tatjam · HackerTrans

vor 15 Tagendiscuss

You can't use a solar sail for this, but if you use lasers, you can get a few newtons / GW of incident laser power. Sci-fi stuff but if you can make a very very light reflector that can somehow be cooled (microscopic IR dipoles come to mind), and a very very focused and powerful laser, you can go a long way. Not sure what the purpose of moving a thin metalized foil at a fraction of lightspeed would be, though :)

tatjam

vor 21 Tagendiscuss

Galileo already contains this function for the navigation message via OSNMA, and GPS CHIMERA is soon to be operational, with the latter actually including crytographic "signatures" in the spreading code itself, so if you use these two constellations you become really harder to spoof.

Of course, they dont protect against jamming.

tatjam

vor 28 Tagendiscuss

Uranium is not even that rare, it's just that when chemistry fails at separating atoms, you have to use physics, and 3 ~proton~ (EDIT: neutron) masses is very little to work with

tatjam

letzten Monatdiscuss

This is a very cool idea, feels like a sane way to use LLMs in this crazy time! Could be a very good way to break the ice when starting a new project and everything is friction.

tatjam

letzten Monatdiscuss

I'd honestly love to see the PCB. Using an LLM for a mostly geometric task like PCB layout feels like using a hammer to cook a chicken, unless KiCAD has some kind of text-based description language i'm not aware of that gets around having to specify coordinates.

tatjam

letzten Monatdiscuss

Aggh if only its LSP was better! I have always run into issues when using Helix with it (it kept crashing), and I'm absolutely spoiled by good LSPs in other languages :(

Wish I had the time and skill to actually contribute to the LSP, if you have ever used Nim it's a seriously underrated language.

tatjam

vor 2 Monatendiscuss

Welp, I mean once the Rust rewrite is merged, isn't it vibecoded? Fair enough, it was vibecoded from a pretty detailed Zig specification :)

tatjam

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

Precisely, I would say embassy is a satisfying middle-point between "baremetal" firmware and running something like FreeRTOS / NuttX that hides the event loop from you.

tatjam

vor 3 Monatendiscuss

Writing embedded code with an async-aware programming language is wonderful (see Rust's embassy), but wonder how competitive this is when you need to push large quantities of data through a micro controller, I presume this is not suitable for real-time stuff?

tatjam

vor 5 Monatendiscuss

I do agree with this, and in fact I do often use LLMs for for these tasks! I guess my message is more intended towards vibe-only coders (and, I guess, the non-technical higher ups drooling at the idea of never having to hire another developer).

tatjam

vor 5 Monatendiscuss

Would you consider drudgery the in-depth thinking that's required to actually go and write that algorithm, think out all the data ownership relationships, name the variables, think the edge cases for the tests?

For me, the act of sitting down and writing the code is what actually leads to true understanding of the logic, in a similar way to how the only way to understand a mathematical proof is to go trough it. Sure, I'm not doing anything useful by showing that the root of 2 is irrational, but by doing that I gain insights that are otherwise impossible to transfer between two minds.

I believe that coding was one of the few things (among, for example, writing math proofs, or that weird process of crafting something with your hands where the object you are building becomes intimately evident) that get our brains to a higher level of abstraction than normal mammal "survival" thinking. And it makes me very sad to see it thrown out of the window in the name of a productivity that may not even be real.

tatjam

vor 5 Monatendiscuss

Except the cooks don't exist anymore as they all have become head chefs (or changed careers) and the food is being cooked by magical cooking black boxes

tatjam

vor 5 Monatendiscuss

It's perfectly framed in the loss of local-compute autonomy that seems to be the trend nowadays: https://andrewkelley.me/post/renting-is-for-suckers.html

If it wasn't obvious by now, the big capital doesn't really care about open source, hobby coding or small companies.

tatjam

vor 5 Monatendiscuss

Claude, fix the memory leaks, or you'll go to jail!

tatjam

vor 6 Monatendiscuss

Wellll you could technically jam their uplink channels, but doing so may get the US in your doorstep quite quickly

tatjam

vor 6 Monatendiscuss

Confusingly, because it stops the "particle spawning" but not the animation! At first I thought it just changed the background to orange.

tatjam

vor 6 Monatendiscuss

Exactly, for the thing that has been done in Github 10000x times over, LLMs are pretty awesome and they speed up your job significantly (it's arguable if you would be better off using some abstraction already built if that's the case).

But try to do something novel and... they become nearly useless. Not like anything particularly difficult, just something that's so niche it's never been done before. It will most likely hallucinate some methods and call it a day.

As a personal anecdote, I was doing some LTSpice simulations and tried to get Claude Sonnet to write a plot expression to convert reactance to apparent capacitance in an AC sweep. It hallucinated pretty much the entire thing, and got the equation wrong (assumed the source was unit intensity, while LTSpice models AC circuits with unit voltage. This surely is on the internet, but apparently has never been written alongside the need to convert an impedance to capacitance!).

tatjam

vor 7 Monatendiscuss

This kind of stuff could trigger the next revolution in computing, as the theoretical energy consumption of computing is pretty insignificant. Imagine if we could make computers with near-zero energy dissipation! A "solid 3D" computer would then become possible, and Moore's law may keep going until we exhaust the new dimension ;)

tatjam

vor 7 Monatendiscuss

Lean 4 seems to be pretty AI-usable, and you get insane guarantees (but LLM do seem to make very heavy use of "sorry")

tatjam

vor 7 Monatendiscuss

As a quick example, compare doing embedded work with a C static uint8_t[MAX_BUFFER_SIZE] alongside a FreeRTOS semaphore and counter for the number of bytes written, vs using Rust's heapless::Vec<u8, MAX_BUFFER_SIZE>, behind a embassy Mutex.

The first will be a real pain, as you now have 3 global variables, and the second will look pretty much like multi-threaded Rust running on a normal OS, but with some extra logic to handle the buffer growing too big.

You can probably squeeze more performance out of the C code, specially if you know your system in-depth, but (from experience) it's very easy to lose track of the program's state and end up shooting your foot.

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