TaylorAlexander

Huh. I suppose I meant that if we as a society decide we don’t want them to charge a lot for drugs, an alternative is publicly funded drug research. “Not making drugs” doesn’t strike me as an alternative solution.

Seems like eradicating disease and illness worldwide is a pretty strategic concern for humanity.

I guess it’s like climate change. We can’t beat our neighbors by solving it so who cares, but these feel like things our species is really gonna have to start solving. But maybe we won’t and we will just make life unnecessarily hard for most human beings, when we could be stopping climate change and eradicating AIDS.

Elaborate on “default alternative”? Aren’t there many alternatives? Why is one a default?

To me it seems obvious that the correct solution to this dilemma is to publicly fund all medical research. All other approaches feel like band aids we are forced to implement because we’re simply doing it the wrong way, expecting private companies to pay for public benefit research.

Do you have your code publicly available? I was just discussing with a friend it would be nice to add an optional Ethernet mode to my motor controller, but the limitations of this library or other approaches limit the appeal.

Also, are there any other approaches that might be better and would offer 100meg or even gigabit links with the RP2350? Thanks!

> "all information is public"

Published works, not "all information". It's up to society to decide if we want to prioritize publishers or humanity. I don't believe our restrictive legal regime will persist around the world in perpetuity. It is too harmful to humanity, and someone will break ranks with "harmonization" even if the USA does not.

I disagree that purchasing the book is automatically the “right” thing to do. If someone cannot afford the book, it is my view that society should not expect them to pay. I believe that this view towards knowledge will lead to a wiser society, and we deviate from that path at our peril.

Just to clarify, and it sounds like the answer is yes, this is a problem even with an external 50MHz clock signal?

Hard disagree that it is inherently "mean" to pirate a book regardless of its status. If you can afford to support someone you should, but IMO we should value most of all unrestricted access to knowledge without shame.

Also this book first came out in 1986. One hopes the author is still not dependent on its sales.

I have never had even the slightest luck getting any of the AI services to generate something as specialized as embedded system drivers.

Hah thats right. I did get some parts to try to update the other one you are referring to, but given all my projects it has not made it near the top of the queue yet.

> My hope is that they'll eventually provide a library of ready-made "soft peripherals"

Perhaps they could be more ready-made, but there are loads of official PIO examples that are easy to get started with.

https://github.com/raspberrypi/pico-examples/tree/master/pio

This is very exciting! For the last several years I have been developing a brushless motor driver based on the RP2040 [1]. The driver module can handle up to 53 volts at 30A continuous, 50A peak. I broke the driver out to a separate module recently which is helpful for our farm robot and is also important for driver testing as we improve the design. However this rev seems pretty solid, so I might build a single board low cost integrated single motor driver with the RP2350 soon! With the RP2040 the loop rate was 8khz which is totally fine for big farm robot drive motors, but some high performance drivers with floating point do 50khz loop rate.

My board runs SimpleFOC, and people on the forum have been talking about building a flagship design, but they need support for sensorless control as well as floating point, so if I use the new larger pinout variant of the RP2350 with 8 ADC pins, we can measure three current signals and three bridge voltages to make a nice sensorless driver! It will be a few months before I can have a design ready, but follow the git repo or my twitter profile [2] if you would like to stay up to date!

[1] https://github.com/tlalexander/rp2040-motor-controller

[2] https://twitter.com/TLAlexander

I assume “circuit breakers” is a technical term for some automatic system that is built in to the market to activate if some condition occurs, to alter market behavior.

Thanks for the tip this is wonderful!

Sure but how many millijoules per day is that?

Well in my case, it turns out the benefits of adderall are extremely helpful. I can’t imagine I’m the only one who at 39 years old still had never tried adderall and also struggled with weight loss, who finds the combination of effects beneficial. Meanwhile when I consider ozempic myself instead, I’d get the weight loss but not the focus benefit I’ve sorely needed.

I am really not the type to seek a “weight loss drug” so I don’t know the state of mind of those who do (big fan of the Maintenance Phase podcast!), it just seems to me if people want focus and weight loss at the same time they might want to consider it.

I see some “it’s an amphetamine” like that means it’s obviously bad. But I guess we all know that “glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists” are totally fine, sure. I think I would posit that amphetamines are more well understood, but I’m no expert.

Certainly I could have realized it would lead to weight loss, I just never really thought of it that way. I can’t be the only one, and I am simply surprised it’s not a part of the broader conversation.

Notably I started Adderall this year and so far I’ve lost 20 pounds. I’m surprised everyone is so excited about Ozempic when other drugs can give similar results. I don’t even take a huge dose, just 10mg XR, but it seems to keep my appetite in check.

> Once AI has replicated and replaced all human based thinking, creativity and task, etc

This will never happen.

Well I’d absolutely love to see AI tools to add alt text to images since people can’t seem to be bothered to do it manually. But I assume you mean the post text that comes with the image which, yeah normally people want to have a personal message there!

Yeah certainly.

Speaking of foreign investment I believe the Saudis own a large portion of Twitter (or its debt) which is no less comforting.

I have no data but I speculate that since US companies sell surveillance for money, foreign governments just set up shell companies and buy everything they can. We constantly hear about controversies of these companies selling huge swaths of our data. It would be absurd for foreign governments to ignore this!

Basically our downfall is our unending need for profit which will see us selling ourselves down the river.

EDIT: Fine here is some data. "Each Facebook User Is Monitored by Thousands of Companies" You're telling me not any one of those companies is likely to be a foreign intelligence agency's shell company?

https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/privacy/each-fac...

I agree with this! I simply find it hard to explain the shortcomings in a way that people accept, and clear examples like this are the best I can do. But you’ve said it nicely.

My sincerest hope is that eating animals becomes less popular over the next hundred years such that killing them for medical needs becomes less acceptable.

tbh I bet plenty of bacon lovers feel bad that a sweet intelligent animal dies to make their meal, and if a perfect copy of bacon could be made without it I bet a good number of them would be happy to switch to it.

Would be nice if a pig didn’t have to die to save a human though. This is not something everyone cares about but some people (like me) do care. Hopefully some day we can advance the technology enough with artificial solutions.

It’s ambiguous with software releases but if someone says “which number is bigger, 7.11 or 7.9?” With no other context, I doubt any human with basic mathematical understanding would provide an incorrect answer. That is not an ambiguous question unless the concept of software releases was specifically introduced in to the conversation.

Worst part about these LLMs is they don’t ask clarifying questions, they just provide false answers.

Cars are vulnerable to attacks on fuel stations, attacks on bridges, dumping a load of nails on the road during rush hour, etc. I’m not sure I’d automatically assume disrupting thousands of car passengers is necessarily harder than disrupting thousands of train passengers.

> AI closing in on general intelligence

That’s what the hype men say, but increasingly I don’t believe it. I read yesterday that most major AI systems cannot correctly answer “which is larger, 7.11 or 7.9?”.

Often I read of these strange examples, and struggle to remember each one or provide accurate examples when people challenge my claims that these systems still have many flaws. And fair enough. I’ve thought about that recently, and I think this is partly due to the fact that intelligence is a complex highly dimensional phenomenon, and failures in artificial systems manifest as all these weird little quirks and strange behaviors and failures and they are honestly hard for me to remember as an interested lay person.

That said, these systems have loads of shortcomings, and in particular they’re not good at learning from small datasets which means they can’t easily generalize to humanoids (for example) doing the millions of little real world tasks humans do. And they can’t serve as general algorithms for all software problems. They work well with text and pretty well with images but I think we will find for a long time to come significant shortcomings that prevent them from really manifesting as a truly general intelligence.

And I don’t know about this quantum stuff but until we actually solve AGI I don’t think we can really say with confidence what it takes to make intelligence function.