fps-hero

With an open set of weights, fixed seeds and parameters, recorded inputs and feedback loops, the entire AI decision making process is auditable.

It also lends itself nicely for the ability to adjust the AI systems when deficiencies are found. You can tweak the AI systems to align itself with the desired output, and check for regressions, much like tests in a codebase.

Human decision-making lacks this thoroughness. I’ve scarcely come across rigorous documentation of decisions and how they were reached professionally.

A lot of the conversations around AI in the past years have been “we will delegate almost all work to AI, but the most decisions will be left to humans.”

I’m fairly confident that the opposite will be true. The most important decisions will be made by AI, and humans will only be left to guide decisions as a matter of taste. AI has the ability to be impartial, and immutable. You can endlessly probe and reason its decisions.

This isn’t true of our current human decisions. Where we see red tape, bureaucracy, rent seeking, status quo. AI will see through these human constructs.

I do like the idea that we will need more mathematicians, physicists, and scientists to understand the discoveries of AI. That might be the best possible outcome of AI, but I fear the opposite and we are painting ourselves into a corner of which we no longer have the knowledge to sustain ourselves and society itself collapses.

You can patent a black mirror episode?

Small business, but basically everyone gets a card. We do not have a procurement department, so we are responsible for our spending. The card is in our name so we would be legally responsible for any purchases made using it.

It helps reconcile purchases orders, and on the accounting side for purchases that aren’t directly attributable to something we track in the ERP.

The dangerous part is effectively it’s tied to virtually unlimited credit without oversight, but it’s a serious criminal offence to miss use it so no one is going to purposely use it for personal expenses (embezzlement/fraud).

It hasn’t provided direct URLs for decades? Not exactly new behaviour.

I’ve got something that will blow your mind. Google now has tracking analytics, for get this, your business’s phone number. Some “Adsense partner” convinced our web admin to install a little script which changes your phone number on your website so they track phone call enquires back to search engine leads / advertising spend.

Yeah no thanks, that was creepy as hell and had it rolled back ASAP. You’ve got to realise the power these tech companies hold over your business. Don’t show up in the search results, someone lists your business as closed in maps, a tracking phone number goes dead so they can’t call you, you might as well have shut up shop and ceased to exist.

I just find this an interesting comment. Having an electrical engineers education, there is this interesting repetition of formula which is unmistakable.

First you learn the physical equations, mostly applied to sound interestingly. Then at some point you learn about transmission line theory and maximum power transfer theory. Lastly, you get introduced to Maxwells equations, and how they produce the phenomena you’ve been learning about for years.

Unfortunately that is where my learning stopped, and I never got an answer to how quantum theory resolves with Maxwells equations, and how it interacts with standard model and special/general relativity.

Honestly I’d love an explanation of the standard model that wasn’t covered with mystery and math. It makes the idea of understanding particle physics impossible.

Fellow excited. Sol has been revolutionary for me. It’s been the first time I’ve let a model “go ham” on a production code base and it actually worked, and also didn’t bankrupt my company in the process.

I’m far more excited for the trajectory that OpenAI has chosen. I’ve been listening to mates whose companies adopted Claude wholesale, only for their AI use to become a double digit percentage of their salary.

I get that AI is a force multiplier, but that level of expense isn’t a path to mass adoption.

Honestly, this feels like a real revolution now in a way that 90s kid never really experienced. We grew up with technological progression, we never experienced the obsolescence of skill.

The internet revolution made for more skills and innovation, it didn’t obsolete entire careers. My kids are almost certainly going to grow up knowing less but being capable of more.

Imagine being a 1950s “human calculator” on the dawn of a computer revolution. That’s what it feels like right now.

Tahoe has destroyed macOS performance. I’m running a maxed out last gen intel and was getting stuttering and slide showing straight out of the update. It was completely unusable until I turned on reduced transparency.

Colleagues on much better spec’d M1/2/3 all noted similar, but not quite so drastic, slow downs.

The hugest issue is search appears to be universal broken. Spotlight doesn’t work, finder doesn’t work, email doesn’t work. The other day I had to login to Gmail through the web app for the first time in about 5 years to find an email I knew existed that mail decided didn’t exist.

Insult to injury is the search indexing service appears to be somewhat responsible for slowdowns. It’s right up there with the famous “windows updating in the background” slowdowns.

Look to Australia if you want to see how these energy policies work out in the long run.

Energy is big money. Anything that disrupts the status quo is immediately vilified. It got to the point that our major party at the time lead a “gas fired” green energy policy.

They got voted out, the new guys implemented a subsidised home battery policy. In the space of a year it has destroyed the economics of a carbon fuelled grid. All the economics pointing to renewables being the way forward were proven correct.

Everyone gets their back scratched. If you’re a consumer and you invested, you have a massively discounted personal power station that generates you money. If you operate the grid, your transmission costs and peak transmission costs went down. General consumer prices went down because of a reduction in peak electricity use driving up retail costs. Everyone in won.

Except big gas, who cannot turn a profit on a renewable success story. Don’t let rhetoric become your reality.

Strange statement to say in an article specifically about water, of which both the Kelvin and Celsius derive their scale.

> Pre-merge, this took 5.9 billion uncached input tokens, 690 million output tokens, and 72 billion cached input token reads — around $165,000 at API pricing. By hand, I think this would've taken 3 engineers with full context on the codebase about a year, during which time we wouldn't be able to improve Node.js compatibility, fix bugs, fix security issues or implement new features. We never would've done that. The realistic alternative was to do nothing and keep fixing the bugs at the top of this post forever.

> THE SPINNER MESSAGE CAUSES 100% GPU USAGE ON AN MBP M5!!

One conspiratorial idea I had was that this isn't a bug, and that Codex was actually doing computation on users' hardware under the guise of "thinking". Like Folding@home, or bitcoin mining malware, involuntarily on paying customers. Your usage is being subsidized by your personal compute hardware that you can't take advantage of unless it was being applied at massive scale.

This would make even more sense when you consider that thinking and response time metrics aren't publicly being tracked. There is an assumption that LLM interaction is being processed as fast as possible, but this doesn't align with the reality of fixed hardware and oversubscription. Of course throttling is occurring. So, if you can take advantage of local compute, delay the responses and you have even more access compute!

I find it difficult to believe that given the scale, number of users, and money involved, that someone hasn't fixed this "bug".

People conflate the ideas of happiness, and comfort. Money buys access to increasing levels of comfort, but comfort becomes normalized very quickly. Once you've become accustomed to a certain level of comfort, the luxury of it wears off and it becomes a new norm. You also have an expectation to, at a minimum, maintain wealth so that you don't lose access to your current level of comfort.

When people with 1X see people with 10X or 100X and go hey! Why aren't you doing more? That gives me hope. When these people succeed, they are exactly the type of people who will give back and derive happiness from it. The right person who acquires wealth can do a lot of good in the world.

You've made me do even more digging and now I'm even more confused.

ATMega328P, data sheet specifically calls out using that it cannot represent full range, ADC = VIN * 1024 / VREF. The STM32F4 datasheet shows an idealised transfer function which is mid-tread, but the "actual transfer function" is sort of a shifted mid-tread (lowest code is larger than a single LSB, highest code is VREF and 1/4 LSB). Other STM32 references I found show that it should follow an ideal mid-tread, unless you are using VADC as your voltage reference. High resolution differential input ADCs are, as best as I can tell, always mid-tread with both end codes representing the positive and negative voltage reference.

The best data sheet I've found was for a PIC32, very detailed transfer characteristic diagram. This shows that each LSB is VREF/1024, but also why! The transfer function shows that is is still a mid-tread transfer, but the highest code is assigned to (1023/1024) * VREF, hence the divide by 1024, but it doesn't solve the 1/2LSB end bin problem.

This is different to the ideas presented the article, there is no reason a single ended ADC couldn't use mid-tread quantisation with VREF as the end code. What it does show is that by using divide by 256, you are truncating the range and arbitrarily deciding where the end points should be. This doesn't fix any inherent 1/2LSB quantisation uncertainty, which was the main argument against using divide by 255.

As you say, in ADCs it's a moot point with all of the other sources of error.

This was a genuinely thought provoking article. I had to challenge some personal assumptions.

Coming from an electrical engineering background, I disagree with how the author presented "Two types of quantizers". Mathematically rigorous, but not grounded in practical systems.

In ADCs, there is always an inherent +-1/2 LSB of quantisation uncertainty. The transfer characteristic is always mid-tread sampling, or at least I haven't come across any counter examples. This is true for bipolar or unipolar ADCs.

The lowest code is negative voltage reference, and the highest code the positive reference. The transfer characteristic plot will show what the author has demonstrated, that the highest and lowest bins will effectively be 1/2LSB in width.

In a unipolar system, this has the consequence of not being able to represent the midpoint voltage precisely, or in other words, the gray problem. In a bipolar system, 0V will be mid-tread N/2 value, but that doesn't mean it has "256 ranges".

So, I'll be sticking with (VREF+ - VREV-) * k / (2^N - 1). Or in other words I agree with the normalisation by 255. It's the fence post error all over again, you have N values, but N-1 ranges. If you have less ranges than you do values, you need to distribute 1 of those ranges between two values, hence the 1/2LSB range endpoints.

That’s the mental model that works for people, specifically those that come from VM workflow.

Ironically that’s how Docker works on every platform where it’s running a non-native OS. On macOS that’s how all images are run. Linux on Linux is the only Docker combination that is particularly problematic from a security perspective.

Virtualisation has advanced greatly since docker was introduced, if your running in local hardware that’s supports virtualisation, Docker should be running images fully virtualised. There is no good reason to use the OS kernel for most use cases as the performance impact is negligible. If you need kernel access there are better options, like systemd containers.

I have a wonderful book that explores this idea of an atlas of flavours that work together.

The flavor bible.

I can assure you that it does not contain 1800 ingredients in all of there combinations, but it does a remarkable job of covering a widely used selection of herbs spices vegetables and meats. I doubt a compressed version of the text would even be very large.

The trouble I find with LLM generated recipes is they miss the nuance of the technique. Often the success of a depends on a single step or ratio. For instance “fried chicken” has a million incarnations the world over, but you can’t just average out the recipes and end up with tasty fried chicken.

Well, we finally got to find out what an Apple car would have looked like.

I find it weird today that we are still fascinated by video wall papers.

This was literally my first hack I did in high school in 2005. Doing something I’d never seen done before, a video wallpaper.

Step one, grab a handle to the video memory serving the wall paper. My “game trainer cheats” experience served me well. That was easy.

I had to figure out the hard way that per pixel calculations are extremely CPU taxing, the YUV to RGB video color space conversion. With a pirated Intel compiler I could get the naive blit into memory videy background working.

But then I wondered how other video apps were working so efficiently?

They used a GPU overlay! How it worked is you’d designate a color on your screen as the overlay color, and, when the screen was rendered, any pixel that was the overlay color was swapped with the full screen rendered video. I forget the specifics, it was some directX api. So, set the wallpaper to the hottest hot pink, run the renderer, and bobs your uncle, video wallpaper.

Everyone I showed this to was amazed, I really though I was on to something! Trouble was, I couldn’t get the damn thing to run on other people’s computers!

Little did I know or understand about the dreaded VCruntime redistributable. It wasn’t until 10 years later when I started working in industry I learned about “software distribution”. Linux makes it too easy, windows makes it too hard, static linking everything that isn’t network facing is probably the right approach.

I was so annoyed when Vista had the video wallpaper feature. “Man I was doing this years ago!”.

Tailwind isn't just a framework; it's a design system.

The creators of Tailwind wrote the brilliant book "Refactoring UI" [0], which presents a systematic design system, introducing ideas such a type-scales, color-scales, spacing, and tactics to minimizes the cognitive burden on the designer by forcing design choices. The ideas presented in this book basically are tailwind classes!

When you build with Tailwind, everyone is speaking the same design language, and you end up with harmonious designs, even when components came from different projects or designers.

I disagree with the author's approach. It's basically just copying the utility classes from Tailwind and implementing them in an unergonomic way. Perhaps the best idea is component level CSS which is something that's been enabled by better tooling. I would implore anyone who doesn't really get Tailwind, to read the origin story [1].

[0] https://refactoringui.com/ [1] https://adamwathan.me/css-utility-classes-and-separation-of-...

I think you miss understood the challenge. They are using a 60Msps ADC with a parallel port interface. The challenge is capturing the 600Mbit/s of data and having enough CPU and memory bandwidth to do anything useful with it.

If your microcontroller has a parallel port interface, you would use the clock setup you described. This works, I've done it before, but there was very little CPU left to do anything useful with the data.

It's neat that they used the PIO, its demonstrating how that peripheral fills a niche where you things that might have been impossible without an FPGA, suddenly become doable on a microcontroller.

> But nope, WebRTC has no buffering and renders based on arrival time. Like seriously, timestamps are just suggestions. It’s even more annoying when video enters the picture.

I felt that comment my bones. Why would anyone possibly have the need to know actual presentation timestamp and how that corresponds to actual realtime? Evidently, no one working on WebRTC has had to synchronise data streams from varying sources before with millisecond accuracy.

I was doing a demo for a video stabilisation using a webcam and IMU module in the browser. It turns out the latency between video->rtc->browser and sensor->websocket->browser are wildly different and not constant. The obvious solution would be to send UTC timestamps for the sensors data and synchronise in browser. Not possible, the video has no UTC timestamp reference. When you have control of both sides of the WebRTC pipe, you can do fun things like send the UTC timestamp of the start of the stream, but this won’t solve browser jitter. It worked well enough for a POC but the entire solution had to be reengineered.

I love your reverse psychology analogy. That does make me wonder, if a cap past its SRF is an inductor, and and inductor past its SRF is a cap, why not swap caps for inductors and vice versa, put an amplifier on the end and call it a day!

Loop inductance is what really matters with decoupling. Once you understand that, it becomes really easy to make good decisions. This article explains how you can approximate the inductance for a given layout, so it makes evaluating layouts much simpler. It actually used the data from the paper you referenced in example 3!

https://learnemc.com/estimating-connection-inductance

You can even use mutual inductance of vias improve performance, either by having vias spaced close together and in the right order (https://learnemc.com/decoupling-for-boards-with-widely-space...), or arranging capacitors in alternating or doublet layouts (https://incompliancemag.com/decoupling-capacitor-design-on-p...).

As you say, just having power planes and directly connecting to them is almost always going to be superior to using a trace, despite seeing this all the time, especially in datasheet example layouts. It made sense for 2 layer boards, but not today. Just think, the inductance of the planes is practically zero, and distance to the plane from the components is going to be on the order of 0.2mm, round trip 0.4mm. Is there any way I could place the capacitor 0.4mm away from the pins to achieve an equivalent inductance? And even if you could, you can't add extra vias to lower inductance, and you don't benefit from mutual inductance.

Am I so out of touch?

No! It’s the children who are wrong!

Or simply that Solvespace is a fantastic tool for 2D work? The sketcher is amazing and it has a straight forward workflow for laser cutting. Draw your panel, export to SVG, adjust in Inkscape (cut lines, etches, fills), send to cutter. I'd argue Solvespace is the best free and open source tool for the purpose.

This is exactly what I use it for and I love it. I even use it for front panel decals, not just the laser cut panels. Something about laying out graphics using a CAD tool is really appealing. I need the dimensions tools! I struggle getting things accurately placed using Inkscape.

Another 2D use case is a simple parametric sketch pad. If I need to draw something up quickly and pull measurements, this is the tool I'm reaching for.

It falls down a bit in 3D because unless you're making a very straight forward blocky shape, it's either too cumbersome, or literally impossible to make the geometry you need. If the geometry could be made on a 3-axis CNC, Solvespace should be capable of making it. Anything else, I'm reaching for Fusion360. I've been meaning to give Freecad another crack as the UX seems to finally be getting some priority.

Very interesting! Thanks for sharing.

It’s very frustrating that the tried and true method of sampling comparators has become prohibitively expensive due to niche parts.

I suspected that the ST HRTIMER would be a good candidate for replacing the delay line components, with the benefit of synchronisation for free. Good to see it works!

The diode bridge sampling and verification is the “hard part”. My motivation was for wanting to make a TDR was lack of equipment required to measure the signals required. Ironically, it’s the very equipment you need decent equipment to verify a TDR is working correctly. Most existing designs attempt to replicate old sampling bridges that use exotic unobtainable diodes. If you stray from the tried path, it’s up to you to verify performance, so there is some valuable insight here.

I liked reconstructing the signal using a spectrum analyser, very clever idea.

Did you miss the point of the article? JPEG-XL encoding doesn't rely on quantisation to achieve its performance goals. Its a bit like how GPU shaders use floating point arithmetic internally but output quantised values for the bit depth of the screen.

This would introduce a bias towards countries that are large and have extensive motorway networks. They would appear safer than countries that have a smaller portion of motorway miles.

> If we look at the number of deaths per billion miles driven, we see that motorways are roughly four times safer than urban roads, and more than five times safer than rural roads. This is not specific to the UK: among 24 OECD countries, approximately 5% of road deaths occurred on motorways.5 In almost all countries, it was less than 10%.

I think you have a misunderstanding about the Ethernet standard they are discussing. This isn’t copper Ethernet, its fibre Ethernet standard. Copper Ethernet caps out at 25Gb/s with an impractically short 10 meter cable run.