HackerTrans
TopNewTrendsCommentsPastAskShowJobs

rkangel

7,750 karmajoined há 15 anos

Submissions

An Inside Look at Lego's New Tech-Packed Smart Brick

wired.com
4 points·by rkangel·há 5 meses·0 comments

comments

rkangel
·anteontem·discuss
> has become highly stigmatized in society

When making claims like this, please remember that this is a very international group of people and scope your point appropriately: "has become highly stigmatized in the US"

This is not a problem in large parts of Europe (can't comment about elsewhere). The reason this scoping is important is because the solutions are different for "this is a problem in all of society" compared to "this is a problem in the US".
rkangel
·há 3 dias·discuss
I don't think it's too bad, but I also don't think it's good.

I also don't think Andrew can claim at the end "I actually don't have any personal criticisms of Jarred" when the post includes the sentence "Jarred was already writing slop well before he had access to LLMs".
rkangel
·há 9 dias·discuss
The big thing for me is that the lifetime of a car is a lot longer than the technology development lifecycle.

I just bought a 10 year old Toyota estate (station wagon). It's got a reasonable screen and Bluetooth implementation etc. But I'm never going to want to use the built in navigation because it's just not as good as what my phone will do. And the audio integration isn't as sophisticated as it might be - I have to choose the app on my phone.

Whereas CarPlay/AndroidAuto is generic from the car point of view, and as phone features and software improve your car capability evolves too.
rkangel
·há 9 dias·discuss
The Android Auto experience is very smooth and fundamentally exactly the same.
rkangel
·há 10 dias·discuss
I worked in a US office for a while (but with a few other British people as well). I didn't feel the need to edit my sense of humour luckily, but I purposefully switched to saying things like "sidewalk", "elevator" and "bathroom" because it made interactions a lot easier.
rkangel
·há 10 dias·discuss
I believe it's the ISO standard because it is obviously distinguishable from both the MM-DD-YY (US) date order and the DD-MM-YY (UK/EU/Others) date order and so is unambiguous.

https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html

The fact that they are then sortable is a nice side benefit!
rkangel
·há 3 meses·discuss
Claude Code personal or Team: you pay a flat fee

Claude Code Enterprise: you pay per token
rkangel
·há 3 meses·discuss
Keeps saying "no websocket required" like it's a good thing. The JS client (https://github.com/anzellai/sky/blob/main/docs/design/sky-li...) seems to rely on long polling.

Phoenix LiveView (the inspiration) defaults to using WebSockets because it's much more efficent, but falls back to Long polling if not available.
rkangel
·há 3 meses·discuss
IIRC for Enterprise, using /feedback or /bug is an exception to the "we promise not to use your data" agreement.
rkangel
·há 4 meses·discuss
Not all of the functionality is in the firmware though. You can put stuff in the silicon itself that allows backdoors.

It's very difficult to inspect a laid out chip for nefarious elements - there's too much of it to do manually. Having a secure supply chain is probably the best way to prevent that happening.

Which is not to say that I support this rule - it sounds like another import weapon trump can swing against people who aren't his friends.
rkangel
·há 4 meses·discuss
It's a whole lot easier to store the keys in a special hardened location than it is to store your whole storage.
rkangel
·há 4 meses·discuss
It is VERY different. One company now has complete control of the activities of the team developing these tools. Contributing to Python (money or time) gets you some influence, but doesn't allow you to dictate anything - there's still a team making the decisions.
rkangel
·há 4 meses·discuss
I'm amazed no-one has used the term "Regulatory Drawbridge". It's a classic thing that happens in a number of industries - the big players push for more and more regulation. It costs them money and time, but it makes a massive barrier for new incumbents who don't have the cashflow and manpower to work through the regulatory process.

Medicine is the classic example, but it's happening in the tech industry too. The FAANGs of the world took advantage of an unregulated landscape, but now that they're in the castle they're pulling up the drawbridge behind them.

(sidenote - this is why regulation like the Digital Markets Act in the EU should be great. It's only a cost to larger businesses. In practice we're not yet seeing the changes that it should create).
rkangel
·há 4 meses·discuss
> Assuming that we're talking about a unit test here

I think the categorisation of tests is sometimes counterproductive and moves the discussion away from what's important: What groups of tests do I need in order to be confident that my code works in the real world?

I want to be confident that my code doesn't have race conditions in it. This isn't easy to do, but it's something I want. If that's the case then your unit test might pass sometimes and fail sometimes, but your CI run should always be red because the race test (however it works) is failing.

This is also hints at a limitation of unit tests, and why we shouldn't be over-reliant on them - often unit tests won't show a race. In my experience, it's two independent modules interacting that causes the race. The same can be true with a memory bug caused by a mismatch in passing of ownership and who should be freeing, or any of the other issues caused by interactions between modules.
rkangel
·há 4 meses·discuss
What you're describing is the every day reality but what you WANT is that if your implementation has a race condition, then you want a test that 100% of the time detects that there is a race condition (rather than 1% of the time).
rkangel
·há 4 meses·discuss
Your logic is circular though. You are saying that there won't be much speedup for the sort of things people already do in WASM - but the reason they're doing them in WASM is because they're not slowed down too much.

What you don't get much is people doing standard SPA DOM manipulation apps in WASM (e.g. the TodoMVC that they benchmarked) because the slowdown is large. By fixing that performance issue you enable new usecases.
rkangel
·há 4 meses·discuss
If I missed with tone, that's on me. I was going for "helpful constructive feedback".
rkangel
·há 4 meses·discuss
Are you aware that your Github README doesn't actually tell us anything about Roc is or why we might be interested?

This might be on purpose given the first words are "Work in progress" and "not ready for release", but linking as above does lose some value.
rkangel
·há 4 meses·discuss
The tolerance for interference fit ("clutch power" in Lego terminology) is important, but that's fairly simple. It's the cumulative tolerance when you assemble large structures that's important. Knockoff bricks can be fine for the first few you assemble, and then as the structure gets larger things don't quite fit together.

Also interesting is that in very large models, there is decoupling between sections. Lego has design rules for how large a well connected chunk of Lego can be, which are driven by the tolerances. Above that you are then loosely coupling those large "chunks".
rkangel
·há 4 meses·discuss
I agree, it doesn't say a lot. It also very confidently specifies a series of tolerances with no citations.

Lego does indeed have very tight tolerance, but I don't know if the numbers are in the public domain.