robotguy · HackerTrans

w zeszłym miesiącudiscuss

>The Best Engineers Write Less Code

That's because they are designing circuits. EE FTW!

2 miesiące temudiscuss

I love using analog meters in digital projects. Here's a few different places I've used them.

Minecraft Server Meter:

https://imgur.com/a/minecraft-server-meter-QHpVbY1

Mini Model of a Minicomputer:

https://imgur.com/a/mini-model-of-minicomputer-UTaqI0i

https://imgur.com/a/erniac-u9YVa7K

robotguy

2 miesiące temudiscuss

The Long Run by Daniel Keys Moran takes place in 2069 but was written in 1989 and the tech still holds up decently (to me at least). Sort of a Snow Crash vibe but less satire. AI's exist on the network (called the Crystal Wind) but haven't taken over or anything. Many Players (hackers) use "Image" software that are essentially AI agents.

robotguy

2 miesiące temudiscuss

[dead]

robotguy

2 miesiące temudiscuss

This is pretty much the plot of the Daemon book series by Daniel Suarez. I always thought this series was a decent example of starting with somewhat realistic tech (well, maybe realistic to a non-expert like me) and extrapolating it exponentially. I'm going to need to read the series again because I'm guessing what I would consider "realistic" extends quite a bit further into the plot than it did 20 years ago.

robotguy

3 miesiące temudiscuss

I grew up in the boonies back in the 80's. The only real contact I had with juggling was probably cartoons like described above. I really wanted to learn though and would walk around the woods for hours trying to juggle oak galls in that "circle style" only able to keep it up for a few seconds at a time.

My first day at college, before classes started, I was in the dorms. Everyone was getting to know each other, and I saw someone juggling the right way. It instantly clicked. All the hand-eye practice the 'wrong' way actually helped. That's why I always tell people that the first thing I learned in college was how to juggle.

robotguy

4 miesiące temudiscuss

That's the philosophy behind Safety Third.

robotguy

5 miesięcy temudiscuss

> it can say that it’s a controller and it will give the bus address to talk to and a polling rate.

Many moons ago (over 25 years) I was an EE hobbyist working with an inventor, working adjacent to a major game controller manufacturer. The controllers I was prototyping weren't getting polled by the OS. I was just using the USB HID Class and sending "Button Up" and "Button Down" messages using Interrupt Transfers. Are game controllers using Isochronous transfer now or is there some other method that's developed in the last quarter century?

robotguy

6 miesięcy temudiscuss

I was under the impression that Core War was pretty much a solved problem with multiple optimal warrior types in a rock-paper-scissors circular dominance. I have been somewhat interested in Core War for decades now, but I admit I haven't done any real deep dives into the history/evolution of the game. Does anyone have any suggested reading on how Core Warriors have progressed over the years and what the current status is? I follow /r/corewar but it seems pretty dead.

I am currently working on my own ALife simulation partly because of my (possibly mistaken) belief that progress on Core War had dead-ended. Discovering that there may still be more to do in this realm with Core War probably won't stop me working on my project, but I'd be interested to hear what is still going on.

robotguy

7 miesięcy temudiscuss

I’m learning git and it’s on a private GitHub, but since I’m not a “real” programmer, I’m a bit reticent to make it public.

robotguy

7 miesięcy temudiscuss

I'm working on Mutacortechs, an ALife simulation where "organisms" each have their own emulated 16-bit processor with 64K RAM. Like Core Wars for the 21st century. It's a small project compared to what some others here are working on, but it's an order of magnitude larger than anything this embedded EE has ever written. I have the ISA designed, assembler complete, emulator stage 1 complete (160/204 instructions implemented), and the start of the simulation working. Last night I wrote a program in custom assembly for an "organism" that looked around, found food, moved toward it, and ate it. I'm pretty excited by the milestone!

robotguy

7 miesięcy temudiscuss

I mean, this is the ultimate domain for Quantum Computers:

"Is it odd or Even?"

"YES"

robotguy

7 miesięcy temudiscuss

They're called "processing tomatoes" and it's a very interesting crop and industry. Bred for a narrow ripening window, to be machine harvestable, and shippable in massive bulk.

https://ctga.org/tomato-facts/

robotguy

7 miesięcy temudiscuss

If you're reading this far down this comment chain, you might find this interesting:

  The paperclip maximizer is a thought experiment described by Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom in 2003. It illustrates the existential risk that an artificial general intelligence may pose to human beings were it to be successfully designed to pursue even seemingly harmless goals and the necessity of incorporating machine ethics into artificial intelligence design. The scenario describes an advanced artificial intelligence tasked with manufacturing paperclips. If such a machine were not programmed to value living beings, then given enough power over its environment, it would try to turn all matter in the universe, including living beings, into paperclips or machines that manufacture further paperclips.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instrumental_convergence

Universal Paperclips (2017) - https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/

robotguy

8 miesięcy temudiscuss

>What's with the entire dev board crammed in there? Is that... normal?

Yep. I designed boards for cameras like this (and the vehicles they are mounted on) for 20 years. When you're only going to sell ~30 a year, and it's going into a $7k enclosure, the extra $7 for the dev board you used during prototyping isn't even a consideration. Go ahead and design around the breadboard, at this low volume it's WAY cheaper than the time to re-design the support circuitry from scratch and it gives you time to start working on the NEXT project that has already been sold to customers with a delivery date quickly looming.

Many times I have heard the tech stack for the subsea industry called "Shop & Glue."

robotguy

8 miesięcy temudiscuss

Here's the chance for the Basic Stamp to make a comeback!

robotguy

8 miesięcy temudiscuss

Not affiliated, just thought it was a neat idea when I stumbled upon it during some hobby weather research last year:

ForecastAdvisor will show you the accuracy of the major weather forecasters, including AerisWeather, Foreca, Microsoft, the National Weather Service, OpenWeather, The Weather Channel, Wetter.com, WeatherBit, World Weather Online, and others. They also provide links to your city's weather forecast from all the other weather forecasters, so you can compare for yourself.

https://www.forecastadvisor.com/

robotguy

9 miesięcy temudiscuss

For anyone (like me) who likes their sci-fi fun and a bit cheesy I have a few recs:

Dream Park - Larry Niven & Steven Barnes: A group of pretend adventurers suit up for a campaign called "The South Seas Treasure Game." As in the early Role Playing Games, there are Dungeon Masters, warriors, magicians, and thieves. The difference? At Dream Park, a futuristic fantasy theme park full of holographic attractions and the latest in VR technology, they play in an artificial enclosure that has been enhanced with special effects, holograms, actors, and a clever storyline. The players get as close as possible to truly living their adventure. All's fun and games until a Park security guard is murdered, a valuable research property is stolen, and all evidence points to someone inside the game. The park's head of security, Alex Griffin, joins the game to find the killer, but finds new meaning in the games he helps keep alive.

The Long Run - Daniel Keys Moran: Years after the massacre of the Castanaveras genies, Peaceforcer Elite Commander Mohammed Vance still searches for the survivors. Now the gene-altered children have come of age. Denice – the world’s most powerful telepath – and Trent the Uncatchable – hacker, thief, and revolutionary – are about to come out of hiding. The world will never be the same. (It's book 2 in the series, but I'd recommend this as a stand-alone, or starting here.)

robotguy

9 miesięcy temudiscuss

There's some really neat stuff that can be done with automation and Custom Super Generators. I call this one "Frequency Drift": https://mynoise.net/superGenerator.php?g1=custom.php%3Fc%3D1...

robotguy

9 miesięcy temudiscuss

As someone who was on the product team for a 6000msw video camera, it's probably not filled with mineral oil. I doubt anyone makes subsea camera bodies/optics completely from scratch, and off-the-shelf units are not designed for pressure. In ours we used Sony camera internals, the enclosure was atmospheric, filled with dry nitrogen to reduce condensation, and the sapphire lens was designed to resist 12500psi and reduce distortion from the air-->sapphire-->seawater interface.

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