phase? i too had a community game server once...

i mean theres kind of no way around it. how else are you gonna get the training data you need? the only way to bootstrap ai is to tag the data with bio-ai first (humans).

different companies 'launder' it differently: with voice, it was done by "accidental" voice assistant activations. i guess with glasses, maybe there will be less window dressing this time. after all, it is clearly pitched to see what you see, at all times of the day.

similar controversy happened with the various roomba products, although arguably that was a combination of data harvesting + lazy engineering.

in the ngspice user manual, they call circuit descriptions an "input deck"

https://ngspice.sourceforge.io/docs/ngspice-manual.pdf

he did a reddit (cringe) and now must be punished for it (the text becomes an absolutely fucking unreadable shade of light grey)

actually, it really is not neccesarily a 'hardware company' thing. ive been in 'hardware companies' where the rtl was just as available for viewing as the rest of the firmware/software.

in big hardware companies, things start getting siloed, but that probably has more to do with big companies (seemingly invariably) operating as a union of fiefdoms (dunbar-number-ification?)

wish oai was publicly traded so i could buy the dip on all this nonsense. the one for musk was super juicy.

absolute truth nuke and the hysteria around it is yet more evidence that HN is a negative signal.

anything HN countersignals, go long on.

TOTAL ALTMAN VICTORY

but doesn't the empirical evidence reject this premise?

if the greatest minds of earth, in their wisdom, have all collectively concluded that the smartest thing for them to do is make as much money as humanly possible, then evidently the greatest calling for mankind is... to be wealthy!

and the older i get the harder it becomes to argue with such a perspective... hmm... maybe i am getting closer to wisdom? haha!

It feels so much better to ask humans a question then the machine

I could not disagree more! With pesky humans, you have all sorts of things to worry about:

- is my question stupid? will they think badly of me if i ask it?

- what if they dont know the answer? did i just inadvertantly make them look stupid?

- the question i have is related to their current work... i hope they dont see me as a threat!

and on and on. asking questions in such a manner as to elicit the answer, without negative externalities, is quite the art form as i'm sure many stack overflow users will tell you. many word orderings trigger a 'latent space' which activates the "umm, why are you even doing this?" with the implication begin "you really are stupid!", totally useless to the question-asker and a much more frustrating time-waster than even the most moralizing LLM.

with LLMs, you don't have to play these 'token games'. you throw your query at it, and irrespective of the word order, word choice, or the nture of the question - it gives you a perfectly neutral response, or at worst politely refuses to answer.

maybe thats what made him so upset

something i have always observed, is how considerate Ted Tso's writing always is, but more than that, how consistent this property has been for so many decades.

its quite funny to me that ext4 very much mirrors him in that regard. its underpinning damn well everything, but you'd never know about it because it works so well.

perhaps the suffering of the printer devs is karmically 'paid back' by the physical suffering of printers around the globe, thus keeping everything in balance.

dealing with an 8051 isn't something I'd inflict even on my worst enemy

surely armed with a C compiler + LLM, this is a non problem nowadays?

to be fair he bought it before chatgpt was released, and it has changed the landscape quite a bit.

the zeitgeist hungers for loanwords

8.3 naming scheme too

some additional thoughts:

i think that, for digital design to be interesting, the cost of entry must be lowered by probably orders upon orders of magnitude.

the google skywaterpdk thing, whatever it is (or was?), did produce a great deal of hobbyist designs and proved that there really isn't anything special about rtl - infact, its really quite monotonous and boring.

which is a good attitude to have, really. lots of hobbyist designs got cranked out quickly on what, as i understood, was a very obsolete pdk from two decades ago.

but its fundamentally still too expensive and too limited. open source software 'blew up' because

1. the cost of entry was free...

2. ...for state of the art tools.

its not enough to be free, or open source. it also has to be competitive. llvm/gcc won the compiler world because they blew the codegen of proprietary compilers out of the water, ofcourse being open source it became a positive feedback loop of lots of expert eyeballs -> better compiler -> more experts look at it -> better compiler -> ...

for digital design to become interesting, you can't trick the kids: they want the same tech the 'big boys' are using. so, what scope is there to make it economical for someone like Intel carving out some space for a no-strings-attached digital design lottery?

i get the impression that, unlike for most manufacturing processes, the costs of silicon digital electronics increases every year, and the amortisation schedule becomes bigger, not smaller.

so if anything, it seems that the more high tech silicon manufacturing becomes, the smaller the pool of players (who have the ever-increasing capital expenditure necessary) becomes, which should indicate that the opportunities for digital design work are actually going to be shrinking as time goes on.

digital circuit design strikes me as a risky gambit for a career, given that almost everyone who ive bumped into in that industry was invariable not actually doing any design, but rather was tasked with writing test cases and verifying the functionality of some specific logical block.

tests are ofcourse very important, but fact of the matter is, bright smart and arrogant young engineers-to-be are very eager to show everyone how much better their version of the 'thing' is, and desperately want to write their version of the thing: they don't want to verify someone else's version of the thing.

if we're being honest, how many people do you really need to do the design of some hardware feature? realistically the design can be done by one person.

so you might have one lead designer, delegates each block to 10 guys, and everything else is basically 'monkey work' of writing up the state machine logic, testing it, and hooking it all up.

and now lets count the number of companies that can put up the capital for tape-out: amd, intel, arm, nvidia, meta, aws, google chips, apple, and lets say plus 50 for fintechs, startups, and other 'smaller' orgs.

so if you want to do design, you might be competing for... lets say 3 lead designers per org on avg, 3 * 50 = 150 silicon design spots for the entire globe. to add, a resource in such scarce supply will no doubt be heavily guarded by its occupants.

i did this calculation back when i was still in uni. i'll never know if it paid off, or if it was even rooted in logic, but i remember thinking to myself back then: "no way in hell am i gonna let these old guys pidgeon hole me into doing monkey work with a promise of future design opportunities." arrogant, yes, but i can't say i regret my decision judging from the anecdotes i get from friends in the hardware world.

"Unalive GNU/Linux"

I've never heard of it doing rm -rf, but apparnetly it did try to launch nethack under certain unknown preprocessor conditions:

https://feross.org/gcc-ownage/?1?1

https://gcc.gnu.org/pipermail/gcc/2002-January/074450.html

replacing phosphor tubes with lcds is a deep spiritual downgrade. probably one of the reasons why we haven't been able to go back to the moon, and why the concorde was decomissioned.

unfortunately having always-on cameras pointing around the house is kind of an arms race. if you don't, someone else will, and their word will be the one that gets taken seriously. so you better have one too!

its kind of like how in videos of altercations, the first thing all parties involved will do nowadays is grab their phones and start recording.

very strange spectacle. both sides know the other won't do anything.

is this done for internal political purposes? someone inside ofcom grinding KPIs or something? ("this month we sent 50% more enforcement notices than last month, we definitely need to expand the budget")

I wish I could share this joy with the people who are fearful about the changes agents are bringing.

The 'fear' is about losing ones livelihood and getting locked out of homeownership and financial security. its not complicated. life is actually largely determined by your access to capital, despite whatever fresh coping strategy the afflicted (and the afflicting) like to peddle.

the quality of life versus capital availability is very non-linear. there is a step-change around the $500k mark where you reach 'orbital velocity', where as long as you dont suffer severe misfortune or make mistakes, you will start accelerating upwards (albeit very slowly.)

under that line, you are constantly having to fight 'gravity'.

basically everyone in tech is openly or quietly aiming to get there, and LLMs have made that trek ever more precarious than before.

there is something to be said about old windows installation CDs being essentially modern-day equivalents of immutable docker layers - i don't think one could say that about modern windows, but then i'm not super clued in into ms stuff.

love software archaeology like this.

there was another article where someone bootstrapped the very first version of gcc that had the i386 backend added to it, and it turns out there was a bug in the codegen. I'll try to find it...

EDIT: Found in, infact there was a HN discussion about an article referencing the original article:

https://miyuki.github.io/2017/10/04/gcc-archaeology-1.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39901290

its kind of fun now, in the 'post crypto' era.

i used to think, well the 'serious' stuff is stocks, PMs, RE, etc., but crypto is a 'shitcoin', a 'gamble'.

but infact, it recently dawned on me, its (almost) the other way around. everything is a 'shitcoin'. your real estate is a 'shitcoin', and can get 'rugged' with crime rates, or tax band shifts, or legislative changes with the sole purpose of winning populist votes. stocks can (and have) been getting rugged. gold got rugged recently (although now recovered.) cash gets rugged with money printing (but everyone already knows that.)

for a long time i felt an implication that there's a 'safe house' for your resources, like in a video game, but at your choosing you can 'leave' the safe house for a risky win. but thinking about it more - that's a very 90s US-centric viewpoint of 'the end of history' - no, you can get absolutely screwed doing the 'right thing', playing 'smart'. you can do your homework and get deep fried anyway.

i'm actually not sure which is more risky: holding bitcoin or real estate. genuinely, which is more dangerous?

very broad extrapolation of the previous two 'cycles'. after a peak, it tends to crash to 20-30% of previous peak value, goes sideways for a year or two, then goes up to 2x its previous peak.

the 'four year cycle' is perhaps moreso the 'US presidential cycle'.

i reckon this time it will touch $30k before hitting new high of $200k