kreelman

Indeed. I worked there for about 4.5 years, initially on the clinical programming software (the software that makes it as easy as possible for a clinician to setup various channel levels for the hearing part of the device and how they map to electrodes). It was a fair bit of fun doing it.

I ended up wanting a change and went and worked on the TIKI (Totally Implantable Cochlear (K?) Implant). During that time, Cochlear ran into some profit problems (circa 2000 ish?) and they did the redundancy thing for nearly everyone on the TIKI project. That was my first redundancy..

A TIKI device was eventually implanted in a volunteer subject. It was found to hear too much body/blood flow noise and was deemed unsuccessful. The device was made to operate as a normal implant as well, so they simply got an external speech processor and they were able to hear.

It would be interesting to hear how and how well Med-El managed to filter out the body noise from the internal device.

Often, engineering in Australia is hard to come by. We're a small nation in terms of population. If you've got a great idea and you have good people, you can still go far. Cochlear is one example. Resmed is the other Australian medical device success story. There are failure stories too like the Telectronics pacemaker whose wire insulation perished over time...

I'm really hoping QSAT (https://qsat.au/) will be another Australian success story. QSAT have a very neat satellite ground based comms system that can track and communicate with multiple satellites simultaneously. It's derived from the CSIRO phased array project. Unfortunately CSIRO looks like it's fading away. It is also harder for QSAT (probably most Oz startups?) to find startup capital in Oz. In the US you can pick up 0.5Mill of the side of the road....

I really do wish QSAT well. They have an innovative product and excellent people working on it.

Is this whole article (the article in this Hacker News post, to be clear) an example of

   "Correlation is not causation"  ?

It indeed is very worth being very clear about the limited data that makes the images. It is also very cool. ..Nothing to add, simply echoing your sentiment :-)

It's quite a lot of fun to make guitar like noises and adjust the various parameters...

Air Guitar players unite!!!!

Poor old America.

I think you'll need to wait for the Orange Toddler to pass away before you can get anywhere with reinstating environmental checks and balances.

Even then you'll need to contend with large corporations with buckets of money... and the Republican party...

If I create a view of a table containing JSON data (or any other kind of data), I can create columns from calculations on existing fields.

I'm guessing the advantage of generated columns is that they are real columns, not computed columns like in a view. This means that if an insert doesn't work with the new generated column an error will be generated? Is that a correct understanding ?

Is this perhaps the main advantage of this feature ?

The data creation and storage options, always computed or stored on write of dependant columns seems like a possible advantage too.

Agree!

He has some great videos. I watched this one and was impressed at the calculations, the transparency and the celebration at the end when he reached supersonic speeds.

Amazing, you can play chess on an emulated system built in the '90s from technological "mud and straw".

It's an amazing feat of teenage engineering.

I hope you have a job working with code somewhere!

Gracias!

It looks interesting.

Isn't the same kind of thing available from LLVM?

  clang -emit-llvm -c main.c -o - | lli

Here's the CH32v003, https://github.com/openwch/ch32v003 These are pretty low end and are fairly available at low cost. Here's a youtube of someone talking through some of the the CH32 boards, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kss6WQvJbRs

He talks about them being the "10c/chip" chip.

Then, there is the CH32v303 https://www.wch-ic.com/products/CH32V303.html, which is the lower end of the chips that support minimal floating point and USB host/client. These ones are a bit more pricey, https://www.lcsc.com/product-detail/C5456849.html at $US1.72 each. The extra price is QFP64 (64 pins, quad flat pack) and more features on the chip, USB, CAN, V4F extension giving one instruction multiply and some floating point operations.

Note that the fact that this chip uses an extension, V4F, for floating point (I think?) is part of the argument of Dmitry's piece on the RISC-V. The chip is pretty low price for a fair bit of power.

With missteps and imperial arrogance in Iran and Ukraine, perhaps the world might not be counting on the US as much militarily either?

"An army marches on its stomach"... If things at most soldiers homes aren't as good as they could easily be (financial prospects, opportunities..), maybe they don't have the same drive to fight with the same vision and discipline as they used to? I hope they will employ good vision and discipline.

Science is gradually getting gutted too...

Vale Elise.

Glad you'll get to watch them.

RV Jones was pretty incredible. From the interviews you get a bit of a picture of his initial attempts at getting his points across. He was persistent and knowledgeable.

Indeed, it's a shame that war brought us so many advances...

Ah, thanks. As I think about it, you're right. There was a Lorentz landing system in bombers that was far too accurate for just landing. Intelligence gathering extracted that from the crew's conversations. That was how they hid their direction finding... But the system already existed.

I think I got confused with radar, but radar isn't beams as such.

This is such a fascinating piece of history.

I've always been very interested in the developments that occurred in WW2. I think The "Battle of the Beams" is one development that gave us the basis for what we use so much now in general aviation.

The BBC series "The Secret War" is a fantastic series that pulls apart how these discoveries were made. It has a lovely 1970s vibe to it and is very well narrated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkCW4g8It_A&list=PLV7OedKrXD...

Interesting to realise that the cavity magnetron, providing higher resolution radar, was invented by the British and gifted to the United States. I believe the Germans researched it, but decided it was impossible. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this though.

If you watch "Greyhound", the tools that sunk the U-boats were British inventions, hedgehog and ASDIC. HuffDuff (High Frequency Direction Finding) is mentioned I think in the movie? It was made by a Polish engineer working for the British. Amazing that the Kriegsmarine didn't work out that their mandatory reporting schedule was sinking their U boats. With such a collection of defenses combined with doctrine changes for attacking U boat swarms, no wonder the U-Boat losses became so huge.

WW2 changed the world and brought us forward so much in terms of technology. Fascinating stuff.

It's a great place to explore the physics of it all, since the tools used were sometimes elementary (X-Ray machines to baffle direction beams).

Reginald Jones changed the world. Thanks hi_hi for the links.

G'day Mattheus, Was fun to see some of the things I find fascinating causing fascination in others. I'm a bit of a Common Lisp tragic and I also love the APE setup and using llava files to run local LLMs.... Even on tragically old servers! Hope things go well. Thanks for doing the interview. I'll look into Lone Lisp. Cheers

Climbing up on a soap box....

I'd really like it if the United States could very soon get rid of or at the very least eventually vote out Donald Trump.

The Nature article points to the MOF Nobel prize winner going to China. I gather this is because science is getting defunded in the US? I think defunding science shows an incredibly short term view and damages the future for the world, starting with America.

Have a look at this video by the Australian Economics professor, Justin Wolfers, working in the US, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkUEVl8uamM

I know there are problems with the US democracy that have been in play for decades. There is inequality, there is racism and religious bias... I think throwing out the entire system that largely worked doesn't solve these problems and in fact makes the future worse for our kids. The video above argues that the damage done now to universities will be noticeable in decades time. Even doing a large funding push to universities may not fully repair the damage being done now.

The US is not a perfect place nor a perfect actor, but when governed reasonably I think it is better than China in terms of its aims, philosophies and interactions. Hopefully his work done in China will be shared globally.

That is an option, but it's not free.

I've heard it said that growing crystals in gravity is tricky... If we could do this in space, gravity free, we could get better crystals.

Is that correct? Pardon for asking a bit of a question to your comment. I don't know too much about growing crystals for things like jet engine blades.

I'm using Chromium on Linux and getting the same error.

I'll come back here later and hopefully the answer fairy will give us a gift of some info on how to fix this...

...Confusingly, the error looks/seems like something to do with the server... But I'm all at sea with this one....

This site is vaguely addictive in a dopamine feeding sense. What will the next image be? ...One more click won't hurt... :-)

...I can't work out what this is.

Thanks so much for being bold enough to be fairly open about the costs, how you arrange billing and the advantages that's given you.

I've been fooling around with DeepSeek 4 agentically. It's probably not as good as Anthropic offerings, but even those seem to be roiled in politics and strife and DeepSeek 4 is very good IMHO. I'll later try out GLM.

I'm in Australia. The government has set up a "return and earn" scheme to keep aluminium cans, plastic bottles and paper drink cartons out of the waste stream. A laudable project. The money you make from return drink containers is pretty low, $AU 0.1 per container. I've participated to get the rubbish out of natural water streams and to make a nano amount of money on the side.

When I looked at the costs of an app I was getting DeepSeek to help me with, I realised that the several hours I'd spent learning and building had cost something like 8 recycled containers. In my head after doing some DeepSeek stuff, I calculate a "cans per app" metric for myself for fun. I may even setup a simple graph to view my costs that way.

I kind of hope the Anthropics of the world get enough price competition from sources like DeepSeek and GLM to drop their prices significantly. Time will tell.

I'm using the Chinese DeepSeek provider, so everything done there could potentially be taken and used by the CCP... But this is hobbyist learning.

There is probably a market for Deepseek/GLM served from non CCP available servers. I might even look into how hard that would be to setup here.

I also hope that inference focused hardware will come to the fore, reducing energy use and cost. Realistically this will take time though, on the order of years.

Here in Oz, we have community batteries that community members can charge and later draw from. Their electricity prices are competitive. I wonder if someone could setup something like a community battery to run data centres... That way reasonable environmental consideration could be given to inference power generation... This might not work in a market like the US or Europe, but small market size might be an advantage... Who knows.

When life gets tough...

Contact DARPA for a lift !

At the end of Dune.... Chani is heartbroken... Needing to get away...

   Oh I'm a leavin' on a Shai-hulud
   Don't know when I'll be back again..

Tah for that.

What is post-ZIRP please :-) ?

TLDR :-)

This comment is not entirely on point with your comment, it circles around and above it looking for lift though.

If you're not doing work that requires your code to stay in home nation data centres, Claude for Deepseek, Deepclaude (https://github.com/aattaran/deepclaude) is a great way to get better at using Claude like tools for software development. It even does a pretty good job of putting together cover letters for job applications...

Using Deepclaude is very much cheaper than using claude... For hobby projects, I've found it useful. A recipe (for cooking) management app I've made took a couple of hours to put together and cost $US 0.5. Claude is far more expensive.

The downsides of Deepclaude for many are:-

- DeepSeek is a Chinese corporation so the Chinese Communist Party may ask for data if it wants it.

- DeepClaude isn't as fast as normal Claude, though it's still pretty fast and I think fast enough (YMMV).

- DeepClaude might not be as optimised for various code issues that Claude may be able to solve more quickly or effectively.

- The same safeguards are probably on DeepSeek, but you won't be "wasting" as much money as you might on using Claude.

Inference focused hardware (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvPqHoVSenE, AI generated speech) may in the medium future cause a large enough cost/energy reduction for LLM tools like Claude to make local LLMs more attractive.

Inference focused hardware would make running Open Source models like DeepSeek on local machines far cheaper and control over safeguards would return to the end user.

Hopefully this leads to a localised LLM provision market where local businesses provide varieties of these "local" LLM services. Here, local could mean on premise through to state or nationally based LLM services. Eventually, government orgs outside of the US may demand this kind of LLM use, in the same way governments legally require data to be stored within national borders for many critical government functions.

A bloke can dream I guess...

...Could affordable inference focused hardware also cause the bottom to fall out of these stock market bending valuations for AI corps and their datacentre obsessions?... Not to mention the societal costs caused by the AI super corps building these data centres. At the moment, they're nearly making a profit... They seem almost like speculative companies... Is that a term?

The Blaise Pascal compiler uses QBE for it's backend compiler.

https://github.com/graemeg/blaise

Having Blaise work on Windows, could be interesting... Though of course only in the long tail of already built Delphi apps... that still have source.... that are reasonably written... that don't rely on now unsupported libraries...

Hmmm... Ah yes. These may be some of the reasons people might not do Delphi as much anymore. Still, Delphi was great for me and helped me get a mortgage and things like that.

The Blaise author is progressing his development along nicely using QBE for the compiler. To me, Blaise looks like a team progressing things nicely, but I think it's mostly the original author.

Blaise could be a neat Pascal compiler with a great deal of old cruft cleaned out and is quite quick.

I get what you're saying about Gemini for coding and it's useful that you mention it.

I wonder though if Google isn't so worried about the viability of their coding AIs and have a longer term view than simply providing coding aids. This might also be indicated by their recent $40B investment in Anthropic, https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/24/google-to-invest-up-to-40-bi...

...Only time will tell!