More like, “the unmeasurable” or “unmodelable”. Examples could be the “A” in the Arrhenius equation or the “k” in Fourier’s law of conduction.
“A” is described as being derived from the collision frequency of molecules in that specific reaction but really it’s just an arbitrary magic number you look up in a book for the specific reaction that you’re working with. It’s often relatively temperature invariant across some range of temperatures but go outside that range and it becomes a function of temperature too.
Pulling up the wikipedia for “Collision theory” will show you that there has been some work to derive values of A rather than just find them all experimentally for every reaction. But it’s still very unsatisfying to the curious mind.
“k” is the thermal conductivity of a particular material. Curious minds might wonder what’s hidden behind this constant. How would someone predict “k” for a novel theoretical material? Like, say, tetrahedrane?
It’s been awhile, otherwise I’d walk you through a graph containing a couple hierarchical nodes where one constant leads to another equation. But it’s a bit too late to pour through Perry’s Handbook right now to jog my memory.
As a chemical engineer, one of the signs of maturity was myself and each of my classmates individually coming to accept and embrace the inevitable “magic coefficient”.
The curious always wanted to know why some magic coefficient was there. Where did it come from? How is it measured / calculated? How to derive the magic coefficient?
Eventually you learn that it’s turtles all the down. You can pick apart the magic coefficient and dive into the nuanced physics that its derived from…but then you still end up with a new magic coefficient.
So eventually, the curious students learn that the mysteries are out there for when you want to go out and explore them. But otherwise, we pick our level of abstraction for the problem we’re currently working on and accept the magic coefficients that apply to that level of abstraction.
The real trick is knowing the conditional boundaries when those magic coefficients no longed apply and you either need different ones or “here be dragons”.
Domestically it would seem difficult to balance "anti-involution" and "anti-trust". I think American consumers might enjoy some additional worker protections, but would also likely complain about paying artificially high prices.
China is just exercising its oligopolistic power over many of its export categories. Now that China has finally achieved >50% of global manufacturing, they are shifting towards raising prices and extracting as much value as they can from the nations they export to.
Ah indeed, I misremembered. That is also a very similar compound, identical structure but more saturated carbon bonds (non-aromatic ring). It's always delightfully silly to get your own correction corrected!
Experienced humans can do basic high speed layout without expensive simulation using rules of thumb that worked for them in the past. It’ll be overconstrained and overbuilt, but it will work.
I’m curious if AI’s know enough to do some useful high frequency / data rate layouts without paying for $50,000+ simulation tools.
For hobby stuff, I'd like to create some boards that involve a bit more than the usual MCU. Things like PCIe or USB4 or HDMI. If AI can't do those things for <$2,000 it doesn't make a difference to my life.
At some point the cost makes it irrelevant. If you drive a Bugatti Chiron, you don't care about the price of petrol. Humans or AI, there's not really a difference if the capital costs vastly outweigh the labor costs.
> Hook it up so it can experiment away by itself with tools, provide a end goal and ask it to iterate until it reached it
Those "tools" you throw out so cavalierly cost around $50,000 to $300,000 per annual seat license with all the optional packages needed for 40GHz signals (like Cadence Allegro + Sigrity X Speed / SystemSI). Even if AI could do it it'd be much cheaper ($3-8k) to get someone in China to use their license and knowledge to do it.
What confidence would you have in AI's ability to do 20-40GHz signal routing with good integrity? HDMI + USB4 + USB-C DP AltMode and a bunch of USB4 routing/switching fabric stuff?
You'd probably need some basic custom lens (not crazy $$) that would distort the heck out of the image, but you could correct the shape in software. Given that GP wanted this to be the "low quality / high speed" secondary scanning option, the inevitable loss of quality would be acceptable.
Seeing chromatic aberration on a document scan would be strange, but this is basically how many document scans are created today (using phone camera + software correction). It's just the lens effects from this cheap lens would be a lot worse than what Apple/Samsung/Google can do with their super expensive to design custom lens stacks.
I added several quality-of-life features / UX improvements to a very old game, “Deadlock: Planetary Conquest”[0]
I had no idea how to do any of this. I let GPT-5.5 download Ghidra + MCP connectors, start the project, and do all the work. I gave it my vision and gave it iterative user testing feedback.
Sure. Fentanyl should neither be completely banned from the nation nor easily obtained OTC by anyone. We should keep it available for things like epidurals.
“A” is described as being derived from the collision frequency of molecules in that specific reaction but really it’s just an arbitrary magic number you look up in a book for the specific reaction that you’re working with. It’s often relatively temperature invariant across some range of temperatures but go outside that range and it becomes a function of temperature too.
Pulling up the wikipedia for “Collision theory” will show you that there has been some work to derive values of A rather than just find them all experimentally for every reaction. But it’s still very unsatisfying to the curious mind.
“k” is the thermal conductivity of a particular material. Curious minds might wonder what’s hidden behind this constant. How would someone predict “k” for a novel theoretical material? Like, say, tetrahedrane?
It’s been awhile, otherwise I’d walk you through a graph containing a couple hierarchical nodes where one constant leads to another equation. But it’s a bit too late to pour through Perry’s Handbook right now to jog my memory.