amirhirsch

I have thought that there is a big opportunity financing components by optioning the sale of overstocked parts ahead of time. For a consumer electronics product that had heavy Q4 sales, my annual sales were entirely dependent on how many chips I could order by October 19, but then I'd have excess stock every January because things are sold in reels of varying sizes.

I’ve been making hardware for 20 years. My highest-volume product was Flybrix, a LEGO drone kit manufactured by Seeed and UniPrecision in China and by Sparqtron in Fremont, California. I’d be happy to work with you on a v2 reboot: Flybrix Swarmz, because every American high school needs a drone swarm.

Beyond that, I’ve worked with many domestic suppliers and built ITAR-controlled products as well. Even without owning the production capacity, if you can offer Net 90 on fabrication and extend credit for components--beyond existing DigiKey, Arrow, Mouser, and vendor credit lines--then I can build products and get paid without putting all the capital at risk upfront.

Factoring is expensive, especially against a purchase order rather than an invoice, and I don’t know of anyone offering working-capital credit based solely on an SBIR award.

Credit is what makes the spice flow.

That paper is in the wiki refs but Hastad’s original is from 1986

There is a beautiful proof of the disjunction between AC0 and NC showing parity cannot be done in AC0 using harmonic analysis of Boolean functions

For those unfamiliar: NC is the class of problems which can be solved in polylogarthmic depth with polynomial number of logic gates. It is unproven if NC != P similar to P != NP.

1. The OP has nothing to do with quantum computers.

2. Quantum computing deals in coherent quantum states: associated with N qubits there are 2^N complex amplitudes. You can measure by sampling the square-magnitude of the complex amplitude which turns it into a Probability Distribution. Quantum computing "gates" cause interference in the complex amplitude of entangled qubits cancelling out incorrect results, such that if you maintain coherence for long enough and sample the final state and measure the probability distribution, you get a computationally useful result. The key challenge in quantum computing is extending the coherence time of a larger and larger number of qubits, which is why you hear so much about quantum error correction. Recent results from Google showed a scaling law for "surface codes" using multiple qubits to create an error-corrected topological qubit with extended lifetime. There is no telling how far this scaling law will go, but as long as Gil Kalai is in the next room, it is unlikely there will be actual useful quantum computation for a while.

The FPGA emulator we made had to pass the xxdp test suite which was provided to me on punched tape and microfiche. The emulator had a specific test for FDIV overflow which even tested the accuracy of the partial result. None of the software emulators I tested did this. I emailed Gordon Bell who introduced me to Bob Supnkk, and we found the original flowcharts for it so I could replicate the divider logic precisely. Imagine a nuclear reactor dependent on this lol.

I built the PDP-11/70 emulator that controls the nuclear reactors in Ontario. That was 20 years ago and I'm probably still the youngest person who can read PDP-11 assembly (and the raw octal)

If your CTO didn't spend the past year making an orchestration tool and a baby is he even qualified?

I have a vibe-coded orchestrator that I use to manage my claude and codex sessions across multiple machines, can also spin up sprites from fly.

https://github.com/tinkerer/propanes

warning: it is probably totally unsuitable for anyone else to use except for me

The main idea is a widget that you embed in your apps that lets you select elements, paste screenshots, and prompt what to change. This workflow is very productive for me. I would encourage everyone to add element selection to their orchestrators prompt composers. If you watch the looms on the readme note that my CLAUDE.MD calls me a Meat Computer and reminds me to hydrate.

I have a native tauri version that lets you select UI elements through the macos accessibility api too.

The session service uses tmux so you can open a native terminal via ssh and tmux attach. I add a ton of features that are in varying degrees of half-baked: the "brainstorm" mode allows you to do microphone transcription while interacting with the DOM and it will suggest tickets automatically. I've also been working on "bd2sdd" which is supposed to take your strings of user inputs and transform it into a spec, presumably because I also desired regressions. There are Wiggums (which aren't relevant anymore with /goal) and "FAFO swarms" (fan-out, aggregate, filter, optimze) which I use to reverse engineer other pieces of software, PowWow for codex and claude to work together.

I stole the structured views and remote session control from my friend's Agent Portal project txcl.io which is more fully-baked and narrower scope than propanes.

The ticketing system / tmux / structured views has been slowly evolving into multi-agent chat with a primary "Chief of Staff." It integrated pretty nicely into Slack.