lambdaone

I'm working on improving my PCB synthesis system; given a KiCad schematic and some extra metadata it can currently lay out and route an entire double-sided PCB with about 50 components in 4 minutes without any human intervention.

I wrote it because I was too lazy to learn how to use KiCad's layout features properly, and thought 'how hard can it be?'. Several months later, I had this.

It's not intended to compete with Altium etc. but it certainly produces compact, valid and fully design-rule-compliant boards with much less work that doing it myself or using one of the low-cost remote labour platforms.

It uses constraint logic programming to solve the hard parts of the problem. Hierarchical decomposition of the circuit design helps reduce combinatorial explosion, which was a show-stopper for early versions of the system. Current indications are that I may be able to scale it further in the longer term to deal with more complex design scenarios and larger boards, without hitting the exponential cliff.

It's the 10% chance they are worried about. Reform is very much the Farage party, and him losing to a bin in their heartland would be catastrophic; he would go from being the presumptive next Prime Minister to a national joke.

Binface, ridiculous though it may seem, is going to be the unity candidate for tactical voting, and that's deadly serious from the point of view of those who wish to get Farage out.

Even if Farage wins, but with a reduced majority, in an election where the alternatives are fringe or novelty candidates, it will be hard for his dignity to recover.

To be fair, we really don't know what counts as smart business attire on Sigma IX.

His birth name, and I believe still his legal name, is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. But he is "commonly known as" Boris Johnson, so that's what can go on the ballot paper, although his full name must still go on the registration documents. Count Binface is in the same situation.

Absolutely. For him the bloat is not a problem; it's a negative externality.

If only there was some way that countries could make international agreements on things...

IP-only != fibre. Try reading my comment above in its entirety. You can also read this for further enlightenment about SOGEA:

https://www.btwholesale.com/products-and-services/data/sogea...

I wish I had a link for the other thing, but it was deep inside some Openreach site that Google don't seem to have access to.

No, it's still sitting on my machine. It was just a quick-and-dirty shim on top of an LLM service, and not worth maintaining. And it ate tokens at an amazing rate updating every character's point of view.

Right now, Openreach are maintaining two entirely different local loop networks, one baseband and other IP. My experience of their PON network is that it's rock solid, and that's clearly where all the effort is going - it's much easier to keep connectivity if you can link your PON headend to the exchange via multiple fibre paths so when street works sever one cable the other keeps working, unlike with legacy copper-to-the-exchange.

They very much want to cut that back to one; big cost savings. And there are eventually going to be (hundreds of?) millions to be made from tearing the copper out from underneath the pavements and selling it, unless copper thieves get there first.

It's half right (the worst sort of right) digital data is carried over ADSL/VDSL as OFDM analog waveforms, albeit with frequencies well above the audio range.

Soon to be repeated in the UK, by the end of January 2027. We've now passed the tipping point where doing telephony end-to-end entirely over IP is cheaper that keeping the baseband analog PSTN going. The main network backbone, of course, has been all-VoIP for years.

It's taken British telcos years to plan for this, and it's been put off a couple of times to deal with practical problems such as situations where you absolutely can't put fiber-to-the-premises in in any reasonable timescale.

This time they really seem to be determined to make it happen, even if it involves bizarro products like SOGEA, and if I recall correctly a sort of exchange-hosted baseband-only single-line DSLAM for the most intractable cases such as elderly people with no access to mains power - but even then it will implement the standard Digital Voice protocols, not the legacy DSLAM stuff.

Even the bus route articles seem to have drawn sufficient reliable-sources attention to merit them being kept. The policy is clear and definitive.

For me the most plausible argument for "quantum consciousness" was made by Roger Penrose. I still don't believe it; we can demonstrate wavefunction collapse using experiments like the delayed-choice quantum eraser without anything conscious being involved (unless you believe in retrocausality or the cosmic conspiracy theory, or in panpsychism, which is really no weirder than the quantum consciousness ideas and also quite fun to contemplate).

I think you'd have great difficulty in doing either, as you are imagining what you think it might be like to be one of these animals are are almost certainly unable to encompass what they might feel it to be like; the case of bats is literally the subject of Thomas Nagel's What Is It Like to Be a Bat?

> Consciousness is the echo chamber of the quantum domain

[citation needed]

What makes this most interesting from my point of view is that this is a specific enough theory that it might be amenable to experimental investigation.

I wrote a text-based adventure game engine that implemented quite a detailed world model. The results were very engaging indeed, but after a time I realised that while its game world was hugely detailed to the point of individual characters having their own simulated thoughts, feelings and world view, the game was quite shallow in terms of conceptual depth - it very successfully rehashed genre cliches, but nothing about it felt new or fresh.

I see it's been nominated for deletion today. Looking at it, it's been marked for attention for two years, so it's not as if people haven't had time to do anything about it.

You can write about whatever you like and put it on the web, just not in Wikipedia for which, as has been said exhaustively above, there are clearly laid out admissions criteria, not just the whims of a "select group". You are entirely free to contribute to articles-for-deletion process yourself.

Wikipedia does not exist to be a soapbox, self-publishing host or advertising medium, and having a Wikipedia article is not a human right.

Actually, I see the article has already been moved to draftspace, so nothing has been lost, except visibility, for which you will have to establish notability; you have six months to work on this before it gets deleted, and you can always go back for as many tries as you like.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Draft:Odin_(programming_langua...

The existence of EverybodyWiki demostrates the usefulness of Wikipedia's restrictions. Nothing is stopping you from either putting up your own website or writing on any of the free-access wikis; the reason people treat Wikipedia as a valuable resource is exactly because it won't publish anything indiscriminately. Having a Wikipedia article is not a right.

"They are maniacal about deleting things that I consider noteworthy but others don't" is exactly the point of the notability policy in the first place.

Otherwise Wikipedia would almost instantly fill up with crap.

The deletion discussion also takes time and consensus, and even then isn't irreversible; you can move the text to draftspace, [1] and try again when you do have proof of notability. Even if the article is deleted before you can respond you can always get a deletion review [0] get your article text back via temporary undeletion and move that to draftspace.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Drafts

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_review

The sad (or wonderful) fact is that anyone can write a new programming language now; I could for example use Claude create a wrapper on top of an existing languge (for example, a Python-like syntax wrapper for Scheme) in a few hours and start marketing it as a new language. So how can Wikipedia tell toy languages from real ones with actual useful adoption?

It's simple; get coverage in reliable sources,[0] and the article can come back. That really doesn't seem to be too high a bar to cross.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources

What practice? I'd like to see non-trivial uses of this outside scenarios other than this [0] which even now seems to show slow but steady improvements over time.

As for the Machiavellian scheming aspect, this seems to me to be very much like the operations of some real-world human CEOs.

[0] https://news.sky.com/story/claude-opus-4-6-this-ai-just-pass...

Structured thinking and deliberation are indeed important, but you can also make LLMs do structured "thinking" if you work hard enough, and generate quite plausible reasoned arguments with valid real-world results, and you can get them to write down their working as they go. But as research has shown, it's not "true" thinking, just pattern matching at a higher level, and eventually runs out of steam.[0]

But you only have to drill down a couple more layers and you are back in the void again; do you have any proof that your own thinking, no matter how structured and accurate, is anything other than pattern-matching at a sufficiently much higher level at which you are incapable of seeing it as such?

I think we will be finding some very interesting things out soon using the combination of LLMs and theorem provers, as demonstrated by Terence Tao's recent work.[1]

A cheetah is not a motorbike is not an aircraft is not a rocket.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.06941

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.12744

Yes, but there aren't any people in that one.

This happens all the time to me. The model emits thousands of lines of high-quality code, making vast progress very quickly, but on the way does a few very, very stupid things a human being would never have been silly enough to do.

Then it takes hours or days - sometimes weeks - to find and fix the AI-induced problems. If you very, very tightly constrain the AI by using structured processes and unit tests you can work wonders with it, but you do start to wonder to what extent this is better than if you had simply coded it yourself.

I had never heard of Mponeng Gold Mine. Terrifying.

Tesla's semi-autonomous FSD falls in the uncanny valley between being good enough to lull you into an inattentive state, but not reliable enough to be better than humans with all possible unforseen situations of the sort that cause real-world crashes and either deal with it safely without driver intervention or at least safely slow to a stop without disaster.

You either capture Level 4 autonomy or you don't, and currently Waymo are leading the way in this, not Tesla, who are Level 3 at best - curious, because with the ever-increasing rate of AI competence and their massive head start, you'd expect them to have cracked Level 4 by now.

The prospect of Level 4+ FSD and being #1 in an ever-expanding market without realistic competition were Tesla's USPs and they are in the process of losing both.

I suspect the market knows this and sees the recent better than expected results as a short-term reprieve, not a renewal of the dream.