Recently, I made an Arduino UNO that I showed to have better switching characteristics than a commercial board. It was a great project to help me understand how seemingly inconsequential routing practices can lead to issues down the line.
Liquid crystal elastomers will most likely never be used in humans because, in order to drive the phase transition (mematic mesogens going from isotopic to anisotropic phase) necessary for macro scale work, the LCE has to be heated well beyond 100C. Even in non-thermal contexts, you need kilovolts to influence a doped bulk LCE. I just don't see it happening.
to be fair, the approach is usually covered in snowpack for most of the year, so impact is minimal by foot traffic. However, most of the protection is fixed, which could have lasting effects if something were to rip out.
For other mountains with dry summits in the summers, I would agree: the effects of erosion are frightening
Today I scheduled a dentist appointment over the phone with an LLM. At the end of the call, I prompted it with various math problems, all of which it answered before politely reminding me that it would prefer to help me with "all things dental."
It did get me thinking the extent to which I could bypass the original prompt and use someone else's tokens for free.
What do you see as the bad part of this? That the user is trying to farm points by copying patterns of upvote-winning users, or that there's a flood of inauthentic new users? Genuinely asking.
I suppose that's why the harpejji [0] has recently gained popularity? I too have wished for an isomorphic keyboard. All of the non-stacked ones become either too wide or the keys become too skinny. Example: Dodeka Keyboard [1]. I know that the Lumatone [2] exists too, but it is too progressive for my taste :)
As a side note, the traditional keyboard size is not representative of the average pianist's hand size. David Steinbuhler [3] has been making modified traditional keyboard layouts
by varying the width of the keys slightly, and people rave about it. I've had the chance to visit his shop in Titusville, Pennsylvania, where he designs them. It's a totally enhanced playing experience, even for someone like me who can play a 10th without difficulty.
This is orders of magnitude more complicated and risk prone than wire wrapping due to the possibility of cold joints, but as I understand it, this look is what people dig these days (just watch any EE youtuber). I too used to think that soldering on porto board was a great way to go about prototyping sans SBB, but you can't ignore the bomber connections that wire wrapping gives you.
I'm curious as to what kind of control stack Waymo uses for their vehicles. Obviously their perception stack has to be based off of trained models, but I'm curious if their controllers have any formal guarantees under certain conditions, and if the child walking out was within that formal set of parameters (e.g. velocity, distance to obstacle) or if it violated that, making their control stack switch to some other "panic" controller.
This will continue to be the debate—whether human performance would have exceeded that of the autonomous system.
Had a similar thought today while marking up pdfs with my iPad. Half of the time I'm fighting with Files' ability to persist my changes after it frequently crashes. Why market it as an iPad if marking up pdfs is so scuffed? this has been happening for years, it's like Apple's desire to add new features tops the desire to fix long lived bugs.
I guess that explains why they had no qualms shutting down half of Boulder's power with a vague time horizon. After losing everything in my fridge, though, they finally turned it back on today.
I highly recommend looking into Marc's work [0]. I would say he's on the sharp end of lithography for microrobotics. As soft lithography catches on more, work like his will become only more common to see.
When searching for podcasts that interview researchers I'd like to hear about, I often have to scroll past many AI-ingested arxiv summaries before finding what I'm looking for. It's not inherently bad to have those TTS summaries, but they should reside in their own place rather than the general podcast space.